In Romans 4, our eyes are opened to the God of miracles, the God who calls Abraham out of obscurity and makes impossible promises to him – and keeps them! It is the same God of Psalm 32, who forgives sins not because we, in our wisdom and effort, convince him to do it but because it is simply in his nature to forgive. The God of miracles is the ancestry of the Church. Paul alerts us to this ancestry…

Psalm 32 begins with, “Happy [or, Blessed] are those whose transgression is forgiven.” We see this here and there in scripture and we know what to call it: beatitude, a pronouncement of what the good life, the happy life looks like. If you ask Psalm 32, the happy, blessed life is to experience forgiveness, to receive the good news that God is looking at you and seeing something other than the mistakes you’ve made. And this is nothing short of…

Through the first three chapters of Romans, Paul has much to say about the faithfulness of God and of Jesus. And when we get to Romans 4, we finally read specifically of what we mean when we talk about God’s faithfulness – faithfulness to his covenant with Abraham (Genesis 15). Since Abraham, God has been on a mission to bless the whole world, and that mission has never faltered (even though we humans mess it up plenty). As proclaimed in…

One of the apostle Paul’s favorite Bible stories comes in Genesis 15. For what Paul has to say about faith as the defining trait of those who belong to the family of God in Jesus Christ, he goes back to the beginning where all the talk of faith and God’s family began. In Genesis 15, God has already made a shocking and scandalous promise to Abraham, that Abraham will have a family and use that family to bless “all the…