Abram and Sarai tired of waiting on God to fulfill his promise decide to make it happen themselves by adopting a strategy they borrowed from the Canaanite culture in which they lived. When we fail to trust God by ordering our lives according to God's word we don't go without an object of faith or a way of living. Instead, we conform our thinking and living to the world around us. Instead of courageously, wisely and humbly correcting Sarai, Abraham repeats what Adam did in the Garden of Eden, and again, the consequences are disastrous. Dissension and division result between Abram, Sarai and Hagar when Abram fails to correct Sarai. Once again, God's sovereign mercy is displayed through his word reaching Hagar and restoring order.

After Moses tells us that Abram believed God and God credited it to him as righteousness, God declares that he is the one who brought Abram out of Ur to give him the Promised Land. Abram then asks God how he will know that he will possess it. Abrams question addresses God's method and Abram's assurance. God's answer draws attention to Him and His word. God then ratifies his covenant with Abram. Here is the Gospel in perhaps its most vivid display-God obligating Himself to keep His covenant both for Him and Abram.

Genesis 15, verse six is crucially important for understanding the nature of the Christian faith and life. Both the apostles Paul and James quote this text in explaining the way of salvation and the Christian life. When we understand that this is not the first time that God's word has come to Abram, nor the first time that Abram has demonstrated faith in God, we realize that we are being told something of vital importance at the beginning of Genesis 15. After all, it is the first time that the phrase "the word of the Lord" is used in Scripture and it is used twice at the beginning of the chapter. But it is also the first time that we are told Abram believed God. This belief in God is credited to Abram as righteousness. The faith in God that justifies is present in Abram and every sinner who believes in God because of the word of the Lord resurrecting the spiritually dead. Not simply faith, but faith in God and His word is what results in a sinner counted as righteous by God.

While salvation from sin is accomplished by God, it does not result in the objects of God's mercy being passive but active. In salvation God resurrects deadened sinners by illuminating their minds, enlivening their will and stirring their affections so they actively particpate with God in God fufilling his promise to bring his kingdom. We see this active participation in Abram's by his submitting his reasoning to God's word and to the historical process of learning from God's word.

Every persons view of life, including the Christian life, reveals their view of God's relationship to them and the entire universe. We have only three basic choices regarding God's relationship to creation. God is either dissolved into, disconnected from, or distinguished from the physical world. The Bible reveals that God is distinguished from his creation, able to act in it and yet it is always dependent upon him. Thus, the biblical gospel is fundamentally about what God does for, in and through his people. The biblical gospel does not cast us back upon ourselves, but upon God, and thus Christian living is not motivated by guilt over what we are not doing for God, but motivated by love and gratitude for what God has done, is doing and will do for, in and through us, who are the objects of his mercy.

God spoke his word to Abram and commanded him to go from his country, his relatives and his father's house to the land that God would show him. In doing this, God was requiring Abram to do something that was very scary--to leave everything that in the ancient world was the source of security, status, success and satisfaction. Stephen in Acts 7 and the writer of Hebrews in his 11th chapter tell us that Abram did not receive in his lifetime the things promised, that he left not knowing where he was going, and that he, and all his descendants who believed in God for salvation were strangers and exiles on the earth. Faith in God means a way of life that is scary, but it is truly a life of faith in God; it casts us back on God, not ourselves. Abram is able to answer this call and obey this command because he received God's word.

After God commanded Noah and his sons to do the very thing he had commanded Adam and Eve to do, he declares that he is establishing his covenant with Noah and his sons and their descendants. God's covenant is not only with Noah, his family and their descendants, but with all creation. It is God's covenant that describes and determines God's relationship to everyone and everything. Like Noah and his family, Israel, God's old covenant people, were prone to think and feel alone and overwhelmed by the task in which God enlisted them. The antidote to the despondency and despair to which God's people are prone is a clear understanding that God makes and keeps his covenant. God and God alone institutes and fulfills his covenant.

God is faithful to his covenant promise. This is seen in God's remembering Noah and all the creatures with Noah in the ark. God remembers Noah, or demonstrates his covenant faithfulness by his providential control of creation, purging creation of sin, and provision of a personal mediator. Though God's purging creation of sin through the flood is not a total purging, it is partial and a true picture of God's ultimate judgment against sin that will come and usher in through his personal mediator the Lord Jesus Christ a new creation free from sin. The post-flood world that Noah and his family and the animals occupy represents that new creation.

The fight for and of Christian faith, is the fight to think and act in harmony with God's word in the presence of alternative ways of thinking and living. Every culture has its own stories about reality and human life that both harmonize and conflict in various ways with God's word. Both Noah's life and the account of it given in Scripture encapsulate this fight of faith that calls us to think and and live in obedience to God's word.

There seems to be a significant number of American Protestants who do not understand what it means to be Protestant. Some prominent historical and theological scholars believe that what has traditionally divided Protestantism from Roman Catholicism has been overcome through theological developments among Protestants and Roman Catholics. One notable scholars has gone so far as to say that since the church is largely in exile in the West, the issues that have divided Protestants and Roman Catholics need not be emphasized since they are "at the margins of faith." This is dangerously false, and demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of both historic Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. The differences between the two has to do with what is central to saving faith in the Lord Jesus.