Called According to Paul: Romans 4:17
Monday, January 3, 2011 at 7:31PM I want to put this old series of posts in the favorite posts section on the right sidebar, so I’ve been reposting them from my previous Blogger blog one by one. An explanation of this series of posts can be found here. You’ll find other posts in this series here.
In Roman 4:1 Paul writes,
…as it is written, ‘I have made you the father of many nations’—in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. (ESV)
Paul is writing in Romans 4 of Abraham’s faith. Abraham, he says, believed that God would fulfill his promise. You’ll remember the promise: God told Abraham that he would make him the father of many nations so that the number of his offspring would be like the number of stars in the sky.
Abraham’s faith held firm when a son seemed like an impossibility because he knew the God who spoke the promise to him was the God who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. In other words, Abraham’s faith was strong regardless of the impossibility, humanly-speaking, of what God had promised him (Abraham, after all was “as good as dead” and Sarah was barren), for he understood that his God was the God of divine fiat.
The language of the phrase we’re looking at—”calls into existence the things that do not exist”—harks back to God’s creation by command. And while in this usage call is not refering to the call that works salvation (or faith, or conversion) like the usages already examined in 1 Corinthians 1 and 7, Paul is nonetheless using it in the sense of divine command. Abraham understood that just as God had called all of creation into existence out of nothing, he could produce offspring from an old man and his barren wife by calling into existence things that do not exist. Paul is using call here to refer to a command with creative power.
As with other posts in this series, I welcome additions/corrections/comments regarding the way Paul uses of the word call in this passage.
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