8. God’s righteousness revealed and illustrated
All human beings, of every race and class, of every creed and culture, Jews and Gentiles, the immoral and the moralizing, the religious and the irreligious, are without any exception sinful, guilty, inexcusable and speechless before God. That was the terrible human predicament described in Romans 1:18 – 3:20. There was no ray of light, no flicker of hope, no prospect of rescue.
‘But now’, Paul suddenly breaks in, God himself has intervened. ‘Now’ seems to have a threefold reference: logical (the developing argument), chronological (the present time) and eschatological (the new age has arrived). After the long dark night the sun has risen, a new day has dawned and the world is flooded with light. ‘But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known’ (21a). It is a fresh revelation, focusing on Christ and his cross, although ‘the Law and the Prophets testify’ to it (21b) in their partial foretellings and foreshadowings. So then, over against the unrighteousness of some and the self-righteousness of others, Paul sets the righteousness of God. Over against God’s wrath resting on evildoers (1:18; 2:5; 3:5), he sets God’s grace to sinners who believe. Over against judgment, he sets justification.
He begins, first, by describing the revelation of God’s righteousness in Christ’s cross, and lays the foundations of the gospel of justification (3:21–26). Second, he defends this gospel against Jewish critics (3:27–31). Third, he illustrates it in the life of Abraham, who was himself justified by faith and is in consequence the spiritual father of all who believe (4:1–25).
1. God’s righteousness revealed in Christ’s cross (3:21–26)
Verses 21–26 are six tightly packed verses, which Professor Cranfield rightly calls ‘the centre and heart’ of the whole main section of the letter, and which Dr Leon Morris suggests may be ‘possibly the most important single paragraph ever written’. Its key expression is the righteousness of God, which we considered when it first occurred, namely in 1:17. The stress is on the saving initiative which he has taken to give sinners a righteous status in his sight. Both speak of his righteousness as being ‘revealed’ or made known. Both indicate its newness by declaring that it is made known either ‘in the gospel’ (1:17) or apart from the law (3:21). Yet both represent it as a fulfilment of Old Testament Scripture, which shows that it was not a divine afterthought. And both state that it is available to us through faith. The only significant difference between these two texts lies in the tense of their main verbs. According to 3:21 a righteousness from God has been made known, a perfect tense which must refer to the historical death of Christ and its abiding consequences, whereas in 1:17 a righteousness from God is being revealed (a present tense) in the gospel, which presumably means whenever it is preached.
In verse 22 Paul resumes his announcement of the gospel by repeating the expression righteousness [from God], and now adds two more truths about it. The first is that it is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. In addition, it is offered to all because it is needed by all. There is no difference between Jews and Gentiles in this respect, as Paul has been arguing in 1:18 – 3:20, or between any other human groupings, for all have sinned [hēmarton, everybody’s cumulative past being summed up by an aorist tense] and fall short [a continuing present] of the glory of God (23). God’s doxa (‘glory’) could mean his approval or praise, which all have forfeited, but probably refers to his image or glory in which all were made but which all fail to live up to. Of course there are degrees of sinning, and therefore differences, yet nobody even approaches God’s standard.
The second novelty in these verses is that now for the first time ‘the righteousness of God’ is identified with justification: and . . . are justified freely by his grace (24a). The righteousness of (or from) God is a combination of his righteous character, his saving initiative and his gift of a righteous standing before him. It is his just justification of the unjust, his righteous way of ‘righteoussing’ the unrighteous.
Justification is a legal or forensic term belonging to the law courts. Its opposite is condemnation. Both are the pronouncements of a judge. In a Christian context they are the alternative verdicts which God the judge may pass on Judgment Day at the end of time. So when God justifies sinners today, he anticipates his own final judgment by bringing into the present what belongs properly to the last day.
Some scholars maintain that ‘justification’ and ‘pardon’ are synonymous. For example, Sanday and Headlam wrote that justification ‘is simply Forgiveness’, while more recently Professor Jeremias has insisted that ‘justification is forgiveness, nothing but forgiveness’. But surely this cannot be so. Pardon is negative, the remission of a penalty or debt; justification is positive, the bestowal of a righteous status, the sinner’s reinstatement in the favour and fellowship of God. Sir Marcus Loane has written:
The voice that spells forgiveness will say: ‘You may go; you have been let off the penalty which your sin deserves.’ But the verdict which means acceptance [sc. justification] will say: ‘You may come; you are welcome to all my love and my presence.’
C. H. Hodge clarifies the difference further by developing the contrast between condemnation and justification.
To condemn is not merely to punish, but to declare the accused guilty or worthy of punishment; and justification is not merely to remit that punishment, but to declare that punishment cannot be justly inflicted . . . Pardon and Justification therefore are essentially distinct. The one is the remission of punishment, the other is a declaration that no ground for the infliction of punishment exists.
If justification is not pardon, neither is it sanctification. To justify is to declare or pronounce righteous, not to make righteous. This was the nub of the sixteenth-century debate over justification. The Roman Catholic view, as expressed at the Council of Trent (1545–64), was that justification takes place at baptism, and that the baptized person is not only cleansed from sins but simultaneously infused with a new, supernatural righteousness. We can understand the motive which led to this insistence. It was the fear that a mere declaration of righteousness would leave the person concerned unrenewed and unrighteous, and might even encourage persistence in sinning (antinomianism). This was, of course, the precise criticism which was levelled at Paul (6:1, 15). It led him to respond in the most vigorous manner that baptized Christians have both died to sin (so that they cannot possibly live in it any longer) and risen to a new life in Christ. Put a little differently, justification (a new status) and regeneration (a new heart), although not identical, are simultaneous. Every justified believer has also been regenerated by the Holy Spirit and so put on the road to progressive holiness. To quote Calvin, ‘the apostle maintains that those who imagine that Christ bestows free justification upon us without imparting newness of life shamefully rend Christ asunder’.
An important fresh turn in this Roman Catholic–Protestant debate was taken by Professor Hans Küng in 1957, when his dialogue with Karl Barth entitled Justification was published. He agreed both that justification is a divine declaration and that we are justified by faith alone. But he also insisted that God’s words are always effective, so that whatever he pronounces comes immediately into being. Therefore, when God says to somebody, ‘You are just,’ ‘the sinner is just, really and truly, outwardly and inwardly, wholly and completely . . . In brief, God’s declaration of justice is . . . at the same time and in the same act a making just.’ Thus justification is ‘the single act which simultaneously declares just and makes just’. There is a dangerous ambiguity here, however. What does Hans Küng mean by ‘just’? If he means legally just, put right with God, then indeed we become immediately what God declares us to be. But if he means morally just, renewed, holy, then God’s declaration does not immediately secure this, but only initiates it. For this is not justification but sanctification, which is a continuous lifelong process. This is the point which C. K. Barrett is making when he claims that to justify does signify to make righteous, but that ‘“righteous” does not mean “virtuous”, but “right”, “clear”, “acquitted” in God’s court’.
Turning back to the text of Romans, and in particular to verses 24–26, Paul teaches three basic truths about justification: first its source – where it comes from; second, its ground – on what it rests; and third, its means – how it is received.
a. The source of our justification: God and his grace
We are justified freely by his grace (24). Fundamental to the gospel of salvation is the truth that the saving initiative belongs to God the Father from beginning to end. No formulation of the gospel is biblical which removes the initiative from God and attributes it either to us or even to Christ. It is certain that we did not take the initiative, for we were sinful, guilty and condemned, helpless and hopeless. Nor was the initiative taken by Jesus Christ in the sense that he did something which the Father was reluctant or unwilling to do. To be sure, Christ came voluntarily and gave himself freely. Yet he did it in submissive response to the Father’s initiative. ‘Here I am . . . I have come to do your will, my God.’ So the first move was God the Father’s, and our justification is freely [dōrean, ‘as a gift’] by his grace, his absolutely free and utterly undeserved favour. Grace is God loving, God stooping, God coming to the rescue, God giving himself generously in and through Jesus Christ.
b. The ground of our justification: Christ and his cross
If God justifies sinners freely by his grace, on what ground does he do so? How is it possible for the righteous God to declare the unrighteous to be righteous without either compromising his righteousness or condoning their unrighteousness? That is our question. God’s answer is the cross.
No expression in Romans is more startling than the statement that ‘God . . . justifies the ungodly’ (4:5). Although it does not occur until the next chapter, it will help us to follow Paul’s reasoning if we take it now. How can God justify the wicked? In the Old Testament he repeatedly told the Israelite judges that they must justify the righteous and condemn the wicked. But of course! An innocent person must be declared innocent, and a guilty person guilty. What more elementary principle of justice could be stated? God then added: ‘Acquitting the guilty and condemning the innocent – the Lord detests them both.’ He also pronounced a solemn ‘woe’ against those who ‘acquit the guilty for a bribe, but deny justice to the innocent’. For, he declared of himself, ‘I will not acquit the guilty.’ But of course! we say again. God would not dream of doing such a thing.
Then how on earth can Paul affirm that God does what he forbids others to do; that he does what he says he will himself never do; that he does it habitually, and that he even designates himself ‘the God who justifies the wicked’ or (we might say) ‘who “righteousses” the unrighteous’? It is preposterous! How can the righteous God act unrighteously, and so overthrow the moral order, turning it upside down? It is unbelievable! Or rather it would be, if it were not for the cross of Christ. Without the cross the justification of the unjust would be unjustified, immoral and therefore impossible. The only reason God ‘justifies the ungodly’ (4:5) is that Christ died for them (5:6). Because he shed his blood (3:25) in a sacrificial death for us sinners, God is able justly to justify the unjust.
What God did through the cross, that is, through the death of his Son in our place, Paul explains by three notable expressions. First, God justifies us through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus (24b). Second, God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood – to be received by faith (25a). Third, he did this to demonstrate his righteousness (25b), so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus (26). The key words are redemption (apolytrōsis), atonement or better ‘propitiation’ (hilastērion), and demonstrate (‘demonstration’, endeixis). All three refer not to what is happening now when the gospel is preached, but to what happened once for all in and through Christ on the cross, his blood being a clear reference to his sacrificial death. Associated with the cross, therefore, there is a redemption of sinners, a propitiation of God’s wrath and a demonstration of his justice.
i. Redemption
The first word is apolytrōsis, that is, redemption. It is a commercial term borrowed from the marketplace, just as ‘justification’ is a legal term borrowed from the law court. In the Old Testament it was used of slaves who were purchased in order to be set free; they were said to be ‘redeemed’. It was also used metaphorically of the people of Israel who were ‘redeemed’ from captivity first in Egypt, then in Babylon, and restored to their own land. Just so, we were slaves or captives, in bondage to our sin and guilt, and utterly unable to set ourselves free. But Jesus Christ ‘redeemed’ us, bought us out of captivity, shedding his blood as the ransom price. He himself had spoken of his coming ‘to give his life as a ransom for many’. In consequence of this purchase or ‘ransom-rescue’, we now belong to him.
ii. Propitiation
The second word is hilastērion. Many Christian people are embarrassed and even shocked by this word, however, because to ‘propitiate’ somebody means to placate his or her anger, and it seems to them an unworthy concept of God (more heathen than Christian) to suppose that he gets angry and needs to be appeased. Two other possible ways of understanding hilastērion are therefore proposed. The first is to translate it ‘mercy seat’, referring to the golden lid of the ark within the temple’s inner sanctuary. This is what the word nearly always means in lxx and also what it means in its only other occurrence in the New Testament. Since sacrificial blood was sprinkled on the mercy seat on the Day of Atonement, it is suggested that Jesus is himself now the mercy seat where God and sinners are reconciled. Those who hold this view tend to render the verb protithēmi (presented) as to ‘display publicly’ (BAGD), in order to indicate that, although the mercy seat was hidden from human eyes by the veil, ‘God has publicly set forth the Lord Jesus Christ, in the sight of the intelligent universe’ as the way of salvation. Luther and Calvin both believed that ‘mercy seat’ was the right translation, and others have followed them.
But the contrary arguments seem conclusive. First, if Paul meant ‘mercy seat’ by hilastērion, he would inevitably have added the definite article. Second, the concept doesn’t fit in Romans which, unlike Hebrews, does not move ‘in the sphere of Levitical symbolism’. Third, the metaphor would be confusing and even contradictory, since it would represent Jesus as being simultaneously the victim whose blood was shed and sprinkled and the place where the sprinkling took place. Fourth, Paul’s sense of personal indebtedness to Christ crucified was so profound that he would hardly have likened him to ‘an inanimate piece of temple furniture’.
A second possible translation of hilastērion is ‘an expiation by his blood’ (rsv). The argument for this is that, whereas in secular Greek the verb hilaskomai means to ‘placate’ (whether a god or a human being), its object in lxx is not God but sin. It is therefore said to mean not to ‘propitiate’ God but to ‘expiate’ sin, that is, to annul guilt or remove defilement. C. H. Dodd, with whom this viewpoint is particularly associated, wrote that expiatory acts ‘were felt to have the value, so to speak, of a disinfectant’.
The main reason these options are not satisfactory, and a reference to propitiation or ‘sacrifice of atonement’ seems necessary, is the context. In these verses Paul is describing God’s solution to the human predicament, which is not only sin but God’s wrath upon sin (1:18; 2:5; 3:5). And where there is divine wrath, there is the need to avert it. We should not be shy of using the word ‘propitiation’ in relation to the cross, any more than we should drop the word ‘wrath’ in relation to God. Instead, we should struggle to reclaim and reinstate this language by showing that the Christian doctrine of propitiation is totally different from pagan or animistic superstitions. The need, the author and the nature of the Christian propitiation are all different.
First, the need. Why is a propitiation necessary? The pagan answer is because the gods are bad tempered, subject to moods and fits, and capricious. The Christian answer is because God’s holy wrath rests on evil. There is nothing unprincipled, unpredictable or uncontrolled about God’s anger; it is aroused by evil alone.
Second, the author. Who undertakes to do the propitiating? The pagan answer is that we do. We have offended the gods; so we must appease them. The Christian answer, by contrast, is that we cannot placate the righteous anger of God. We have no means whatever by which to do so. But God in his undeserved love has done for us what we could never do by ourselves. God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement. John wrote similarly: ‘God . . . loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice [hilasmos] for our sins.’ The love, the idea, the purpose, the initiative, the action and the gift were all God’s.
Third, the nature. How has the propitiation been accomplished? What is the propitiatory sacrifice? The pagan answer is that we have to bribe the gods with sweets, vegetable offerings, animals and even human sacrifices. The Old Testament sacrificial system was entirely different, since it was recognized that God himself had ‘given’ the sacrifices to his people to make atonement. And this is clear beyond doubt in the Christian propitiation, for God gave his own Son to die in our place, and in giving his Son he gave himself (5:8; 8:32).
In conclusion, it would be hard to exaggerate the differences between the pagan and the Christian views of propitiation. In the pagan perspective, human beings try to placate their bad-tempered deities with their own paltry offerings. According to the Christian revelation, God’s own great love propitiated his own holy wrath through the gift of his own dear Son, who took our place, bore our sin and died our death. Thus God himself gave himself to save us from himself.
This is the righteous basis on which the righteous God can ‘righteous’ the unrighteous without compromising his righteousness. Charles Cranfield has expressed it with care and eloquence:
God, because in his mercy he willed to forgive sinful men, and being truly merciful, willed to forgive them righteously, that is, without in any way condoning their sin, purposed to direct against his own very Self in the person of his Son the full weight of that righteous wrath which they deserved.
Professor Cranfield returns to the theme in his final essay on ‘The Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ’. He argues that God intended Jesus Christ to be a propitiatory sacrifice in order ‘that he might justify sinners righteously, that is, in a way that is altogether worthy of himself as the truly loving and merciful eternal God’. For God to have forgiven their sin lightly would have been
to have compromised with the lie that moral evil does not matter and so to have violated his own truth and mocked men with an empty, lying reassurance, which, at their most human, they must have recognized as the squalid falsehood which it would have been.
iii. Demonstration
So far we have looked at two of the words Paul uses to describe the cross, namely apolytrōsis (‘redemption’) and hilastērion (‘propitiatory sacrifice’). We come now to the third, endeixis (‘demonstration’). For the cross was a demonstration or public revelation as well as an achievement. It not only accomplished the propitiation of God and the redemption of sinners; it also vindicated the justice of God: He did this to demonstrate his righteousness (25b); he did it to demonstrate his righteousness (26a). In order to understand the form which this took, we need to note the deliberate contrast which Paul makes between the sins committed beforehand or previously, which in his forbearance he had left . . . unpunished (25b), and the present time in which God has acted to demonstrate his righteousness (26a). It is a contrast between the past and the present, between the divine forbearance which postponed judgment and the divine justice which exacted it, between the leaving of former sins unpunished (which made God appear unjust) and their punishment on the cross (by which God demonstrated his justice).
That is, God left the sins of former generations unpunished, letting the nations go their own way and overlooking their ignorance, not because of any injustice on his part, or with any thought of condoning evil, but in his forbearance (cf. 2:4), and only because it was his fixed intention in the fullness of time to punish these sins in the death of his Son. This was the only way in which he could both himself be just, indeed demonstrate his righteousness, and simultaneously be the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus (26b). Both righteousness (the divine attribute) and justification (the divine activity) would be impossible without the cross.
Here, then, are the three technical terms which Paul uses (apolytrōsis, hilastērion and endeixis) to explain what God has done in and through Christ’s cross. He has redeemed his people. He has propitiated his wrath. He has demonstrated his righteousness. Indeed, these three achievements belong together. Through the sin-bearing, substitutionary death of his Son, God has propitiated his own wrath in such a way as to redeem and justify us, and at the same time demonstrate his righteousness. We can only marvel at the wisdom, holiness, love and mercy of God, and fall down before him in humble worship. The cross should be enough to break the hardest heart, and melt the iciest.
We have considered that the source of our justification is God’s grace and its ground Christ’s cross. Now we turn to the means by which we are justified.
c. The means of our justification: faith
Three times in this paragraph Paul underlines the necessity of faith: through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe (22); to be received by faith (25); and God justifies those who have faith in Jesus (26). Indeed, justification is ‘by faith alone’, sola fide, one of the great watchwords of the Reformation. True, the word ‘alone’ does not occur in Paul’s text of verse 28, where Luther added it. It is not altogether surprising, therefore, that the Roman Catholic Church accused Luther of perverting the text of Holy Scripture. But Luther was following Origen and other early Church Fathers, who had similarly introduced the word ‘alone’. A true instinct led them to do so. Far from falsifying or distorting Paul’s meaning, they were clarifying and emphasizing it. It was similar with John Wesley who wrote that he felt he ‘did trust in Christ, in Christ alone, for salvation’. Justification is by grace alone, in Christ alone, through faith alone.
Further, it is vital to affirm that there is nothing especially admirable about faith, and that when we say that salvation is ‘by faith, not by works’, we are not substituting one kind of merit (‘faith’) for another (‘works’). Nor is salvation a sort of cooperative enterprise between God and us, in which he contributes the cross and we contribute faith. No, grace is non-contributory, and faith is the opposite of self-regarding. The value of faith is not to be found in itself, but entirely and exclusively in its object, namely Jesus Christ and him crucified. To say ‘justification by faith alone’ is another way of saying ‘justification by Christ alone’. Faith is the eye that looks to him, the hand that receives his free gift, the mouth that drinks the living water. As Richard Hooker, the late-sixteenth-century Anglican divine, wrote: ‘God justifies the believer – not because of the worthiness of his belief, but because of his [Christ’s] worthiness who is believed.’
Justification (its source God and his grace, its ground Christ and his cross, and its means faith alone, altogether apart from works) is the heart of the gospel and unique to Christianity. No other system, ideology or religion proclaims a free forgiveness and a new life to those who have done nothing to deserve it but a lot to deserve judgment instead. On the contrary, all other systems teach some form of self-salvation through good works of religion, righteousness or philanthropy. Christianity, by contrast, is not in its essence a religion at all; it is a gospel, the gospel, good news that God’s grace has turned away his wrath, that God’s Son has died our death and borne our judgment, that God has mercy on the undeserving, and that there is nothing left for us to do, or even contribute. Faith’s only function is to receive what grace offers.
The contrast between grace and law, mercy and merit, faith and works, God’s salvation and self-salvation, is absolute. No compromising mishmash is possible. We are obliged to choose. Emil Brunner illustrated it vividly in terms of the difference between ‘ascent’ and ‘descent’. The really ‘decisive question’, he wrote, is ‘the direction of the movement’. Non-Christian systems think of ‘the self-movement of man’ towards God. Luther called speculation ‘climbing up to the majesty on high’. Similarly, mysticism imagines that the human spirit can ‘soar aloft towards God’. So does moralism. So does philosophy. Very similar is ‘the self-confident optimism of all non-Christian religion’. None of these has seen or felt the gulf which yawns between the holy God and sinful, guilty human beings. Only when we have glimpsed this do we grasp the necessity of what the gospel proclaims, namely ‘the self-movement of God’, his free initiative of grace, his ‘descent’, his amazing ‘act of condescension’. To stand on the rim of the abyss, to despair utterly of ever crossing over, this is the indispensable ‘antechamber of faith’.
2. God’s righteousness defended against criticism (3:27–31)
Paul now reopens his ‘diatribe’, which he continued throughout chapter 2 and which was clearly articulated in the four questions of 3:1–8. These related to his charge that all human beings are under the judgment of God and that Jews are not shielded from it. Now he anticipates a fresh set of Jewish questions, related this time not to judgment but to justification, and in particular to justification by faith only.
Question 1: Where, then, is boasting? (27–28).
In the post-Sanders era, in which many scholars accept his thesis that first-century Palestinian Judaism was not a religion of works-righteousness, it has seemed to them necessary to reinterpret Paul’s rejection of ‘boasting’. If Judaism was not a system of merit, it cannot be this kind of boasting that Paul has in mind. It must rather be Judaism’s self-confident assumption of national, cultural and religious superiority. And indeed the Jews were immensely proud of their privileged status as the chosen people of God. They imagined that they were heaven’s protected favourites, which is why Paul characterized them as ‘relying’ on their possession of the law and ‘bragging’ about their relationship to God (2:17, 23 where the verb in both cases is kauchaomai, to boast).
But these external privileges were not the only object of Jewish boasting. Jewish people were also proud of their personal righteousness. Thus Paul himself, reflecting on his own pre-conversion career in Judaism, put his Jewish inheritance (‘a Hebrew of Hebrews’) together with his individual attainment (his zeal in persecuting the church and being faultless in ‘righteousness based on the law’) as together forming the ‘flesh’ in which he put his confidence until as a Christian he began to ‘boast in Christ Jesus’ (kauchaomai again).
Boastfulness was not limited to the Jews, however. The Gentile world also was ‘insolent, arrogant and boastful’ (1:30). In fact, all human beings are seasoned boasters. Boasting is the language of our fallen self-centredness. But in those who have been justified by faith, boasting is altogether excluded. This is not on the principle of observing the law, which might give grounds for boasting, but on that of faith (27), which attributes salvation entirely to Christ and so eliminates all boasting. For our Christian conviction is that a sinner is justified by faith, indeed by faith alone, apart from the works of the law (28). Whether these ‘works of the law’ which Paul has in mind are ceremonial (observing rules for diet and the sabbath) or moral (obeying God’s commandments), they cannot gain the favour or forgiveness of God. For salvation is ‘not by works, so that no one can boast’. It is only by faith in Christ, which is why we should boast in him, not in ourselves. There is, indeed, something fundamentally strange about Christians who boast in themselves, as there is something essentially authentic, appropriate and attractive about their boasting in Christ. All boasting is excluded except boasting in Christ. Praising, not boasting, is the characteristic activity of justified believers, and will be throughout eternity. So ‘let the one who boasts boast in the Lord’, and ‘May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.’
Question 2: Is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? (29–30).
Jewish people were extremely conscious of their special covenant relationship with God, in which Gentiles did not share. It was to the Jews that God had entrusted his special revelation (3:2). Theirs too, as Paul will soon write, are ‘the adoption to sonship . . . the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises’, not to mention ‘the patriarchs’ and ‘the human ancestry of the Messiah’ (9:4f.). What the Jews forgot, however, was that their privileges were not intended for the exclusion of the Gentiles, but for their ultimate inclusion when through Abraham’s posterity ‘all peoples on earth’ would be blessed.
This covenant with Abraham has been fulfilled in Christ. He is Abraham’s ‘seed’, and through him the blessing of salvation now extends to everyone who believes, without exception or distinction. If the gospel of justification by faith alone excludes all boasting, it excludes all elitism and discrimination also. God is not the God of Jews only; he is the God of Gentiles too (29), since there is only one God (it is the truth of monotheism which unites us), who has only one way of salvation. He will justify the circumcised [Jews] by faith and the uncircumcised [Gentiles] through that same faith (30).
This same truth applies to all other distinctions, whether of race, nationality, class, sex or age. Not that all such distinctions are actually obliterated, for men remain men and women women, Jews are still circumcised and Gentiles uncircumcised, our skin pigmentation does not change, and we still have the same passport. But these continuing distinctions are rendered insignificant. They neither affect our relationship with God, nor hinder our fellowship with one another. At the foot of Christ’s cross and through faith in him, we are all on exactly the same level, indeed sisters and brothers in Christ. ‘The message’, writes Dr Tom Wright, ‘. . . is simple: all who believe in Jesus belong to the same family and should be eating at the same table. That is what Paul’s doctrine of justification is all about.’
Question 3: Do we, then, nullify the law by this faith? (31).
The law was the Jews’ most treasured possession. By ‘the law’ (Torah) they usually meant the law of Moses, that is, the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. Sometimes, however, because the word tôrâ was derived from the verb ‘to instruct’, they extended its meaning to embrace the whole of Old Testament Scripture, conceived as divine instruction. How, then, would they react to Paul’s unrelenting insistence that justification was by faith only, and that ‘the works of the law’ could not possibly provide a satisfactory basis for God’s acceptance? Paul seemed to them to set ‘law’ and ‘faith’ in opposition to each other, to exalt faith at the expense of law, and even to nullify the law altogether.
Paul denies this conclusion. Indeed, he affirms the opposite. Do we, then, nullify the law by this faith? he asks, and replies: Not at all! Rather, we uphold the law (31). What does he mean? Our answer will depend on what meaning he is giving to ‘the law’ in this context. If he is referring to the Old Testament in general, then his gospel of justification by faith upholds rather than undermines it, by showing that the Old Testament itself taught the truth of justifying faith (cf. 3:21). If this interpretation is correct, verse 31 becomes a transition to Romans 4 in which the apostle argues that both Abraham and David were, in fact, justified by faith.
If, on the other hand, Paul is using ‘the law’ in its more restricted sense of the law of Moses, then his assertion that faith upholds rather than nullifies the law may be understood in two ways. First, faith upholds the law by assigning to it its proper place in God’s purpose. In his scheme of salvation the function of the law is to expose and condemn sin, and so to keep sinners locked up in their guilt until Christ comes to liberate them through faith. In this way the gospel and the law dovetail with each other, since the gospel justifies those whom the law condemns.
The alternative explanation of Paul’s statement sees it as his response to a different set of critics. These held that, by declaring justification to be by faith, not obedience, Paul was actively encouraging disobedience. This charge of what is known as ‘antinomianism’ Paul will decisively refute in Romans 6 – 8. But he anticipates these chapters here by the simple affirmation that faith upholds the law. What he means, and will later explain, is that justified believers who live according to the Spirit fulfil the righteous requirements of the law (8:4; cf. 13:8, 10). It seems to me that this is the most likely explanation.
Here, then, are three implications – positive and negative – of the gospel of justification by faith alone. First, it humbles sinners and excludes boasting. Second, it unites believers and excludes discrimination. Third, it upholds the law and excludes antinomianism. No boasting. No discrimination. No antinomianism. This is the apostle’s effective defence of the gospel against current criticisms.
3. God’s righteousness illustrated in Abraham (4:1–25)
Paul has both expounded his gospel of God’s righteousness, that is, of justification by faith (3:21–26), and defended it against its critics (3:27–31). In doing so, he has also insisted that it is verified by Old Testament Scripture (1:2; 3:21, 31). So the next step in his argument is to supply an Old Testament precedent and example. He chooses Abraham, Israel’s most distinguished patriarch, supplemented by David, Israel’s most distinguished king. Similarly, when Matthew introduced his Gospel with Jesus’ genealogy, he named him ‘the son of David, the son of Abraham’.
Some modern commentators make no attempt to disguise their impatience. They find both the substance and the form of Paul’s reasoning equally irrelevant. His rebuttal of Jewish objections was doubtless necessary at the time, they concede, reflecting the debates going on in the rabbinical schools. But these things ‘have little interest and no weight for us’, wrote C. H. Dodd, and Paul’s ‘scholastic and rabbinic’ arguments ‘makes the whole exposition seem remote and unenlightening’. But on the contrary, Romans 4 occupies a very important place in the letter, for at least two reasons.
First, Paul further clarifies the meaning of justification by faith. He uses what the Bible says about Abraham and David to go into more detail about the significance of both words, ‘justification’ in terms of the reckoning of righteousness to the unrighteous, and ‘faith’ in terms of trusting the God of creation and resurrection.
Second, Paul wants Jewish Christians to grasp that his gospel of justification by faith is no novelty, having been proclaimed beforehand in the Old Testament, and he wants Gentile Christians to appreciate the rich spiritual heritage they have entered by faith in Jesus, in continuity with the Old Testament people of God. Abraham and David show that justification by faith is God’s one and only way of salvation, first in the Old Testament as well as in the New, and, second, for Jews as well as for Gentiles. It is therefore a mistake to suppose either that in the Old Testament people were saved by works and in the New Testament by faith, or that today the Christian mission should be limited to Gentiles on the ground that Jews have their own distinctive way of salvation. I shall have more to say about the evangelization of Jewish people in chapter 14.
There seem to have been two reasons for Paul’s choosing Abraham as his main example. The first is that he was the founding father of Israel, ‘the rock from which [they] were cut’, the favoured recipient of God’s covenant and promises. The second reason is doubtless that Abraham was held in the highest esteem by the rabbis as the chief example of righteousness and even the special ‘friend’ of God. They took it for granted that he had been justified by works of righteousness. For instance, ‘Abraham was perfect in all his dealings with the Lord and gained favour by his righteousness throughout his life.’ They quoted the Scriptures in which God promised to bless Abraham because he had obeyed him, without observing that these verses referred to Abraham’s life of obedience after his justification. They even quoted Genesis 15:6 (Paul’s text in this chapter, verse 3), in such a way as to represent Abraham’s faith as meaning his faithfulness, which therefore made him worthy of praise. For example, ‘was not Abraham found faithful in temptation, and it was reckoned unto him for righteousness?’
Moreover, an echo of the Jewish belief that Abraham was justified by works is heard in the letter of James. It is true that what James is asserting is not that we can be justified by works, any more than Abraham was, but rather that the authenticity of justifying faith is seen in the good works to which it gives rise. ‘I will show you my faith by my deeds,’ says the genuine believer, because without resulting good works faith is dead. Nevertheless, behind James’s argument lies the Jewish tradition (which he rejects) that Abraham was justified by works.
Romans 4 presupposes familiarity with the biblical story of Abraham, and in particular with four of its main episodes. First, God called Abraham to leave his home and people in Ur, and promised to show him another land, to give him many descendants, and through him to bless all peoples on earth. Second, God made his promises more specific, identifying the land as Canaan and declaring that his descendants, though he was still childless, would be as numerous as the dust of the earth and the stars in the sky. It was by believing this latter promise that Abraham was justified. Third, when Abraham was ninety-nine and Sarah ninety, God confirmed his promise of a son, changed his name from Abram to Abraham to signify that he would be ‘a father of many nations’, and gave him circumcision as the sign of his covenant. Fourth, although Paul only hints at this indirectly, God tested Abraham by asking him to sacrifice Isaac, the subject of the promise, and, when he showed his willingness to obey, reconfirmed his covenant.
Moreover, these four episodes correspond to the four occasions on which Hebrews 11 says that Abraham took action ‘by faith’ (verses 8, 9, 11 and 17–18). He obeyed God because he trusted God.
We now consider four assertions which Paul makes about Abraham’s justification, the first three of which develop the three questions and answers of his diatribe at the end of chapter 3. Verses 1–8 affirm that boasting is excluded (cf. 3:27f.), verses 9–12 that circumcision makes no difference (cf. 3:29f.), and verses 13–17 that the law has its proper, God-assigned place (cf. 3:31).
a. Abraham was not justified by works (4:1–8)
Paul begins with a question: What then shall we say that Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh, discovered in this matter? (1).
Responding to his own question about Abraham (1), Paul immediately sets in contrast the wrong answer (2), namely that he was justified by works, and the correct answer (3), namely that he believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness. The first reason the very concept of Abraham having been justified by works is so fiercely rejected by Paul is that this would have given him something to boast about, or might have appeared to. But Paul will allow his imaginary questioner to go no further. He interrupts indignantly: but not before God (2). Some may boast before other people, and others may entertain boastful thoughts in secret. But Paul rejects any possibility of human beings boasting before God, either creatures before their Creator or sinners before their Saviour. Whether the object of boasting is national privilege or personal piety makes no difference. Both forms of boasting are expressions of self-righteousness, and to suppose that the unrighteous can establish their own righteousness before God is to think the unthinkable.
Then there is a second reason for Paul’s denial that Abraham was justified by works, and that is the text of Scripture. What does Scripture say? he asks (3). Consider the implications of this apparently innocent question. First, the singular form (‘Scripture’), like our ‘the Bible’, indicates that Paul recognizes the existence of this entity, not just a library of books but a unified body of inspired writings. Second, his representation of Scripture as something that can speak indicates that he draws no distinction between what Scripture says and what God says through it. Indeed, throughout the New Testament we seldom know whether to translate legei, when it has no subject, as ‘he says’ or ‘it says’. Third, instead of the present tense, ‘What does Scripture say?’, Paul could have used the perfect tense and asked, ‘What was written?’ (gegraptai). For ‘the Scripture’ means ‘what is written’, and in asking what it ‘says’, the apostle indicates that through the written text the living voice of God may be heard. Fourth, to ask the question is to turn to Scripture for authoritative guidance. It implies that, as with Jesus and his critics, so with Paul and his, in every controversy Scripture was acknowledged as the final court of appeal.
In answer to his query as to what Scripture says, Paul quotes Genesis 15:6: Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness (3). He then proceeds in verses 4–5 to draw out the significance of the verb ‘credited’ (logizomai), which he here uses for the first time, and uses five times in six verses (3–8). It means to ‘credit’ or ‘reckon’, and when used in a financial or commercial context, it signifies to put something to somebody’s account, as when Paul wrote to Philemon about Onesimus: ‘If he has done you any wrong or owes you anything, charge it to me.’ There are, however, two different ways in which money can be credited to our account, namely as wages (which are earned) or as a gift (which is free and unearned), and the two are necessarily incompatible. Now to the one who works, wages are not credited as a gift but as an obligation (4), literally, ‘not according to grace [charis] but according to debt [opheilēma]’. This is emphatically not so with our justification, however. In this case, talk of ‘work’, ‘wages’, ‘debt’ or ‘obligation’ is entirely inappropriate. Instead, to the one who does not work but trusts God who justifies the ungodly, their faith is credited as righteousness (5).
The contrast between these two kinds of ‘crediting’ should now be clear. In the context of business, those who work have their wages credited to them as a right, a debt, an obligation, for they have earned them. In the context of justification, however, to those who do not work, and therefore have no right to payment, but who instead put their trust in God who justifies the ungodly (a marvellous phrase we have already considered on pp. 98f.), their faith is credited to them as righteousness, that is, they are given righteousness as a free and unearned gift of grace by faith. Paul cannot be teaching that faith and righteousness are equivalents, and that when righteousness is lacking faith is acceptable as a substitute. For that would make faith a work which deserves to be rewarded and play into the hands of the rabbis, who thought of Abraham’s ‘faith’ as his ‘faithfulness’. If anything is clear in the contrast between verse 4 and verse 5, it is that the crediting of faith as righteousness is a free gift, not an earned wage, and that it happens not to those who work but to those who trust, and indeed who trust the God who, far from justifying people because they are godly, actually justifies them when they are ungodly. This emphasis on faith (Abraham believed God) plainly shows, then, that God’s ‘crediting faith as righteousness’ is ‘not a rewarding of merit but a free and unmerited decision of divine grace’. Faith is not an alternative to righteousness, but the means by which we are declared righteous.
Paul now moves on from Abraham to David, and so from Genesis 15:6 to Psalm 32:1–2. He finds a fundamental agreement between the two texts. David says the same thing when he describes the blessedness of the one to whom God credits righteousness apart from works (6). We notice at once how the language of ‘crediting’ has changed. God is still the person who in sheer grace does the crediting, but now what he puts to our account is not ‘faith as righteousness’ but ‘righteousness’ itself. This is what David’s Old Testament beatitude teaches. Three times, in Hebrew parallelism, he refers to evil deeds, once as transgressions (anomiai, ‘lawlessnesses’) and twice as sins (harmartiai, ‘failures’), for sin is both the stepping over a known boundary and the falling short of a known standard. And three times he tells us what God has done with them. Our transgressions are forgiven, our sins are covered and our sin the Lord will never count against us (7–8). Instead of putting our sins to account against us, God pardons and covers them.
We are now in a position to bring all this rich vocabulary together. Paul’s mind is not limited to one expression or to a single imagery. He has made it clear that the righteousness of (or from) God, which is revealed in the gospel (1:17; 3:21f.), is his just justification of the unjust. So in the second half of chapter 3 he keeps on using the verb ‘to justify’ (e.g. 3:24, 26, 28, 30). He also continues to use it in chapter 4 (4:2, 5, 25), as he will in chapter 5 (5:1, 9, 16, 18). He dismisses out of hand the possibility that Abraham could have been justified by works (2). But when he affirms positively how God justifies the ungodly (5), he uses new expressions. First, God credits to us faith as righteousness (3, 5, 9, 22f.). Second, he credits to us righteousness apart from works (6, 11, 13, 24). And third, he refuses to credit our sins against us, but pardons and covers them instead (7–8). We cannot claim that these three expressions are precise synonyms, but they belong together in justification. Justification involves a double counting, crediting or reckoning. On the one hand, negatively, God will never count our sins against us. On the other hand, positively, God credits our account with righteousness, as a free gift, by faith, altogether apart from our works.
We are reminded of another, somewhat similar, double statement of Paul’s, namely that in his work of reconciliation God was ‘not counting people’s sins against them’, but instead ‘made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’. Christ became sin with our sins, in order that we might become righteous with God’s righteousness.
We may recall that the verb logizomai is sometimes translated not to ‘credit, count or reckon’ but to ‘impute’. The imagery of counting and crediting is financial, but that of imputation is legal. Both mean to ‘reckon something as belonging to someone’, but in the former case this is money, in the latter innocence or guilt. This language became prominent in the sixteenth-century debate whether in the act of justification God ‘infuses’ righteousness into us (as the Roman Catholic Church taught) or ‘imputes’ it to us (as the Protestant Reformers insisted). The Reformers were surely right that when God justifies sinners he does not make them righteous (for that is the consequent process of sanctification), but he pronounces them righteous or imputes righteousness to them, reckoning them to be, and treating them as, (legally) righteous. C. H. Hodge clarifies this for us. ‘To impute sin is to lay sin to the charge of anyone, and to treat him accordingly.’ Similarly, ‘to impute righteousness is to set righteousness to one’s account, and to treat him accordingly’. Thus Paul writes in Romans 4 both of God not imputing sin to sinners, although it actually belongs to them, and of his imputing righteousness to us, although it does not belong to us. What Paul affirms is ‘that it was by means of faith that Abraham came to be treated as righteous, and not that faith was taken in lieu of perfect obedience’.
A further question is whether the righteousness which God graciously imputes to us may be said to be the righteousness of Christ, whether it is right to speak of being ‘clothed in the spotless robe of Christ’s righteousness’, and whether Zinzendorf was correct to write (in John Wesley’s translation):
Jesu, thy blood and righteousness
My beauty are, my glorious dress;
Midst flaming worlds, in these arrayed,
With joy shall I lift up my head.
This kind of language, even in devotional hymns, is unfashionable today, and is declared by some to be wrong theologically. Indeed, we must agree that the precise imagery does not occur in the New Testament. We are certainly told in this very letter to clothe ourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, but his righteousness is not mentioned as the garment we are to put on. Nevertheless, on at least three occasions Paul comes so close to this picture that I for one believe it is biblically permissible to use it. We are told that he was made sin for us, ‘so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’; that he ‘has become for us . . . our righteousness’; and that if we ‘gain Christ’ and are ‘found in him’, then the righteousness we have is not our own but ‘the righteousness that comes from God’ through faith in Christ. In each case, either Christ is our righteousness, or God’s righteousness becomes ours when we are in Christ. ‘Being clothed’ with the righteousness of God or of Christ is not mentioned; we are given the even greater privilege of ‘having’ it and even ‘becoming’ it. Once the reality of imputed righteousness is accepted, there can be little objection to the ‘clothing’ metaphor.
b. Abraham was not justified by circumcision (4:9–12)
Paul’s first question has been whether Abraham was justified by works or by faith (1–3). His second is whether this blessedness of justification is available only for the circumcised (the Jews) or is also for the uncircumcised (9a). This question prompts a supplementary one, concerning the circumstances in which Abraham was justified. Was he justified after he was circumcised, or before? (10a). In other words, did he submit to circumcision first, and so achieve righteousness, as the rabbis taught? Or was he already justified when he was circumcised? What was the order of events? In particular, did his justification come before or after his circumcision? Paul’s answer to his own question is brief and blunt: It was not after, but before! (10b). In fact it happened long before. For his justification is recorded in Genesis 15 and his circumcision in Genesis 17, and at least fourteen years (even twenty-nine years according to the rabbis) separated the two events.
But although they were separated, they were not unrelated. Abraham’s circumcision, though not the ground of his justification, was its sign and seal. For Abraham received circumcision as a sign, a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised (11a). God himself had called circumcision ‘the sign of the covenant’ which he had established with Abraham. Similarly, Paul now calls it a sign of his justification. As a ‘sign’ it was a distinguishing mark, setting Abraham and his descendants apart as God’s covenant people. Indeed, it was not only a sign to identify them; it was also a seal to authenticate them, as the justified people of God.
So Abraham received two distinct gifts of God, justification and circumcision, and in that order. First he received justification by faith while he was still uncircumcised. Second, he received circumcision as a visible sign and seal of the justification which was already his. It is the same with baptism. Leaving aside the debatable question whether an analogy between baptism and circumcision justifies the practice of baptizing the infant children of believing parents, the order of events for adult converts is plain. First, we are justified by faith, and then we are baptized as a sign or seal of our justification. But we must get the order right, and we must also clearly distinguish between the sign (baptism) and the thing signified (justification).
So then, Paul continues, there was a purpose in the fact that Abraham was justified by faith, and circumcised only later. Indeed, there was a double purpose. It was first that Abraham might be (as he is) the father of all who believe, and so have been justified, but have not been circumcised (11b). In other words, Abraham is the father of Gentile believers. Circumcision is no more necessary to their justification than it was to his. The second purpose of this combination of faith, justification and circumcision was that Abraham might also be (as he is) the father of the circumcised who in addition to their circumcision also follow in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised (12). Thus he is the father of all believers, irrespective of whether they are circumcised or uncircumcised. In fact circumcision, which was of supreme importance to the Jews, must not be allowed to undermine or disrupt the unity of believers in Christ. Although according to the Jews Abraham was ‘the great dividing point in the history of mankind’, according to Paul Abraham through his faith became ‘the great rallying point for all who believe, whether circumcised or uncircumcised’. For where circumcision divides, faith unites.
c. Abraham was not justified by the law (4:13–17a)
Paul begins this new paragraph with a sharp not . . . but contrast, in which the negative is emphatic. There are no questions and answers now, as there have been in the continuing diatribe. There is just an uncompromising assertion that if justification is neither by works nor by circumcision, it is not by law either. For how did God’s promise come to Abraham and his offspring? Answer: not through the law . . . but through the righteousness that comes by faith (13). The promise in mind must still be Genesis 15:5, that Abraham’s descendants would be as numerous as the stars. It was a promise without any conditions or requirements attached to it. God’s word came to Abraham as promise, not as law. He simply believed God and was justified.
To our initial astonishment, Paul portrays God’s promise as being that Abraham would be heir of the world (13). Yet in the Genesis text Abraham was promised Canaan, ‘north and south . . . east and west’ of where he was standing, whose boundaries were later delineated. How then did ‘the land’ become ‘the world’? It is partly that, as a general principle, the fulfilment of biblical prophecy has always transcended the categories in which it was originally given. It is partly that God made the subsidiary promise that through Abraham’s innumerable descendants ‘all nations on earth’ would be blessed. This promised multiplication of Abraham’s descendants led the rabbis to the conclusion that God would ‘give them an inheritance from sea to sea, and from the Euphrates to the ends of the earth’. The third reason for Paul’s statement that Abraham would inherit ‘the world’ is surely messianic. As soon as Abraham’s seed was identified as the Messiah, it was further recognized that he would exercise a universal dominion. Furthermore, his people are his fellow heirs, which is why the meek will inherit the earth and why in and through Christ ‘all things are [ours]’, including ‘the world’.
Having made clear what the promise is, why does Paul assert so strongly that it is received and inherited by faith, not law? He gives three reasons. The first is an argument from history. He has already stated it clearly in Galatians 3:17, namely that ‘the covenant previously established by God’ could not possibly be invalidated by the law which was given 430 years later. The same truth is implied in Romans 4, even though it is not developed. Second, there is the argument from language. In these verses the apostle uses a profusion of words – law, promise, faith, wrath, transgression and grace. These terms all have their own logic, and we must be careful not to confuse categories. Thus, if those who depend on the law are heirs, that is, if the inheritance depends on our obedience, then faith means nothing [kekenōtai; literally, ‘has been emptied’, i.e. of its validity] and the promise is worthless [katērgētai; literally, ‘has been destroyed’ or ‘rendered ineffective’; 14]. Something can be given to us either by law or by promise, since God is the author of both, but they cannot both be in operation together. As Paul has written in Galatians, ‘if the inheritance depends on the law, then it no longer depends on the promise’. Law and promise belong to different categories of thought, which are incompatible. Law-language (‘you shall’) demands our obedience, but promise-language (‘I will’) demands our faith. What God said to Abraham was not ‘Obey this law and I will bless you’, but ‘I will bless you; believe my promise.’
Verse 15 develops this argument, showing why law and promise exclude each other. It is because the law brings wrath, and because where there is no law there is no transgression. The words ‘law’, ‘transgression’ and ‘wrath’ belong to the same category of thought and language. For the law turns sin into transgression (a deliberate trespass), and transgression provokes God’s wrath. Conversely, where there is no law there is no transgression and so no wrath.
Verse 16 is a further example of the logic of language, as it brings together grace and faith. The Greek sentence is much more dramatic than the English, since in the original there are neither verbs nor the noun ‘promise’. It reads literally: ‘therefore by faith in order that according to grace’. The fixed point is that God is gracious, and that salvation derives from his sheer grace alone. But in order that this may be so, our human response can only be faith. For grace gives and faith takes. Faith’s exclusive function is humbly to receive what grace offers. Otherwise ‘grace would no longer be grace’ (11:6).
Paul’s contrast in verses 13–16 is similar to his work–trust and wage–gift contrast of verses 4–5. It may be summarized as follows: God’s law makes demands which we transgress, and so we incur wrath (15); God’s grace makes promises which we believe, and so we receive blessing (14, 16). Thus law, obedience, transgression and wrath belong to one category of thinking, while grace, promise, faith and blessing belong to another. This is the argument from language and logic.
In addition to his arguments from history and language, Paul now develops an argument from theology, especially the doctrine of Jewish–Gentile unity in the family of Abraham. The reason justification is by grace through faith, or by faith according to grace (16a), is not only to preserve linguistic and logical consistency, but also so that the promise . . . may be guaranteed to all Abraham’s offspring – not only to those who are of the law [meaning Jews who trace their physical descent from Abraham] but also to those who have the faith of Abraham, that is, all believers, whether Jews or Gentiles, who belong to the spiritual lineage of faith (16b; cf. 11b–12). The law (not least its cultural and ceremonial provisions) divides. Only the gospel of grace and faith can unite, by opening the door to the Gentiles and levelling everybody at the foot of Christ’s cross (cf. 3:29f.). Hence the importance of faith. All believers belong to Abraham’s seed and so inherit Abraham’s promise. The fatherhood of Abraham is a theme which runs right through this chapter. In the first verse Paul calls him ‘our forefather according to the flesh’, that is, Israel’s national ancestor. But after this he makes three affirmations: ‘he is the father of all who believe’, whether circumcised or uncircumcised (11–12); he is the father of us all (16); and he is our father in the sight of God (17). Thus the Scripture has been fulfilled which says: I have made you a father of many nations (17a). Only justification by faith could have secured this.
Much of Romans 4 has so far been negative. It has been necessary for Paul to demonstrate that Abraham was justified neither by works (since it is written that he believed God and was justified), nor by circumcision (since he was justified first and circumcised later), nor by law (since the law was given centuries later, and in any case Abraham was responding to a promise, not a law). In each case, Paul has affirmed the priority of Abraham’s faith. His faith came first; works, circumcision and law all came later. It has been a process of systematic elimination. But now at last the apostle reaches his positive conclusion.
d. Abraham was justified by faith (4:17b–22)
Paul moves on from the priority of Abraham’s faith to its reasonableness. The description of faith as ‘reasonable’ comes as a surprise to many people, since they have always supposed that faith and reason were alternative means of grasping reality, and mutually incompatible. Is not faith a synonym for credulity and even superstition? Is it not an excuse for irrationality.
No. Although, to be sure, faith goes beyond reason, it always has a firmly rational basis. In particular, faith is believing or trusting a person, and its reasonableness depends on the reliability of the person being trusted. It is always reasonable to trust the trustworthy. And there is nobody more trustworthy than God, as Abraham knew, and as we are privileged to know more confidently than Abraham because we live after the death and resurrection of Jesus through which God has fully disclosed himself and his dependability. In particular, before we are in a position to believe God’s promises, we need to be sure both of his power (that he is able to keep them) and of his faithfulness (that he can be relied on to do so). It is these two attributes of God which were the foundations of Abraham’s faith, and on which Paul reflects in this passage.
Take God’s power first. Two evidences of it are brought together at the end of verse 17, where God, the object of Abraham’s (and our) faith, is called the God who gives life to the dead, which is resurrection, and calls into being things that were not, which is creation. Nothing baffles us human beings more than nothingness and death. Our ‘angst’ is, at its most acute, our dread of the abyss of nothingness. And death is the one event over which (in the end) we have no control, and from which we cannot escape. The comedian Woody Allen sums up for many this inability to cope with the prospect of death. ‘It’s not that I’m afraid to die,’ he quips; ‘I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’ But nothingness and death are no problem to God. On the contrary, it is out of nothing that he created the universe, and out of death that he raised Jesus. The creation and the resurrection were and remain the two major demonstrations of the power of God. It was in prayer to the sovereign Creator, who had made the world by his ‘great power and outstretched arm’, that Jeremiah added, ‘Nothing is too hard for you.’ It was also in prayer that Paul asked that the Ephesians might know God’s ‘incomparably great power’ which he had displayed ‘when he raised Christ from the dead’.
This firm conviction about the power of God was what enabled Abraham to believe, both against all hope and in hope (18a) at the same time, when God promised him that his descendants would be as many as the stars, although at that time he and Sarah did not have even a single child. He became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, ‘So shall your offspring be’ (18b). It is not that he ran away from the realities of his situation into a world of fantasy. On the contrary, without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact, indeed the two painful, stubborn facts, that he could not beget a child and that Sarah could not conceive one. For the facts were that his body was as good as dead – since he was about a hundred years old – and that Sarah’s womb was also dead (19). Yet out of that double death God brought a new life. It was at one and the same time an act of creation and of resurrection. For this is the kind of God Abraham believed in. Indeed later, when facing the supreme test of his faith, whether to sacrifice his one and only son Isaac, through whom God had said his promises would be fulfilled, Abraham ‘reasoned that God could even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from death’. Hence Abraham did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in [or, better, ‘by’] his faith and gave glory to God (20). The alternative responses to God’s promise are here contrasted: unbelief (apistia) and faith (pistis). If Abraham had given in to unbelief, he would have ‘wavered’ or been ‘at odds with himself’. Instead, he strengthened himself by means of his faith. In this way he gave glory to God (20). That is to say, he glorified God by letting God be God, and by trusting him to be true to himself as the God of creation and resurrection.
It is this concept of ‘letting God be God’ which forms a natural transition from his power to his faithfulness. There is a basic link between our faith and God’s faithfulness, so much so that Jesus’ command ‘Have faith in God’ has sometimes been roughly but justly paraphrased, ‘Count on the faithfulness of God.’ For whether people keep their promises or not depends not only on their power, but also on their will, to do so. To put it another way, behind all promises lies the character of the person who makes them. Abraham knew this. As he contemplated his own senility and Sarah’s barrenness, he neither turned a blind eye to these problems, nor underestimated them. But he reminded himself of God’s power and faithfulness. Faith always looks at the problems in the light of the promises. He knew that God could keep his promises (because of his power) and he knew that he would do so (because of his faithfulness). He was fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised (21). This is why, Paul adds, namely because he believed God’s promise, ‘it [his faith] was credited to him as righteousness’ (22).
e. Conclusion: Abraham’s faith and ours (4:23–25)
Paul concludes this chapter by applying lessons from Abraham’s faith to us, his readers. He writes that the biblical words ‘it was credited to him’ were written not for him alone (23), but also for us today. For the whole Abraham story, like the rest of the Bible, was written to teach us (15:4). So the same God, who credited faith to Abraham as righteousness, will credit righteousness to us also if we believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead (24). Abraham was not unique in his experience of being justified by faith. For this is how God saves everybody.
But the God we are to trust in is not only the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; he is also the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification (25). ‘This verse’, writes Hodge, ‘is a comprehensive statement of the gospel.’ It is indeed. Its parallelism is so well honed that some think it was an early Christian phrase or a fragment from a creed. The verb delivered over (paradidōmi), although it is used in the Gospels of Jesus being ‘handed over’ by Judas, the priests and Pilate, here evidently refers to the Father who ‘did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all’ (8:32). So both the death and the resurrection of Jesus are attributed to the Father’s initiative: he ‘delivered him over to death’, and he ‘raised him to life’.
Although there is little difficulty in understanding these references to the death and resurrection of Jesus, the second part of each clause presents a problem: for our sins and for our justification. The preposition dia with the accusative normally means ‘because of’ or ‘on account of’. It gives a reason for something having happened, and so looks backwards. In this case the meaning would be that Jesus was delivered to death ‘because of our sins’, dying the death which we deserved, and then was resurrected ‘because of our justification’, which he had accomplished by his death. More briefly, in the words of Bishop Handley Moule, ‘we sinned, therefore he suffered: we were justified, therefore he rose’. The difficulty with this rendering is with the second clause, for Paul regards justification as happening when we believe, not as having taken place before the resurrection.
So other commentators understand dia as meaning ‘for the sake of’ and having a reference to the future. Thus John Murray translates: ‘He was delivered up in order to atone for our sins and was raised in order that we might be justified.’ The difficulty here is with the first clause. ‘In order to atone for’ is a complicated way of expressing the simple preposition ‘for’.
The third possibility is to abandon the consistency which insists that dia must have the same meaning in both clauses. It could be causal or looking backwards in the first (he was delivered ‘because of our sins’), and final or looking forwards in the second (he was raised ‘with a view to our justification’).
In this chapter the apostle teaches us about the nature of faith. He indicates that there are degrees in faith. For faith can be weak (19) or strong (20). How then does it grow? Above all through the use of our minds. Faith is not burying our heads in the sand, or screwing ourselves up to believe what we know is not true, or even whistling in the dark to keep our spirits up. On the contrary, faith is a reasoning trust. There can be no believing without thinking.
On the one hand, we have to think about the problems which face us. Faith is not closing our eyes to them. Abraham faced the fact that he and Sarah were both infertile. But on the other hand, he reflected on the promises of God, and on the character of the God who had made them, especially that he is the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not (17). And as his mind played on the promises, the problems shrank accordingly, for he was fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised (21).
We today are much more fortunate than Abraham, and have little or no excuse for unbelief. For we live on this side of the resurrection. And we have a complete Bible in which both the creation of the universe and the resurrection of Jesus are recorded. It is therefore more reasonable for us to believe than it was for Abraham. Of course we have to make sure that the promises we are seeking to inherit are neither wrenched out of their biblical context nor the product of our own subjective fancy, but truly apply to us. Then we can lay hold of them, even against all human hope, yet in hope (18), that is, in the confidence of God’s faithfulness and power. Only then shall we prove to be genuine children of our great spiritual forefather Abraham.