Romans 14:23 in Its Chapter

The verse that closed the last chapter usually comes wrapped in a claim that sounds deeply spiritual, which is part of its appeal. It runs like this: “For the born-again, sin is no longer measured by a list of rules. Paul said, ‘Everything that is not from faith is sin’ (Romans 14:23). So sin, for a believer, is anything not lived by faith. Not remaining in the law is not sin.”

It is easy to see why people find this freeing. It moves sin from the outside to the inside, from rules to the heart, and it seems to say that what matters to God is trust rather than the details of what we do.

The words really are in Romans: “everything that is not from faith is sin.” The question, then, is not whether Paul wrote them but what he was speaking about when he did.

The Whole Chapter

Romans 14 does not open with a statement about the nature of sin. It opens with a situation in the congregation:

Romans 14:1-3 Now receive the one who is weak in faith — not for diakrisis διάκρισις dee-ak'-ree-sis(discernment) of dialogismoi(reasoning, deliberations). One person believes he may eat all things, but the one who is weak eats only vegetables. The one who eats must not despise the one who does not eat, and the one who does not eat must not krino κρίνω kree'-no(judge) the one who eats, for God has received him.

Two kinds of people are sitting in the same gathering. One believes that he may eat all things. The other, whom Paul calls “weak in faith,” eats only vegetables. Paul’s instruction concerns how they are to treat each other: they are to receive one another, and neither is to despise or judge the other. Most of the chapter is about food and eating, and about one believer’s conscience set beside another’s.

Our verse stands at the end of the chapter:

Romans 14:22-23 The faith you have — keep it to yourself before God; blessed is the one who does not krino(judge) himself in what he approves. But the one who diakrino διακρίνω dee-ak-ree'-no(middle, passive: doubts, wavers) is katakrino κατακρίνω kat-ak-ree'-no(condemned) if he eats, because it is not from faith; and everything that is not from faith is sin.

Verse 23 is careful about who is condemned. It is not everyone who eats, nor everyone who lacks some general quality called faith. It is “the one who diakrino(middle, passive: doubts, wavers)” and then eats. The Greek word diakrino (διακρίνω) means to separate or to make a distinction, and in this form it describes a person divided inside himself, wavering. He eats, but in his heart he is not sure that he should.

Romans 14:23 is about that person. A man who thinks that eating something may be wrong, and eats it anyway, has acted against his own conviction. Whatever the food itself was, he did not eat “from faith.” He ate while doubting, and for him, Paul says, it was sin.

The Parking Space

Picture yourself pulling into a parking space downtown. A sign stands beside it, half hidden by a tree branch, and you cannot quite read it. Parking may be allowed here, or it may not. You turn off the engine, still unsure, and say to yourself, “This might be wrong, but I will leave the car here anyway.”

Perhaps the space was perfectly legal. Even so, something happened inside you. You chose to do a thing you believed might be wrong, and you were willing to break the rule, whatever it turned out to be.

That is the man in Romans 14:23. Paul is describing one particular case of sin: acting against one’s own conscience. He is not giving a new definition of sin that replaces every other.

One Case, Not the Definition

Scripture describes sin in several ways, and each one names a real case:

1 John 5:17 All unrighteousness is sin, and there is sin that does not lead to death.

James 4:17 So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.

All unrighteousness is sin. Knowing the right thing and failing to do it is sin. Eating while doubting is sin. Each of these is true, yet none of them is the definition of sin as a whole.

The defining verse is the one we read closely in Chapter 3: “Everyone who practices sin also practices anomia ἀνομία an-om-ee'-ah(Torah-lessness); sin is anomia(Torah-lessness)” (1 John 3:4).

That is the plain definition, and it stands. Romans 14:23 does not cancel it; it sits inside it. To take one verse about a doubting eater, make it the whole definition of sin, and then use it to say that leaving the Torah is not sin, is to ask a single case to do the work of the definition.

Set the two sentences side by side and the problem is plain. The claim says, “Not remaining in the law is not sin.” John says, “sin is anomia(Torah-lessness).” Living without the Torah is not a gray area that faith has now made safe. It is the very thing John names when he tells us what sin is. Romans 14:23 adds one more way in which a person can sin, acting against his own conscience, but it does not take away the way that John had already named.

Faith Does Not Fight the Law

The claim rests on one further assumption: that faith and the law stand on opposite sides, so that whoever lives by faith is no longer under any claim of the law. Paul answered that directly: “Do we then nullify the nomos νόμος nom'-os(law) through faith? May it never be! On the contrary, we uphold the nomos(law)” (Romans 3:31). We read that verse in Chapter 4, and Book 1 examined it as the verse our minds tend to correct before we have finished reading it. Faith does not nullify the law; faith upholds it.

What, then, does faith look like in Scripture? The great chapter on faith gives a picture of it:

Hebrews 11:8 By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance, and he went out, not knowing where he was going.

The word pistis πίστις pis'-tis means faith or trust, and here that faith heard God’s call and went. Abraham did not have the whole map, and he did not know where he was going, but he obeyed. In Scripture, faith and obedience are not two separate roads. Faith is the reason a person obeys.

James puts it bluntly:

James 2:17 So also faith, if it does not have works, is dead in itself.

A faith without works is not a deeper or more inward faith. James calls it dead.

What Faith Looks Like

Once Romans 14:23 is put back where Paul set it, the claim loses its footing. The verse concerns a believer who eats while doubting. It does not declare that sin is now measured by faith instead of by God’s commandments. Sin is still anomia, faith still upholds the law, and faith, from Abraham onward, has always shown itself in obedience.

None of this means that anyone earns salvation by obeying. As we saw in Chapters 1 and 2, we are justified by grace through faith in Messiah’s blood. But the faith that receives that grace is the same faith that, like Abraham’s, rises and goes where God says.

All of this concerns the walk of someone who has already turned. The turning itself, repentance, is the subject of several claims of its own, and the first of them begins right at the door: the fruit of repentance, it says, is written in Scripture, and yet it is not a standard that must be kept.