Believe the Word of God - Part One

Believe the Word of God – Part One

Matthew 8:5-13 & Romans 4

Eugene H. Peterson, a retired Presbyterian pastor, author of more than twenty books one of which is The Message and a scholar of biblical and Ancient Near East languages, reminds us that the Bible was originally a verbal book before it was written down.  The guidebook for our faith and the textbook of life was transmitted orally like the great epics of classical literature before scribes began to copy it onto papyrus and parchment.  Long before the invention of the printing press in Gutenberg, people knew the Bible with the same exactitude as many of us who pore over the pages of scripture.  Somewhat incredibly to us, our forebears in the faith believed genuinely in the Word of God although they did not have the book to consult.  They had the promises of God in their hearts and they accepted them without question.  They truly believed that God is who His Word reveals Him to be.  They did not question whether He has done the great and mighty deeds that they had heard from generation to generation. 

Moreover, they did not waver in their faith about the fact that God is capable of doing everything that He promises in the Bible.  Like a verbal covenant and oral contract between good friends or longstanding business partners, they took God at His word.  Often we have heard, “A man’s word is his bond.”  Your word obligates you to support it with integrity of action.  Likewise, the Word of God compels our Heavenly Father to fulfill His spoken promises to His people.  Essentially, the Bible which is the written record of His promises and deeds is a compilation of the spoken Word of God.

In the fourth chapter of Romans, the apostle Paul discourses upon Abraham’s impressive example of faith.  He says “Abraham believes God and it was accredited to him as righteousness.”  Remarkably, Abraham lives more than four hundred years before the Law is written down.  You recall the covenants that God makes with Abraham in Genesis 12 and 15.  In the first instance, God directs Abraham to leave his home and travel to the land where God sends Abraham.  There, Abraham, as the father of faith, will become the father of a great nation, the number of which the stars of the sky and the sand on the seashore cannot equal.  Multiple material blessings accompany this promise.  However, in the second occurrence, God promises this man of one hundred years of age whose wife is ninety-nine years old that he and she will have a natural child who will be the seed of this nation.  The author of Genesis, in the sixth verse of the fifteenth chapter, says, “Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness.”  What an amazing promise for God to make!  It is equally astonishing that Abraham unconditionally and unwaveringly accepts this promise.