Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Romans · About this commentary
The Righteous Shall Live by Faith
Romans 1:16-17
16 For I am not ashamed of the Good News of Christ, because it is the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first, and also for the Greek. · WEB
Two verses state the thesis of the whole letter, and every phrase in them is a chapter waiting to happen.
For I am not ashamed of the Good News of Christ, because it is the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first, and also for the Greek. For in it is revealed God's righteousness from faith to faith. As it is written, "But the righteous shall live by faith."
The rest of the letter is these two verses unpacked, and each phrase carries weight worth stating.
Not ashamed — a litotes with force behind it. The message is a crucified criminal proclaimed as Lord, announced by an unimpressive traveling worker to the capital of the world; shame was the natural social price, and Paul names the temptation by refusing it.
The power of God for salvation — not information about power: power itself, operating in the telling. The gospel does what it announces, which is why Paul is eager to preach it in Rome rather than merely confident it is true.
For everyone who believes — the universal and the condition in four words. The scope will take three chapters to establish (all have sinned, so all are addressed), and the condition will take four more (faith, apart from works of the law, exhibited in Abraham).
For the Jew first, and also for the Greek — the order that chapters 9 to 11 exist to honor and explain. Priority without partiality Romans 2:11: the letter never lets either half of the phrase eat the other.
God's righteousness — the letter's central term, falling in thirty verses. It is God's own character and God's way of setting people right, and the argument will insist on both at once: that God is just, and the justifier Romans 3:26.
From faith to faith — faith at every point of the process, start to finish, with no stage handed over to something else.
And the warrant is a prophet: the righteous shall live by faith, from Habakkuk — the sentence that anchors the thesis in the Scriptures the greeting invoked Romans 1:2. One line from a minor prophet, quoted in a letter to Rome, became the hinge of the book that has reshaped the church more than any other.
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