That was a living faith. It wasn’t a bare acknowledgement of God, but rather an active friendship (verse 23, referring to passages like Isaiah 41:8). That friendship, embodied in the ‘covenant’ which God established in Genesis 15:7–20 and reaffirmed in 22:15–18, is the basis for what James, like Paul, calls ‘justification’, God’s declaration that a person is a member of the covenant, is ‘in the right’, is part of God’s forgiven family. The second person James mentions is Rahab. She appears, initially,
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