Lectionary Commentaries for June 7, 2026
Second Sunday after Pentecost

The second Sunday after Pentecost brings us into the heart of Jesus’s ministry, where we encounter two key themes: the calling of the unlikely, and the power of healing. These passages—Matthew 9:9–13 and 9:18–26—show us a Christ who moves toward those in need, who upends social expectations, and who embodies mercy in ways that challenge religious structures. The stories of Matthew’s call and Jesus’s healing acts emphasize restorative mercy. This mercy is not simply words, not just words of forgiveness or absolution, but tangible acts of restoration that show what the kingdom of God ought to be like.

The call of Matthew (9:9) is striking for several reasons. First, tax collectors were viewed as traitors within Jewish society. Working for Rome, they were associated with economic oppression, often collecting excessive taxes to benefit the empire and themselves. Matthew’s presence at a tax booth signifies his active role in this system—yet Jesus sees him, calls him, and invites him into his circle. The response is immediate: Matthew leaves everything and follows.

The next scene (9:10–13) reveals the radical nature of Jesus’s mission. While sharing a meal with tax collectors and sinners, Jesus is questioned by the Pharisees, who ask why he associates with such people. His response reveals a relational ethos: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’” This statement is a direct challenge to the religious order. The Pharisees emphasize purity and sacrifice, but Jesus reorients the discussion toward mercy, toward healing, and toward relationship. 

As an Indigenous Christian, I see resonance with Indigenous spirituality. Indigenous practice often prioritizes relational healing over ritual correctness. Indigenous ceremony is central in Indigenous spirituality, and many ceremonies are open and welcoming to others. While there are protocols around ceremony, they are often not so rigid that relationship is sacrificed. Laughter brings us together and connects us in these moments. Just as Jesus calls Matthew into a new life, Indigenous traditions recognize that love and restoration happen through inclusion, not exclusion. A person is not cast out for past failures but invited to walk a new path.

The second part of this reading (9:18–26) brings us into two intertwined healing stories—a synagogue leader’s daughter and a woman suffering from chronic bleeding. These two individuals stand at opposite ends of the social spectrum: The synagogue leader is prominent, while the woman is unnamed and ostracized. The synagogue leader is confident enough in himself to walk directly up to Jesus, while the woman lives in a state of shame and desires to move unnoticed. For both people, Jesus responds with equal compassion.

The woman’s faith is remarkable. She believes that simply touching Jesus’s cloak will heal her. Again, I see deep resonance with Medicine Men and Women in Indigenous cultures. Medicine People recognize that healing is both physical and spiritual. Jesus, like a traditional healer, perceives the woman’s act of faith and affirms her: “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.” This is not just a physical restoration—it is a social and spiritual reintegration. She is no longer unclean, no longer cut off from her community. Her restoration stretches beyond the physical ailment. Her healing is holistic. Jesus is good medicine, for body and soul. And his healing brings communal restoration, as she no longer needs to hide herself and walk unnoticed.

It is good and right as Jesus-followers to look to Jesus as our example and seek to emulate his life. We certainly need to embrace compassion as a relational ethic. But I want to also suggest that we need to use our sanctified imaginations to see ourselves within the other characters in these stories. After all, life is not easy. We continue to need the healing work of Jesus and the Holy Spirit, in both body and soul. 

And for those of us who live in North America, we must reckon with the fact that we may be the tax collectors of our society, profiting off current and past injustices, and globally speaking, we occupy the richest sectors of society. Do we recognize how much we ourselves are in need of mercy and the healing touch of Jesus? And are we ready to respond to his call? 

Or perhaps today you feel like that dead girl. Life has been sucked out of you, or perhaps you feel you are spiritually dead, in a dark night of the soul. As hard as it may be, can you trust that others are seeking Jesus on your behalf, and that Jesus has the power to revive?

Commentators have long puzzled over the interpretation of this passage for several reasons.¹ First, they suggest various understandings of the language of being raised up on the third day in 6:2, and second, they differ on how to interpret YHWH’s response in Hosea 6:4–6 to the people’s preceding speech in 6:1–3. Interpretive difficulties ought not to dissuade readers from engaging this passage because of its vital teachings for the Christian life. This is evident from the fact that Jesus quotes from this passage on more than one occasion (see Matthew 9:13; 12:7). I will first address these interpretive difficulties and then provide an explanation for the entire passage.

Hosea 6:2 has been interpreted in a myriad of ways. For example, the early church fathers cited this verse as a prophecy of Christ’s resurrection, and some scholars suggested that it contained Canaanite ideology of a dying and rising God. Rather than describe the resurrection of a deity on the third day, the passage describes healing from severe illness. The language of “revive,” “on the third day,” “he will raise/go up,” and “that we may live” has parallels with 2 Kings 20, a passage that describes the recovery, not the resurrection, of Hezekiah from near death.

In 2 Kings 20, Isaiah initially announces to Hezekiah, “You shall die; you shall not live” (verse 1), but later, he communicates to him the words of YHWH: “I will heal you [see also Hosea 6:1]; on the third day you shall go up to the house of the LORD” (verse 5). Hosea 6:1–2 expresses the people’s belief that they would soon recover from the critical injuries they had experienced.

The other interpretive difficulty is how to understand the penitential speech of the people in Hosea 6:1–3, given YHWH’s clear rejection of the people’s worship in 6:4–6. The opening summons to worship, “Come, let us return to the LORD,” appears in liturgical texts such as Isaiah 2:3; Micah 4:2; and Psalm 95:1, and the passage resembles calls to communal laments of repentance such as Lamentations 3:40, “Let us test and examine our ways, and return to the LORD.” There is nothing unorthodox in the people’s speech in Hosea 6:1–3, and there is nothing to indicate that the people are insincere. Why then does YHWH reject the people’s worship?

Israel does not lack in orthodoxy or sincerity but, rather, orthopraxy. In Hosea 6:3 the people declare that YHWH’s appearance and return are as sure as the dawn, showers, and spring rain. In Hosea 6:4 YHWH continues this metaphor of precipitation to describe how Israel’s love is like the morning cloud and dew. The people expect a flood of healing from God, but in contrast, God finds their love to be a mere vapor. Their confession lacks substance and commitment.

What more does God require from Israel? Hosea 6:6 ought not be read as a wholesale rejection of the institution of the cult but, rather, the recognition of its insufficiency. Prior to chapter 6, the word “steadfast love” (ḥesed) appears two times. In Hosea 2:19–20 [2:21–22], the word is collocated with the terms “righteousness,” “justice,” “compassion,” “faithfulness” and “know[ing] YHWH.” In Hosea 4:1 it is combined with “faithfulness” and “knowledge of God,” and the verses to follow describe how, because Israel lacks these qualities, social injustice is rampant in the land.

True knowledge and loyalty involve a commitment to a politics of peace rather than one of violence and oppression. Although many Christians quote Hosea 6:6 as if the verse condemns cultic religion and extols inward piety, such is a misreading of this verse within the context of Hosea, as well as Jesus’s citations of it in Matthew 9:13 and 12:7.

One finds the teaching of this passage consistent among the eighth-century Israelite prophets. In Amos, God declares that he hates Israel’s worship gatherings (Amos 5:21) and rejects burnt offerings (Amos 5:22) and sacrifices (Amos 5:25), and instead calls out, “But let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24). Micah wonders whether God requires of him burnt offerings (Micah 6:6) and the sacrifice of calves and rams (Micah 6:6–7) but instead concludes, “He has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?”^” (Micah 6:8).

Similarly, God’s declaration, “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (Hosea 6:6), is a call for justice and righteousness.

This passage opens with God declaring that he will return to his place until the people acknowledge their guilt and seek God (Hosea 5:15). The people are in distress because God, through the destructive power of the Assyrians, has wounded and torn Israel (5:13–14). Hosea 6:1–3 captures the words of the people as they express their belief that God will heal and restore them. Hosea 6:4–6 describes God heartbroken over his people and his decision to judge them and reject their false hope for restoration.

This passage is unsettling for Christians because 1 John 1:9 teaches, “If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” Is there ever an instance where God did not forgive his people when they confessed their sin?

First Samuel 15 tells the story of God’s rejection of Saul as king even after he confessed his sin and asked for forgiveness (1 Samuel 15:24–25). This passage has several similarities to that of Hosea 5:15–6:6, including the prophet Samuel’s rebuke of Saul: “Has the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obedience to the voice of the LORD? Surely, to obey is better than sacrifice and to heed than the fat of rams” (1 Samuel 15:22; see also Hosea 6:6). In addition, the language of Saul’s request for Samuel to “return” with him and Samuel’s refusal to do so (1 Samuel 15:25–26) is similar to Hosea 6:1.

These similarities are not coincidental since the Scriptures teach that “[God] rejected the tent of Joseph; he did not choose the tribe of Ephraim” (Psalm 78:67), and scholars have observed that “Saul stands for the northern kingdom of Israel, in both its choice and its rejection.”² Both Saul and eighth-century Israel cannot avert the judgment announced in Hosea 6:5, “Therefore I have hewn them by the prophets; I have killed them by the words of my mouth, and my judgment goes forth as the light.”

The book of Hosea provides a cautionary warning to the church. True repentance involves justice and righteousness and not merely liturgical penitence. The good news of Hosea is that chapter 6 is not the end of the prophecy. In the conclusion to the book, God invites Israel to return to him in penitence (Hosea 14:1–2 [14:2–3]; see also Hosea 6:1), and this time God declares that he will heal (Hosea 14:4 [14:5]; see also Hosea 6:1) their disloyalty.

Saul and the Assyrian conquest of 722 BCE are not the end of the story for God’s people. God will answer the people’s prayer that he come to them like the spring rains (Hosea 6:3) so that, in the end, “they shall flourish as a garden; they shall blossom like the vine; their fragrance shall be like the wine of Lebanon” (Hosea 14:7 [14:8]).

Notes

1. Davies catalogues five different interpretations of this passage. See G. I. Davies, Hosea, NCBC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 150–151. Much of what follows can be found in Bo H. Lim, and Daniel Castelo, Hosea (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 109–112.
2. Ellen F. Davis, Opening Israel’s Scriptures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 183.

Get up and go! (verses 1–3)

When I was learning biblical Hebrew, I was intrigued by the phrase in Genesis 12:1: lekh lekha.¹ It consists of two simple words from the same verbal root, lakha (“to go, come; to walk”). Literally translated as “go forth, yourself,” lekh lekha occurs only twice in the Hebrew Bible: Genesis 12 and 22. Despite its simplicity, the phrase introduces the pivotal story of God calling Abram and bestowing on him a divine promise to make of him a great nation.²

The broad, sweeping narrative of Genesis 1–11 shifts abruptly in Genesis 12 to focus on one man, Abram. The passage begins with a threefold command from God for Abram to leave his native land, birthplace, and father’s house—the place where he belonged—and go to a land God would show him. Each prepositional phrase intensifies the weight of the imperative. Did God question whether Abram would obey?

After all, God expected Abram—at age 75—to leave familiar sights, sounds, and smells: the towering ziggurats, merchants bartering in crowded marketplaces, and the aroma of roasting meats. Technically, Abram’s homeland was Ur of the Chaldeans (11:28), but he and his family were living in Haran at this time. Thus, the call is less about leaving a single geographical place and more about leaving behind the old so that God could do something new.

God does not appear before Abram but nonetheless speaks to him. God declares a threefold promise: descendants, wealth, and a great reputation. God promises not only to make Abram a numerous people but also to establish them as a political entity in a land God would reveal—“I will make of you a great nation” (verse 2).

God concludes with a promise: “I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (verse 3). This kind of blessing formula was common in the ancient world. Here, it conveys divine protection for Abram against those who might wish him harm. The passive form suggests that by invoking Abram’s name, people bless themselves—“May God make you as blessed as Abraham.”³

Some Christians interpret Genesis 12:3 as establishing an eternal covenant obligating support for the modern state of Israel and the Jewish people. For example, US Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) sparked controversy during a Twitter video interview with Tucker Carlson when he defended US support for Israel’s conflict with Iran based on the belief that “those who bless Israel will be blessed.”⁴ He declared that he learned this lesson in Sunday school. Although he did not cite the verse explicitly, he was invoking Genesis 12:3. According to this view, individuals and nations receive tangible benefits for supporting modern Israel—taken to be the same as biblical Israel.

A new home (verses 4–9)

Abram obeys God’s command and sets out from Haran toward Canaan. The imperative lekh lekha—“go forth, yourself”—can be understood as God calling Abram alone. The text does not specify that Abram should bring family or possessions. It implies full separation from his father’s household. Yet Abram travels with his nephew Lot, his wife Sarai, and his possessions, including slaves (verses 4–6). The text does not explain their destination choice, especially since God had not yet identified the land. It does note that Canaan was already inhabited—it was not terra nullius (“land belonging to no one”).

Abram journeys through Canaan to Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. There, the text is explicit that God appears to him. God confirms that this land will belong to his descendants—the first theophany in the Bible. Abram responds by building an altar. He continues to Bethel, where he pitches his tent and builds a second altar to worship God. From there, he journeys on (verse 9).

Call narratives in the Hebrew Bible typically describe an encounter between the deity and an individual, followed by a commission—or in Abram’s case, a promise. Likewise, if you are reading this, it is probable that you, too, have experienced a sense of God calling you to go: to seminary, to serve, to proclaim. These stories usually center on the person summoned, giving little to no attention to the impact on their families—just as God’s call to Abram notably omits Sarai and Lot.

Even when God’s call does not require relocating, families still bear the weight of the demands placed on the one who is called. And when responding to God’s call does involve picking up and moving—sometimes multiple times—to a new ministry setting or place, the strain on families can be even greater. As a community, we can seek ways to support families even as we support those called by God to serve.

God’s promise to bless Abram was not contingent on Abram’s obedience—as a reward for trusting God—but others would be blessed in Abram nonetheless. Those who interpret Genesis 12:3 as a mandate for unwavering support of the modern state of Israel reduce God to a transactional deity who dispenses favor only to those who defend Israel. Instead, Genesis 12:3 affirms that all peoples will consider themselves blessed because God first blessed Abram. “May God make you as blessed as Abraham.”

Notes

1. Parashat Lekh-Lekha (Genesis 12:1–17:27) is the third weekly portion in the annual Jewish cycle of Torah reading.
2. God changes Abram’s name to “Abraham” in chapter 17.
3. Julie Galambush, Reading Genesis: A Literary and Theological Commentary (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2018), 58.
4. Cruz’s view belongs to a theological teaching called “dispensationalism.” For explanation see Jonathan Newman, “Ted Cruz, Dispensationalism, and the State of Israel,” Mises Institute, June 20, 2025, https://mises.org/power-market/ted-cruz-dispensationalism-and-state-israel.

This is a commentary on the middle section of Psalm 50—Psalm 50:7–15. The psalm can be divided into three sections:

1. Psalm 50:1–6—Introduction (See my 2021 commentary on these verses)
2. Psalm 50:7–15—God speaks to his people
3. Psalm 50:16–23—God speaks to “the wicked” (this section never occurs as a whole in the RCL; 50:1–8, 22–23 do occur in the semi-continuous option in Year C)

So, it is a little strange to be commenting only on the middle verses. It feels sort of like trying to eat a peanut butter sandwich without either the top or bottom slice of bread. But here goes …

Let’s start with a fun fact about Psalm 50:7–15. Many preachers loved the Revised Standard Version translation of Psalm 50:9a: “I will accept no bull from your house!” Many a preacher could have been caught thinking these words when the head of some household was offering unsolicited sermon feedback.

Here’s another fact about Psalm 50—it isn’t as funny, but it’s probably more relevant: Psalm 50 is a festival psalm. More precisely, Psalm 50 is considered one of the three great festival psalms—psalms that were composed for and used during one of the three festivals of the Israelite liturgical year: Passover, Pentecost (Weeks), and Booths. (The other two are Psalms 81 and 95.)

The reason that this is important is because at these festivals, the faithful people of Israel brought their tithes and first-fruits offerings to the Temple (or another religious site) in order to fulfill the law. This law is laid out in several places in the Pentateuch. Deuteronomy 16 is one place:

[Passover] Observe the month of Abib by keeping the passover for the LORD your God, for in the month of Abib the LORD your God brought you out of Egypt by night. You shall offer the passover sacrifice for the LORD your God, from the flock and the herd, at the place that the LORD will choose as a dwelling for his name. (Deuteronomy 16:1–2)

[Weeks/Pentecost] You shall count seven weeks; begin to count the seven weeks from the time the sickle is first put to the standing grain. Then you shall keep the festival of weeks for the LORD your God, contributing a freewill offering in proportion to the blessing that you have received from the LORD your God. (Deuteronomy 16:9-10)

[Booths] You shall keep the festival of booths for seven days, when you have gathered in the produce from your threshing floor and your wine press. (Deuteronomy 16:13)

[Summary] Three times a year all your males shall appear before the LORD your God at the place that he will choose: at the festival of unleavened bread, at the festival of weeks, and at the festival of booths. They shall not appear before the LORD empty-handed; all shall give as they are able. (Deuteronomy 16:16–17a)

Note two things. First, each of the festivals was an agricultural festival at which worship was commanded. Second, a specific offering to God was commanded of each family.

• The spring festival of Passover included the offering of the first fruits of the barley harvest. The offering commanded was a “sheaf” or “armful” of barley.
• The summer festival of Weeks or Pentecost marked the end of the barley harvest and the beginning of the wheat harvest. The offering commanded was bread made of choice flour, along with seven lambs, one bull, and two rams.
• The fall festival of Booths marked the harvest of the fruit of the orchards—olives, grapes, and the like. Numbers 29 outlines the tremendously large offering expected from the people: 189 animals and more grain and produce!

What is the point of all of this context? That God commanded offerings be made at these three festivals.

Also note that Psalm 50 is a liturgy. In this liturgy, God speaks directly to the people. Liturgy is here not “the work of the people,” but rather “the Word of God.” In 50:3–4, the psalm says, “Our God comes and does not keep silence. … He calls to the heavens above and to the earth, that he may judge his people.”

Imagination plays a huge role in biblical interpretation. So imagine this psalm in the ancient world. As you imagine this psalm being used in ancient Israel, imagine being a worshiper who has come to worship and to bring the offerings that God has commanded: maybe a bull, maybe a ram, maybe a goat. Maybe some wheat, or barley, or wine, or olive oil, or a pair of doves. And then, when you bring forth your offering, rather than being greeted with the offering ritual laid out in Deuteronomy 26, you instead hear these words from God:

I will not accept a bull from your house,
or goats from your folds.
For every wild animal of the forest is mine,
the cattle on a thousand hills.
I know all the birds of the air,
and all that moves in the field is mine.
If I were hungry, I would not tell you
for the world and all that is in it is mine.
Do I eat the flesh of bulls,
or drink the blood of goats? (Psalm 50:9–13)

At the basic level of meaning—what does the text say?—the psalm seems to reject everything commanded in the Pentateuchal laws. God does not—contrary to what you’ve read in the Torah—desire you to bring a bull, or a goat, or birds, or any animal as an offering to God.

At the middle level of meaning—what does the text mean?—the psalm seems to be a fairly straightforward critique of the primitive notion that animal sacrifice in some way feeds God or the gods. God does not actually eat. God is not fed on the sacrificial, animal offerings of the people. God does not eat animal flesh, drink animal blood, or in any way subsist on sacrifices.

We can go further. Offerings are not in any way actual gifts to God. You can’t give anything to the person who already has everything. God made everything, and all that exists already belongs to God. As Psalm 24 says, “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.” And as Psalm 50 adds, with more than a fair amount of sarcastic wit, “If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and all that is in it is mine.” You truly cannot give anything to the one who literally has everything.

So what, then, does this text mean at a still higher level of meaning—what does the text mean for us? The last two verses of the assigned text tell us:

Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving,
and pay your vows to the Most High.
Call on me in the day of trouble;
I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.

What God wants and what, in fact, God needs are these things: our gratitude, our confessions of faith, our prayers for help, and our praise. God does not need these things for God’s own self. But God does need these things for God’s mission. And God needs our offerings for God’s mission, too. God does, in reality, desire that we be generous—for the sake of God’s mission to love, bless, and be reconciled to the whole world.

Notes

1. Commentary previously published on this website for June 11, 2023.

The argument of Romans 4 contains two main themes. Paul discusses both Abraham as a believer justified by faith and Abraham as the father of a worldwide people of God. It is all too easy for commentators and preachers to focus only on one of these themes, but they are intertwined in the text, for verses 1–12 contain both themes, and verses 13–25 contain both themes. The challenge is, therefore, not only to understand each theme in isolation from the other, but also to understand what, from Paul’s perspective, binds them together.

The first theme of Abraham as believer allows Paul to emphasize how human beings come into right relationship with God—in other words, the means by which they are justified. This happens through faith, by trusting in the saving power of Jesus’s death and resurrection (4:25), just as Abraham trusted in God’s promise of descendants, even though his body and that of Sarah were dead in reproductive terms (4:18–21). Justification is not through obedience to the law of Moses (4:13–14).

In its own nature as an expression of God’s desire to be in covenant relationship with God’s people, the law is good. Yet although the law tells human beings what is good, it cannot empower them fully to obey it and so only brings wrath when people break it (4:15). Instead, justification comes through faith in Jesus, which is reckoned as righteousness (4:22–25), so that the sins of those who believe are not counted against them and they are declared to be in the right. The text, therefore, says something crucial about the identity of those who believe in Jesus: They stand in the right before God, not because of their own deeds, but because of what Jesus has done for them.

The second theme—Abraham as father of a worldwide family—allows Paul to emphasize that all who share Abraham’s faith are genuinely his descendants: “He is the father of us all” (4:16). It is this family of Abraham, the sharers of his faith, who are the people of God in the world, and this people is now composed not only of Abraham’s biological descendants through Isaac but also of those among the Gentiles (“the nations”) who share his faith. Paul is here controversial in his own time and place in asserting that non-Jews can become part of Abraham’s family through faith in Jesus.

Yet Paul is simultaneously very conventional since it never occurs to him that anyone can be part of God’s people without being a descendant of Abraham. Just as God made Abraham and his descendants God’s children through the promises made to, and received in faith by, the patriarch, so now Gentiles are made children of Abraham, and hence also children of God, when they believe in Jesus after the manner of Abraham. The text, therefore, says a second crucial thing about the identity of those who believe in Jesus: They are children of Abraham, and this is an integral part of their experience of salvation.

The connecting point between the two themes is, of course, faith, which is the means by which human beings are justified. And it is by sharing Abraham’s faith that Gentiles become his descendants. This justifying, family-creating faith has several dimensions:

• It clearly has cognitive content. Believing that Jesus died and was raised by God really matters.
• However, it is also even more fundamentally about trust in the mercy of God and the conviction that, although circumstances may make it seem unlikely, the promises of God are completely reliable. Faith, therefore, honors God (it gives glory to God, 4:20) by accepting God’s promises as true.
• Faith is also both receptive and active: receptive because in accepting God’s promises, faith acknowledges that we can do nothing for ourselves to achieve the salvation they proffer; active because it profoundly changes how we engage with circumstances that appear in opposition to God’s promises.
• When we are told that Abraham “grew strong in his faith” (4:20), the literal sense is that he was empowered by faith. As Luther famously expressed it, “It makes us altogether different … and brings with it the Holy Spirit. O it is a living, busy, active, mighty thing, this faith.”¹

Yet if Paul has much to say here about the faith of human beings, the even more fundamental point of connection between the two themes of the passage concerns the actions of God:

• It is God who made the promises to Abraham recorded in Scripture: that Abraham would be the father of many nations (Genesis 17:5, quoted in Romans 4:17 and 4:18) with innumerable descendants (Genesis 15:5, quoted in Romans 4:18).
• It is God who justifies and who reckoned Abraham’s faith as righteousness (Genesis 15:6, quoted in Romans 4:22), so that the fulfilment of God’s promises rests on God’s own grace (4:16) rather than upon any aspect of human identity or achievement.
• Above all, it is God who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead (4:24). God’s justifying activity and God’s resurrecting activity express God’s identity as the creator, for God “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (4:17).

God has created life where there was none in the birth of Isaac, in justifying the Gentiles, and in the resurrection of Jesus. “The creating God who is the resurrecting God is also the justifying God: this implies that justification is an act of new creation and resurrection.”² God forgave Abraham’s sins and graciously gifted him with life out of death, and God now does the same for those who believe in Jesus.

That the forgiveness of sins and the gift of life out of death must be held together in understanding God’s justifying act is made clear by Paul’s final statement that Christ was “handed over to death for our trespasses and raised to life for our justification” (4:25). Justification involves participation by faith in Christ’s death and resurrection, the only source of righteousness and life. To be justified is to receive forgiveness of sins, but this forgiveness is a life-giving act of God that creates the family of God in the world, that family of which Abraham is the human father.

To say this is not to step back from the truth that justification is not based upon any aspect of human identity or achievement. The family of God does not become a location where human beings can now demonstrate their worthiness in a way they could not before. Rather, it is the place where, united with Christ by faith, they stand under grace and grow together more and more into the fullness of who Christ is.

Notes

1. Luther’s Works 35:370.
2. Michael Gorman, Romans: A Theological and Pastoral Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2024), 136.