¹⁵ For the law always brings punishment on those who try to obey it. (The only way to avoid breaking the law is to have no law to break!) ¹⁶ So the promise is received by faith. It is given as a free gift. And we are all certain to receive it, whether or not we live according to the law of Moses, if we have faith like Abraham’s. For Abraham is the father of all who believe. ¹⁷ That is what the Scriptures mean when God told him, “I have made you the father of many nations.”^[a] This happened because Abraham believed in the God who brings the dead back to life and who creates new things out of nothing.¹⁸ Even when there was no reason for hope, Abraham kept hoping—believing that he would become the father of many nations. For God had said to him, “That’s how many descendants you will Have.” Romans 4:14-18NLT 

Footsteps # 281 In his discussion on the law in v15 what he means is that even though the law is good for some things, it is worthless as a way to earn salvation. It reveals our sin (transgression) and points us to our need for faith in God’s mercy. The law ought to wake us up to the fact that we must have grace. The tragedy is that we sometimes try to make it a substitute for grace. 

Praise God today for the guarantee of his promise to each of us who accepts Jesus as our Saviour. God will bring us through whatever we are going through if we hold on to His grace. 

V17 refers to the fact that everyone who is finally saved, both Jew and Gentile, will not only be a child of Abraham but they will be saved in the same way he was – by placing faith in God’s gracious promises. That, Paul has repeatedly asserted, is the only way to inherit the promise or to be justified. 

 “Hope”(v18) is an important word for Paul. It appears 53 times in the New Testament, 36 in Paul’s writings. Romans, of all the New Testament books, uses hope most often –  13 times. 

In Paul’s letters, hope has two very distinct flavours. On the one side are those without hope. Ephesians 2:12, for example, speaks of those who are “strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and are without God in the world.” Again, in 1 Thessalonians 4:13, Paul writes: “I would not have you to be ignorant brethren, concerning them which are asleep [dead] that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope.” In that passage, he comforts those who have faith in Christ by pointing to the coming resurrection of the dead. After describing that event he urges his readers to “comfort one another with these words” (1 Thess. 4:18). 

For Paul, those without Christ have no hope. Thus throughout his writings, he connects hope with faith. If those without faith in Christ have no hope, so those with faith do have hope.