Romans 4:3 “What does the Scripture say? ‘Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.

How do Christians, how do God’s people, settle an issue? It is not a matter of our own opinions, no matter how passionately we may cling to them, nor how loudly we proclaim them. “I think” is never equal to “God says.”

It is not a matter of which position sounds most reasonable or has the tightest logic. God reserves the right to defy our logic. His thoughts are not our thoughts.

It is not a matter of who has the best scientific research. There are more ways of knowing things, more ways of learning the truth, than what comes out of a laboratory. God does not make himself our laboratory rat to be dissected and examined. “How unsearchable his judgments and his paths beyond tracing out.” If personal opinion, human reason, and the scientific method had the final say, most of the Christian faith as we know it would completely disappear.

So no personal opinion, or logical argument, or laboratory experiment would ever lead us to the idea that justifies us by faith. Only Scripture can teach us this. Here Paul tells us what the book of Genesis had to say about Abraham: “Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness.” God regarded sinful Abraham a righteous man. Abraham received his righteous status from God by trusting him. That is from the first book of the Bible.

The examples don’t stop there. Paul goes on to make the same case for David, who confesses in the Psalms, “Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will never count against him.” The prophet Jeremiah calls the coming Christ “the Lord is our righteousness” in his book. The prophet Habakkuk says that the righteous live by faith. Jesus says that whoever believes will be saved, whoever believes will not perish but have everlasting life. In each case it is not what we do. God gives righteousness, he credits it, to the person who has faith in him.

We do not have to be ashamed to believe this because the Scriptures say. How else would we know? It is God’s own Word. We do not have to be afraid to believe that we are God’s righteous people, not guilty, acquitted of all our sins. We, too, have received the gift by faith. It’s what the Scriptures say. We are “the man (or woman) whose sin the Lord will never count against him.” We are the ones whose Lord is our righteousness. We are the righteous who will live by faith.

Like Abraham, we believe God, and it is credited to us as righteousness.