Romans 4 — Abraham, Justified by Faith
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Romans 3 ended with a thesis — a righteousness from God, through faith, apart from works of the law. Romans 4 is the proof from precedent, and Paul chooses his witness shrewdly: Abraham, the one figure every party in the synagogue claims. If Abraham was justified by works, Paul’s gospel collapses; if by faith, it stands on the Torah itself.
Wages or gift (vv. 1–8)
Paul’s exhibit is a single verse, Genesis 15:6: “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.” He then presses the bookkeeping verb counted (λογίζομαι, eleven times in this chapter). To a worker, pay is “not counted as a gift but as his due” (v. 4); justification, by contrast, is credited to “the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly” (v. 5) — perhaps the most scandalous phrase in Paul, since the Torah forbids human judges to do exactly that (Exodus 23:7). Only a judge who has himself absorbed the wrong may acquit the guilty justly; see Justification by Faith Alone.
David seconds the motion (vv. 6–8, quoting Psalm 32): blessing is sin not counted — the same ledger, wiped.
Before circumcision, before the law (vv. 9–17)
Now the chronological argument, simple and devastating. Genesis 15 (faith counted as righteousness) precedes Genesis 17 (circumcision) by years. Circumcision was therefore a seal of a righteousness Abraham already had by faith (v. 11) — not its cause. The father of the circumcised turns out to be, first, the father of all who believe, Gentiles included. The promise that he would inherit the world came “through the righteousness of faith” (v. 13), not law — for the law brings wrath, and a promise resting on law-keeping would be void the day it was signed.
Hoping against hope (vv. 18–25)
Finally Paul describes the anatomy of this faith. Abraham, about a hundred years old, considered his body “as good as dead,” and Sarah’s womb barren — and believed the God “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (v. 17). Faith is not optimism about circumstances; it is confidence in a particular kind of God — the God of creation out of nothing and resurrection. That is why the chapter can end by handing Abraham’s faith to us: the words “counted to him” were written “also for us, who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (vv. 24–25).