In Romans 4 Paul argues that people are made right with God solely through faith. Much has been misunderstood owing to the large gulf between the meaning of pistis in Koiné Greek and "faith" in English. We are the victims of centuries of practice of using the word "faith" to mean intellectual assent to propositions about God developed by the Church, whether Roman Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, or Baptist, and so on. Faith so defined misses Paul's point.
Pistis means "trust." In New Testament terms, as we will see, it means "trust that leads to following Jesus in loving obedience" or "trusting Jesus to be always who he said he was when on earth and behaving accordingly." Yet another way to define pistis is "faithfulness." It is used of God to describe his faithfulness in dealing with us.
In what we know as chapter 4, Paul quotes Genesis 15:6, which says that Abraham believed in God, that is, that God would keep the promise to make Abraham's descendants a great nation. This trust in the faithfulness of God justified Abraham (accounted to him as righteousness). Justification is a legal term meaning to acquit an accused person. In Paul it means that a person is put into right relationship with God, whose purpose has always been redemption, and whose message is personal and ethical. That is what righteousness means.
After quoting from the Torah, Paul goes on to say that works did not justify Abraham, otherwise we would have something to boast about. Keep that idea in mind, as later on in the book Paul talks about what it is proper to boast about as a believer. When we work at a job and are paid, we are given what is owed to us. It is not a gift. Similarly, we cannot make God owe us, but rather justification, or being accounted as right with God, is a free gift.
Even the psalmist says "Blessed are those whose iniquities (acts of disobedience to God) are forgiven and whose sins are blotted out; blessed is the one against whom the Lord (יהוה) will not reckon sin." (Psalm 32:1-2).
Then Paul points out that Abraham was accepted as righteous by God before he or anyone of his family was circumcised and long before the Torah was given. At this point in the reading of the book in Rome, the Greek Christians were probably nodding with satisfaction, while the Jewish Christians were squirming. God set Abraham as the father of many nations before there was law (Torah) or even circumcision. Abraham continued to believe after he was very old and Sarah was, to all human knowledge even today, beyond child-bearing possibility. That is what faith (trusting) is. All the hearers of the letter knew that, in her old age, Sarah bore a son to Abraham and named him Yitschak ("he laughs").
If becoming right with God were a matter of obeying the Torah, then faith would be meaningless, and the promise to Abraham would be empty. If you can by obedience to rules make yourself righteous and attain your hope, then there is no place for faith or promise. So what is God about, then, and what was the purpose of the Torah? Paul's position is that what the Torah does is to bring wrath (condemnation) and to make faith and promise empty, while God is working out his promise to Abraham in those who believe in the one who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, he who died because of our rebellious living and was raised from the dead to make us right with God.
That is strong enough, however, something of major importance is lost in translation into English. When Jesus is given the title Lord, that is the word in Greek kurios, which all of Paul's hearers knew was the word used by Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (the Septuagint) every time the covenant name of God (יהוה) appeared. This is the Trinitarian teaching that Jesus was none other than the One God come to earth as a first-century human.
If that is the case, then the nature of God is not that of an ancient Middle Eastern vengeful and angry God who needs to be appeased, but rather the loving God, attested to throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, whose purpose is redemption, whose nature is love, and who promises, as he did to Moses, to be with us to the end of the age.
Yes!
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