📜WEB · Romans 4:9
What does Romans 4:9 mean?
"Is this blessing then pronounced on the circumcised, or on the uncircumcised also? For we say that faith was accounted to Abraham for righteousness."
— Romans 4:9 (World English Bible)
Surrounding context
Even as David also pronounces blessing on the man to whom God counts righteousness apart from works,
“Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, whose sins are covered.
Blessed is the man whom the Lord will by no means charge with sin.”
Is this blessing then pronounced on the circumcised, or on the uncircumcised also? For we say that faith was accounted to Abraham for righteousness.
How then was it counted? When he was in circumcision, or in uncircumcision? Not in circumcision, but in uncircumcision.
He received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had while he was in uncircumcision, that he might be the father of all those who believe, though they might be in uncircumcision, that righteousness might also be accounted to them.
He is the father of circumcision to those who not only are of the circumcision, but who also walk in the steps of that faith of our father Abraham, which he had in uncircumcision.
Explanation
Romans 4:9 sits in the middle of Paul's argument about how a person is made right with God. The verse asks a pointed question: is the blessing of righteousness reserved only for the circumcised—that is, the Jews who carried the sign of the Abrahamic covenant—or is it also available to the uncircumcised, meaning Gentiles? Paul answers by returning to the case he has already established: Abraham's faith was credited to him as righteousness, referring back to Genesis 15:6, which Paul quoted earlier in the chapter. The point is that this crediting of righteousness through faith happened to Abraham specifically, and the timing of when it happened is about to become crucial to Paul's argument.
To understand this verse, it helps to know Paul's audience and purpose. Paul wrote Romans to a church that included both Jewish and Gentile believers, and one of the central tensions in the early church was whether Gentile converts needed to be circumcised and follow the Mosaic law to be truly right with God. Many Jewish Christians assumed that God's covenant blessings flowed through the badge of circumcision and law-keeping. Paul, a Jewish scholar of the law himself, sets out to dismantle this assumption by going back before the law of Moses even existed, to Abraham, the father of the Jewish nation, to show that righteousness by faith predates and does not depend on the law or the sign of circumcision.
The verse leads directly into Paul's next move, which is to point out a chronological fact: Abraham was declared righteous in Genesis 15,
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