Edenic Law and the Book of Romans: Part 3

When God justifies us, something powerful happens... fruitfulness is possible despite the natural desires of the flesh.

God wants us to be fruitful, but we are involved in a lifelong struggle against our own fleshly nature.  However, God knows what He is doing by justifying us because of our faith. Paul’s thesis statement in Romans states the gospel is “the power of God for salvation.” (Romans 1:16).1 When God justifies us, something powerful happens because, through God’s process that begins with justification, fruitfulness is possible despite the natural desires of the flesh.

A useful analogy for understanding the power of the gospel is to think of a plant. When we are receptive to the gospel and justified by faith, it is like God has planted a seed in our hearts. Then, because of God’s kindness, we are motivated to repent (Romans 2:4), so the seed begins to sprout and grow. Finally, the plant will produce fruit. This is God’s method—His work in us as the gospel becomes powerful in our lives.

The Blessing

That’s why Paul calls justification a “blessing,” a keyword at the beginning of Romans 4. As Paul transitions from David to Abraham, he finishes with one last quotation from David, which explains “the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works.” (Romans 4:6). The word “blessing” occurs twice in Paul’s Davidic quotation from Psalm 32. He sums it up in verse 9 by asking the question, “Is this blessing then only for the circumcised, or also for the uncircumcised?” 

Why is justification called a blessing? In the first few verses of chapter 4, Paul begins mentioning Abraham, the preeminent example from the Old Testament of someone justified by faith— “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness” (Romans 4:3, citing Genesis 15:6). The word “blessing” is the key word when Abraham first encountered God:

And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. (Genesis 12:2-3).

The words “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” is a foundational statement regarding the gospel. In fact, in Galatians 3:8, Paul says this is the gospel:

Peter also mentions the blessing of Abraham but extends it beyond justification to repentance:

You are the sons of the prophets and of the covenant that God made with your fathers, saying to Abraham, “And in your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” God, having raised up his servant, sent him to you first, to bless you by turning every one of you from your wickedness. (Acts 3:25-26).

Peter and Paul don’t contradict each other but illustrate that Abraham’s blessing is a process. Coming back to our analogy, justification, or the forgiveness of sins, is the seed being planted. But it doesn’t end there because the kindness of God in forgiving us motivates us to repent, and we turn from our wickedness.

Before the Law

Having said that justification is a blessing, Paul then establishes that Abraham was justified before he was circumcised (Romans 4: 9-11). Paul’s point is that justification happened before Abraham ritualized his religion, let alone before the Law of Moses. Abraham was not saved by ritualistic adherence to law: 

In the next verse, Paul says something which is key to the gospel message:

The gospel is about the power of God, not our own ability to follow law. If we are saved by law, we are no longer a work of God in which he plants a seed and makes it grow. In effect we have rejected animal skin and chosen to keep our fig leaf garments on.

Or, to put it another way, we must allow God to bless us. The word “blessing” can be thrown around in religious circles without truly understanding what it means. So, what exactly does it mean to be blessed by God? As it pertains to the gospel, we’ve already seen that it involves justification and repentance. But it is more than that. Many Old Testament passages detail how God blesses his people, for instance:

Ultimately, blessing has to do with fruitfulness, as we can see from the passage above. The Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament says, 

Fruitfulness happens to be integral to the covenant that God made with Abraham. For instance, God says, “I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make you into nations, and kings shall come from you.” (Genesis 17:6). The gospel, preached to Abraham, has been designed by God to help us become fruitful. God’s method works; it is the power of God for salvation.

The ideas of blessing and fruitfulness are not only fundamental to the Abrahamic covenant and gospel message, but they find their roots in the most foundational passage in the entire Bible, Genesis 1. The first time the words “blessing” and “fruitful” occur is in Genesis 1:22, where God blessed the animals. He created and told them to be fruitful. A few verses later, after creating the man and woman, “God blessed them. And God said to them, ’Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.’” (Genesis 1:28). 

We recall what Paul said about the blessing in Romans 4, that it came to Abraham before circumcision and before the Law. That principle finds its origin in Genesis, where the blessing comes before the commandment, which was not given until later. God blessed humankind and told them to be fruitful before the commandment and events in Eden took place. The principle is that God works outside the bounds of law. His purpose is not tied up with our ability to follow law. The Law illustrates the sinfulness of human beings, as we discovered in Genesis 3 and as Paul will outline in Romans. But it was never designed to prevent sin, earn righteousness, or gain salvation.

Life Out of Death

Having established that Abraham’s faith came before he was circumcised and before the Law, we can conclude that salvation is a work of God. In Romans 4:16-22, Paul drives the point home by illustrating the depth of Abraham’s faith. He answers the question “Why his faith was ‘counted to him as righteousness?’” (v. 22).

In verse 17, Paul reminds us of the time when God told Abraham, “I have made you the father of many nations.” The significance of this statement is twofold. First, as Paul says at the end of the verse, God “calls into existence the things that do not exist.” God didn’t say, “I will make you,” but “I have made you.” In God’s estimation, the promise was so sure that it was as good as done. 

However, verse 17 has a deeper significance. Just before the words “calls into existence the things that do not exist,” Paul also wrote, “who gives life to the dead.” These words are key to Abraham’s faith and all faith.

First, notice how the words “calls into existence the things that do not exist” echo the definition of faith given in Hebrews 11— “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.” (Hebrews 11:3). Our minds are here taken back to the creation account in Genesis and how out of nothing “the things that do not exist” God created an abundance of fruitfulness. Before “the word of God” began its creative work, the Earth was a barren rock, hurtling through space. Somehow, by virtue of a miracle, that dead rock blossomed with life. 

Which brings us back to our plant analogy. Hebrews tells us God used his word to create, as we see in Genesis 1. The word of God is likened to a seed in Scripture, and in a seed is the invisible design of what the seed will produce. When God plants the seed of the gospel in our hearts, that invisible design will grow and bear fruit.

So it is, coming back to Abraham’s faith, that “He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb.” (Romans 4:19). Like the pre-creation dead rock later known as the Earth, Abraham’s body was as good as dead. Not only was Sarah barren, but she had gone through menopause (Genesis 18:11), and her womb was dead. So, Paul defines Abraham’s faith as an understanding that God “gives life to the dead.” This idea is not a blind faith, but was first seen in creation, as we’ve just considered, when God took a pile of dead dust of the ground in the shape of a man and “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” (Genesis 2:7). God can bring life out of death.

What about us? We struggle with these bodies of flesh, but the process works when God plants the seed of the gospel in our hearts. Paul wrote elsewhere, “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins.” (Ephesians 2:1). What “made us alive” (v. 5) and “raised us up” (v. 6)? Not our ability to follow a law but from God “being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us” (v. 4) because “by grace you have been saved” (v. 5). The gospel was designed by God “so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith.” (vv. 7-8). Salvation is a work of God.

Faith understands that God can bring life out of death, and that’s why Paul ends his words on justification by faith in Romans 4 by writing, “It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.” (vv. 24-25). Our justification is intimately linked with the fact that God raised Jesus from the dead, and through that, we understand that God can bring fruit out of the spiritual deadness of our bodies. This is the principle taught by God providing animal skins for Adam and Eve. For that to occur, a death had to happen, but a death that brought life, all fulfilled in the death and resurrection of Christ.

Richard Morgan,
Simi Hills Ecclesia, CA