God’s righteousness can have in a believer’s mortal life after the penalty of sin has been removed. Does this mean that paragraph breaks at 1:16 and 1:18 are wrong? No, we just need to keep the bigger structural picture in mind. Paragraph breaks are flat; they can’t show us much in the way of hierarchy. So even though we generally view Romans 1:16–17 as the theme of the whole book, we have to remember that it is embedded within the larger idea: wanting to visit. Similarly, the whole section describing