My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering.

O that unbelievers would learn of faithful Abraham, and believe whatever is revealed from God, though they cannot fully comprehend it! Abraham knew God commanded him to offer up his son, and therefore believed, notwithstanding carnal reasoning might suggest may objections.

when Paul says in Romans 4:3, 5, 9, and 22 that 'faith is counted as righteousness,' he does not mean that our faith is our righteousness. He means that our faith unites us to Christ so that God's righteousness in Christ is reckoned to us.

Abraham entered into what God was doing for him, and that was the turning point. He trusted God to set him right instead of trying to be right on his own. Romans 4:3

Abraham is such a fascinating figure. Three world religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - all claim him as a patriarch. He was raised in a religious home. And yet he rejected religion in order to pursue a personal relationship with God.

Every time we believe God, He credits it to our account as righteousness.

What then can we say that Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh, has found? Romans 4:1

How did Abraham know that it was God that bid him offer his son, being a breach of the sixth commandment?

It is important to understand that Paul is not just using Abraham as an illustration of the gospel or of his teaching about justification by grace through faith. No, Abraham is the beginning of the gospel.

For it is difficult to believe in God without an example, to be led by God as He led Abraham, a solitary individual, to see all the other peoples having an abhorrence for the religion you follow, to find that you alone believe and follow something different from all other men.

And so Paul says that Abraham's faith was imputed to him for righteousness, because by it he gave glory to God; and that to us also, for the same reason, it shall be imputed for righteousness, if we believe (Rom. iv.).

Romans 4 is all about the covenant that God made with Abraham in Genesis 15. It is not a detached statement about someone in the ancient scriptures who was "justified by faith." It is not simply a "proof from scripture" of the "doctrine" that Paul has stated in Romans 3. Abraham is not simply an "example" of either the way God's grace operates or the way some humans have faith.