The Example of Justification
4: 1-25
The entire fourth chapter of Romans is devoted to Abraham, whom Paul uses as an example of the central biblical truth that mankind can be justified only by faith in response to His grace, and never by good works. We can assume several reasons for this. First, Abraham lived about 2,000 years before Paul wrote his letter to the believers in Rome, demonstrating that the principle of salvation by faith rather than by good works was not new in Judaism. Abraham was the first and foremost Hebrew patriarch. He lived more than six hundred years before the TaNaKh was established through Moshe. Therefore, long before the Torah was given, and obviously could not have been saved by obedience to it.
Second, Paul used Abraham as an example of salvation by faith simply because he was a human being. Until this point in Romans, Paul had been speaking primarily about theological truths in the abstract. In Abraham, however, he gives a flesh-and-blood example of justification by faith.
The third, and doubles most important, reason Paul used Abraham as the example of justification by faith was that, although rabbinical teaching and popular Jewish belief were contrary to Scripture, as far as the basis of Abraham’s righteousness was concerned, they agreed that Abraham was the supreme example of a godly, righteous man in the TaNaKh, who was acceptable to God. He was, and is, the biblical model of genuine faith.
By using Abraham as the supreme scriptural example of justification, or salvation by faith alone, Paul was attacking the very foundation of Rabbinic Judaism that had perverted the message of the Torah into works righteousness. If Abraham was not, and could not have been justified by good works, then no one could be! Conversely, if Abraham was justified solely on the basis of his faith in YHVH, then everyone else must be justified in the same way since Abraham was, and is, the biblical standard of a righteous man.89
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