How
could Abraham have kept hoping? He had
been promised a great line of descendants, but he and Sarah were too old for
this to be humanly possible. Wouldn’t you
start to doubt your memory, doubt yourself, doubt if your understanding of God’s
will for your life was really accurate?
In the verses just before where our reading began, Paul uses strong
language, describing Abraham as being as good as dead, as regards his chances having
a child. But as regards faith, we read
today, he was very powerful. More
precisely, he was empowered, gifted with power by God. God had poured into Abraham the power of
faith, the power to trust, to cling to hope.
God, we read, has the power to do what he promised, and he shared his
power with Abraham. Abraham, as good as
dead, was powerful at trusting, at ascribing glory to God, at confessing in
praise that God will raise the dead.
And
God does. God gave Abraham progeny, overcoming
the death of his and Sarah’s fertility.
And God gave Abraham faith, and that trust made him righteous in God’s
eyes, made him right before God. Because
Abraham stood giving glory to God, the opposite of the portrait Paul painted earlier
in this letter of the sinner who boasts in themself and gives glory to an idol. Abraham was right before God because he
adopted a posture of trust, of giving glory, of knowing that God could conquer
death.
We
come here today to celebrate that we share that faith. We have been empowered by God to trust, to
hope, to give glory. We have the
competence to see our transgressions for what they truly are: death. The world’s sin, our sins, deaden us. God conquers death. God would hand over his only son for us. There’s the promise: God saying, I want you
to live forever, perfect, with me. God raised Jesus from the dead. There’s the power: God has the power to do
what he has promised, to conquer death, to raise us from our death.
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