Romans 4:1-12 Merely Circumcised

Of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsek preaches his series in the Book of Romans, A Righteousness from God. Let's listen in.

Well, good morning.

Welcome to Recast Church. I'm Don Filsek, I'm the lead pastor here, and a special welcome to those of you that are here maybe just checking things out. I recognize that it can be a little bit dicey, checking someplace out for the first time, and so just grateful that you've taken the time to come and join us this morning.

I hope you make yourself comfortable. I encourage everybody to take advantage of the coffee and the juice and the donuts that are back there, and then also take advantage of the connection time that we're gonna have for just a few minutes coming up at the end of the worship set, just to introduce yourself to somebody you don't know.

I've recognized increasingly more new faces. How many of you have noticed that around here? So, it's a great thing, and something that's great to celebrate, but also something that just puts the onus on us to make sure that people feel comfortable and that we're friendly and greeting one another.

Here at Recast, we believe that every follower needs three primary things to continue on in their faith with God, their walk with God, and their journey with God. The first is that it's really three things that we need to be growing in, not that you have to possess them and then be increasing in them in your life.

It's growing in faith, growing in community, and growing in service. That is the main growth plan that we have here for people here at Recast Church, and so we offer opportunities to grow in faith by hearing from his word and by believing it.

Faith, Community, and Service as the Church’s Growth Plan

Our text this morning is gonna be very fundamental text about the necessity of faith, that is what I said we should be growing in, the necessity of faith in the process of salvation, and the purpose of this text will be to show us the testimony of two individuals in the Old Testament who were considered as righteous because they trusted God by faith.

I say this often, that what I mean when I talk about growing in faith as a church, and what I mean by that as individuals, is that it means that we take in God's word. There really is no opportunity to grow in faith without first coming in contact with a God who has promised things to us, who has told us things about himself and told us what he intends to do.

So faith requires some level of knowledge and understanding about who God is and what he has said to humanity about us and about the way that he's gonna work. So the first step of growing in faith is taking in his word.

The second thing is believing it. You have to believe it's true. If you just think it's like a novel or it's on par with something that's been written by some fiction author or something like that or just some ancient mythology or something like that, then it's not gonna impact your life at all.

So you take in God's word, you believe that it's true, and you believe that it's true in a way that you go out and live according to it. So how much do you believe it's true? So much that you would go out and base life decisions this next week based on the truth of who God is and how he rolls.

And we're gonna see that in our text. This is exactly the model, the example of Abraham, the model example of King David, what they did in the Old Testament. They serve as a model and example to us showing that all people, whether religious Jew, whether somebody who's very religious in their life, and in this context, in the Book of Romans, he's gonna be talking about the Jewish religion specifically but anybody who would trust themselves in their own religious actions and their own behaviors and their own patterns and routines of worship, or even the pagan Gentile, all need, and by pagan Gentile, I mean the kind of person who just goes out and lives it up in parties all the time, all need faith in order to obtain the righteousness of God that is available through his son, Jesus Christ.

There is a righteousness from God that's available, and it's only available by faith in his son and what his son has done for us. And that is the righteousness that matters. It is a righteousness granted, not a righteousness obtained by works, by doing, by our actions, our behaviors.

And this text is gonna be one of the most central texts of declaring that to us. And so, if you're not already there, open your Bibles to Romans chapter four, verses one through 12. Again, Romans four, one through 12, and we're gonna dive into this text and read it together.

If you have a device that you can navigate over to the Bible, use that. You can use the Bible that's under the seat in front of you or your own Bible that you brought with us. But recast, this is God's precious and holy word written to us.

This is what he, this is the fuel for faith. This is the fuel that will help you to grow this week. And so, not my words, but his words. So let's listen in. What then shall we say was gained by Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh?

For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about. But not before God. For what does the scripture say? Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness. Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift, but as his due.

And to the one who does not work, but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness. Just as David also speaks of the blessings of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works, blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven and whose sins are covered.

Blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin. Is this blessing then only for the circumcised or also for the uncircumcised? For we say that faith was counted to Abraham as righteousness.

How then was it counted to him? Was it before or after he had been circumcised? It was not after, but before he was circumcised. He received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised.

The purpose was to make him the father of all who believe without being circumcised so that righteousness would count to them as well. And to make him the father of the circumcised who are not merely circumcised, but also walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised.

Let's pray.

Father, I thank you for your word. I thank you for the glory and the beauty of how explicitly you state that salvation comes by faith. That at the end of the day, the only people that you can justify are ungodly people.

And so Father, that seems like a downer at first when we think and consider about our status and what the scriptures and the book of Romans have been saying to us week after week after week for several weeks now, emphasizing our sinfulness, emphasizing our ungodliness, emphasizing our unrighteousness, so that we would know who we are before you to see all the more the glory of your breaking in and saving.

We are unworthy and you are worthy. You have indeed carried us. What we couldn't do and what we couldn't accomplish on our own, you have done for us through the blood of your son. And Father, I pray that that very truth, our frailty, our brokenness, our ungodliness, our sinfulness before you would give way to the light of the glory of your beautiful grace and mercy toward your people.

The wrath that was poured out on the son that we no longer stand under your wrath because of that. Father, I pray that our voices would just rise together in enthusiasm and delight and joy for the salvation that has been granted to your people in Jesus.

And it's in his name that I pray. Well, you can go ahead and be seated. I just wanna give a shout out to the band and just how grateful I am for them and especially Dave. He worked really hard on that.

That was a new song that we just sang and he worked on that this week to get that one in there, my request. And so I just really appreciate the way that he works, works diligently to help lead us in worship.

So grateful for him. And if you appreciate what he does, I'd encourage you to just let him know that. That's a good thing, too. So I encourage you to get comfortable. Keep your Bibles open to Romans 4, 1 through 12 as we're gonna dive into this passage.

And again, like I always say every week, if at any time during the message, for the sake of your own comfort, if you need to get up and get more coffee or juice or donuts, or you need to get up and stretch out in the back, or you need to go use the restrooms, they're out the double doors down the hallway on the left.

But our goal at the end of the day, what we want most is to keep our focus on God and his word and what he has revealed to us over the remainder of our time together. And so I wanna start off by saying just a statement.

Faith is one of those words that we're pretty confident we understand until somebody asks us to define it. So you have this fuzzy notion.

That you're pretty confident.

About how you would define the word faith until somebody says define it. And then it's kinda like, wait, what, what? Hold on a second. I've got some memorized things, or some quips or some things that I heard from a sermon once or something like that.

But it can be a little bit hard for us to define. But it's interesting that what Paul does here in our text, he does something that is valuable for us, something that's a little bit different. He defines faith for us in the context of an example of a real person in real time and in real history.

You see, faith is not a thing, a substance that can be defined in terms of, you know, you can walk around it and look at it from the right and look at it from the left and look at it from the top and look at it from the bottom and kinda feel it and touch it and see it.

But I would suggest to you that you can see it when it's embodied in an individual, when it's in a person, when a person is expressing it, when this person is living it, then you can see it, then you can begin to describe it, then you can begin to define it.

But it is only in the context of what it is in a person that makes sense. You see, faith cannot be detached from the human element in defining it. It is ultimately the response by a person to another person.

It requires one who gives a promise and another to trust the one issuing the promise. That's what, it requires that. And Paul established very clearly in verses 21 through 31 of the previous chapter, remember that the chapter divisions are not inspired, they're there just to help us out, to be able to find verses and reference it and stuff like that.

But at the end of the day, what just came before this is significantly comes to bear on what's written here. And in verses 21 through 31 of that previous chapter, he said that faith is essential for us to be acquitted of our unrighteousness and ungodliness.

We must have faith in order to be acquitted, in order to be set free from the bondage and the slavery to sin and death. So for the religious Jew and for the pagan Gentile, faith is the only way for either one to be justified.

In other words, if you had an upbringing where you were in church the first Sunday after you were born, you were in church the nine months before you were born, okay, and then every day your family was in church three services a week and then multiple events during the week and all of that and the only people you ever knew growing up were Christian church people.

Or if you grew up in a party family where your parents bought the beer for your high school parties. The two opposite. Faith is the only way for anyone to be justified, to be declared righteous, to be acquitted of our sin.

So it shouldn't surprise us that Paul now launches out into two examples who will serve as witnesses from the Old Testament, declaring to us that the way, really of the way that faith is the basis for being okay in God's eyes.

And so he's gonna start off and he selects Abraham to begin with. The father of the Jewish religion is really the example here that he highlights for us and one that any Jew at that day and age would have got their attention.

Abraham, of course, to us here in the text, if you're reading through the book of Romans in one sitting or you're reading it as a letter and you're thinking about it from that context, Abraham shows up pretty abruptly in this text.

But to the religious person in Paul's day and age, it would make complete sense for Abraham to show up and really even unannounced in a monologue about religion. They would have been like, oh yeah, of course you're gonna talk about Abraham.

That makes sense to us. He was the father of the Jews, it says in the text, according to the flesh, what that just simply means is that all Jews trace their ancestral line back to Abraham. But it goes without saying that Abraham was also the forefather of the Jews religiously as well.

It's not just a descendant, it's not just their champion, it's not just their hero, but it's their faith hero as well. And so in the overarching story arc of the Bible, I mean, the whole Bible is telling a story.

I don't know if you're aware of this,.

But this is very fundamental to your understanding. When you sit down and you read scripture, it's good for you to know the plot lines. The overarching story arc of the Bible is that really Abraham is standing at one of those key junctions and you have to understand why.

Why is he so significant? What's so important? Well, if you understand the flow of human history and God's working with history, then it's gonna make sense. The flow of scripture is this outline. Creation, fall, redemption, and restoration.

That is the story of scripture. That is the story of God's work in human history. Stated more clearly in kind of sentence form, God created it all good. Mankind broke it in rebellion against the creator.

God set out with a plan to buy it back, and one day the creation will be restored to a place even better than it was at the start. That is the storyline of scripture. That is what the story is telling us.

But Abraham, Abraham stands at a really key point in that story arc, because Abraham is the first move that God makes toward redemption. You have the creation, all good, the brokenness, and you have the flood, and you have all of those things that are there in early Genesis, and then in Genesis 12, God singles out an idolater that lived in probably what is modern day Iraq and the territory of Babylon during that time, and he calls him by a new name.

God, the almighty God, the creator, who we rebelled against, reaches down into real human history and grabs a man and makes some promises to him, changes his name, and gives him these three promises. He says, I'm gonna turn your descendants into a great nation.

I'm gonna give them a great land for the protection of this people, and the protection, really, at the end of the day, the giving of that land is for the protection so that one of their offspring from that nation will be a blessing to all peoples, all nations.

The entire world will be blessed through one who is born from your family's line. I share all of that backdrop so that you understand just how foundational Abraham is to God's plan of redemption, how fundamental it is that Paul is addressing and talking about Abraham here, because it was a real hinge point in the entire history of humanity and relationship with God.

Mention Abraham in Paul's day, and you would have the attention of any Jew with an earshot. And he begins by a simple question about Abraham here in the text. What should we say that Abraham gained? Another way of stating this question, really, in essence, at the core of this question is, really, guys, what made Abraham special?

What made him stand out? What was distinct about Abraham? And the answer is, he begins with answering what didn't make Abraham special first. What made Abraham acceptable to God was not his works. It was not that he was a super good guy.

It wasn't that he would stand out among his people. It wasn't that he was amazing and awesome. Did Abraham's obedience and good deeds make him special? Did he gain God's attention by giving to the poor, by going to church every Sunday, or being honest with his business dealings, and God looked down upon the peoples of the earth and said, Abraham, he's super awesome.

I need me one of those.

No.

You see, he's gone on already in the text, really, ultimately, if he was justified, if he was made acceptable in God's eyes by works, then the text tells us he would have cause for boasting. He'd have cause for boasting before others, like, God likes me more, I'm better than all of you, nana nana, right?

Some of us know that person. You've lived with them. But by linking the words boasting and justified in the same sentence in verse two, we ought to consider what he has just said to us back in verse 27, because we're only a few verses away from that, but because there's a chapter break, our minds turn off what was before that chapter break, but it's important, because in verse 27, he says, since justification can only come through faith, all boasting is excluded.

There is nobody who's justified that has anything to boast about. Nobody is acquitted in God's courtroom that can boast and say, it's because I'm awesome. Nobody is justified or acquitted of their sin based on works of the law, but only based on faith in the work of Jesus Christ.

And I love the little addition at the end of verse two, by the way. At the end of verse two, basically, Paul's saying, even if Abraham did, in this hypothetical scenario, have something to boast about, even if he did a really good job, even if he was a really good man, he still wouldn't have anything to boast about before the holy, righteous, and almighty God.

Not before God. Nobody could boast. You see, Paul couldn't bring himself to state even a hypothetical scenario where someone would stand before the almighty God and boast. And I love how Paul models something for us here, starting in verse three.

It's fundamental.

It's very important. If you're taking notes, I want you to get some notes down on paper about this section. You see, when we find ourselves at a religious question where there are differing views and a variety of religious opinions, a bunch of different thoughts about a religious subject, what do you do?

Do you go with the one that seems most logical? Do you go with the one that's got the most degrees behind their name? Do you go with the one with the most experience, the older person? How do you determine who you're gonna follow in those situations?

Do you throw up your hands and hide behind a lazy agnosticism that says, I guess nobody can truly know what made Abraham special? Or even worse, you have your opinion. You Jews think he was special because he kept the law enough that God liked him.

And we, Paul and the Christians, think that he was special because of faith. Your truth is true for you and our truth is true for us. You do you, Jews. But that's not what he says. What does he say in this text in verse three?

No, Paul says, hey guys, novel idea. Let's do a Bible study up in here and see what the word of God says about Abraham. Let's get into the word. What does the scripture say? What an excellent question in verse three.

Do you see it there?

What does the scripture say? Unfortunately, this question is asked less often than it is needed in our lives. Think about this. The religious Jews who launched out into teaching justification by keeping the law, by obedience, they said, you can be made right by God, by your works, by the things that you do.

They missed what the scripture said about the father of their religion regarding his works and his faith. They missed a sentence in there. And it's an important and vital sentence. And how could that be?

How could they miss something so fundamental as to say that Abraham was justified by faith and not by works? How could they miss that? I would suggest to you that we see what we want to see so often. And we ignore what doesn't fit our bias.

We have to be cautious of this as Christians. But this is how we end up with flat earthers and people who think Elvis is still alive. I mean, everybody knows Elvis died last year on some remote island.

I mean, everybody knows that. He's not still alive. Come on, folks. No, really, information bias is real. We see data that lines up with our frequency bias and we ignore the data that disagrees with our bias.

And that is why we must turn to scripture. God knew what he was doing when he gave us a text. We can turn to time and time again. We can verify, we can study, we can research, verify again, test, study, read, obey, and verify once more.

We've got a text that we can take in, we can memorize, we can work our way through it, we can draw understanding from it and draw life and nourishment from this word. It's available to us to study, to know him.

And really, for the next 10 verses of our text, Paul is gonna lead us all in a Bible study. We're in the Bible, we're doing a Bible study. He is verifying from the law and the writings, really, basically, two major sections, two overarching sections that the Jews would have looked at as fundamental.

You need to give us some evidence from the first five books of the Bible, of the Old Testament, and then something from the rest of the Old Testament to verifying witnesses that will say this before we're gonna believe it.

And that's the way that the Jews would have processed their theology. And so Paul is giving them a very technical Bible study, saying, here's one person from the first five books who verifies that salvation is by faith, and here's somebody from the rest of the Bible.

It's gonna be in the Psalms. And so what he does here for us is seeking to verify from the law and the writings that faith is the basis for acceptance by a God who only has wrath toward unrighteousness and ungodliness.

And so he quotes Genesis 15, six. That's what we're looking at here. When he says, Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness. It may come as a shock that such a clear indication of a faith-based righteousness is found in the Old Testament.

But you can look it up for yourself.

There it is.

And it's right there to ignore if your bias is toward a works-based salvation. If you have the preconceived notion that you can be good enough, then you'll skip this one.

But it's there.

It's there for us to wrestle with. It's there for us to deal with. And Abraham believed God. This means that Abraham took God at his word. He trusted God's promises. He listened to the things that God was pledging.

He believed God was telling him the truth. And then he went out and lived according to those promises. And think about this.

I think there's something beautiful.

The way that Scripture comes full circle on itself, from the beginning fall to the way that redemption happens. The way that God purchases us back is consistent with the way that we fell and broke the world around us.

The original fall in the garden was fundamentally about a lack of trust in the Almighty Creator. A lack of faith in him, if you will. And the seeds of the temptation that Satan sowed were distrust.

Did God really say?

And then further, even more emphatically, more direct to the point, of sowing distrust. God doesn't have your best interest in mind here, is what Satan is getting at when he talks to Eve. He knows you will be like him if you eat this fruit.

And by implication, Satan was sowing seeds of distrust between humanity and our Creator there in the garden, saying God is willing to hold you back. That's what he wants. What a pity. Do you people know what you could be if you just disobey and go off on your own?

Do you know what you could be, how powerful you could be? But God doesn't want you to be as powerful as him. And he knows if you eat that fruit, you'll be just like him. He says, oh, sounds good, crunch.

It's so fitting that the human race, which was broken by distrust, would be healed by trust. Do you see that? There's a beauty to the way that God works in the gospel, that belief and faith and trust is the mode of our breaking, or disbelief and distrust and a lack of faith is the mode of our breaking, and therefore, trust, belief, and faith are the mode of our healing.

And that trust is not, by the way, some generic feelings of goodwill that you try to drum up. It was in Abraham's case and in our case, a trust in specific promises that the Almighty has given to us. Abraham didn't just muster up a sense of, out of the blue, he's worshiping idols and going along with his father's religion and doing all of that stuff that they did in Ur, in the area of Babylon during the time, and he wasn't just doing that and just mustered up some sense of, wow, I bet there's an Almighty God who created all this, and I bet he's good and kind.

He didn't come to that on his own, but he trusted specific promises that God came to him and addressed.

He will give me offspring.

He will make my descendants into a great nation,.

Says Abraham.

He will give us a great land, and he will bless all nations through my offspring.

I believe him.

I believe him, I trust him. And the end of verse three is, it's crazy important.

It's fundamental.

It actually has divided Christendom. Christendom is split because of a misunderstanding at the end of verse three. Abraham's faith was not righteousness. It was counted as righteousness, but it wasn't righteous.

Abraham didn't drum up faith to have God say, oh, I like that. Your faith got my attention. Your faith is amazing. Your faith is righteous. It says he counted it as righteousness. The word counted or credited, Paul is going over the top.

He uses that phrase eight times. That Greek word counted, credited, reckoned, different translations have it in different ways, but it occurs eight times in the next nine verses. I think that indicates that there might be a theme here, something that he's trying to communicate to us.

The theme is that faith is reckoned.

It is counted.

It is given. Or even to think of it in terms of being considered.

As righteous.

Salvation by grace through faith is actually a much more, what I think you need to hear here is it's actually a much more passive thing than our human hearts want to believe. We want some credit at least for something.

At least I believed.

But saving faith is believing simply straight up what God has said and what he has done. Emphasis on him, trusting him as faithful to keep his word and to fulfill what he has promised. Faith is not an act of righteousness.

It is a trust in his work through which he credits our account with his righteousness. Nobody, nobody except the son of God himself ever possessed on this earth their own righteousness. It is only a gift, ever.

You've never met a righteous person. You've met a person who displays the righteousness of God. And that's only through his spirit living in them. In verses four and five, Paul reemphasizes that works has no part in this and he does so through a really common everyday illustration talking about wages, talking about employment, talking about how we work.

The acquittal of God is not a wage that is earned. Back in Romans 3, 24, Paul already established that acquittal in God's courtroom is established, or really rather received by his grace as a gift. He's already told us that.

It's a free gift, it's free to you. And therefore, the one who believes they are working to earn it, if you believe you're working for salvation, you cannot have it. God will give it to nobody who thinks they deserve it or believes that they have earned it.

Salvation is not for sale, it has already been purchased for you. Salvation is a redemption by God. It is him purchasing a sinner back from slavery to sin. And no price can accomplish what the blood of Jesus has already bought for you and I.

And these two verses has found one of the most profound rejections of any notion of a works-based, actions-based salvation. You can't earn it, you can't do anything for it. It is not a wage earned by one who works hard for God because at the end of the day, we've already established well through the previous three chapters that nobody works for God.

Go back and read it for yourself if you doubt it. Paul has been clear that in our status, without the righteousness of Christ, none of us are able to do any God-honoring good at all. No one is righteous, no one does good, no one seeks after him.

And in verse five, we find one of the most used passages by the reformers in the face of the Roman Catholic Church in the 1500s. Paul paints an extreme picture of salvation by grace, an extreme, extreme picture.

And what he's basically getting at in verse five, if I can summarize, he says that even one who does absolutely nothing in any attempt to please God, someone who didn't even know anything about the church, somebody who didn't even know anything about doing good, somebody who tried to do evil their entire life, but believes and turns to God and believes and puts their faith and trust in the Son would be justified because they believe in the God who justifies the ungodly, the text says, and that one, his faith will be counted as righteousness.

This is profound.

He is painting a clear and powerful portrait of every single person who has ever found the treasure of justification, who has ever found the treasure of acquittal and forgiveness through the blood of Jesus Christ.

He is describing every single one of us who have believed that God will acquit us based on the wrath poured out on his Son for us.

And he is saying,.

Even if you had absolutely zero religious activity, no spiritual work, when you believed in the redemption and justification that God promises, you were counted as righteous. Let that sink in. Counted as righteous.

What was necessary for you to be saved?

What did you need?

Simply to believe the good news. Trust that Jesus had paid the penalty for your sins. No work was necessary before the point of an open-handed reception of this salvation. And the reformers love to camp on one phrase that's found in here.

It's a beautiful phrase, it's an intentional phrase. It is simply this. He says that those who have done no work must believe in him who justifies the ungodly. Justifies the ungodly.

What a beautiful reminder.

What an important reminder for us of who we are. The word selection is intentional. Those who are already, there are some of you in this room that are already thinking about the ways that works are helpful.

But I mean, you gotta do some good, don't you? You gotta do something right. You've gotta have something in order. You gotta line something up. But those who are thinking down those lines need the reminder of what we are.

Not just merely what we do, but what we are. We are ungodly to such a degree that doing a couple of minor things like working to supply water for several villages in Africa. I mean, nothing that you can think of that you can think of as really super good.

None of it is worthy of even noting in the scope of his holiness. Doesn't even get his attention. Salvation is always, recast salvation is always God justifying an unworthy, ungodly person. Every time.

He never justifies a godly person. It is never him justifying a good person who has served him and worked for him well. None of you were there. He has only ever saved an ungodly person. He has only ever justified and acquitted and set free someone who knows that they are ungodly.

You hear that?

That's us.

That's all of us. This text flies in the face of any religious notions that one must do certain things or clean up their act before being justified. Paul uses a second witness to confirm that even in the midst of ungodliness, trust in God is the key.

Trusting in the God who will justify on the basis of his goodness is the key. Justifying the ungodly based on his goodness. So he quotes David as an example of one who understood in the Old Testament that righteousness is counted to a person apart from works, even in the midst of sin.

The context here is even in the midst of sinning against God. It's not even so much like that you're saying, well, I didn't do enough work for my employer, so therefore I don't deserve the wages. But it's like literally I was undercutting my boss.

I was literally stealing from the employer. I was literally doing bad when he justified me. So he quotes David as the one here. And in the midst of being caught up in the knowledge of his own sin, David read the Psalms, a man who is very, very, very clearly acquainted with his own sin.

And in Psalm 32, one and two, he says this. David writing, and I'm sure the weight of his own sin pressing him down, and he says this, he knew who he was. He knew what he was. He knew what he had done.