Godbey's Commentary - Acts - Romans - Enter His Rest

of God, but, on the contrary, you are a child of the devil (John 8:44), with all your boasted church
membership and legal obedience.
6. “Therefore indeed David speaks of the blessedness of the man to whom God imputeth
righteousness without works [Psalm 31]:
7. “Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered,
8. “Blessed is the man to whom the Lord may not impute sin.
9. “Therefore cometh this blessedness on the circumcision, or indeed upon the uncircumcision?
For we say, that faith was imputed unto Abraham for righteousness.
10. “How then was it imputed? to him being in circumcision or in uncircumcision? Not in
circumcision, but in uncircumcision.” This is a continued evolution of this wonderful and
unanswerable Pauline argument, actually the most prolix in all the Bible, confirmatory of
justification full and free for all the world by the free grace of God in Christ, received and
appropriated by faith alone, without work of law. The very fact that this took place in the case of
Abraham twenty four years before the organization of the visible church in his house, teaches us a
grand and impressive lesson; i.e., that God in His infallible administration, by putting twenty-four
years between the two transactions, forever annihilates the possibility of their identification by
sensible, honest people. What an awful job the devil has on his hands to prove the essentiality of
water baptism or any other church ordinance to justification, when Abraham, God’s paragon saint
and the representative of every other, was justified by the free grace of God in Christ twenty-four
years before he received a church ordinance! I know there is a disposition on the part of many
superficial, bogus theologians flippantly to pass over the Abrahamic covenant. This is wholesale
murder, because Abraham had no covenant, but was simply the recipient of the renovation of the
Messianic covenant by which the world is redeemed. Hence the Scriptures positively identify the
Abrahamic with the Mediatorial covenant. Then, if you are not justified like Abraham, becoming one
of his legitimate spiritual posterity, you have no interest in Christ (Galatians 3:25). Mark this long
quotation from the Psalms of David, descriptive of God’s “blessed man,” whose sins are covered,
and to whom he does not impute iniquity. If it turns out that you are not that “blessed man,” the devil
gets you to an absolute certainty, whether in the pulpit, the pew or the world. Now you see clearly
how Paul identifies this “blessed man” with the Abrahamic covenant, because he is justified by faith
alone, without works, like father Abraham, who actually got converted twenty-four years before he
was baptized. Do not forget the inspired epithet, “blessed,” which God applies to the man who, like
Abraham, is justified by faith without legal obedience. “Blessed” literally means “happy.” You take
the poor legalists, all round, and you find anything but a happy people. They are blue as indigo. It
is a regular long-faced Christianity — Satan’s counterfeit. Take the people who have nothing but
Jesus and depend on nothing but God, and you will find “happy” pilgrims every time. That is the
reason why Satan’s legalistic church members can not keep away from theaters, dances, card tables,
circuses, horse races and saloons. It is because they have no happiness in their religion. Hence they
have to go to the devil for joy to keep them from dying of the blues. There is nothing in the
Abrahamic covenant but Jesus. Hence the children of father Abraham are a jolly set.