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- Romans Chapter 4 (part 3)
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Keep reading below if you want to start where we are (Romans 4:9-12)
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.
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Before diving into my notes, I encourage you to read Romans 4:9-12 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.
Peace to you, brothers and sisters.
Romans 4 has been circling around one massive question from the beginning: How can a guilty person stand before a holy God and be declared righteous?
Paul keeps bringing us back to Abraham. Not because Abraham had somehow earned God's favor. Abraham was born into paganism. Joshua 24 tells us his family worshiped other gods. Yet God made him a promise, and Abraham believed Him. That’s the entire argument.
God spoke.
Abraham trusted Him.
And righteousness was credited to him through faith.
Now Paul takes the argument even further.
Because Abraham wasn’t merely promised descendants.
Paul says he was promised the world.
“For the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world did not come through the law but through the righteousness of faith.”
Heir of the world?
If you search Genesis for those exact words, you won’t find them. God promised Abraham land, offspring, blessing, nations, kings, victory over enemies. But Paul looks at all those promises together and realizes they were pointing somewhere larger than Abraham could fully see at the time.
He starts pulling on threads from across the Old Testament until they finally converge in one person.
The Messiah.
The land promise expands outward until it becomes the kingdom of God over all the earth. The offspring promise narrows until it lands on one descendant. The blessing to the nations grows until people from every tribe and language are gathered in.
“Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.” Psalm 2:8
“And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him.” Daniel 7:13-14
Paul reads all of it and sees one person, Jesus Himself.
Christians do not inherit the promises alongside Christ, as though God has one inheritance for Jesus and another smaller inheritance for His people. We inherit because we belong to Him. His inheritance becomes ours through union with Him.
“If you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.” Galatians 3:29
Man… I've read past that verse more times than I can count. I'm not sure I ever really saw it.
A Gentile believer living thousands of years after Abraham can somehow be called Abraham’s child.
Not through bloodline.
Not through circumcision.
Not through ethnicity.
Through faith.
When two people marry, their lives are joined together. What belongs to one becomes shared with the other. The inheritance is no longer divided into “yours” and “mine.” It becomes ours because the union itself changes everything.
That is how Scripture talks about believers and Christ.
What belongs to Him becomes ours because we are in Him.
In Matthew 22, the Sadducees tried to corner Jesus with a hypothetical question about marriage after death. They didn't believe in resurrection and wanted to prove their point. Jesus answered them by quoting Exodus 3.
“I am the God of Abraham.”
Not “I was the God of Abraham.”
“I am.”
Jesus told them God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.
When God told Abraham, “I will be your God,” He was never making a temporary arrangement that would expire at the grave. He was binding Himself eternally to a man He intended to keep alive forever.
Abraham is still alive somewhere right now.
His body is still waiting for resurrection.
The fullness of the inheritance hasn’t arrived yet.
But the promise did not fail.
And neither will ours.
Paul’s point is that none of this came through the law. The law arrived more than four hundred years after Abraham believed God in Genesis 15. Sinai hadn’t happened yet. Moses hadn’t even been born. Abraham could not possibly have been justified by a law that did not yet exist.
The promise came first.
Whatever comes later cannot overturn the way God already chose to save people.
“For if it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void.”
Law and faith operate in completely different ways.
Law says:
Obey and live.
Faith says:
Trust the One who promises.
The moment we start sneaking our performance into the foundation of our acceptance before God, faith quietly disappears and self-reliance takes its place. Sometimes it happens in obvious ways. Sometimes it hides inside religious activity.
Church attendance.
Bible knowledge.
Giving.
Serving.
Years of ministry.
None of those things are bad. But as humans we're always looking for something to bring to the table. We naturally want to believe God loves us because we’ve performed well.
Paul says the moment law becomes the basis, the promise collapses, because law requires perfection.
“For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it.” James 2:10
That verse is terrifying.
Not mostly obedient.
Not sincerely obedient.
Perfectly obedient.
Every thought.
Every motive.
Every word.
Every moment.
That’s the standard.
For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law there is no transgression.
Instead of producing righteousness, the law produces wrath because the law exposes what we really are.
"God is a righteous judge, and a God who feels indignation every day." Psalm 7:11
His anger burns against wickedness. Not occasionally. Every day. Because He is just. And a just God cannot look at evil and pretend it’s not there.
Galatians 3:10: "Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them."
Not most things. All things.
If you're thinking, "Wait. Obey all things? I can't do that." That's exactly where Paul wants you.
"Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us." Galatians 3:13
That verse almost feels too much to absorb. The curse didn’t simply disappear. Justice was not ignored.
Christ stepped underneath it Himself.
He stood where we should have stood.
And because He absorbed the curse, the blessing promised to Abraham can now come to sinners like us without compromising the justice of God.
The second part of that verse is easy to misunderstand:
“Where there is no law there is no transgression.”
He’s not saying people without the law are innocent. Romans 2 already made clear that all humanity is guilty before God. Paul’s point is more specific. The law turns sin into conscious rebellion.
When we were in Minnesota for Christmas, our kids experienced real snow for the first time.
Guatemala is beautiful but there are zero blizzards.
One morning I looked outside and saw Bella press her tongue against a frozen metal pole. I honestly had no idea where she got the idea from. Maybe a movie. Maybe one of her brothers dared her. I called her inside and explained why that was a terrible idea.
Later that same day… SHE DID IT AGAIN.
The first time she didn’t know.
The second time she absolutely knew.
That’s what the law does.
It doesn’t create the sinful impulse. It reveals it, names it, defines it, and exposes it for what it really is. Once God says, “Do not cross this line,” stepping over it becomes defiance instead of ignorance.
The law didn’t make us sinners.
It made our sin undeniable.
Which means people raised around truth carry more accountability than they often realize. Hearing Scripture every week is not automatic safety. Knowledge by itself never saves anyone. The law was always meant to drive people somewhere beyond itself.
To Christ.
“That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring.”
Grace is the entire point.
If salvation rested even partially on our obedience, assurance would vanish instantly. How much obedience would finally be enough? How would you know when you had crossed the invisible line into acceptance with God?
You wouldn’t.
You would spend your life measuring yourself.
But grace changes the entire relationship.
"But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace." Romans 11:6
Faith is simply the empty hand receiving what grace freely gives.
That’s why the promise can extend beyond Israel into the nations. Jew and Gentile come the same way. The moral person and the immoral person come the same way. The lifelong church member and the new believer from a shattered background come the same way.
Through faith.
In a sermon I watched, John Piper said:
“We have no hope without your heritage. You have no hope without your Messiah.”
That’s exactly what Paul is arguing in Romans.
And because salvation rests on grace instead of human performance, the promise is guaranteed.
“I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand.” John 10:28
Our security ultimately rests less on our grip on God than on His grip on us.
Paul says believers are heirs of the world.
Not a piece of it.
Not a symbolic version of it.
The world.
First Corinthians 3:21 says:
“All things are yours.”
Imagine someone handed you the winning lottery ticket. The Powerball. You don't have to imagine what you'd do with it. You already know.
You'd sleep differently. Think differently. Walk differently.
Yet if someone watched our lives closely, they might assume the promises of God were weak.
And honestly, I get it. Some days my life doesn’t reflect my faith well.
I think about the pastors I know in Cuba. Men with almost nothing. And they live like heirs.
It’s humbling. And inspiring. At the same time.
Some weeks I finish studying Romans and think I barely scratched the surface. While writing, the whole thing starts to feel almost too large to carry.
Paul is dealing with glory, inheritance, wrath, grace, resurrection, justification, and the eternal purposes of God all at once.
Some weeks it feels like walking through mud.
But I keep coming back to this:
God made promises to Abraham that death itself could not cancel. And if we belong to Christ, those promises belong to us too.
Not because we earned them.
Not because we held onto God tightly enough.
But because God does not break His word.
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.