God, Paul said in Romans 4:17, brought life out of the dead. What does this look like in real life? While the focus of 4:17 seems to be on Gentiles, that life-giving-faith is at the heart of the Jewish family because it is the faith of Abraham. God, Paul said in Romans 4:17, brought life out of the dead. What does this look like in real life? While the focus of 4:17 seems to be on Gentiles, that life-giving-faith is at the heart of the Jewish family because it is the faith of Abraham.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":197,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1752],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-romans"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nRomans 4:18-22 shows how Abraham\u2019s life-giving-faith is the faith that gave rise even to Israel\u2019s own faith. And in short, Abe\u2019s faith was that God would give Sarah and him a baby in spite of their age. They are both old, too old.
\nBut Abraham believed \u201cin hope against hope.\u201d
\nWhy, he believed the God he was trusting that God \u201chad power to do what he had promised.\u201d
\nThis is the faith that was reckoned to Abraham as righteousness.<\/em>
\nI\u2019m impressed by the concrete reality of Abraham\u2019s faith, and of Paul\u2019s understanding of Abraham\u2019s faith.
\nI\u2019m also impressed that Paul will connect, in the verses that follow, this kind of faith to faith in the God who raised Jesus from the dead. Abraham\u2019s faith is resurrection faith.
\nWright has a magnificent chart comparing Abraham\u2019s faith here with the collapse of humans in Romans 1 \u2014 words like glory, creator, God\u2019s power, and the proper joining of man and woman \u2014 and this shows that Paul is showing Abraham as acting as all humans are to act.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"