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To make the matter quite certain, leaving no room for doubt, the apostle clinches the
argument by saying:--
"Now it was not written for his sake alone, that it was imputed to him: but for us also,
to whom it shall be imputed, IF WE BELIEVE ON HIM THAT RAISED UP JESUS
OUR LORD FROM THE DEAD" (Rom. 4: 23, 24).
The insistence here is upon resurrection. The birth of Isaac was the manifestation of
resurrection power, for his parents were "as good as dead"; "Therefore sprang there even
of one, and him as good as dead, so many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the
sand which is by the sea shore innumerable" (Heb. 11: 12). And at the offering of Isaac,
this same element of faith is prominent: "Accounting that God was able to raise him up,
even from the dead; from whence also he received him in a figure" (Heb. 11: 19).
While, therefore, justification is "by His blood", it becomes ours by faith in the God of
resurrection. This is emphasized in the last verse of Rom. 4:: "Who was delivered on
account of our offences, and was raised again on account of our justification." It is not
the truth to say: "He was raised again for our justification", for (dia) followed by the
accusative, meaning "on account of". The delivering up of Christ by the Father was the
demonstration of our guilt to all, for had no guilt been ours, no death would have been
His. In like manner the resurrection of Christ was the demonstration before men and
angels of the acquittal of all His people. The debt was paid by His death. The acquittal
was received in resurrection, and it is for this reason that Gen. 15: 6, and not Gen. 12: 3
(or elsewhere), is the place where Abraham's justification is revealed. He most implicitly
believed in God Who quickens the dead when he believed the promise of a literal seed to
himself.
We shall have to give these closing verses of Rom. 4: further attention, but for the
moment we must leave them and come back to Rom. 4: 1-8.
The testimony of David.
With the introduction of David, the apostle brings forward the third division of the
O.T. It must be remembered that the Hebrew Scriptures are divided into three great
sections, viz., the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms (Luke 24: 44). The Law and the
Prophets have born their witness (Rom. 3: 21), as seen in the case of Abraham and
Habakkuk (Rom. 4: 1-8; 1: 17). The quotation from David's words now brings the third
and last witness to the gratuitous nature of justification.
David's testimony is particularly useful because of the precision of his language.
He describes the blessedness of the man to whom God imputeth righteousness without
works, by saying: "Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin"
(Rom. 4: 8). Here we have balancing terms. To impute sin is to lay sin to the charge of
any one, and to treat him as a sinner. To impute righteousness must in the same way set
righteousness to one's account, and treat one as being righteous. True, the sin is our own,
and the righteousness was another's, but the one is no more a pious fiction than the other.
Just as surely as the unsaved man is really a sinner, so the accepted believer is really