Then he believed in the Lord; and He reckoned it to him as righteousness. Genesis 15:6
This passage is from the story of God reaffirming the promise He initially made to Abram in Genesis 12:1-3. Despite Abram’s misgivings, which he had enumerated in the previous verses, we are told he trusted God. His trust in God considered, or counted, to be righteousness.
Paul quotes this verse in Romans 4:3 to emphasize that faith is the basis of our relationship with God. He contrasts this rudimentary trust, which is also a form of love, with any sense that through what we do we can establish a right relationship with God. We are to trust God, as Abraham did.
As for Me, behold, My covenant is with you,
And you will be the father of a multitude of nations. Genesis 17:4
The third time God repeats His promise, God says “as for me” and articulates what He will do. God will follow through on His promise to make Abraham a father of many nations.
God said further to Abraham, “Now as for you, you shall keep My covenant, you and your descendants after you throughout their generations. Genesis 17:9
Then God tells Abraham what His “part” is, along with His descendants, and it is to “keep the covenant”. How is Abraham to do that? How does He, and do we as well, keep the covenant which is the promise God makes?
We might be inclined to think keeping the covenant means obeying God’s commands, but Abraham had not been given any commands or moral instructions. The law of Moses came centuries later. All Abraham had was a promise. The only way He had of keeping the covenant was to continue to trust the promise, to have the faith that God counts as righteousness.
This is keeping the covenant. We trust it. We have faith. This is the lesson Paul pulls from His careful examination of Abraham’s story.
To trust what God promised was the only way Abraham had to obey. There was no set of commands, religious observances, or even moral instructions for Him to obey.
In fact, the Latin root of the word “obedience” means to listen, to hear, or to pay attention to. For Abraham to keep the covenant is the obedience of paying attention to the promise. That means relying on God’s pledge.
We know from the story of Abraham that he does not always trust the promise of God. His faith is not steady and consistent. Even his imperfect, sometimes weak, or even vanishing faith is still the example of trusting the promise of God to which Paul points.
The constant thread of the story throughout all scripture, Old and New Testaments, centers on the grace of God generously given to us out of love. We can do nothing but trust that God is doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves. We receive in faith all that God does, though our faith, like Abraham’s, is far from ideal.