Recall from my SPS that I said that Abraham's offering of his son Isaac was just as much a factor in making him the father of the faithful as his belief in God's promise to give him a son in the first place. Mainstream Christian theology highlights his belief in the promise of a son because the apostle Paul makes it a prominent part in his argument concerning justification by faith in Romans 4. That is where Paul brings up the fact that he believed God and it was accounted for him as righteousness, and that is basically the jumping off point for Paul's argument on justification by faith. And so he argues from that scripture that I just quoted in Genesis 15. This is the promise about the son being born. This is where Paul picks up in Romans the fourth chapter. Paul's whole argument about justification by faith hinges on verse 6. Abraham's righteousness at this point was not a work. It was not a deed. It was not an act. It was not a ritual of any kind. Abraham did nothing except believe. Abraham's righteousness was belief. It was trust in God, trust in the promise, faith that God would give what He had promised. And then God accounted that faith as righteousness. He credited him with righteousness because of his faith. It was not an act, not a work, but just belief. God, You said You'll give me a son. Fine. I agree. I thank you. I believe. Now, this was when Abraham was 80 years old and Isaac was born when he was 100 years old. So it makes his belief even more incredible because he had to wait twenty years for the fulfillment of his faith. So it is an amazing thing that Abraham did. Like Abraham, God imputes righteousness to us at the time of our conversion. He imputes righteousness to us because we believe in His Son. It is the same sort of thing. We have not done anything up to that point. But if we believe, He imputes that righteousness to us and it is credited to us because at that point we do not have the strength. We do not have the understanding. We do not have the ability to do any acts of righteousness really. All we can do is believe, and then He gives the strength through His Spirit later and we can begin to do acts of righteousness. But we believe on His Son, whose shed blood covers our sins, and that allows us to have a relationship with the Father. All of that righteousness is imputed to us because of Christ. It is His righteousness that we take on, and we go through the veil, as it were, on the strength of Christ's righteousness. Not our own, because we do not have any yet. So it takes Christ's righteousness to bring us to the point where we can approach God and have a relationship with Him. What he means here is that for a person who works, the wages are not a gift but his wages are what is owed to him. If you work, you are granted wages by the person who hired you. It is not a gift from the employer. It is something that he owes you because of the work you did. But he is saying here that it was not a work of Abraham that allowed him to be called righteous. It was simply imputed to him because he had faith. God recognized his faith and said, I'm going to give you grace and you can then have the righteousness of Jesus Christ imputed to you so you can have a relationship with Me and then we will work on things. We are going to read quite a bit here as he is getting towards his conclusion. He is talking about people like the Jews who had learned the law, but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham. He is mostly talking about Gentiles here who had not been exposed to the law, and he is saying that this allows God's grace, allows both of these factions, if you will, to come into one as His church, as His Family. This is Paul's argument about justification by faith. He says that what happened with Abraham, we can see the same pattern taking place in us. God does the exact same thing for us as He did for Abraham. The promises are basically the same. He is going to give us a future, that we have a promised Seed, as