Walk on

The most astounding about all of this is that Abraham is an example of justification by faith. What is justification? Justification by faith is a legal concept for most of us, is it not? How can you make someone understand “justification by faith” if you do not have a law code, if you do not have a court, and if you do not have a judge? Yet Abraham is the supreme example of being justified by faith. He believed God and it was accounted unto him for righteousness. Clearly that is not according to some legal system of accounting. So what is the righteousness that God is seeking and which accrued to Abraham? The essence of it is a personal relationship with the living God. Notice Genesis 17:1. God says that if Abraham is to be all he is meant to be as a human being (“perfect” in the language of the King James Version), he has only to “walk” before God. That is not surprising when we remember that in Genesis the most characteristic way of describing what we mean by the term salvation is to say that a person “walked with God.”— Lectures in Old Testament Theology, page 123