Original Meaning

VERSES 23–24 FOLLOW directly from verse 22, where Paul quoted the last words of Genesis 15:6: “It was credited to him as righteousness.” As Paul draws his exposition of this Old Testament text, with what it says about Abraham’s faith, to an end, he makes explicit what has been implicit throughout, that it has direct application to Christians. As God “credited” Abraham’s faith “for righteousness,” so he does the same for us. And as Abraham believed in the “God who gives life to the dead” (v. 17), so do we. In Abraham’s case, God revealed this power in creating life in the dead womb of Sarah. For us, this power of God is manifested in his raising from the dead Jesus our Lord. Paul often describes God as the One who raised Jesus from the dead (Rom. 8:11; 10:9; 1 Cor. 6:14; 15:15; 2 Cor. 4:14), but he rarely makes God the object of our belief. He does so here to make Christian faith as similar to Abraham’s faith as possible.

In verse 25, Paul adds a description of this Jesus whom God raised from the dead. The description falls into two parallel lines:

who	was delivered over to death	for our sins
and	was raised to life	for our justification

This parallelism, along with some language that is unusual in Paul, suggests the apostle may be quoting a brief confessional formula circulating in the early church. He probably adds it here because it continues the emphasis on Jesus’ resurrection. The first line reflects the language about the Suffering Servant in the Greek translation (LXX) of Isaiah 53, particularly verse 12: “Because of their sins he was delivered over.” This language from Isaiah 53 was applied by Jesus himself to his death (e.g., Mark 9:31; 10:33). “Delivered over” is probably a “divine passive,” that is, the implied subject is God (see Rom. 8:32: God “gave him up for us all”).

In the first line of this confession, the preposition “for” (Gk. dia followed by accusative) probably means “because of.” In the second line, however, it is difficult to give the same word this meaning. For Christ’s resurrection was not based on, or caused by, our justification. Probably, then, the word “for” in the second line has the sense “in order to accomplish.” The parallelism between the two lines is rhetorical and does not extend to the meaning of the word.

Bridging Contexts

ONLY ONE BRIEF matter calls for comment: the significance of the confessional statement in verse 25. We have detected such traditional statements elsewhere in Romans (see comments on 1:3–4). It makes sense for Paul to include such common early Christian formulations in his letter as a way of creating rapport with a church he has never visited. By using language familiar to his readers, he both assures them that he can be trusted and creates a more personal response to his teaching. At the same time, identifying the verse as part of a tradition makes it easier to think that the same pronoun might have a different meaning in the two lines.

This brief Christological statement was probably part of a hymn, written to be remembered and perhaps even sung in worship. This kind of poetic genre usually features parallel constructions and words in order to achieve a rhetorical effect. Often, the parallels will not have the same function or meaning.

Contemporary Significance

THE STRONG CURRENT of pluralism in our culture has forced Christians to reexamine all kinds of issues in order to defend more ably the uniqueness of the Christian faith as the only way to God. One perennial issue, of course, is the fate of those who have never heard the gospel of Christ. One argument often used to support the idea that one can be saved without explicit faith in Christ is that the Old Testament saints were saved in just this way. Abraham, for instance, was “justified” through his faith in God—not through faith in Christ, who had not yet come. Why, then, cannot people in our day who, like Abraham, have not heard about Christ, likewise be saved by faith in God?

Some deny this line of reasoning by insisting that Abraham did in fact believe in Christ. But we have no good textual evidence to support this idea. What we can say is that Abraham believed in the God who had made certain promises. His faith, as Paul makes clear, was oriented not just vaguely to “God,” but to the specific promises God had made to him. In other words, Abraham believed in God and in what God had revealed about himself and about his plan. Those who argue that people in our day believe in God the same way Abraham did miss the vital point that “God” must be given content. He is a person, not a mere verbalization or abstract concept. Thus, one should first insist that a person in our day who wants to be saved by believing in God as Abraham did must also believe in the same God in whom Abraham believed.

But we can go further. God reveals more and more of himself as his plan of salvation unfolds. Each of those further revelations becomes part of the “content” of God. One cannot claim to believe in the God of the Bible without including that content. In our day, God has definitively revealed himself in Jesus Christ. Were Abraham alive today, he could not be saved apart from faith in God-as-revealed-in-Christ. Thus, we must also conclude that only people who believe in this particular God-as-revealed-in-Christ have hope for salvation.