Romans 4

Romans 4:1–3: The Text

Romans 4:1–3: Key Questions

• Paul opens the chapter by raising Abraham himself. What is the argument he is addressing before it has even been stated?
  Interpretations

  Paul has just closed chapter 3 with the claim that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the law, and that boasting is therefore excluded. That claim invites one obvious rebuttal, and every interpreter agrees on what it is: Abraham. If justification is by faith apart from works, what do you do with the man Genesis holds up as the model of obedience, who left Ur at God’s word, who received circumcision as the sign of the covenant, and who was willing to offer Isaac? Second Temple Jewish literature made exactly this case. Sirach 44:19–21 says Abraham “kept the law of the Most High” and that the covenant was established “in his flesh,” and 1 Maccabees 2:52 asks, “Was not Abraham found faithful when tested, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness?”, tying Genesis 15:6 to the Aqedah of Genesis 22 so that the crediting of righteousness becomes a reward for his obedience. That was a live reading in Paul’s world, and Paul heads it off.

  The rhetorical technique is prolepsis, anticipating and answering an objection before the opponent voices it, and Paul uses it throughout Romans (2:1–5, 3:1–8, 6:1, 9:19). His method here is to grant the terms of the challenge and then take the hardest case, the patriarch himself, and show that even he was justified by faith. If Abraham cannot be made an exception, no one can. And Paul does not argue it in his own words; he goes to Genesis 15:6 and lets the text settle it. (Moo, Schreiner, Cranfield, Murray)

  My Interpretation

  It seems like Paul is attempting to refute an argument before it is even mentioned, because he knows it is coming. My interpretation is that it is because the Jewish people are going to look to the father of the Jewish people, Abraham, and say, “What about him? Was he not credited by his works?”

  And then Paul is going to point to Genesis 15:6, basically refuting that even before the works, his belief in God was credited to him as righteous. So he is made righteous before God because of his faith in him.

• Verse 2 says that if Abraham was justified by works he has something to boast about, “but not before God.” Is Paul saying we should not boast before man, or that we can boast before man but not before God?
  Interpretations

  The sentence is a conditional Paul does not actually grant. The structure is: if Abraham was justified by works, then he would have a boast, but the qualifier “not before God” pulls the ground out from under it. Two ways of taking the clause:

  The boast is denied outright: Most read “but not before God” as Paul’s denial of the premise. Whatever standing Abraham might have had in human estimation, before God there is no boast at all, and verse 3 gives the reason: Scripture says he believed, and it was counted to him. The word Paul reaches for in the next verse, logizomai, is the accounting term for crediting something to a ledger, and what is credited is precisely what was not earned. (Moo, Cranfield, Murray)

  The two tribunals are distinguished: Others emphasize the phrase itself, which presupposes a real distinction between the human court and the divine one. Abraham was genuinely impressive by any human measure, and Jewish tradition celebrated him for it. Paul does not dispute that estimate; he relocates the question. The only tribunal that determines righteousness is God’s, and there the comparison is not against other men but against God himself. (Calvin, Schreiner)

  The two readings converge, because the second explains the first: the reason no boast survives before God is that his court does not grade on a curve. This is the same move Paul made in 3:23, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” where the measure is not other sinners but God’s own glory, and it is why the boasting excluded in 3:27 stays excluded here.

  My Interpretation

  My interpretation is that by man’s standard, someone can have more pious actions than another. But we are comparing imperfect to imperfect, versus comparing to God’s standard, which none of us can meet by our own works. His standard is absolute versus comparative.

  So there is a sense in which a boast before man is possible, because a man really can out-perform another man. But that is a comparison between two people who both fall short. It says nothing about where either of them stands before God. The moment the measure changes from other men to God himself, the boast has nothing left to stand on.

Romans 4:4–5: The Text

Romans 4:4–5: Key Questions

• Verse 4 says that to the one who works, his wage is not counted according to grace but according to what is due. What is Paul establishing about works?
  Interpretations

  Paul shifts into commercial vocabulary and the metaphor does the arguing. The word for wage, misthós, is what an employer owes a laborer at the end of a day, and the word for what is due, ophílēma, is a debt. The point is that grace and wages are two different categories that cannot be mixed: the instant something is owed, it stops being a gift. If Abraham had earned his standing, God would be paying a debt, not showing grace, and the language of “counted” in Genesis 15:6 would be the wrong language entirely. Paul will make the same either/or explicitly in 11:6: “if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace is no longer grace.”

  Underneath the metaphor sits the point about the standard. The law does not offer credit for compliance; it states what is required. Jesus puts it in a parable in Luke 17:7–10: the servant who has done everything commanded says, “We are unworthy slaves; we have done only that which we ought to have done.” Full obedience earns no surplus, because full obedience is the baseline. So even a hypothetical perfect law-keeper would have nothing over, which is why Paul can move so quickly to verse 5, where the one justified is not the worker but the one who does not work and believes.

  And verse 5 is the scandal of the sentence: God “justifies the ungodly,” ton asebē. That is the exact thing the law forbids a human judge to do, since Exodus 23:7 says God “will not acquit the guilty” and Proverbs 17:15 calls justifying the wicked an abomination to the LORD. Paul is not contradicting those texts. He is depending on what he just said in 3:25–26: God can acquit the guilty without ceasing to be just because the propitiation has satisfied the justice that stood against them. (Moo, Schreiner, Murray, Calvin)

  My Interpretation

  My interpretation is basically that works are not counted towards you. They are not a plus. They are the standard. They are due already. And so you do not receive grace or salvation by your works.

  That is what the wage language is doing. A wage is something the employer owes you when the work is done, and there is nothing gracious about being paid what you are owed. If salvation worked that way, God would be settling an account rather than giving a gift. But we never even get to that point, because obedience does not put God in our debt in the first place. Perfect obedience would only be meeting the standard, and meeting the standard is what was required from the start.

  And then verse 5 backs that up. It flips to the one who does not work but believes, and says his faith is what gets counted as righteousness. And he also backs this one up with Scripture from the Old Testament.

• If we are justified by believing, should we boast about that? Should we boast about something we did, that is, believing in Jesus Christ? Are we justified in boasting?
  Interpretations

  This is the objection that survives everything Paul has said so far. Grant that works are excluded; faith still looks like something the sinner contributes, and if it is our contribution, the boast returns through the back door. Two broad answers:

  Faith is itself a gift (Reformed): The boast is excluded because faith is not something the sinner produces. Ephesians 2:8–9 grounds it, “by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast,” where the exclusion of boasting is tied directly to faith being given. Philippians 1:29 says believing was “granted” to us, and John 6:44 that no one can come unless the Father draws him. The dead cannot raise themselves, which is why Ephesians 2:5 says God made us alive “when we were dead in our transgressions.” Regeneration precedes and produces faith, so the believing is real and it is genuinely ours, but it is not the ground of anything and it originates outside us. (Augustine, Calvin, 1689 LBCF 14.1, Murray, Schreiner)

  Faith excludes boasting by its nature (broader): A second answer, held widely including by many who are not Reformed: even setting aside the question of faith’s origin, faith is not the kind of thing that can be boasted in, because it is by definition a looking away from the self to another. Its whole content is empty-handed reliance on someone else’s work. A beggar receiving alms has nothing to boast about; the receiving is not an achievement. On this reading Paul’s “law of faith” in 3:27 excludes boasting structurally, since faith has no merit to claim.

  The Reformed answer takes both, and the second is why the first matters: faith cannot be boasted in because of what it is, and it cannot be boasted in because of where it came from. Paul’s own summary is a question rather than an argument: “What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?” (1 Corinthians 4:7).

  My Interpretation

  My interpretation is no, because I don’t believe that we worked for that belief whatsoever. It was 100% God who put the Holy Spirit in us, who replaced our heart of stone with the heart of flesh, Ezekiel 36:26–27. God chose us, not the other way around.

  This goes back to Romans 3 as well, the reference to the Psalms that no one seeks for God. At least, no one seeks for God in our unregenerate nature. If the verdict of the catena is that there is none who seeks for God, then faith cannot be the one thing the unregenerate man manages to produce on his own. It has to be given, and if it is given, there is nothing in it to boast about. The believing is genuinely ours, but we did not generate it. God did, and boasting about a gift is not something the recipient has any right to.

Romans 4:6–8: The Text

Romans 4:6–8: Key Questions

• Paul backs the point with a second Old Testament witness. Why David, and why this psalm?
  Interpretations

  The quotation is Psalm 32:1–2, and the choice of witness is deliberate. Paul now has the two figures Israel revered most, Abraham the father of the nation and David the king, and both testify to the same thing.

  The link is a single word, and it holds in both languages. Jewish exposition used a technique of joining two texts that share a common term, and the term here is logizomai. Genesis 15:6 says faith was counted to Abraham as righteousness, and Psalm 32:2 says the blessed man is the one whose sin the Lord will not count against him. Those are the same Greek word: the Septuagint renders Genesis 15:6 with elogisthē and Psalm 32:2 with logisētai, both forms of logizomai, and Paul quotes the Greek in both places. The connection is not an artifact of the translation either. Underneath both verses the Hebrew is the same root, chāshab, to reckon or account. Abraham’s case and David’s case use one vocabulary in Hebrew and one vocabulary in Greek, and Paul is building on a link that was already there in the text before he touched it.

  Two things follow. First, the word is commercial. Logizomai is the accounting term for entering an amount in a ledger, which is why it sits so naturally beside the wage and debt language of verse 4, and why the Reformed tradition speaks of righteousness being imputed, credited to an account rather than produced by the account holder. Second, because it is one word, righteousness credited to the account and sin not charged to the account are one act seen from two sides, not two separate transactions. Paul leans on the term hard: logizomai appears eleven times in Romans 4 alone (vv. 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 22, 23, 24), and it carries the argument of the chapter. English versions obscure this somewhat by varying the rendering, since the LSB has “counted” and “take into account,” the NIV “credited,” the NASB and NRSV “reckoned,” and the KJV “imputed,” but all of them are translating one Greek word.

  David is also the harder case in one respect that Abraham is not. Psalm 32 belongs to the aftermath of his adultery and murder, the same episode behind Psalm 51 that Paul already quoted in 3:4. This is a man with no case to make, and the blessing he pronounces is not on the one who has made amends but on the one whose sin is forgiven, covered, and not taken into account. That is precisely verse 5’s “justifies the ungodly” with a name attached to it. (Moo, Schreiner, Cranfield, Calvin)

• How does Paul contrast Abraham and David?
  Interpretations

  Commentators generally describe the pairing as complementary rather than as a contrast, and put the weight on three things. The first is authority: Abraham and David are the two figures Israel revered most, the father of the nation and the king, and Paul has now enlisted both. The second is the logizomai link, which lets him read Genesis 15:6 and Psalm 32:2 as one transaction seen from two sides, righteousness credited and sin not charged. The third is chronological, and it is where Paul is heading: Abraham was justified while still uncircumcised and centuries before Sinai (4:9–12), while David was a circumcised Israelite living under the law. So the two witnesses bracket redemptive history and demonstrate that the crediting never depended on circumcision or law in either era.

  The best case and the worst case: A further contrast, more often drawn in preaching than in the commentaries, though it does not conflict with them. The two men sit at opposite ends of the moral range. Abraham is the strongest possible case for justification by works, so strong that Jewish tradition made him the exhibit, and Paul’s answer is that even his obedience earned nothing, because the crediting came at Genesis 15:6 before the works. David is the opposite case, a man guilty of adultery and murder, and the answer is that even that did not put him outside the blessing. Neither the ceiling of obedience nor the floor of scandal moves the verdict, because the verdict was never keyed to the works at either end. It is worth noting this framing is an inference from Paul’s material rather than something he states, since he never actually sets the two men against each other. But it follows from what he does say, and it is why the two witnesses together are stronger than either alone.

  One limit worth marking: David’s case shows that grave sin does not forfeit the crediting, but it should not be read as Paul’s answer to whether a justified person can lose their justification. Psalm 32 is David after he already believed, so what it displays is a justified man’s sin being forgiven and not counted, which is exactly Paul’s point about the ground of justification: it never rested on the works, so the works failing does not collapse it. But the question of perseverance is a different question, and Paul answers it elsewhere, in 5:1–11 and above all in 8:31–39, where nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ. Romans 4 establishes that justification does not stand on works; Romans 8 establishes that it cannot be lost. (Moo, Schreiner, Cranfield, Murray, Calvin)

  My Interpretation

  This is such a good contrast between Abraham and David. It is basically saying, yeah, you can be good, but it doesn’t matter. And then the natural next question is, okay, well then can you lose it if you’re bad? And that is when he brings up David.

  David shows that righteousness, or rather the removal of guilt, can be credited after genuinely serious sin. So it is not forfeited by failure either. Abraham closes the door on earning it and David closes the door on losing it by works, and the two of them together cover the whole range. If the best man Israel could name did not earn it, and the man who committed adultery and murder was not shut out of it, then works are simply not what the verdict is keyed to, in either direction.

  That is what makes the pairing so strong. Paul is not just stacking up two witnesses who happen to agree. He is taking the two ends of the spectrum and showing the same thing is true at both.