Q. Rom 4:5 BSB "However, to the one who does not work, but believes in Him who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited as righteousness". Exo 23:7 AKJV "Keep you far from a false matter; and the innocent and righteous slay you not: for I will not justify the wicked". Yah warns us he will not justify the wicked. Paul tells us to believe in him who justifies the wicked. Who is this God that Paul worships? [Pro 17:15 NKJV] "He who justifies the wicked, and he who condemns the just, Both of them alike are an abomination to the LORD." An abomination to Yahweh.

A. Context, context, context, my friend. You can't go reading the Scriptures the way the Jehovah's Witnesses do or unschooled Christians and Messianics who treat the Bible text like a crossword puzzle or a dictionary. It's a complex historical narrative from multiple eras, each at very different places in the unfolding of revelation. Only the context reveals what the usage of certain terms means in each of those eras and in each specific context.

The context here is the former pagan ABRAHAM, not MOSES - different situations entirely. All Abraham did, according to Paul, was to trust the Elohim (God) who declares the ungoldly (like himself) to be in the right ('justified', an unfortunate word densely loaded with 500 years of Protestant theology that messes up people's thinking - see Justification for a deeper treatment), by trusting in Yahweh alone. Abraham had no Torah to begin with, and then in a form that we know little about, as is true of the ante-Diluvian (pre-Flood) Patriarchs. Abram did not have the kind of advance knowledge of Torah that those in Moses' day enjoyed to which he gave obedience, not at least in the early days of his conversion. Genesis does NOT say that 'Abram kept the works of the Torah, and so Elohim established His covenant with him'. Had it done so, it would have strongly implied that Abraham's true covenant family was to be defined for all time by the performance of those 'works' - which is precisely of course, what the later Rabbinical Rabbis came to believe.

We must remember that Paul was (rightly) viewing Abram as a typical pagan before he was called by El Elyon, the One True Elohim (God), and at that point of his call he was still 'ungodly', unaware of very much about who this Yahweh-Elohim might be or what it might mean to follow Him and be conformed to His will and His Derech (Way). And yet Yahweh called him into covenant, a covenant designed to deal with the problem of ungodliness itself and all its consequent human degradation, disintegration and wickedness. In other words, Abram started where we all start, and in particular, where pagans and non-Israelites start. That is where Elohim met him: it isn't where Elohim (God) left him. Elohim (God) did not say Abram was fine where he was - his initial trust in Elohim's (God's) promise of a large family was simply the beginning of a process of testing, leading and transformation. Thus he was justified as an ungodly pagan, trusting at the beginning of his walk as all of us who were not raised in Torah must do, and as the first Gentiles did in Acts when they came to Messiah-trusting. The Council of Jerusalem guided them in their first steps of Torah-obedience, the minimum for ex-pagan converts.

So Paul is NOT in error here.

See the Anti-Paulism website for more information.

This page was created on 1 October 2020 Last updated on 1 October 2020

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