MDB 9: Genesis 15

Genesis 15: 6:
"And he (Abram) believed the LORD and he counted it to him as righteousness."

How were Old Testament believers saved? The New Testament is clear enough on the centrality of faith in Christ as the alone instrument of salvation, but how about those Old Testament saints? Were they too saved by faith?

If you had posed that last question to Paul, you probably would have gotten a funny look. "The question," Paul may have answered, "is not, 'Were Old Testament saints saved through faith?' but instead, 'Will New Testament Christians continue to be saved through faith as they were in the Old Testament?'" And Paul would point you to this verse in Genesis 15 as proof of his doctrine of justification by faith (see Romans 4 and Galatians 3 to see Paul's use of the verse in his argument).

Perhaps forgotten in all of the important debates about justification and faith and righteousness and perspectives on Paul is just what Abram is being promised and just what he is believing. Abram is old. And he has a wife that is both barren and old. He was 75 when he left his father's country, his wife a decade or so younger, and they were in the middle of a 25 year waiting period to see the promise fulfilled, a period marked by some concern and alternate planning: first Abram looks at Eliezer and then Ishmael as the fulfillment of the promise to have a son. But neither is what God has in mind. His promise is to bring a child from the union of Abram and Sarai. In God's timing, a 70 or 80 year old woman was just too young to become the mother of Isaac, and they would have to wait!

And old man looking up at the sky, having a conversation with an unseen being about stars and offspring. Were that unseen being not the Maker of Heaven and Earth, we may have cause to question Abram's sanity in believing the promise. But because it is God Almighty who is speaking, the only response is to believe. It is the Promise Giver that makes all the difference (Luke 18:27).