She pats his hand and wipes some drool from his lips. My heart aches as I watch an old dear friend being cared for by his faithful wife. His Alzheimer’s has taken away his ability even to sit. So he is strapped into his chair. He says a word or two, but I can’t converse with him.
My friend’s wife faithfully sits alongside him and carries the conversation as she looks after him. Some of what she says even seems to put a smile on his face and he seems at peace. Praise God for this woman’s faithfulness to the promises she made in marriage decades ago. It makes all the difference in the world to how my friend will experience his last days on earth.
An even more incredible faithfulness to a promise is Paul’s subject in Romans 3 and 4, and as he arrives at our text for this Sunday, Romans 4:13-25, the promise comes sharply into focus. It’s God’s covenant promise to Abraham and as Paul has been arguing all along, that promise includes not only Abraham’s physical descendants in the Jewish people, but the whole world.
Here in this text Paul wants to celebrate the full scope and power of God’s promise and His ability to keep it. That’s why Paul’s mind turns all the way back to the original creation at the end of verse 17 as he tells us Abraham believed God “who gives life to the the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”
God’s covenant with Abraham and ultimately with us is an extension of His covenant with all creation, to redeem it and establish it as His kingdom. So the promise which Abraham believed and which is fulfilled in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, is really a promise kept from the beginning of creation.
The “justification” here, the faith being reckoned to Abraham as righteousness is the declaration of inclusion in that single promise which God is keeping to His creation. It’s God’s work to put humanity back in the right place, into His plan and promise for the whole world. And verses 23 and 24 tell us that the same reckoning is our as well, when we in faith believe in God as the one who raised Jesus from the dead.
My friend’s wife can only keep her marriage promises as the old vows say, “until death do us part.” But God’s faithfulness to us in Jesus Christ includes us in a promise that has the power to carry on even beyond death. In that promise given us in Jesus’ resurrection we live in and for a new life in God’s kingdom that will be everlasting. May we be faithful to our own part in that great promise.