What is the peculiar character of the covenant made with Abraham, which caused him to differ from other religious men of his time? Abraham was a man of faith, and the purpose of the patriarchal covenant was the education of faith in the heart of a family chosen by God to display to the world the marks and powers of faith. Looked at from this standpoint, the history of Abraham and his successors marks itself off and rises above all the rest and becomes an object-lesson. In it are to be found all the facts required to set out the nature of religious faith, its difficulties and its triumph.
The elements of faith are-
(1) Knowledge: every religious faith presupposes a Divine message, a meeting with God.
(2) Assent: a spontaneous movement of the soul, a moral affinity and deep sympathy of the heart, which over-rules the material perceptions and wins the message acceptance, at times even in the teeth of probability or preference or the cold calculations of reason.
(3) Trust: a triumphant effort of the will, which leaves our fate to the wisdom of Him who gave the message and allowed the heart to perceive Him. Faith, for its realization, requires absolute trust, begetting obedience and raising it high above all human selfishness. That is what St. Paul calls “the obedience of faith” or the faith of the heart, the fount of justice.
In the religious education of the patriarchs we find very clearly marked the three constituent elements of faith. There is a clear message and a formal meeting with God. What did Elohistic worshippers expect from their patron gods? Prosperity in their lands, victory in their battles, and a numerous seed multiplying the resources and strength of the tribe. God promises Abraham a fertile land, a royal power which no enemy can destroy, and a numberless posterity, sprung from a son whom Sarah shall give him in his old age. To these promises, purely temporal and in line with Abraham's religious development, the patriarch replies by an assent which binds him to the new God whose benefits he accepts. This assent, which never failed for a moment in the chequered career of the patriarch, constitutes the moral unity of his conscience and contributes more than anything else to the impression of majesty left on our minds by Abraham's religious character. The reason is that the grand promises of God are not unconditional, and the covenant agreed to by the son of Terah is a contract to which there are two parties. To each benefit of God there must be a corresponding act of faith on the part of Abraham. To form and train this faith, God makes use of a feeling which seems to have been especially marked in the patriarch's soul, namely, family affection. The history of Abraham shows us that he clung above all to his kindred, and that ties of blood were all-powerful with him. It is by means of these that God speaks to him and brings him, through a series of conflicts between the interests of the flesh and the Divine will, to transform the assent of faith into the proportions of an heroic trust and obedience.
The requirement of faith runs through the entire Old Testament. “In the Old as in the New Testament, faith is the subjective condition of salvation.” It is the prerequisite of all spiritual blessings-pardon, guidance, enrichment, help, discipline, communion. The words regarding Abraham (he “believed in the Lord, and he counted it to him for righteousness”) contain the essence of evangelical faith. When the typical believer was counted righteous by the Divine Judge, the meaning is not that he was acquitted-for acquittal declares that a man has done no wrong-but that God accepted him in spits of his sins. The evangel of both Testaments is that righteousness is not achieved by deeds, but received as a gracious gift. Had Abraham won God's favour by his extraordinary merits, he would have been no example for his posterity: but he was accepted by God for his faith, which all could imitate. Here, as Ewald says, is “a sketch and model of genuine faith which could never be forgotten, but in all succeeding ages exerted a wonderful influence. The writer regards faith in its extreme importance as the chief and crowning excellence of a man's life in God.”1 [Note: J. Strachan, Hebrew Ideals, i. 78.]
The Bible does not define “faith”-even Heb_11:1 is scarcely an exception-but exhibits it in action. It does not command faith in express terms, but recommends it by example. The men and women, or if you please so to regard them, the characters, whether historical or symbolical, of the Old Testament, live as though they saw the Invisible. That they do not in other things always rise above the level of their times, that they are occasionally disfigured by insincerity or cruelty or sensuality, does not lessen the wonder of their faith but rather serves as a foil to set it off. Being what they were, living when they did, they were on the whole victorious over the evil of the world; their faith in God saved them from the worst things. That is the lesson of every good life depicted in the Hebrew Bible, and it is a lesson of surpassing value for all ages.1 [Note: H. B. Swete, in Cambridge Biblical Essays, 546.]
