Justification by Faith from the Beginning
A great deal that is written and taught about the Old Testament assumes that God was a legalist who “saved” people through their good works and only cared about one nation, and that then Jesus came and changed all that. It would be easy to look at texts from all over the Old Testament showing the opposite of each of these assumptions: for instance, the impossibility of self-righteousness in Psalm 51:1–3 and Psalm 130:3–4, 7–8, or the evangelical inclusion of the nations in Psalm 117:1, Isaiah 2:1–4, and Habakkuk 2:14. The two ideas are combined in Psalm 2:8–12.
However, the evangelical nature of God’s Word is not a matter of a few scattered texts: it is evangelical through and through, because God is evangelical from eternity to eternity. We can begin to see this by paying attention to the first book, Genesis, where Moses taught the Old Testament saints that they could not save themselves and to look forward to God saving the nations.
Christians know that we are justified entirely by God’s grace, by faith alone, apart from any merit of our own, and entirely by the merit of Jesus. Yet often, from the way that we misread some New Testament passages, we can come away with the impression that “justification by faith alone” was only invented once Jesus came. We miss the glorious and comforting reality that God has always been the Saviour “who justifies the ungodly” and “counts righteousness apart from works” (Rom. 4:5–6).
Our salvation is guaranteed by who God is. In our personal relationships, we can bump into each other on a good day o ra bad day. Not so with God: we haven’t caught God on a good millennium. Freely justifying sinners, from top to bottom, despite any merit which we think we might have, entirely through crediting to us the merit of another, is what God does. Below, we will see why both Paul and James kept turning to Genesis to prove that we are only ever justified by faith alone. (Spoiler: it’s because there is no other God in Genesis than in the Gospels.)
Genesis 3: Redemption Restores Creation
How does God choose to save people? How does he add them to the people he is saving? We will see that God is fulfilling his original purpose for creation, even after it has been marred by sin, and that his way of saving people is through their trust in him, quite apart from what we deserve.
In Genesis 3, Adam and Eve made sure to reject God in the only way they could—by disobeying the one and only thing he had forbidden. They distrusted his kindness and believed the lie that he was withholding blessing from them. Yet God’s purpose continues. He saves us so that we will do what he created us to do in the first place.
God’s punishment is itself a reminder of his purposes and his promises. For example:
From here on, God’s work and ours would be not merely creation, but redemption. Most significantly, the mandate to multiply, the command to fill the world with people, had always meant to fill it with righteous people: the only kind that were around. That would no longer be so simple. Filling the world with righteous people in right relationship with the God who made them now requires that universally sinful people should be made righteous worshippers. How?
The curses of Genesis 3 show us that God’s punishment is itself a reminder of his purposes and his promises. The curse on the enemy, in 3:15, is salvation for God’s people:
“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”l
The judgement on the serpent is a promise of a future fight. The betting shops aren’t giving odds, though, because the issue has already been decided: “He shall bruise your head.” What will it mean that “you shall bruise his heel”? How will that be salvation for his people?
Noah: Alien Righteousness
Let’s look at the first act of judgement-and-salvation through re-creation: Noah.
The whole world was filled with the opposite of God’s purpose: people’s wickedness turned to violence in every corner (Gen. 6:11–12). That was the opposite of God’s mandate to multiply humanity, since violence reduces the number of people. The God who loves people and wants more of them doesn’t sit back and watch as people destroy and harm each other.
To save humanity, God acts to remove the violent in Noah’s day, and he chooses a man by grace.That man is labelled a “herald of righteousness” (2 Pet. 2:5), but most significantly he serves as an example of saving faith: Noah “became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith” (Heb. 11:7). By trusting in God’s promise about the ark, he and his family were saved to be the new humanity.
Nevertheless, on this occasion, the one who was saved by faith alone was already relatively righteous (Gen. 6:9). Therefore, we could end up with completely the wrong idea. But Moses squashes that misunderstanding as soon as it raises itself, with Noah himself. Compare God’s assessment of humanity before and after the flood:
Twice the Lord observes that people’s hearts are thoroughly corrupt: the first time he decides to judge and sends the flood; the second time he determines not to judge, and that’s because of a sacrifice. That phrase for “pleasing aroma” will reappear throughout the Law, describing animal sacrifices that pay for sin as substitutes for sinners. Noah’s own righteousness (such as it was) turns out not to be what saved him.1
If anyone reading Genesis were to think of being saved by being righteous, Moses immediately corrects us when he tells us at length about Abraham.
Abraham: The Father of Faith
Let’s say that you read Genesis to this point and get the impression that God saves those who are of above average righteousness. You get a sense that God will deal with sin by destroying those who are insufficiently righteous. We’ve already seen, with Noah, that this cannot be. When God explains his purposes for the world to Abraham, it becomes crystal clear.
Moses tells us clearly that it is only by faith that God counts Abraham righteous (15:6):
“And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness.”
Counted Righteous by Faith Alone, apart from Good Works, in Genesis
What does it mean to count righteousness to him? Ordinarily, someone is justified when they are in fact in the right and they are publicly shown to be in the right. For instance, when an innocent man is acquitted in a court of law, he is justified. When God, who is always right, is publicly shown to be right, he is “justified” (Ps. 51:4, also quoted in Romans 3).
That isn’t how Moses describes what happened to Abraham. Here, we find that Abraham is not righteous, because God counts something to him as righteousness. The link between faith and righteousness is one of the most comforting truths in the Bible, so it’s worth getting it right. Faith is not a substitute for righteousness. Faith is how we receive a righteousness that comes from outside of us. Faith receives God’s promise. And those who receive his promise, as Abraham did, God counts as righteous. He “justifies” them in such a way that it breaks the bounds of what the word “justify” can bear. For example, this is the entry for “justify” in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary:
justify • verb (justifies, justifying, justified) 1 prove to be right or reasonable.
- be a good reason for.
2 Theology:
declare or make righteous in the sight of God.
Christians have to write our own dictionaries as a result:
justification • noun an act of God’s free grace, in which he pardons all our sins, and accepts us as righteous in his sight, only because of the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and received by faith alone.2
Notice that we’re only fifteen chapters into Genesis, the first book of Moses, the opening of the Law, and we already we have seen that:
- Salvation has to come from God providing a Saviour (3:15)
- Salvation is universally needed because of sin (before and after Noah)
- Salvation requires payment for sin which we ourselves do not make (Noah’s sacrifice)
- God saves, not by making us righteous, but by counting us righteous (15:6)
- God chooses to count righteous those who trust in his promises (15:6).
There is no other way of salvation, anywhere in the Bible, than justification by faith alone.
Shown to Be Righteous by Good Works, in Genesis
Later on in Abraham’s life, in one very significant incident, God tests him. Will Abraham prove himself righteous? He trusts in God’s ability to supernaturally return Isaac from the dead (Heb. 11:19). His faith in God, at that point, produces the fruit of obedience. At that point, God justifies Abraham in the more conventional sense: he demonstrates that he is righteous. God hasn’t given up on producing a righteous humanity. James 2 picks up on this point:
“Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up his son Isaac on the altar? You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by his works.” (vv. 21–22)
Does that undermine what we think we have discovered in Genesis? Some notice that Paul appears to agree with us (as we see also in Romans 4), and that James here contradicts Paul. But read the next verses:
“And the Scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”—and he was called a friend of God. You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.” (vv. 23–24)
James is well aware that two events in Genesis happened one after the other, and the order matters. Abraham was justified (counted righteous, despite his lack of righteousness) first. He believed God’s promise. His trust in God later caused him to obey God in a certain matter (Genesis 22). When Abraham passed that test, God justified him (vindicated him, demonstrated that he acted righteously). James’ point (one which Paul will also make in Romans) is that you can’t say that you trust God to save you and yet never trust God to instruct you in how to live.
So much has been written about “Romans 4 versus James 2.” Much of the confusion could have been spared by noticing the order of events in Genesis and what Moses in Genesis already teaches about how God counts sinners righteous, apart from good works.
The Nations Counted Righteous by Faith Alone, apart from Good Works, in Genesis
One might have expected that after the flood, given a bit of time, violence would cause God to send another flood. God swore not to, but in Abraham provided a different way of ridding the world of sin. Not only was Abraham himself justified by faith, but he was also promised that the unrighteous world would be blessed through him: “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3). It is true that (as with Noah) God will protect the people whom he is creating against attack (“him who dishonors you I will curse”). However, he also promises to create a righteous humanity by using sinners like Abraham to redeem the sinful nations.
Abraham is the classic New Testament example of justification by faith alone (for example, see Romans 4). But don’t miss the fact that Abraham is not chosen, from among many Sunday school characters from the Old Testament, as one who happens to be justified by faith. As we have seen, Paul didn’t have to go far in his Bible to find Abraham. Abraham is the father of Israel, the ancestor, the beginning of how God saved the world through a people. The Old Testament is full of reminders that all the blessings to God’s people flow from his promise to Abraham. If the New Testament reminds us that Abraham was justified by faith alone, that’s because the Old Testament keeps reminding us that God’s dealings with Abraham are the foundation of his plan to save:
“And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Gen. 12:2–3)
God’s overarching purpose is to bless and save the world. Someone has rightly said that it is God’s ordinary work to save, but his strange work to condemn. We see this throughout the Old Testament—for example, in Ezekiel 18:23: “Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, declares the Lord God, and not rather that he should turn from his way and live?” That’s not an idea that developed later on; rather, we see it in Genesis in the wording of the promise to Abraham about the enemy and the nations. As Gordon Wenham points out, there would have been little unusual in the ancient world about saying something more balanced, like “those who bless you I will bless, and those who curse you I will curse.” Yet in Genesis 12, Wenham notes:
“We have the singular “he who disdains you.” … This appears to imply that those who disdain Abram will be far fewer than those who bless him. He will flourish to such an extent that few will fail to recognize that God is indeed on his side.”3
In Abraham, God is on the march against sin among the nations, but as Saviour of nations. How does Paul explain what we have to do with Jesus? He tells us what was promised to Abraham, namely:
“For the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world did not come through the law but through the righteousness of faith.” (Rom. 4:13)
That is why, before the nation of Israel was invented, before Abraham was even circumcised (in Genesis 17), the promise of salvation was by faith (Genesis 15) so that it would eventually include the nations (Genesis 12).
“Is this blessing then only for the circumcised, or also for the uncircumcised? For we say that faith was counted to Abraham as righteousness.” (Rom. 4:9)
For most of us reading this, that’s just as well. This is how the gospel began to be preached after Jesus died and rose—first to Israel:
“You are the sons of the prophets and of the covenant that God made with your fathers, saying to Abraham, ‘And in your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed.’” (Acts 3:25)
But first is not last:
“And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed.’ … so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.” (Gal. 3:8, 14)
One Bible, One Jesus, One Gospel
This all comes down to the fact that God has not changed, and that is a great comfort. Imagine if it were not so.
If the Old Testament were teaching a way of salvation based on our own merit, would it be useful reading when I want to grow in Christ—the one whose yoke is easy?
If the God I meet in the Old Testament were a different God from the one whom I meet in Christ, could I build others up in Christ by reading the two Testaments together?
If the God who saves me through the work of Jesus now “saved” quite differently back then, could I delight in the God I meet in the pages of the Old Covenant?
Most importantly, if the way the nations are saved now isn’t how they were always saved, would I dare to copy the apostles when they preached Jesus to the nations from the Old Testament?
It doesn’t bear thinking about. Whenever you open any part of the Old Testament, God is speaking to you there as the one who “justifies the ungodly.” He does not change. We’re resting on his very character, his eternal nature: the most solid rock imaginable. Especially as a member of the nations, I’m glad:
“We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs that fall from your table. But you are the same Lord, whose nature is always to have mercy.”4
More resources from Steffen Jenkins
This article was originally published as “Justification from the Beginning,” in The Reformation Fellowship Magazine 5 (October 2022): 26–33.
1 See especially Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, Word Biblical Commentary (Dallas: Word, 1987), 189–190.
2 The Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q&A 33.
3 Wenham, Genesis 1–15, 277.
4 Book of Common Prayer, alluding to Jesus’ encounter with the Syrophoenician woman.
