(Continued.)
WHERE is boasting then? “Is there any room for it? Oh, no, says the apostle,” it is excluded. By what law? of works?” No, it is excluded by the law (or principle) of faith. That is the principle on which boasting is excluded.
I do not dwell on the end of the chapter, but just a few words on the next chapter.
The Jew says, What about Abraham? There were promises made to Abraham. Well, says the apostle, all the blessings Abraham ever got were on the ground of faith. If Abraham were justified by works he has something to glory in, but, nobody can ever glorify himself before God through any works of his own. No, Abraham believed God―it was faith―and so Abraham, this one to whom the Jews looked, was justified, not on the ground of law, because the law had not yet been given; Abraham stood on the ground of God’s promise, and that was faith, and his faith was counted to him for righteousness. He was reckoned to be a righteous man before God on the ground of faith. Never mind whether you understand it or not, God says it. On what ground does God reckon me to be righteous? On the same ground on which He reckoned Abraham to be righteous―he believed God. It is not merely what God told him to believe, but the fact that he believed God, no matter what God told him. Faith and reason are not the same thing. You may believe a thing because you consider it to be reasonable, but that was not what Abraham did. It was an unreasonable thing that God told him. He said, Look at the stars, and so shall thy seed be. That was enough to make Abraham stagger. It was most unreasonable to think that his seed should be as the stars for multitude, but Abraham believed what God told him, no matter what He told him. It is not faith to believe God because I think He tells me a reasonable thing, but to believe God because He says it. That is faith; and at the end of the fourth chapter we see that the ground on which we get the blessing is the same. In the twenty-third verse it says, “Now it was not written for his sake alone that it was imputed to him, but for us also, to whom it shall be imputed, if we believe on Him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead.” In other words, it is not merely an interesting history or episode of the past, it was not written for his sake alone but for our sakes; it is given to us for a certain definite purpose — “for us also, to whom it shall be imputed.” If Abraham was reckoned righteous before God, so will I and every poor sinner who believes be reckoned righteous. But there is this difference between Abraham’s faith and ours. Abraham believed that God was able to do what He promised, but we believe that God HAS DONE two things.
We are told in the last verse, that Christ “was delivered for our offenses.” Let each one ask himself and herself to-night, Do I believe that the Lord Jesus Christ was delivered for my offenses? Ask yourself the question honestly before God. You say, Christ died for sins. But was He delivered for your sins? Did He suffer for your sins?
People often say that they believe in the forgiveness of sins, but if you were to go to many persons who say that as regularly as each Sunday comes round and ask them, Whose sins? they could not tell you. Do you believe in the forgiveness of your own sins or of somebody else’s? It is no use to believe in the forgiveness of sins unless it be in the forgiveness of your own. As you look back by faith at the cross, can you say, The Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, suffered for my sins? And for how many of them? If He bore them at all, He bore them every one, and if He did not bear them every one, there would be no gospel for you to hear or for me to preach.
Every believer may look back at the cross and say, There the Lord Jesus, God’s beloved Son, bore my sins and every one of them. That is the first thing that the gospel tells us to believe. What is the second? That He “was raised again for our justification.” If Abraham had ground to trust God when He told him He was going to do a thing that to Abraham himself seemed most improbable, how much more should you and I believe God when He tells us that He has done these two things―Christ has been delivered for our offenses and He has been raised from the dead for our justification; and believing it, what is the result? I have peace with God. Oh, may God in His mercy bring this gospel home with power to all our hearts here—the remedy that God has provided when man had done his very worst! Not only was he sinful, as he was in the Garden of Eden; not only had he transgressed the law, as he did at Mount Sinai, but when he had crucified the Lord Jesus Christ, when he had done his very worst, then God comes with this gospel to deliver him from his evil state, to extricate him from it and to bring him into His own presence, never to go out again, never to lose it; because to be, according to God’s righteousness, brought into His presence is an eternal thing, never to be lost.
May God give us to rejoice in it and never to lose the power of it in our souls!