Credited as Righteousness: How Abram Was Made Right (Genesis 15)

Your shield, your very great reward

God named Himself Abram's protection and his pay, because Abram had just fought a war and turned down the plunder he was owed. "I am your shield, your very great reward" (Genesis 15:1). Both words are chosen with care. 'Shield' is magen (H4043), the round shield a soldier carried into the line, and Abram had just come home from a real fight against four kings. 'Reward' is sakar (H7939), the wages or plunder a soldier was owed. Just before this, Abram had refused the king of Sodom's spoil so that no one could say a man had made him rich (Genesis 14:23). Now God answered the soldier who turned down a fortune by naming Himself the wages. The protection Abram carried and the payment he walked away from, God said, are Me.

Eliezer of Damascus, the heir

Abram's reply was honest, and it was more exact than it first sounds. He named the heir he already had, Eliezer of Damascus, and said the arrangement plainly, "a servant in my household will be my heir" (Genesis 15:3). Clay tablets dug up at Nuzi, from roughly Abram's corner of the ancient world, record this very practice. A childless couple would legally adopt a trusted servant as their heir, on the understanding that a natural son, if one ever came, would take the servant's place. Abram had an heir on paper. He was holding God's promise of Genesis 12 in one hand and a household contract in the other, and the two did not agree.

God's answer set the paperwork aside. "This one will not be your heir, but one who comes from your own body will be your heir" (Genesis 15:4). Then the vision opened onto the sky. God told him to "count the stars, if you are able" (Genesis 15:5), and promised, "So shall your offspring be" (Genesis 15:5). To a man whose entire ache was one missing child, God gave a number he could not reach the beginning of.

Abram believed the LORD

Abram leaned his whole weight on the God who had spoken, and trusted a promise his own body could not back up. "Abram believed the LORD, and it was credited to him as righteousness" (Genesis 15:6). The word for 'believed' is aman (H539), and it is worth slowing down on, because most of us say it several times a week without knowing it. Aman is the root behind 'amen'. Its oldest sense is firmness, being solid enough to bear weight. It is the word for a pillar that holds a roof up, and the same root gives the name for a guardian or nurse who carries a child, held so securely the child can go completely limp in the arms. It is the picture behind Moses' complaint in Numbers 11:12, "Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries an infant". So when Genesis says Abram 'amaned' the LORD, it records a man leaning his whole weight on the God who had spoken, the way a child goes heavy in arms it trusts. He said amen with his life to a promise his own body could not back up.

Credited as righteousness

Abram's faith was credited because he trusted God's promise, and God counted that trust as being in the right with Him, years before Isaac was born and before Abram was circumcised. 'Credited' is chashab (H2803), an accountant's word. It means to reckon, to calculate, to enter something in a ledger and count it at a set value. The same verb weighs out silver and settles a price. Here God kept the books on Abram, and in the column marked righteousness, tsedaqah (H6666), being in the right with God, He entered Abram's trust. Abram had done nothing yet. Isaac was years away, and every act of obedience praised later in the New Testament was still ahead of him. What God counted as righteousness, before a single work, was that Abram took Him at His word.

This is the verse the New Testament writers returned to again and again. Paul quoted it whole in Romans 4:3, "Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness" (Romans 4:3), and again in Galatians 3:6, to show that God has always put people right with Himself the same way, by trusting what He says. The crediting was written down, Paul added, "for us who believe in Him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead" (Romans 4:24). James, reading the same line, wrote that Abram "was called a friend of God" (James 2:23), which is what this kind of trust makes a person, someone known by God and welcome near Him. And the offspring like stars narrows, Paul wrote, to a single seed, Christ (Galatians 3:16), then opens wide again into the countless family gathered into Him out of every nation.

Which is why Scripture uses this quiet, fearful night to define what it means to know God. To know the God who speaks is to hear Him say something your circumstances flatly deny, carry your honest questions back to His face, and then set the full weight of your life on His word and call it enough. Abram counted the stars he could not number and believed the God who could. Look up, and lean.