Second Sunday after Pentecost

God has created life where there was none

Commentary on Romans 4:13-25

Stephen Chester

The argument of Romans 4 contains two main themes. Paul discusses both Abraham as a believer justified by faith and Abraham as the father of a worldwide people of God. It is all too easy for commentators and preachers to focus only on one of these themes, but they are intertwined in the text, for verses 1–12 contain both themes, and verses 13–25 contain both themes. The challenge is, therefore, not only to understand each theme in isolation from the other, but also to understand what, from Paul’s perspective, binds them together.

The first theme of Abraham as believer allows Paul to emphasize how human beings come into right relationship with God—in other words, the means by which they are justified. This happens through faith, by trusting in the saving power of Jesus’s death and resurrection (4:25), just as Abraham trusted in God’s promise of descendants, even though his body and that of Sarah were dead in reproductive terms (4:18–21). Justification is not through obedience to the law of Moses (4:13–14).

In its own nature as an expression of God’s desire to be in covenant relationship with God’s people, the law is good. Yet although the law tells human beings what is good, it cannot empower them fully to obey it and so only brings wrath when people break it (4:15). Instead, justification comes through faith in Jesus, which is reckoned as righteousness (4:22–25), so that the sins of those who believe are not counted against them and they are declared to be in the right. The text, therefore, says something crucial about the identity of those who believe in Jesus: They stand in the right before God, not because of their own deeds, but because of what Jesus has done for them.

The second theme—Abraham as father of a worldwide family—allows Paul to emphasize that all who share Abraham’s faith are genuinely his descendants: “He is the father of us all” (4:16). It is this family of Abraham, the sharers of his faith, who are the people of God in the world, and this people is now composed not only of Abraham’s biological descendants through Isaac but also of those among the Gentiles (“the nations”) who share his faith. Paul is here controversial in his own time and place in asserting that non-Jews can become part of Abraham’s family through faith in Jesus.

Yet Paul is simultaneously very conventional since it never occurs to him that anyone can be part of God’s people without being a descendant of Abraham. Just as God made Abraham and his descendants God’s children through the promises made to, and received in faith by, the patriarch, so now Gentiles are made children of Abraham, and hence also children of God, when they believe in Jesus after the manner of Abraham. The text, therefore, says a second crucial thing about the identity of those who believe in Jesus: They are children of Abraham, and this is an integral part of their experience of salvation.

The connecting point between the two themes is, of course, faith, which is the means by which human beings are justified. And it is by sharing Abraham’s faith that Gentiles become his descendants. This justifying, family-creating faith has several dimensions:

It clearly has cognitive content. Believing that Jesus died and was raised by God really matters.
However, it is also even more fundamentally about trust in the mercy of God and the conviction that, although circumstances may make it seem unlikely, the promises of God are completely reliable. Faith, therefore, honors God (it gives glory to God, 4:20) by accepting God’s promises as true.
Faith is also both receptive and active: receptive because in accepting God’s promises, faith acknowledges that we can do nothing for ourselves to achieve the salvation they proffer; active because it profoundly changes how we engage with circumstances that appear in opposition to God’s promises.
When we are told that Abraham “grew strong in his faith” (4:20), the literal sense is that he was empowered by faith. As Luther famously expressed it, “It makes us altogether different … and brings with it the Holy Spirit. O it is a living, busy, active, mighty thing, this faith.”¹

Yet if Paul has much to say here about the faith of human beings, the even more fundamental point of connection between the two themes of the passage concerns the actions of God:

It is God who made the promises to Abraham recorded in Scripture: that Abraham would be the father of many nations (Genesis 17:5, quoted in Romans 4:17 and 4:18) with innumerable descendants (Genesis 15:5, quoted in Romans 4:18).
It is God who justifies and who reckoned Abraham’s faith as righteousness (Genesis 15:6, quoted in Romans 4:22), so that the fulfilment of God’s promises rests on God’s own grace (4:16) rather than upon any aspect of human identity or achievement.
Above all, it is God who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead (4:24). God’s justifying activity and God’s resurrecting activity express God’s identity as the creator, for God “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (4:17).

God has created life where there was none in the birth of Isaac, in justifying the Gentiles, and in the resurrection of Jesus. “The creating God who is the resurrecting God is also the justifying God: this implies that justification is an act of new creation and resurrection.”² God forgave Abraham’s sins and graciously gifted him with life out of death, and God now does the same for those who believe in Jesus.

That the forgiveness of sins and the gift of life out of death must be held together in understanding God’s justifying act is made clear by Paul’s final statement that Christ was “handed over to death for our trespasses and raised to life for our justification” (4:25). Justification involves participation by faith in Christ’s death and resurrection, the only source of righteousness and life. To be justified is to receive forgiveness of sins, but this forgiveness is a life-giving act of God that creates the family of God in the world, that family of which Abraham is the human father.

To say this is not to step back from the truth that justification is not based upon any aspect of human identity or achievement. The family of God does not become a location where human beings can now demonstrate their worthiness in a way they could not before. Rather, it is the place where, united with Christ by faith, they stand under grace and grow together more and more into the fullness of who Christ is.