“For the promise to Abraham or to his descendants that he would inherit the world  was not through the law, but through the righteousness that comes by faith. If those who are of the law are heirs, faith is made empty and the promise nullified, because the law produces wrath. And where there is no law, there is no transgression.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Faith is one of the essential ingredients for getting through life and enjoying most of the ride. Assuming on a fairly generic understanding of faith as simple belief in what we cannot see, we definitely don’t go a day and rarely go more than a few moments without it. Sometimes we fool ourselves into buying into the notion that we don’t need faith, but this is little more than playing a game of philosophical Opposite Day where we just stake out whatever is the opposite position the people around us hold. It’s silliness masquerading as seriousness. I wonder if part of the reason faith is such a central aspect to our lives isn’t because God designed salvation to operate on faith. Let’s talk about one reason faith is so essential.

For the Jewish background members of Paul’s audience, their connection to Abraham was enormously important. In unpacking the Gospel for them, Paul had to do it in terms they could understand. So, he took things back to Abraham. He looked to Abraham not just as the father of God’s people, the Jews, but of all those who place their faith in Him. He does this by observing that Abraham’s righteousness was declared by God before there was any kind of law or sign or ritual in place between him and God.

The basic idea is that what Jesus proclaimed was not a deviation from what God was doing in and through Abraham and his descendants. Instead, it was a continuation. But instead of being a continuation of the covenant of law through Moses, it fulfilled that covenant and returned things to the older covenant God made with Abraham. This older, deeper covenant was not rooted in law, but in faith. Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness.

This makes me think of the wonderful scene from C.S. Lewis’ classic work, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe where Aslan gives his life for Edmund and is then raised from the dead in the third day. The White Witch only knew the deep magic of Narnia that allowed her to claim the lives of traitors or a willing substitute for them. What she didn’t know was the deeper magic which said that one who gave his life in sacrifice for another would gain it back again as a reward.

Speaking in Lewis’ terms, the covenant of law through Moses is a deep magic, but the covenant of faith through Jesus by Abraham is a deeper magic. It is a richer, fuller, truer magic that is how God has always operated toward us. This deeper magic is more original than merely the deep magic. It is what God’s first plans were. The deep magic came later, and was intended to be a kind of holdover from where humanity was then until the time was just right, as the apostle Paul put it, for God to send His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons and daughters.

What Paul is pointing to here is the fact that the law was never intended by God to be more than a holdover system to carry humanity from one point to another. “For the promise to Abraham or to his descendants that he would inherit the world…” In other words, the thing to which all of the Jews so ferociously attached their identity, “…was not through the law, but through the righteousness that comes by faith.” Yes, God created and defined a people with the covenant of law given through Moses. That covenant wasn’t unimportant. It helped to frame out a people who were called by His name who were going to reflect His character – however badly they usually did that – but who were, more importantly, to be the vehicle through whose genetic line God would eventually bring His Son into the world. They were to create a cultural climate over time in which the message His Son was going to come preaching was able to make sense.

But the first and more important promise God had made to Abraham to create a people through whom He would introduce Himself to the world and bless the world was not rooted in the Mosaic Covenant. It was rooted in the Abrahamic Covenant. And the Abrahamic Covenant was based on a righteousness (and specifically God’s imputed righteousness) that came by faith. That is, it came by a willingness to accept God as God without having seen Him (since, as a spirit, and not possessing a body until Christ, and then that’s only one person of the Trinity and not the whole of the Godhead, He can’t be physically seen), an acceptance which is demonstrated practically by our willingness to obey His commands.

What Paul says next is both really interesting and really challenging. He essentially sets the path of righteousness accessed by faith against the path of righteousness accessed by law. You can’t have it both ways. Either righteousness comes by faith or it comes by law, but not both. If righteousness with God is something that is obtainable by law, then faith is irrelevant. If, on the other hand, faith is the key, then the law doesn’t matter as far as being a means of obtaining God’s righteousness.

“If those who are of the law are heirs, faith is made empty and the promise nullified, because the law produces wrath.” If God came along after declaring Abraham to be righteous because of his faith and made it so that the heirs of God’s promise to bless the world through him and his descendants something that came by adherence to the law, then faith in God no longer mattered. All that righteousness took was keeping the rules. Belief in God at that point was irrelevant.

But the trouble here is that the law produces wrath. When God starts laying out rules, our breaking those rules is necessarily going to produce wrath. Wrath is God’s just anger at violations of His character and command. Because God is the source, the only source, of all goodness and righteousness (it is indeed a dangerous delusion to think that we can find goodness apart from Him), any action that falls outside the boundaries of His righteousness is necessarily evil. That is, it is evil by definition. God is good, and therefore He hates what is evil. Pursuing a righteousness rooted in the law means that we are going to fall short of that righteousness because we are not consistent law-keepers. This, again, produces God’s just wrath. But where there is no law, wrath doesn’t have the opportunity to enter the picture. Or, as Paul finally puts it, “And where there is no law, there is no transgression.”

This is why faith matters so much. It separates our pursuit of righteousness from a set of rules that we don’t consistently keep anyway, and roots it in the character of the God who loves us so much that He pulled out all the stops to pave our way back to Him if only we are willing to walk it. Pulling out all the stops took shape in the form of Jesus who kept the Law in order to fulfill that covenant. With the Mosaic Covenant now fulfilled by and in Christ, we can go back to the older covenant of God’s promise to Abraham to make a people through whom He would bless the world, a promise that was rooted in God’s receiving Abraham’s faith.

Like Abraham, we can’t see God. He hasn’t changed since then. But we can see the evidence of His existence all over the place. We can see and experience the demonstration of His character through the work of the church’s faithfully keeping His command to love one another after the pattern of Jesus’ love for us. We can see the reasonableness of His existence through the total and expanding inability of naturalism to account for the existence of the universe and the origination of life in its manifold of forms. We can see it through the inherent awareness of right and wrong that persists across humanity. We can marvel at His necessity through the presence of beauty in the world, a superfluous luxury that naturalism cannot explain. Your faith is justified. Your faith is the ticket to life and a receiving of God’s righteousness in Christ. Step out and place it on Him. You won’t regret it.