📜WEB · Romans 4:20
What does Romans 4:20 mean?
"Yet, looking to the promise of God, he didn’t waver through unbelief, but grew strong through faith, giving glory to God,"
— Romans 4:20 (World English Bible)
Surrounding context
As it is written, “I have made you a father of many nations.” This is in the presence of him whom he believed: God, who gives life to the dead, and calls the things that are not, as though they were.
Besides hope, Abraham in hope believed, to the end that he might become a father of many nations, according to that which had been spoken, “So will your offspring be.”
Without being weakened in faith, he didn’t consider his own body, already having been worn out, (he being about a hundred years old), and the deadness of Sarah’s womb.
Yet, looking to the promise of God, he didn’t waver through unbelief, but grew strong through faith, giving glory to God,
and being fully assured that what he had promised, he was also able to perform.
Therefore it also was “credited to him for righteousness.”
Now it was not written that it was accounted to him for his sake alone,
Explanation
Romans 4:20 speaks about Abraham, holding him up as the prime example of what it means to trust God fully. In plain language, the verse says that Abraham did not doubt or hesitate when he considered God's promise to him, even though that promise seemed humanly impossible to fulfill. Instead of wavering, his faith grew stronger over time, and this trust in God became an act of worship — he gave glory to God through his confidence in God's word.
To understand the context, we need to remember what promise Paul is referring to. God had told Abraham, when he was about a hundred years old and his wife Sarah was well past childbearing age, that he would become the father of many nations and that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars (Genesis 15:5, 17:5, 17:17). By any natural measure, this was absurd — Abraham's body was "as good as dead" for the purpose of having children, as Paul says just a few verses earlier in Romans 4:19. Paul, writing to the Christians in Rome (a mixed congregation of Jewish and Gentile believers), is building an argument about how a person is made right with God — not through obeying the law, but through faith, just as Abraham was justified by faith centuries before the law was even given. Abraham serves as Paul's Exhibit A, since Jews already revered him as their father and model of righteousness.
Theologically, this verse highlights several important truths. First, faith is not the absence of difficulty but trust in God's character and power despite difficulty. Abraham didn't deny the physical realities working against the promise; he simply believed that God
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