In this compelling episode, we delve into the history of Abraham as a profound illustration of God’s initiative in the realm of salvation. Contrary to the notion that faith is a personal endeavor, we explore how God’s revelation to Abraham, a man unaware of divine intentions, exemplifies the heavenly pursuit of humanity. Through the lens of Romans chapter 4, we uncover the astonishing truth that God seeks us out continually, instilling faith as a response to His revelation through Jesus Christ. Abraham’s journey from a state of disbelief and mistakes to becoming a vessel of blessing to the world
In this history of Abraham, we have the account of God revealing himself, taking the initiative, and therefore God… electing someone who was completely oblivious of God’s intentions. That’s what we need to understand about salvation. It is not we who search for God. It is not our initiative to go forward and give our hearts to Jesus. Yes, many of us have done that, gone forward to the altar and given our hearts to Jesus. But something happened before that. And what was it? the revelation of God to us through his Son, Jesus Christ. And so what we have here in Romans chapter 4 is Paul not simply using Abraham, as I said the other day, as an illustration, but rather Paul citing the beginning, or at least the beginning for Israel, of God’s initiative upon the world. God came to Abraham. You see, it says, if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does Scripture say? Abraham believed God. What did he believe about God? He didn’t know about God. His father was a pagan. He was a pagan himself. Well, God revealed something to Abraham, as I said the other day. He said, get up. Leave your country, go to a land that I will show you, and I will, in you and your children, I will bless the whole world. In your seed shall all families of the earth shall be blessed. And this is God Almighty speaking. Now, how he revealed himself, I don’t know. Was it in a dream? Was it in an actual visitation? It’s hard to say. But the point that Scripture makes is that God is the initiator. We don’t have here somebody who decides of his own volition to sit on a rock and meditate for 12 hours and see what happens. This is not what we have. We don’t have super spiritual men here. This is not an example of Abraham the superman, the faith superman. the superman of faith? Absolutely not. In fact, when you, and I urge you to read the story of Abraham in the book of Genesis, beginning chapter 12, you will find that Abraham made so many gaffes and mistakes and embarrassed himself and his wife many a time and brought about a child that was not the intended child, because Abraham tried to force the promise. That’s what we do, you see, and Abraham did. So it wasn’t about Abraham’s brilliance of faith. It was about God continually training Abraham. And I want you to think about that in relation to yourself. When I say continually training Abraham, God revealed himself to Abraham when Abraham was 75, and he gave him a promise then, and that promise was only fulfilled when Abraham was 100. That is 25 years, 25 years of faith training. How incredible is that? That’s the faithfulness of God towards us. Now look back on your life. If you’re in a downward spiral or if you’re in a dark spot or a dark place and you’ve sort of felt that you’ve lost your faith and things have gone too bad for you and you’ve just given up, and now you get all anxious because you feel that you’d better get your faith together again, because if you don’t, you’ll lose out on eternal salvation. Get your head straight. That’s not how it works. You are not the initiator of your faith. God is. Well, you say, well, what do I do then? Simply sit around and wait for him? He has already come. God, Paul has been revealing himself, rather Paul has been showing how God is revealing himself to us through Jesus Christ. The righteousness of God has been revealed, it says in verse 21. Not simply made known, but revealed as an apocalypse, a revealing. Unbelievable. what shall I say, sort of unfolding what is being covered and hidden, even the righteousness of God through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. It is God’s righteous way of our coming to him. How does he do it? He sends his Son. He sends his Son who takes the judgment of the human race upon himself so that we are justified freely by his grace. justified, that it means declared innocent. The human race is being declared innocent in Christ. It’s not innocent in itself, it’s guilty. And that is why God is instilling faith and calling us to exercise that faith, so that we can embrace this new innocence of ours. because God put Jesus forth as a propitiation. That’s verse 25. That means to take away or to appease his own judgment and wrath against sin and ruin and destruction that the earth has brought upon itself. So this is just phenomenal. I encourage you to get your head into Romans 3, the latter part of it, beginning verse 21, going right through to verse 31, because it is a marvelous revelation of God’s initiative on behalf of the human race. I mentioned the other day that false religions always start with man’s initiative, human initiative, as if we are the ones searching after God. As I told you before, we are not searching after God. Why do I know that? Because of Romans 1 verse 18, the whole world is in a state of suppression of God. They’re afraid of him. They feel guilty in relation to him, and therefore they hide from him. And God has to blast through our intellectual and spiritual concrete. He has to show himself in this marvelous way that he has done in Jesus Christ. So then Paul goes into the history of Abraham to show how God takes the initiative with one individual, Abraham. And by the way, the word Abraham, Abram means Lord, but Abraham means father of a multitude. We’ll talk more about that in a while. So, when it comes to your own experience, as I say, you do not sit upon a rock waiting for God to reveal himself. Meditating until you get there, trying to reach nirvana by human endeavor, mankind from the bottom up seeking to reach God, you rather respond to what God has revealed in Christ. And you say, oh Lord, I’ve been searching for you. Father, thank you for revealing yourself to me. You did not reveal yourself to me because I searched. You revealed yourself to me and therefore I searched. You made yourself available. You made it clear to me that you were accessible to me. So when it says that Abraham believed God, Abraham believed God not because he took an initiative to believe God, but because God, before the believing, revealed himself. Get up. Get out of your land, go to a country I will reveal to you, and I will make you the father of all the nations of the world. That was God’s revelation, and with that revelation came the gift of faith, and Abraham believed it. But remember, Abraham was a human being, a fallen human being like you and me. And so his natural humanity, his mind, resisted that belief. That’s what happens with you and me. We resist belief because we’re afraid, we feel guilty, we just don’t feel we’re worthy of such belief, of such gifts from God. But God is calling us, and God, with the call of salvation in Jesus, with the call gives the faith to believe it. And we then exercise that faith. But when we do, we realize that faith has come into an enemy territory. That is our mind and our emotions. Don’t be put off by that. Don’t be put off by the very idea that you don’t like faith, that it’s contrary to your human nature. Human nature does not naturally trust in God. Let’s suppose you have an addiction to alcohol, to drugs, to sex, to pornography, to food issues, and you’ve tried to stop many times and you’ve failed. Your human nature batters you down and says, look, you’ll never make it. You’ll never count to anything. You’re just a failure, left, right and center. Faith says no. Jesus is my righteousness. Jesus is my judgment. Jesus has taken the judgment of my soul upon himself, and so therefore I am counted as innocent. I am justified by the Father. You say all these things not because you feel you have any right to say them in your flesh. but because Christ has been revealed to you by God. Remember what Paul asks in verse 1 of chapter 4. What shall we say then that Abraham our father has found according to the flesh? Did he find any of this according to the flesh? What does it mean according to the flesh? It means according to human nature, which is fallen and broken. Did this faith emanate from human nature? Did Abraham believe from the capacity and ability of his own mind? That’s the flesh. No, he did not. What happened was that God revealed himself. And so you have to lift up your heart and say, Father, I believe you have already revealed yourself to me. Now remember what an astonishing, astounding, and utterly stupid kind of statement this is. This is our God, the creator of the universe. When I was a boy, we thought there was one galaxy. We now know, at least two or three years ago, that there are two trillion galaxies. This year, we think there may be 20 to 100 trillion galaxies. And each galaxy contains 1 to 200 billion. billion stars. God created all that, and we have the audacity to believe that this almighty God, the creator of all these worlds, thinks of us and numbers the hairs of our head and knows all about us and knows when a couple of sparrows fall to the ground and when we’re hungry and when we need help. Yes, we do. We believe that. It is an absurdity. It is irrational. But faith is irrational. Faith stands up to what appears to be the void and says, no, the void is full of God’s presence. It is full of Jesus and the glory of God. And so, you see, when you feel alone in your addiction, when you feel that you’ve just gone too far, when you feel that you are abandoned, your faith stands up to that, says, Lord God, I’m in the darkness, but you are the light to my darkness. You, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. Father in heaven, I thank you so much for revealing yourself to me in Jesus Christ, and in him you have taken my judgment. You have taken all the brokenness of my human nature and crucified it along with him so that I’m resurrected in his resurrection. Lord God, I affirm that you are my song in the silence. You are my light in the darkness. You are my strength in my weakness. You are my life in my death. Colin Cook here, everyone, and thank you very much for listening to this broadcast today. How It Happens, you can hear it on the radio at 10 in the evening, repeated at 4 in the morning on KLTT AM 670 in the Denver and Colorado and surrounding states. But you can also hear it on your smartphone. Simply download soundcloud.com or potbean.com and key in how it happens with Colin Cook when you get there. It’s listener-supported radio. This is a small ministry, but it’s lasted a long, long time, many decades. And so I ask you, please think of a donation. Send it to FaithQuest, P.O. Box 366, Littleton, Colorado, 80160, or make your donation online at faithquestradio.com. Each program costs $39 per 15 minutes. That’s about $200 for a week’s programs. That’s about $850 to $900 for a month’s programs. Thank you so very much for all your support. I appreciate it. God bless you. See you next time. Cheerio, and God bless again.
