Surrogate Father

Romans 4:1-5, 13-22; Genesis 12:1-4a; Psalm 121; John 3:1-17

Have you ever try standing on one leg for any length of time? For us this should come with the warning, “Don’t try this at home.” It’s not easy. All our weight is resting on a fairly small area. From a physics standpoint, our weight is not situated close to the foot, but at a distance from it. That means there is a torque force involved that wants to bring our torso weight to a point where it is more stable, that is, the floor. On one foot we wobble and sway until the only way we can have stability is by putting our other foot down. Think of it as self-induced vertigo. As I said, don’t try this at home.

This one-legged instability helps us understand how Paul describes the relationship of his Jewish brothers and sisters to God. They were forever wobbling on the one leg of works. Righteousness – being in a right relationship with God – is the torso weight that is so precariously balanced on the leg of works – obedience to the Law. And they wobble all over the place because of the impossibility of fulfilling all of the Law, not to mention the often competing interpretations of the Law offered by different rabbis.

Paul suggests is that there is another way of diagraming this relationship. His Jewish friends need to put their second foot on solid ground. This second leg is faith. Then what they have in their torsos – righteousness – is now stabilized on two legs, on faith as well as works. “Abraham had faith in God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.” Abraham believed God. Eugene Peterson’s The Message puts it this way: “Abraham entered into what God was doing for him, and that was the turning point. He trusted God to set him right instead of trying to be right on his own.”

The Jewish concept of being right with God included only works. Even Abraham was “justified by works,” according to their view. Paul had a different interpretation of scripture: “Abraham had faith in God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.” Righteousness happens only as faith stabilizes works. This became for Paul “the righteousness of faith.” In other words, for Christians, regardless of their background (Jewish or Gentile heritage) righteousness and the works that follow from it proceed only because of faith.

One of the things we have to realize is we use a pretty watered-down understanding of belief. We use it for everything from deeply spiritual matters to “I believe it’s going to rain.” The Greek word which Paul used conveyed the sense of trust in, loyalty to, or commitment to a person. That’s how the our English word “believe” was used in medieval and Elizabethan times. That’s how the King James translators used the word as they were putting their editorial mark of the Bible we came to have. Abraham trusted God, stuck by God.

Today’s understanding of “believe” derives from the influence of the Enlightenment, the intellectual era that rose in the second half of the 17th century, continued into the 19th century, and still holds a significant sway over our thinking in the 21st century. Philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill described human thinking in terms of a proposition: if A, then B. So that having faith in God, trusting in God, believing God became subjective: “I believe that God....” The object of trust, loyalty, commitment isn’t a person but a fact or an assertion. The stress of the belief is on the believer, the subject of the “I believe...” statement, rather than on the object, the one who is believed in, trusted in, and who is the recipient of loyalty, namely God. When I say that I believe that God did this or that, it is all about me. I choose to accept the proposition that God does something. It has nothing to do with God’s overwhelming grace which offers me no other choice than to believe and commit myself to God.

We don’t just snap to one day and believe. Paul notes that Abraham “didn’t hesitate with a lack of faith in God’s promise [of a permanent home and of multitudinous heirs], but he grew strong in faith and gave glory to God.” Before he was Abraham, he was Abram and his faith started out only the size of a mustard seed and it faltered more than once. So did Sarah’s faith. They both laughed when they first heard the promise that they would have an heir. Twice Abram gave Sarai away or at least pretended she was his sister, putting the promise of an heir in jeopardy. He adopted a son as his heir (Eliezer of Damascus) lest he die without one. Sarai used Hagar to give Abram a blood heir. Hagar had Ishmael. But Abraham and Sarah both grew in faith and the climax of it all came when Abraham took Isaac and was about to sacrifice him. That’s when Abraham truly and finally came to trust God. He was willing to give up his own offspring — the tangible evidence of God’s grace, presence, and promise — and not trust in his own actions. Could he lose Isaac and still somehow believe God would still fulfill those promises? Abraham was willing to stake his life and that of his son that God could be so trusted.

We live in a results oriented world. There has to be productivity. We are our work. Doing something and getting something for it is the chief end of the economic human being. It’s not new. Jesus tussled with that mind set. He told a parable about workers who were hired at different times during the day and, when they collected their pay at the end of the day, all had received the wage allotted for a full day’s work. The laborers who worked the full shift thought the others should have gotten their wages pro-rated. That’s who we are. We want what’s coming to us and we don’t want anyone getting more than they deserve.

The only problem with that is what we have coming to us, is not something that we really want. We have earned condemnation, not acclamation.

In our church life we think that there ought to be discipleship before doxology (works before faith). Our emphasis too often is on what we are to do for God, what we need to accomplish for God, what we need to provide for God, for God’s church, and for God’s kingdom. We hem and haw around and never really admit to it, but our underlying thought is that if we don’t do all that stuff, we aren’t going to get any of God’s love.

All this colors our thinking about how the world is supposed to work, how people are to perform in a highly individualistic and competitive world. Obviously someone who has a corner office with windows is worth hundreds or thousands of times more than someone in a cubicle in shipping with no windows.

Every time that Abraham tried to work his way into God’s promised future, things fell apart. When he let go of the need to cling to the things of his own making and the things that fell into his life, his faith soared. We don’t work to hoard. Jesus told the story of the landowner who needed bigger barns and lost everything by trying to have everything.

As Paul tells the Romans, “Faith is credited as righteousness to those who don’t work, because they have faith in God who makes the ungodly righteous.” Paul is not talking about idlers. He is talking about those who know that no amount of work that they can do can gain them the eternal blessing. Paul goes on to say, “The promise to Abraham and to his descendants, that he would inherit the world, didn’t come through the Law but through the righteousness that comes from faith.” That doesn’t mean that wishing will make it so. That doesn’t mean that whatever we think the eternal reward might be will be what it is. It doesn’t mean that we believe that if God, then everything will be hunky-dory between now and the kingdom and in the kingdom, too. It means that we put our unreserved trust in God for whatever God’s grand plan for us is. And that plan is our salvation.

We learn a lot from our parents, whether they are biological or not. What we learn from Sarah and Abraham is faith. Abraham “didn’t hesitate with a lack of faith in God’s promise, but he grew strong in faith and gave glory to God,” just as “Jesus matured in wisdom and years, and in favor with God and with people” (Luke 2:52). We can grow in maturity of faith and life as we put every last ounce of our trust in the one whose promise is sure and whose word is not just truth, but life as well. Let us give thanks that we have Abraham as our surrogate father. May our faith be formed as his was.


Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com 
Copyright 2014 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.