God’s Promise Realized through Faith

13 For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith.¹⁴If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void.¹⁵For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation.

16 For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us,¹⁷as it is written, ‘I have made you the father of many nations’)—in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.¹⁸Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become ‘the father of many nations’, according to what was said, ‘So numerous shall your descendants be.’¹⁹He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already^* as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb.²⁰No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God,²¹being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.²²Therefore his faith^* ‘was reckoned to him as righteousness.’²³Now the words, ‘it was reckoned to him’, were written not for his sake alone,²⁴but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead,²⁵who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.

Abraham and God’s messengers

If we read this passage piously and carelessly we can miss what it’s actually saying. For a start, it definitively sidelines the Jewish religious Law. The promise that through Abraham a great people will arise and that all nations will be blessed through him, does not refer, in Paul’s view, to the Law and its use in Israel, but to Abraham’s trust in God and God’s trust in him.