Or, The God Who Brings His Promise to Life Romans 4:13-17 April 3, 2022 Lord’s Day Worship Sean Higgins

Introduction

Men are manipulators. It is not necessarily a bad thing, at least depending on the definition of manipulation. The Latin word manus means “hand.” To manipulate is a derivative that means to handle, so manipulation is the the word for putting your hands to something; a manual transmission is hand-operated. It obviously has picked up some nasty metaphorical baggage over the years, so that now our first thought about manipulation is trying to get something through “insidious means especially to one’s own advantage” (Merriam-Webster). We don’t appreciate this sort of pushing or steering by another.

The original meaning, subduing the earth by hand, belongs with our image-bearing. I don’t think that opposable thumbs is what makes us image-bearers rather than clever dolphins, but it belongs with our God-given bodies and our God-ordained work. Hand-eye coordination has brought some beautiful and useful things into our dominion.

But especially nowadays, we are tempted to think that if we can’t see it and touch it then it can’t be as important. We want to make things happen. We think we are the ones who make things happen. Is it urgent? All hands on deck.

Of course this is sort of true and mostly not true even though we work hard to ignore how much it isn’t true. We can’t see gravity, and we certainly didn’t create gravity nor can we move gravity around, and yet we depend on gravity so obviously that we take it for granted. God uses gravity to keep the planets and stars in their spheres, and we don’t worry about them crashing into earth. Our hands can write out a scientific formula, but we’ve had no hand at all in how it works.

The principle applies to babies being born, and to crops coming up. The principle also applies to God’s blessing on the world. It is His power, and it comes from His promise.

This isn’t to say that we don’t have things to do. But can you imagine if the world’s blessing really depended on our strength, our wisdom, our obedience? Instead, the world runs on grace, which is out of our hands. The world runs because God is gracious and He gives it His attention. The heirs of the world will only be those with faith, the offspring of Abraham.

In Romans 4 Paul looks to Abraham as the forefather, not just those according to the flesh, but all those with faith. We’ve seen so far faith over works, faith over circumcision, and now faith over law. In Romans 4:13-17 Paul stresses God’s promise to Abraham, and even more than that, the nature of the God who made the promise. God is the one who brings His promise to life.

The Foundation of Inheritance: God’s unconditional promise (verses 13-15)

Abraham’s circumcision didn’t earn him favor with God (Romans 4:9-12); God declared Abraham righteous almost fifteen years before he felt the knife. Not only the special sign, but the special revelation in the law came later. When codified in the Mosaic Law, which the Jews held so proudly, it was 430 years after Abraham’s justification (Galatians 3:17). God came to Abraham not with law but with promise.

For the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world did not come through the law but through the righteousness of faith. For if it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law there is no transgression. (Romans 4:13–15, ESV)

Promise is a noun, a thing, a summary, and it is also a way God acts. In Abraham’s case this promise was far beyond what he could have asked or imagined. Apart from considering Abraham’s moral resume, God promised him offspring, “seed.” The word i[...]