Righteousness without the law
. Paul has called Abraham the father of all believers (4:16), whether they are Jews or Gentiles. That includes everyone. But the apostle now personalizes it for his readers when he spells out the full implications of such a sweeping statement.
The words “it was credited to him” were written not for him alone, 24 but also for us, to whom God will credit righteousness—for us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. 25 He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.
Abraham received righteousness by faith, but that blessing was not restricted just to the patriarch. This method of receiving righteousness—and with it eternal salvation— works for every believer in Christ, including the Roman readers “to whom God will credit righteousness.”
Paul does not mean to say that the Romans were not righteous at the time they were reading his letter or that they were still awaiting the blessing of righteousness through Christ. The use of the future tense here is simply Paul’s logical extension of the promise made to the patriarch carried on to all believers subsequent to the time of Abraham. Every believer of all time is included and will be credited with righteousness.
The reason they can all have righteousness credited to them is because their faith rests on the proper object of faith, namely, the one “who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead.” Note again how God’s power to raise the dead comes into sharp focus.
Christ “was delivered over to death for our sins.” Because we had sinned, we deserved to die. Instead of requiring our death, however, God sent his Son to earth to live the perfect life we could not live and die the death we should have died. By his life he earned righteousness for us, and by his death he paid for our sins. In Christ, God now views us as righteous; in him we have been justified.
The sinner’s justification is an accomplished fact, punctuated by Christ’s cry on the cross, “It is finished” (John 19:30). And to show that he had accepted his Son’s sacrificial death for the justification of all sinners, God raised his Son from death on Easter morning. In doing so, God made a statement to all the world. Paul summarizes this law/gospel statement into a neat, two-line couplet:
He was delivered over to death for our sins
and was raised to life for our justification.
We might paraphrase that in this way:
Christ had to die because we had sinned,
but he could be raised to life because we had been justified by his death.
To the Romans, to us, and to people of all times, our Savior-God bids us look to his finished work and extends the invitation, “Accept what I have done for you; trust in it as your hope of righteousness before God.