¹² In those days you were living apart from Christ. You were excluded from citizenship among the people of Israel, and you did not know the covenant promises God had made to them. You lived in this world without God and without hope.

Paul’s Concern for the Galatians

⁸ Before you Gentiles knew God, you were slaves to so-called gods that do not even exist.

²¹ This includes you who were once far away from God. You were his enemies, separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions.

The Hope of Eternal Life

³ All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is by his great mercy that we have been born again, because God raised Jesus Christ from the dead. Now we live with great expectation,

³¹ “The day is coming,” says the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah. ³² This covenant will not be like the one I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand and brought them out of the land of Egypt. They broke that covenant, though I loved them as a husband loves his wife,” says the Lord.

³³ “But this is the new covenant I will make with the people of Israel after those days,” says the Lord. “I will put my instructions deep within them, and I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. ³⁴ And they will not need to teach their neighbors, nor will they need to teach their relatives, saying, ‘You should know the Lord.’ For everyone, from the least to the greatest, will know me already,” says the Lord. “And I will forgive their wickedness, and I will never again remember their sins.”

The Hope of the Resurrection

¹³ And now, dear brothers and sisters, we want you to know what will happen to the believers who have died^[a] so you will not grieve like people who have no hope.

¹⁸ Their minds are full of darkness; they wander far from the life God gives because they have closed their minds and hardened their hearts against him.

²⁶ And I will make a covenant of peace with them, an everlasting covenant. I will give them their land and increase their numbers,^[a] and I will put my Temple among them forever.

⁵ not in lustful passion like the pagans who do not know God and his ways.