The Trial and the Triumph of Faith (Rom. 4:17-25)

 

Image from Pixabay

Last time, we looked at the nature of gospel faith in terms of its object (the God of promise) and its basis (the promise of God). We noted the importance of the question, “What is faith?” because the apostle makes it clear in this epistle that God has linked justification and the forgiveness of sins to faith in Christ.  What this means is that we cannot be saved apart from faith in Jesus, and if we cannot be saved apart from faith, then it behooves us to know what it is.  What the apostle Paul is doing here in this section of his letter (4:17-25) to the Romans is to illustrate what saving faith is in terms of the life of Abraham.  And that is significant because we are meant to walk in the footsteps of his faith.  As Paul ends, what the Bible says about Abraham’s faith and the imputation of righteous to him was not written for his sake only, but for us also, “if we believe on him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead” (Rom. 4:24).  So we have looked at the nature of faith in terms of its object and basis.

What we want to do today is to look at what the life of faith looks like.  How does someone live who puts their faith in the God of promise?  The apostle has reminded us that “the just shall live by faith” (1:17), and elsewhere that “we walk by faith and not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7).  What does this look like?  How does this play out in the life of the believer?

What I want us to see is that there are two movements in the life of faith: the trial and the triumph.  And you don’t have one without the other.  Both are illustrated in the life of Abraham, and they are meant to be illustrated in our lives as well.  So, for example, you see the trial in expressions such as: “Who against hope believed in hope,”  “being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now dead, neither yet the deadness of Sarah’s womb.  He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief.”  And then you see the triumph of faith in expressions like “believed in hope,” “being not weak in faith,”  “he staggered not . . . but was strong in faith, giving glory to God.”  My hope is that as we reflect on this it will encourage those of us who are presently going through a trial, perhaps very difficult, by reminding us of God’s purpose in it and also by the promise that the trial leads to the triumph of faith in Jesus Christ.

The Trial of Faith

Let’s begin with these words at the beginning of verse 18: against hope.  What does Paul mean by that?  Well, he at least means that, as it was in the life of Abraham, there will be things in the life of a Christian that in themselves are contradictory to and against the hope that we have in Christ.  To illustrate this, the apostle points us in verse 19 to the condition that Abraham and Sarah were in: they were too old to have children, which was precisely what God had promised to them.  Their bodies were in a sense dead.  How can people who are unable to have children have children?  That was the trial, or at least one of the trials God led them through.  

By the way, we can learn an important lesson here in that not only did they have this particular trial but that they had to endure it for many years.  How long did Abraham and Sarah have to wait for the promise?  Twenty-five years!  Twenty-five years when the promise seemed to become more impossible.  In some sense things got worse for Abraham and Sarah before they got better.  All this time they were walking by faith.  But that didn’t mean that the trial went away.  For them, the heat of the furnace of the trial got hotter and hotter before the deliverance came.  Again, this is a lesson for us, isn’t it?  There will be trials, “in this world ye shall have tribulation” (Jn. 16:33), and some of these trials will seem to go on and on. We ask God to take away the thorn, but all we get is, “My grace is sufficient for thee.”  

What about us?  What is our hope?  What has God promised to us?  Ultimately our hope is that God is for us in Christ and with us and not against us, and that he will receive us into his presence when we die and raise our dead bodies from the grave.  But between now and then, there are all sorts of things than can rise up to make us question whether or not God will do this.  Our trials now can sometimes seem to be evidence that God is not with us, or that God has abandoned us.  This was Job’s trial.  He had had all these blessings and advantages, and then in one fell swoop God took it all away.  Both Job and his friends interpreted this to mean that God was against him.  Some of you can probably identify with Job.  You have tried to live by faith and all you see is one trial after another.  And you are tempted to think that this means faith is worthless.  With Jacob we are tempted to say, “All these things are against me.”  With Asaph, we look at the prosperity of the wicked and compare it to our own situation, and say, “Verily I have cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands in innocency. For all the day long have I been plagued, and chastened every morning” (Ps. 73:13-14).

How then do we endure through the trial, especially when it is long?  How does faith endure?  Well, one key element to the victory of faith is to recognize that God is at work for our good and his glory in all our trials (Rom. 8:28).  So many people want to deny that Romans 8:28 includes all things.  But how can you get comfort in your trials if you are not certain that God is at work in an through them?  In terms of the example of Abraham, the Scripture makes it clear that it was by design that Abraham and Sarah had to wait until their bodies were no longer capable of having children in a natural sense.  God made them wait twenty-five years on purpose.  It wasn’t because God couldn’t get his act together for a quarter of a century!  In the same way, the presence of trials in our life are there by God’s design.  “In this world you shall have tribulation.”  We may not be able to see the particular reason why.  As far as we know, this side of eternity, Job was never allowed to understand why he had to go through what he went through.  So part of the life of faith is having to trust in God even when you cannot understand the particular purpose behind the trial you are walking through.  Though faith is not blind in the absolute sense, because we have good reason to put our trust in the living God, yet it is still true that “we walk by faith and not by sight.”  We have to put ourselves into God’s hands and to trust in his wisdom and his goodness, that “he is too wise to err, and too good to be unkind.”

Why does God do this?  Why does he lead us into and through trials?  Are there good reasons for this? Yes!

First, he does so to bring glory to God (20).  God’s glory is demonstrated not through our strength but in our weakness.  As the apostle Paul found out in his own experience, when he asked the Lord to take away the messenger of Satan, the thorn in his flesh: “And he [God] said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me” (2 Cor. 12:9).  God’s strength is not make perfect in our strength but in our weakness.  We are able to experience something of God in our weakness, something good and wonderful even, that we could not experience apart from the suffering and the trial.  I think this is like the experience of the men from the “Band of Brothers,” the men of the 101st Airborne whose interviews after the Second World War signal two things that almost seem contradictory, but which really are inseparable. First, they tell us that their experience in the war was something truly terrible and something they would never want to experience again.  But then when you hear their interviews, you also get the sense that they wouldn’t trade that experience for the world, that the brotherhood which was forged in combat was something utterly unique and special and good and valuable.  God does something similar in our trials.  Yes, the trial itself is not something we can rejoice in or say we enjoy.  And when we get to the other side we don’t wish to go back.  But the experience of the trial brings us through faith into fellowship with God in a way that we could never have experienced otherwise.  This is because God’s glory is shown in our trials in a way that couldn’t be shown any other way.  That is why Paul could say, “Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”  

It’s the reason Jesus stayed where he was when he heard that Lazarus was ill unto death: “When Jesus heard that [Lazarus was sick], he said, This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby. Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus. When he had heard therefore that he was sick, he abode two days still in the same place where he was. (Jn. 11:4-6).  That’s strange, isn’t it?  That Jesus loved Lazarus, and yet when he heard he was sick, he stayed put!  Why?  Because only by allowing him to die could our Lord bring him back to life and demonstrate the truth that he is the resurrection and the life.  Only by allowing him to die could he show them beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had power over death.

It’s also the reason our Lord gave for the blind man’s condition: “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him” (Jn. 9:3).  Again, we see that God’s power is most clearly demonstrated in and through our weakness.  It helps us to see God as he really is and to see ourselves as we really are.  We tend to live in delusions of grandeur while we also tend to sell God short.  It is our trials that open our eyes to the reality and the glory of God’s greatness.  God could have given Abraham and Sarah a child when they were young and carried on the promise that way.  But then it was the supernatural nature of Isaac’s birth that helps us to see that he truly was the child of promise.  There was no doubt that this was the work of God.  Our trials help us to see the glory of God, and surely that is good.

Second, trials strengthen our faith.  Note these words: “And being strong in faith.”  Now this is parallel with the expression “he staggered not at the promise of God though unbelief.”  “In faith” and “through unbelief” are similar expressions in the Greek (τῇ ἀπιστίᾳ . . . τῇ πίστει).  I think we are to read this in the sense that just as unbelief would have caused Abraham to waver, even so Abraham’s faith caused him to grow strong.  In other words, he was “made strong through faith,” which is another way to translate the passage.  

But his faith would never have been strengthened, and he would never have been strengthened through faith if he had never had to navigate trials and difficulties that seemed to stand against hope.  You can’t strengthen your muscles if there is no resistance to overcome.  No pain, no gain.  As the Marines say, “Pain is weakness leaving the body.”  Or better yet, as the apostle Paul put it: “Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” (2 Cor. 4:17).  C. H. Spurgeon memorably put it this way: “I am afraid that all the grace that I have got of my comfortable and easy times and happy hours, might almost lie on a penny. But the good that I have received from my sorrows, and pains, and griefs, is altogether incalculable…. Affliction is the best bit of furniture in my house. It is the best book in a minister’s library.”

I think this is why Paul will write in the next chapter, “we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope: and hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us” (Rom. 5:3-5).  Why would you rejoice and glory in tribulations?  Not for their own sake, but because of what they produce.  Through faith, trials produce endurance, character, and hope.  It is why we should “let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing” (Jam. 1:4).  

Nevertheless, the temptation is to give into unbelief, isn’t it?  We are tempted to stop trusting in God’s promise because of the trials, because of the hardship, because of the grief and the anxiety.  The temptation is to “stagger,” to “waver,” to give in to the doubts in our minds.  Abraham didn’t do that.  And so that brings us to our next point and the next question.

The Triumph of Faith

So the question is, How do we triumph through the trial?  How do we bring our faith through the trial to the triumph?  I think the triumph of faith is tied at least partly to how by faith we look at the past, the present, and the future.

First, don’t let your past paralyze you from trusting in God now.  I think we need to point out that the triumph of faith does not mean that there will have been no episodes of unbelief in our lives.  Abraham didn’t stagger and stumble from the perspective of his life overall, which is what the apostle is getting at here in Romans 4.  This is a bird’s eye view of his life.  But we all know, as did the apostle, that there were several moments when Abraham stumbled and stumbled badly.  Like the times when he lied about his wife and told the half-truth about her being his sister.  Or when he took Sarah’s advice and tried to get a son by means of Hagar, instead of waiting on God to fulfill his word in his way.  Abraham was not a perfect man.  He sinned.  He gave into unbelief for a time on several occasions.  But this didn’t characterize his life overall, did it?  In the big picture, Abraham was truly a man of faith.  He left his homeland when God called him to go.  He waited for God to fulfill his promise.  He went to sacrifice Isaac when God told him to.

So we need to take heart and not allow our past missteps and moments of unbelief keep us from moving forward in a life of faith.  Don’t become paralyzed by your past.  God is good to us and gracious to us and merciful.  I think there is a tremendous lesson that Abraham’s unbelief is not mentioned here in Romans 4 or even in any other part of the New Testament, but only his faith.  Here is the Divine characterization of his life: “He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief but was strong in faith giving glory to God.”  God overlooks Abraham’s moments of weakness and just sees his faith.  Even so, our Lord is not out to put our weakness under the microscope.  Rather, he loves to encourage our faith and in grace to support us even when we have failed him.  He will not break a bruised reed or quench a smoking flax.

Again, it’s important to point out that it is not the strength of our faith that justifies us.  It is the object of faith that justifies us, Jesus Christ.  It is his righteousness, not our own, that commends us to God.  Faith is simply the conduit by which we receive the grace of God in Christ.

Second, don’t pretend the present isn’t what it is.  The triumph of faith does not depend upon ignoring reality.  Note again how Paul puts it: “Who against hope believed in hope.”  The things that were against hope were all the things that made it look like God’s promise would not come to pass.  Abraham didn’t believe in hope by ignoring the things that seemed to be against it.  No, he lived out his faith in the face of such things.  He didn’t pretend like the winds of opposition weren’t against him; rather, he leaned into the winds that were against him and pressed forward in faith.  So again we need to be aware of is that such things will exist for us.  Life isn’t easy.  God’s word doesn’t promise us that if we have enough faith it’s going to be smooth sailing.  One of the things that can undermine faith is a sense that all these difficulties in my life are evidences that God is not present, or he is not for me.  We need to get rid of that unbiblical notion.

Now, even though verse 19 says that “he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sarah's womb,” we are not to take that to mean that Abraham just pretended things weren’t the way they were.   The point is that Abraham didn’t allow these things, even when he did consider them, to upend and destroy and overturn his faith.  

Now I think it’s important to say this because if the strength of your faith depends upon pretending that life isn’t as difficult as it really is, or by ignoring real problems and real trials, then you are probably not going to endure.  For trials have a way of making themselves known!  Rather, the point is that we need to follow Abraham, and “against hope believe in hope.”  Now why did Abraham do that?  Well, it’s because of where his hope was placed.  His hope was in God.  I want you to notice this.  The defeaters to hope in Abraham’s life were things that exposed his own weakness, his own deadness: the barrenness of Sarah, the impotence of Abraham.  But that didn’t bother Abraham because his hope was not in himself, in his power or his wisdom or his wealth.  It was in God.  And this God was the God who could raise the dead.  

So a life of faith doesn’t call us to ignore reality.  It doesn’t call us to imagine that we are greater than we are.  It doesn’t call us to live a life based on positive thinking.  It doesn’t say we have to have a plastic smile plastered on our face at all times.  But it does call us to look beyond ourselves and our limitations to the God who raises the dead and calls into being that which did not exist.  Hope can be sustained even when all the world seems to be against us because God is greater than any possible defeater to our hope.  “Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world,” said the apostle John (1 Jn. 4:4).  “In all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us” (Rom. 8:37).  When our hope is in God and in his promise it can transcend all the opposition to it.

Then, let your hope in future grace be steadfast. Abraham looked to the future, because that is where God’s promise dwelt.  Isn’t this the way faith is portrayed in Hebrews? “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1).  Then he applies this definition to Abraham: “These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country.  And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned. But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city” (Heb. 11:13-16).  We “are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?” (Rom. 8:26).  God’s promises are not promises that we will have heaven now, or our best life now.  God’s promise is that in Christ we have every spiritual blessing in heavenly places (Eph. 1:3).  God’s promise is that “in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:7).  This is what we wait for; this is what we hope for.  This is what a life of faith prepares us for.

And let this faith be steadfast.  We need to understand that there is a determined resolve to the life of faith. Notice that phrase, “he staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief.”  “Staggered not” means he didn’t waver.  He didn’t go back and forth in his mind as to whether or not the promise was believable.  He was “fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able to perform.”  This was clearly a key element to the triumph of Abraham’s faith, and indeed anyone’s faith as they navigate trials and temptations.  There was a fortitude to Abraham’s faith.  How did he do this and how do we do this?

Well, I think the temptation is for us the think that this is nothing we can control.  We think you either stagger or you don’t; you are either that sort of person or you are not.  But I don’t think that’s the lesson we are to take from this.  Abraham is put here, not as a museum piece to admire, but as an example to imitate.  So we too are called to live in such a way that we don’t waver, that we are fully persuaded by the ability of God to fulfill his promise.

How then does this happen?  How do you become this kind of person?  You become this kind of person first of all by keeping the God of the promise and the promise of God before your mind.  One of the reasons we waver is that we don’t keep our eyes focused on God.  We get distracted by other things and those things become bigger than they really are.  We are like Peter on the sea; we stop looking at the Lord and start looking at the raging of the sea all around us.  And we sink.  Peter began to doubt precisely because he stopped keeping his eye on the Lord.  It will happen to us as well.  We don’t want to be like the ancient Israelites the psalmist warns us about: “That they might set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments: And might not be as their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation; a generation that set not their heart aright, and whose spirit was not stedfast with God” (Ps. 78:7-8).  Clearly the generation that does not set its heart upon God and whose spirit is not steadfast with God is a generation that first forgets the works of God.  This is why our Lord warns the church in Ephesus to “Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen” (Rev. 2:7).  They needed to remember.  Why?  Because they had forgotten.

One of the ways we can keep these things in our mind is by reading God’s word, memorizing God’s word, and meditating on God’s word.  And to do these things regularly.  Every day!  I have never met a strong Christian who didn’t do these things.  Now I know that you can do these things by rote and without extracting any real spiritual benefit from them.  But that is no excuse not to do them.  You simply won’t grow if you don’t let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom.

I also think you can’t divorce this strong persuasion in God’s promise from personal holiness.  Why do I say that?  I say it because of what our Lord said: “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself” (Jn. 7:17).  Our Lord says that it is by doing God’s will that we “know” and become assured of the Divine authority of the word of Christ.  There is moral dimension to certainty and the full persuasion of faith.  Those who are unwilling to root the sin out of their lives are going to find their faith on shaky ground.  The Holy Spirit will not be a witness for assurance to a heart that is at odds with God’s will.  Though we must again and again emphasize that we are not justified because we are sanctified, yet we must also say that though we are justified by faith alone we are not justified by a faith that is alone.  Faith brings with it the fruit of the Spirit.  Faith works by love (Gal. 5:6).  Abraham was strong in faith, giving glory to God (Rom. 4:20), and of course it is impossible to give glory to God in this sense when you are living in sin.  Brothers and sisters, would you be like Abraham and be “fully persuaded” and “stagger not at the promise of God through unbelief”?  Then let us live by faith in the will of God and pursue universal holiness.

But let us end by coming back to the fact that though we are called to press through the trial to the triumph, and though it is true that there are things we must do – work out our salvation with fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12) – yet at the end of the day, the life of faith is characterized above all things by looking to God in Christ: to his grace, his strength, his fulness, his wisdom, his goodness, his love, his plan, and his promise.  God works in us both to will and to do of his good pleasure and therein lies our hope (13).  Faith looks away from ourselves to God and the gospel.  Abraham’s faith was not in his power but in God’s, not in his faithfulness but in God’s.  Let it be the same with us.  When we look inward, what do we see?  Sin and weakness.  When we look outward to the world around us, what do we see?  Enemies on every side.  What should we do?  Let us look up, to God and his grace and find rest and peace and joy in him though our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  Friends, let us “believe on him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead; who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification” (Rom. 4:24-25).