Romans VerseQuest Commentary — Essay 28: Strong in Faith, Giving Glory to God

Key Passage: Romans 4:16–22

“Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by grace; to the end the promise might be sure to all the seed; not to that only which is of the law, but to that also which is of the faith of Abraham; who is the father of us all, (As it is written, I have made thee a father of many nations,) before him whom he believed, even God, who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were. Who against hope believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations, according to that which was spoken, So shall thy seed be. And being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sara’s womb: He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God; And being fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform. And therefore it was imputed to him for righteousness.” (Romans 4:16–22)

Introduction

Romans 4 takes a sledgehammer to the notion that a man can place God under obligation by piling up religious works. Paul has already brought Abraham into the courtroom and demonstrated that the patriarch was justified by faith rather than by works, for “Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness” (Romans 4:3). Now the Holy Ghost takes us deeper than the fact that Abraham believed. He shows us what biblical faith looks like when every visible circumstance seems to be laughing at the promise. Abraham had an aging body. Sarah had a barren womb. Time had marched past every ordinary human expectation. Nature had closed the shop, turned out the lights, and hung a sign on the door saying, “Impossible.” Then God spoke. Faith did not pretend Abraham was twenty-five years old. Faith did not deny Sarah’s condition. Faith simply decided that God’s ability outweighed human impossibility. That is where Bible faith begins: not with confidence in circumstances, but with confidence in the God who spoke.

There is a cheap counterfeit called faith that modern religion sells by the truckload. It tells a man to believe in himself, visualize his future, confess what he wants, cultivate positive expectations, and somehow bend reality with sufficient enthusiasm. Abraham did nothing of the sort. He did not believe in Abraham. Abraham was the problem. His body was as good as dead for the matter under consideration, and Sarah’s womb supplied no encouragement. His faith had an object outside himself: “before him whom he believed, even God” (Romans 4:17). Biblical faith is never the power of the human mind to manufacture results. It is confidence in what God has actually said. Faith without a word from God is presumption wearing church clothes. Abraham had something better than optimism. He had a promise, and behind that promise stood the God “who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were.” When God speaks, impossibility has just received notice that it does not have the final vote.

The passage culminates in one of the strongest descriptions of faith anywhere in Scripture: Abraham “staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God; And being fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform” (Romans 4:20–21). Notice what faith does. It rests on the promise, rejects unbelief, glorifies God, and becomes persuaded of God’s ability. It does not need to know every mechanism by which the promise will come to pass. Abraham could not explain how an aged couple would produce the promised seed, but he did not need a medical seminar before taking God at His word. Faith does not demand that God submit His plans for peer review. It asks one question: Did God say it? If He did, the weakness of the instrument cannot cancel the strength of the Almighty. When God makes the promise, faith quits measuring the size of the obstacle and starts measuring the character of the One who spoke.

1. It Is of Faith, That It Might Be by Grace

Paul begins verse 16 with a doctrinal foundation that cannot be improved upon: “Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by grace.” Faith and grace belong together because both leave the sinner with nothing to boast about. Romans 4 has already contrasted working for a debt with believing on the One who justifies the ungodly. “Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt” (Romans 4:4). If a man earns something, the payment is owed. Salvation is not God settling a payroll account with religious employees. It is grace extended to helpless sinners. Faith simply receives what grace provides. The hand that accepts a gift does not become the purchaser because it reached out. Abraham’s faith did not purchase righteousness; it received righteousness on God’s terms. Grace supplies, faith receives, and boasting gets escorted out the back door.

Paul then says this arrangement exists “to the end the promise might be sure to all the seed.” If the promise rested upon human performance, it would never be sure. Put sinful flesh in charge of maintaining a divine promise and you have tied the anchor to a soap bubble. Human merit fluctuates. Human strength fails. Human obedience is imperfect. God’s grace does not wobble with the sinner’s pulse. The promise is sure because its security rests in God rather than man. That principle reaches its glorious fulfillment in the believer’s salvation today. “For by grace are ye saved through faith” (Ephesians 2:8), and Paul immediately adds, “Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:9). God designed salvation so thoroughly around His Son and His grace that human pride cannot get a fingernail underneath it without tearing up the whole doctrine.

Abraham therefore stands as a monumental witness against every religious system that tries to make works the ground of justification. Circumcision cannot claim him, because Romans 4 has already shown that righteousness was reckoned to him before circumcision. The law of Moses cannot claim him, because Abraham lived centuries before Sinai. Religious ceremony arrives too late to become the cause of what God had already counted to Abraham by faith. The flesh hates that arrangement because the flesh wants a trophy case. Grace gives it a grave instead. The religious man wants to bring God his résumé; God points him to a promise. He wants to show what he has performed; God shows what He has provided. Salvation begins when a man stops presenting credentials and starts believing God. Grace does not polish the sinner’s medals. It tells him he never had any worth displaying in the first place.

2. Abraham Believed the God Who Quickeneth the Dead

Romans 4:17 identifies the true object of Abraham’s faith: “God, who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were.” That description is perfectly fitted to Abraham’s situation. God did not merely promise something difficult. He promised something that human ability could not produce. Abraham and Sarah had reached the point where natural expectation offered no help. Yet the God who made the promise is the God who brings life where man sees death. Abraham was not required to manufacture power; he was required to trust the One who possessed it. Faith does not make God powerful. Faith recognizes that He already is. A man can believe with enough intensity to pop a blood vessel and still accomplish nothing if the object of his faith is powerless. Biblical faith is strong because its object is Almighty God.

This is why Scripture repeatedly connects faith with God’s ability rather than man’s emotional confidence. When God created the heavens and the earth, He did not need raw materials supplied by a contractor. Hebrews 11:3 says “the worlds were framed by the word of God.” When Lazarus had been dead four days, Christ did not consult the tomb about whether resurrection was realistic. He said, “Lazarus, come forth” (John 11:43), and death obeyed. When a sinner dead in trespasses and sins is saved, the new life comes from God, not from spiritual self-resuscitation. Ephesians 2:1 says, “And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins.” The God of Abraham specializes in situations where human resources have run dry. Man sees the end of ability; God sees the stage upon which His ability can be displayed.

But the phrase “calleth those things which be not as though they were” does not authorize Christians to invent realities by speaking them into existence. God can call what is not as though it were because God is God. The creature should avoid stealing verbs that belong to the Creator. Abraham was not wandering around Canaan declaring himself fertile until nature surrendered. God had spoken, and Abraham believed what God said. That difference separates faith from superstition. Faith begins with divine revelation; presumption begins with human desire. If God has not promised you a thing, saying it louder does not force heaven to sign the contract. But where God has spoken plainly, faith may rest without apology. God’s promise does not become reliable when we believe it. We believe it because the One who gave it cannot lie.

3. Against Hope Believed in Hope

Paul says Abraham “against hope believed in hope” (Romans 4:18). That phrase sounds contradictory until we notice that two kinds of hope are involved. Humanly speaking, there was no hope. Naturally speaking, Abraham’s situation supplied no reasonable expectation of the promised son. Yet because God had spoken, another hope existed—a hope founded upon the Word rather than the circumstances. Abraham believed against natural hope because he possessed supernatural grounds for confidence. Faith is not blindness to facts. It is refusal to make visible facts superior to divine testimony. The believer does not have to pretend the storm is sunshine. He simply refuses to conclude that the storm has more authority than the God who controls the sea. Faith can look straight at a locked door and still remember that God has keys men have never seen.

The content of the promise mattered: Abraham believed “according to that which was spoken, So shall thy seed be” (Romans 4:18). There is the anchor again—“that which was spoken.” Abraham’s hope did not float in a fog of wishful thinking. It had words attached to it. Genesis 15 records God bringing Abraham forth and saying, “Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be” (Genesis 15:5). The next verse says, “And he believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness” (Genesis 15:6). God said it; Abraham believed it. The transaction was not complicated enough for religion, so religion has spent centuries trying to improve it. God keeps returning to the same simple arrangement: revelation from Him, faith from the hearer.

There is a lesson here for every believer facing circumstances that seem to contradict what God has plainly revealed. We are not promised Abraham’s individual promises, and we have no business stealing his covenant promises and scribbling our names over his. But we serve the same God, and everything He has promised the Church can be trusted with the same confidence in His character. Christ says the believer has everlasting life (John 6:47). Believe Him. Romans 8:1 says there is “now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.” Believe it. Philippians 1:6 says He which began a good work in you “will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.” Take God at His word. Faith does not require us to claim promises that are not ours. It requires us to quit doubting the ones that are.

4. He Considered Not His Own Body Now Dead

Romans 4:19 says Abraham, “being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old.” This does not mean Abraham was unaware of his age. He knew perfectly well how old he was. Faith did not erase arithmetic. The verse means that Abraham did not allow the condition of his own body to become the controlling consideration against God’s promise. There is a difference between recognizing an obstacle and enthroning it. Abraham could count his birthdays without making them lord over God’s Word. Weak faith stares at the obstacle until the promise looks small. Strong faith stares at the promise until the obstacle resumes its proper size. The obstacle may remain enormous by human standards, but it is no longer being compared with human strength. It is being compared with God.

The same verse mentions “the deadness of Sara’s womb.” God deliberately allowed the situation to reach a point where nobody could reasonably praise human ability afterward. Isaac would not be the monument to Abraham’s vitality or Sarah’s biology. He would be the child of promise. That pattern appears repeatedly in Scripture. God reduces Gideon’s army so Israel cannot say, “Mine own hand hath saved me” (Judges 7:2). He lets Lazarus remain in the tomb until there is no mistaking death for a fainting spell. He saves sinners “not by works of righteousness which we have done” (Titus 3:5) so no redeemed man can strut into heaven describing how he helped Christ finish Calvary. God has a way of removing every human crutch before displaying divine power. The flesh calls that discouraging. Faith calls it an excellent opportunity for God to receive the credit.

There is tremendous wisdom in learning what not to consider as decisive. The believer can consider bank accounts, medical reports, age, strength, opposition, weakness, past failure, and every visible circumstance until his soul is buried under a mountain of calculations. Facts have their place, but facts are poor gods. Abraham’s body was a fact. Sarah’s barrenness was a fact. God’s promise was also a fact, and it outranked the others because God’s power was attached to it. Faith is not intellectual dishonesty; it is proper ordering of authorities. When the Almighty speaks, the circumstance becomes evidence of the difficulty, not evidence of God’s inability. Never confuse “I cannot see how” with “God cannot do it.” The first is humility. The second is unbelief with a mathematician’s pencil behind its ear.

5. He Staggered Not at the Promise Through Unbelief

“He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief” (Romans 4:20). The picture is vivid. Unbelief makes a man stagger because it divides his confidence. James describes the doubting man as “like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed” (James 1:6). One moment the promise seems certain; the next moment circumstances take the witness stand and the heart reverses its verdict. Abraham did not stagger in that decisive matter. Scripture records failures and missteps in Abraham’s life, so Romans 4 is not inventing a sinless patriarch. It is describing his settled response to God’s promise concerning the promised seed. Abraham’s faith had been tested across years, corrected through experience, and brought to the place where God’s word carried more weight than the accumulated evidence of human weakness. Faith may be exercised by an imperfect man without becoming imperfect in its object.

Unbelief is not merely an intellectual difficulty. Romans 4 treats it as the opposite of giving God glory. That makes unbelief a moral issue because it calls God’s character into question. First John 5:10 says, “he that believeth not God hath made him a liar.” That is stronger language than modern religion prefers, but heaven did not hire a public relations firm before writing the Bible. When God has plainly spoken, unbelief is not humility. It is disagreement with God. The sinner who refuses the gospel is not modestly suspending judgment; he is rejecting divine testimony concerning Christ. The believer who refuses to rest in what God has clearly promised is not being sophisticated; he is allowing something else to speak with greater authority than Scripture. Doubt becomes respectable only after men change the name on the bottle.

Abraham “staggered not at the promise of God.” Notice again what held him steady: the promise. Not feelings. Not signs. Not a sudden improvement in his physical condition. The promise remained what it had always been because God remained who He had always been. That is the stabilizing power of Scripture in the Christian life. Feelings can change before breakfast. Circumstances can reverse by lunchtime. People who assured you yesterday can disappear tomorrow. God’s Word does not catch a fever. Psalm 119:89 says, “For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven.” A Christian who builds his confidence on circumstances will live on a spiritual seesaw. The one who learns to stand where God has spoken may feel the wind, but he does not have to follow it down the street.

6. Strong in Faith, Giving Glory to God

The positive side of Abraham’s response appears in the second half of Romans 4:20: “but was strong in faith, giving glory to God.” Strong faith glorifies God because it takes Him seriously. It treats His Word as trustworthy, His power as sufficient, His wisdom as perfect, and His character as dependable. When Abraham believed that God could accomplish what nature could not, he was effectively saying, “God is greater than the impossibility before me.” That glorifies God. Faith does not flatter God with religious adjectives and then panic when He must actually be trusted. It puts weight on what it professes. A bridge is not honored because a man sings about its engineering from the riverbank. The bridge is honored when he walks across it. God is glorified when believers rest real weight upon His Word.

This also explains why anxiety and unbelief so often shrink God while enlarging circumstances. The heart begins with the problem, studies the problem, rehearses the problem, discusses the problem, and finally builds the problem a throne. By the time it gets around to mentioning God, He has been reduced to an honorary adviser. Abraham reverses that order. His body is weak; God is strong. Sarah is barren; God gives life. Time has passed; God has not aged one second. The promise seems impossible; God specializes in doing what human ability cannot perform. Faith does not glorify the believer for possessing extraordinary mental strength. It glorifies God because the believer has discovered where strength actually resides. Strong faith is weak man leaning his full weight on a strong God.

There is also a rebuke here for religious boasting. If faith gives glory to God, then anything that transfers glory to man is moving the wrong direction. The gospel strips the sinner of boasting because Christ gets the glory. Christian service should operate by the same principle. “He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 1:31). If God uses a man, that is no reason for the hammer to congratulate itself on building the house. If a preacher is fruitful, if a witness leads someone to Christ, if a ministry prospers, if prayers are answered, God remains the source of every spiritual good. Abraham became a father, but Romans 4 does not close by applauding Abraham’s reproductive achievement. It magnifies the God who promised and performed. Faith receives the blessing and sends the glory back where it belongs.

7. Fully Persuaded That God Was Able to Perform

Romans 4:21 gives the inner foundation of Abraham’s faith: “And being fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform.” Fully persuaded is stronger than mildly optimistic. Abraham had reached a settled conclusion concerning two things: God had promised, and God was able. Those two truths belong together. A promise from someone unable to perform it is worthless. Ability without a promise gives no right to expect a particular result. Abraham possessed both. God had spoken specifically, and the God who spoke had unlimited ability to carry out His word. Faith therefore rested not in possibility but in personality—the character and power of God. Abraham did not need to know how God would perform it. He needed to know who had promised it.

This principle reaches farther than Abraham’s circumstances because it exposes the true question beneath every act of biblical faith: Is God able? Paul answers elsewhere, “He is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him” (Hebrews 7:25). He is “able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day” (2 Timothy 1:12). He “is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think” (Ephesians 3:20). Jude speaks of Him “that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory” (Jude 24). The Christian life is surrounded by divine ability. The weakness is never on God’s side of the transaction. Heaven has never had to postpone a promise because omnipotence was running low that week.

Verse 22 gives the doctrinal conclusion: “And therefore it was imputed to him for righteousness.” Abraham’s persuasion concerning God’s promise is brought back to the theme of justification. His righteousness was imputed, not achieved. God placed righteousness to his account on the basis of faith. Paul will immediately apply the principle beyond Abraham, saying these words “were not written for his sake alone” (Romans 4:23), but for those who believe on Him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead (Romans 4:24). Abraham looked to what God had promised concerning the seed; the sinner today believes the gospel concerning the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The dispensational details differ, but the great truth about faith remains: God is believed, man stops boasting, and righteousness comes from God rather than human merit.

Conclusion

Romans 4:16–22 gives us Abraham standing before circumstances that had already pronounced their verdict. His body said no. Sarah’s womb said no. Age said no. Nature said no. Human probability had packed its suitcase and left town. God said yes. Abraham believed God. That is the contest in the passage, and there was never any real question about which voice deserved the final word. Faith does not make impossible things possible by wishing harder. Faith believes the God who can do what man cannot. Abraham did not deny weakness; he denied weakness the right to overrule God. That distinction ought to be engraved into the mind of every believer. You may be weak. The circumstance may be hopeless by every natural calculation. The door may appear permanently closed. But never use your limitation as a measuring stick for God’s ability.

The passage also shows why true faith gives glory to God. Abraham “was strong in faith, giving glory to God.” Unbelief magnifies the obstacle. Faith magnifies the Lord. Unbelief stares at the deadness. Faith remembers the Life-giver. Unbelief asks how human resources can accomplish the promise. Faith answers that human resources were never the foundation of the promise in the first place. The Christian who learns this truth becomes harder to shake because his confidence is transferred from everything changeable to the One who does not change. Men fail. Bodies fail. Money fails. Plans fail. Nations fail. Churches can fail. Preachers can fail. God does not. Faith is not confidence that everything around you will hold together. It is confidence that God remains true when everything else comes apart at the seams.

And that brings us to the great sentence upon which Abraham rested: “what he had promised, he was able also to perform.” There is the whole matter. What has God promised? Believe it. What has He not promised? Do not manufacture it. Where has He spoken? Stand there. Where Scripture is silent, do not pretend your desires came down from Sinai. But where God has given His Word, quit staggering between the promise and the circumstance as though omnipotence and impossibility were equal contestants. They are not. God cannot lie. Christ has risen. The gospel is true. Eternal life is real. The Word is settled. The promises God has given the believer are as secure as the One who gave them. Abraham’s faith glorified God because Abraham finally learned to measure the promise by God’s ability rather than God’s ability by the problem. That is strong faith—and strong faith still knows where the glory belongs.