Romans 4:24

Romans 4:24, in plain English

The same principle applies to you right now: God will credit righteousness to you too—not because you earned it, but because you believe in Jesus and trust that God raised Him from the dead.

Why it's here

Here's where Paul brings the whole thing home. You're living on this side of Jesus's resurrection, so the object of your faith looks different than Abraham's did, but the mechanism is identical. Abraham believed God's promise about a son; you believe God's promise about resurrection and new life through Christ. Both are acts of trusting God when the world says it's impossible.

Who's speaking

Paul, now speaking to you

Where it sits in the story

The thread running through Scripture tightens here—from Abraham's faith to your faith, from his covenant to yours. God has always saved people through belief, and Christ is the fulfillment of everything Abraham was pointing toward.

The scholarly reading

What Abraham experienced—having righteousness credited to him through faith—extends directly to Paul's contemporaries, whose justification likewise comes through faith in Christ's resurrection, not through ethnic privilege or legal observance.

Language and setting

This is perhaps the most theologically loaded verse in Romans 4. Paul explicitly universalizes the Abrahamic pattern and applies it christologically. The phrase 'to whom righteousness will be credited' (λογισθήσεται, logisthēsetai—future passive) indicates that the same reckoning principle applies now and in the future. Critically, Paul specifies the object of faith: not merely faith in God's power (as with Abraham), but faith 'in Him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead.' This is the eschatological fulfillment—what Abraham believed in shadow form (God's power to give life from lifelessness), believers now grasp in full light (God's raising of Christ from literal death). The inclusion of both Jews and Gentiles ('for us') in a single verse demonstrates Paul's fundamental thesis: the boundary markers of Jewish identity (circumcision, law, ethnicity) are soteriologically irrelevant.

Voice

Paul, directly addressing his mixed Roman congregation

Significance

This verse represents the hinge of Christian theology—the point where Abraham's faith becomes the prototype of Christian faith, and where justification is secured through Christ's death-and-resurrection event rather than through observance of Torah. It recapitulates the Gospel narrative Paul introduced in Romans 1:4 (Christ declared Son of God through resurrection) and forward-anticipates his treatment of Adam-Christ typology in Romans 5. For Paul, Christ's resurrection is the eschatological proof that God's power and fidelity remain constant—the same power that justified Abraham now justifies all who believe.

22This is why “it was credited to him as righteousness.”

23Now the words “it was credited to him” were written not only for Abraham,

24but also for us, to whom righteousness will be credited—for us who believe in Him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead.

25He was delivered over to death for our trespasses and was raised to life for our justification.

Read all of Romans 4 — Long before the law existed, Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness. Grace was the plan from the very beginning.