The Answer

To understand why Abraham’s justification cannot depend on his works, we have to look at the timeline. In Romans 4 and Galatians 3, the Apostle Paul points us back to Genesis 15:6, where Abraham simply believed God’s promise and it was ‘accounted to him for righteousness.’ This happened long before Isaac was even born and years before the events on Mount Moriah. Paul’s point is that justification is a settled legal reality the moment we believe, not a status we gradually earn through high-stakes testing.

David Benjamin explains that God’s arrangement with Abraham was part of the ‘Everlasting Covenant.’ This isn’t a business contract between God and us where we have to keep our end of the bargain to get the goods. Instead, it is a covenant between the Father and the Son (Christ). We are not ‘parties’ to this contract; we are the ‘heirs’ of a Testament—which is like a Will. In a Will, the person who made it does all the work, and the heirs simply receive the inheritance because of their relationship to the one who died. (Galatians 3:15-18).

If we make the promise of Christ dependent on Abraham’s obedience in Genesis 22, we fall into a dangerous trap. We would be saying that the coming of the Messiah—the Savior of the whole world—was contingent on a human being’s performance. If Abraham had hesitated, would God have cancelled the plan of redemption? Of course not! God’s counsel is immutable, meaning it cannot change. The inheritance comes from God’s promise, not from human effort. (Hebrews 6:13-18).

Furthermore, Paul teaches us that justification is primarily about God’s righteousness being put on display, not our own. In the offering of Isaac, Abraham wasn’t ‘completing’ his justification before God; he was acting out of the faith he already possessed. He believed in the resurrection power of God to fulfill the promise before he ever lifted the knife. He knew that even if Isaac died, God was obligated by His own Word to raise him up because the promise was already settled.

When we try to use James 2 to add ‘fine print’ to the Gospel, we effectively nullify grace. Paul argues that once a covenant is confirmed, no one can add to it or change the terms later. If God justified Abraham by faith in Genesis 15, that deal was ‘locked in.’ The works that followed in Genesis 22 were a testimony, but they were never a condition for the promise.

For the ‘beaten sheep’ who feel they are constantly being graded by God, this is a message of total liberation. Your position as a child of God and an heir of all things was secured by Christ’s obedience, not yours. You are not standing on a shaky platform of your own performance; you are standing on the finished work of the One who was the true Lamb provided by God on the mountain.