Romans Chapter 4

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Quick note for new subscribers: We're in the middle of Romans right now. If you just joined us, you might feel like you're walking into the middle of a movie. You are. Here's what I recommend:

Keep reading below if you want to start where we are (Romans 4:1-8)
Or go back to the beginning - [Here's the intro to Romans], and [here's the full archive] so you can start from Chapter 1.

Either way works. I just don't want you to feel lost.

Before diving into my notes, I encourage you to read Romans 4:1-8 first (or the whole chapter if you have time).

I include all the Scripture below, but there’s something about sitting with the whole chapter first — giving yourself room to be curious.

What catches you off guard?
What doesn't make sense?
Where is that?
Who's that?
Why?

Those questions will make the notes hit deeper.

"When disciples followed a rabbi, they followed him closely so they would never be out of his sight, never be someplace where they couldn’t hear him speak. They followed him so closely that his sandals often kicked up dust."

May you be covered in His dust.

To the saints, grace and peace.

You may have noticed there were no notes last week.

Last Sunday, late afternoon, my 25 year old daughter called. She'd had a stroke. They were transferring her to the intensive care unit at Duke University Hospital where a team of neurologists was waiting.

I booked a flight that left at midnight and landed in North Carolina at 9am. I was at her bedside by 9:30.

I put on my best dad face. I acted brave and told her everything was going to be fine.

But if I’m honest, I was scared.

Her vessels were spasming, constricting blood flow to her brain. She'd lost feeling on her left side and there were monitors everywhere.

Late Monday afternoon she began to have another stroke. I watched her face droop and watched her lose control of her body. They rushed her out of the ICU and I stood there in the middle of a hallway that suddenly felt very empty.

They performed a cerebral angiography. That's a procedure where they go in through the groin, thread a catheter all the way up to the brain arteries, inject dye, and watch the blood flow in real time. They needed to see what was actually there.

I've been sitting in a hospital room for six days, watching monitors, talking to doctors, and praying in the dark.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I opened Romans 4.

Paul is about to do something similar to what those doctors did. He's going to inject dye into an argument people had been making for centuries about Abraham, about what made him right with God, about what everyone assumed was there.

And he's going to show them what was actually flowing through the text the whole time.

It was there. Hidden in plain sight.

It changes everything.

Let's get into it.

Paul’s writing like a man who’s had this argument a hundred times.

He knows exactly what's coming. The moment he says justified by faith, not works, every Jewish reader in the room has the same response ready.

"What about Abraham?"

Paul knows it's coming.

So he beats them to it.

Abraham wasn't just important to the Jewish people. He was the example. The man who obeyed when it didn't make sense, who left everything when God said go, who was willing to lay his own son on an altar. In Jewish teaching at the time, Abraham was considered so faithful that the Babylonian Talmud would later say he kept the whole law before the law was even given.

But Joshua pulls back a curtain that most people never look behind.

Long ago, your fathers lived beyond the Euphrates, Terah, the father of Abraham and of Nahor; and they served other gods. Then I took your father Abraham from beyond the River and led him through all the land of Canaan, and made his offspring many. (Joshua 24:2-3)

Abraham came from a pagan household.

A family that served other gods. God didn't call a man who already had it right. He reached into a pagan family beyond the Euphrates and called a man who had no claim on him whatsoever.

That's who Abraham was before any of this started, which makes what Jewish teachers said about him even harder to believe.

So when Paul brings up Abraham, he's picking their best argument and walking straight toward it.

"Okay," Paul says. "Let's go there."

He sets it up carefully. If Abraham was justified by works, then yes, he has something to boast about. You can almost feel someone in the room nodding. Of course he does. Look at his life.

And then Paul adds one line that shifts the entire scene.

"But not before God."

It moves the conversation from people watching Abraham to Abraham standing before God. And in that moment, in the presence of a holy God, all the obedience, all the sacrifice, all the faithfulness doesn't become the grounds for righteousness. Paul already answered this two chapters earlier. Where is boasting? Excluded. He's circling back to the same door and closing it again.

But he doesn't stop with his own argument.

He goes straight to Scripture.

"For what does the Scripture say?"

Notice he doesn't write “what did Moses say?” 

Scripture speaks. When it says something, God is saying something. And what it says has been sitting there for thousands of years, hidden in plain sight.

And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness. (Genesis 15:6)

This is the first time in the entire Bible that the word believed is used. The first time faith is connected to righteousness. The first time God pulls back the curtain and shows us how a fallen person can be made right with Him. And it was written two thousand years before Paul, four thousand years before you and me.

This was always the plan.

But here's what makes the timing matter. When did God count Abraham as righteous? Go back to Genesis and look.

Before Isaac.
Before circumcision.
Before the law even existed.

Abraham was standing in the dark with nothing but a promise, and he believed it. Nothing more.

And God counted that as righteousness.

But what exactly did Abraham believe?

Not just that God existed or that the promises were real. Paul was reading the Hebrew text of Genesis. In Hebrew the word for offspring is zera and like the English word "seed" it can be singular or plural depending on context. Paul says God meant singular. One specific descendant, not many.

Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say "and to offsprings," referring to many, but referring to one, "and to your offspring," who is Christ. (Galatians 3:16)

Abraham wasn't standing under the stars believing in a large family. He was believing in a specific person who would one day come through that family.

Jesus himself confirmed it. "Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad." (John 8:56)

Abraham believed the gospel. Four thousand years before the cross.

God called a man out of paganism, made him a promise about an offspring who would bless the whole world, and Abraham believed him.

Paul steps out of the argument for a second and walks into a place everybody has been. Payday.

When your boss hands you your check at the end of the week, he's not doing you a favor. He's settling a debt. You worked. He owes you. That's not grace. That's a transaction. And you don't thank someone for a transaction. You cash it and go home.

And then Paul says something nobody in that room was ready for. It’s uncomfortable so I think we just read past it.

The only people God justifies are the ungodly.

Not the almost-ready. Not the trying-hard. Not the mostly-good-except-for-a-few-things. The ungodly. And if you grew up in church that word probably slides right past you. But stop and let it land.

The Greek word Paul uses for ungodly is asebēs. It means without reverence. People living as if God’s not a factor. At all. People whose whole posture toward him is broken at the root.

That's who God justifies.
That's the only category he works with.

Which creates a problem.

Because in Exodus 23:7, God says this:

You shall not pervert the justice due to your poor in his lawsuit. Keep far from a false charge, and do not kill the innocent and righteous, for I will not acquit the wicked. (Exodus 23:7)

“I will not acquit the wicked.”

God said that.
And then Romans 4:5 says he justifies the ungodly?

Both are true.
At the same time.
And the only way both can be true is Jesus Christ.

The guilt had to land somewhere. It couldn't be ignored or quietly set aside. A just God doesn't do that. So it landed on His Son. Every last bit of it absorbed by Christ so that God could look at the ungodly and say righteous without corrupting himself.

That's the cross.

Paul ends the verse with a soft exclamation point.

Faith is counted as righteousness. Not love. Not obedience. Not fourteen years as a missionary.

Faith.

The empty hand that reaches out and takes what it could never produce on its own. You don't hold out an empty hand and take credit for what gets placed in it.

That's not how receiving works.

Paul’s been building his case around Abraham. The father of the nation. The man they all pointed to. The best case.

Now he reaches for someone else.

David.

If Abraham is the best case, David is the broken one. A man who committed adultery, abused his power, and arranged the death of an innocent man to cover it up. The kind of record that has no defense.

And Paul puts him right next to Abraham.

Because that's the point.

Matthew opens his entire gospel with two names. The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David and the son of Abraham. Everything God started with Abraham and everything he promised through David finds its completion in one person.

Paul's choosing the twin pillars of the entire Old Testament story and he's showing that both of them, the best case and the broken case, came to God exactly the same way.

And Paul quotes Psalm 32 to prove it.

Psalm 32 is a song. David doesn’t recite it and he doesn’t state it as doctrine.

He sings it.

Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven.
Blessed are those whose sins are covered.
Blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin.

Three times. Blessed. Blessed. Blessed.

But “blessed” doesn't mean life goes easy. It doesn't mean health and comfort and everything working out. It means between you and God, all is well. That's the definition.

Between you and God.
All is well.

Slow down and look at what Paul is doing across these eight verses. Abraham shows you that righteousness is counted to you by faith. David shows you that sin is not counted against you. Two sides of the same transaction.

It's not just subtraction. God doesn't simply erase the debt and leave the ledger at zero. It's also addition. Your sin is laid on Christ. His righteousness is laid on you.

And there's a Hebrew word in Psalm 32 that’s easy to miss. The Hebrew word for covered is kasah. In the Hebrew it means hidden from God's view. Not temporarily set aside. Not filed away somewhere. As if it was never there.

The ledger runs both directions.

Your sin credited to Christ. His record credited to you. God treated Jesus as guilty of sins that weren't his. God treats you as righteous with a righteousness that isn't yours.

We are not accepted as if we are righteous. We are accepted because in Christ we actually are righteous.

David knew what that cost. He had committed adultery, abused his power, and had an innocent man killed to cover it up. Real legal guilt deserving real punishment. His only hope was that God would deal with him completely apart from his works.

And that's exactly what God did.

So
he
sang
about
it.

Not because everything was easy. Not because the consequences disappeared. But because between him and God, all was well.

That's the blessing Paul’s talking about.

That's what's available to you.

As I write this, my daughter is in her room sleeping.

Three good days. No symptoms. Just tests and observation. This afternoon she went for a walk around the ICU. You don't see that very often in there, so she had a lot of stares and a lot of smiles.

If tonight goes well they'll move her to a lower floor. She might be going home soon.

I've been sitting in this hospital room for the better part of a week talking to doctors, and praying. And somewhere in the middle of all of it I kept coming back to the same thing Paul has been saying since chapter one.

None of this is earned.

Not her recovery.
Not the doctors who caught it in time.
Not the fact that I got a flight out of Guatemala at midnight and was at her bedside by morning.

Not one moment of any of it came from me. It came from outside of me.

That's the whole argument of Romans 4.

Abraham didn't produce his righteousness. David didn't pay off his sin. The rescue always comes from outside. From a God who reaches into pagan households and makes promises. Who looks at broken men and calls them righteous. Who counts sin as covered. Hidden from his view. As if it was never there.

I sat next to my daughter's bed and I thought about David singing Psalm 32.

He wasn’t singing because everything was easy. Or because the consequences disappeared. But because between him and God, all was well.

I don't know what you're walking through right now. I don't know what's sitting on your ledger or how long it's been there. But if you’ve put your trust in Christ. If you’ve made Him Lord. What Paul is saying in Romans 4 is true for you too.

Your sin credited to Christ. His righteousness credited to you.

Between you and God, all is well.

That's a verdict, rendered by a just God who didn't look the other way. Paid for by a Savior who absorbed every last bit of it so He could look at you and say righteous without lying.

He will never reverse that verdict.

This song hits deeper today.

I love you,
George

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George Sisneros is a full-time missionary in Guatemala and the founder of Ordinary Missionaries and the El Rosario Christian Academy for Boys.

He’s been married to his wife, Vonda, for 27 years. He’s a father to nine children, five adopted.

In 2024, George and his wife expanded to Cuba, joining forces with nine pastors committed to transforming lives through the gospel.

You can get George’s newest digital book, Uncovering Scripture: The Gospel of Luke HERE.