Romans 2:25-3:18
New Testament for Everyone
The badge, the name and the meaning
25 Circumcision, you see, has real value for people who keep the law. If, however, you break the law, your circumcision becomes uncircumcision. 26 Meanwhile, if uncircumcised people keep the law’s requirements, their uncircumcision will be regarded as circumcision, won’t it? 27 So people who are by nature uncircumcised, but who fulfill the law, will pass judgment on people like you who possess the letter of the law and circumcision but who break the law.
28 The “Jew” isn’t the person who appears to be one, you see. Nor is “circumcision” what it appears to be, a matter of physical flesh. 29 The “Jew” is the one in secret; and “circumcision” is a matter of the heart, in the spirit rather than the letter. Such a person gets “praise,” not from humans, but from God.
God’s determined faithfulness
3 What advantage, then, does the Jew possess? What, indeed, is the point of circumcision? 2 A great deal, in every way. To begin with, the Jews were entrusted with God’s oracles. 3 What follows from that? If some of them were unfaithful to their commission, does their unfaithfulness nullify God’s faithfulness? 4 Certainly not! Let God be true, and every human being false! As the Bible says,
So that you may be found in the right in what you say, and may win the victory when you come to court.
5 But if our being in the wrong proves that God is in the right, what are we going to say? That God is unjust to inflict anger on people? (I’m reducing things to a human scale!) 6 Certainly not! How then could God judge the world? 7 But if God’s truthfulness grows all the greater and brings him glory in and through my falsehood, why am I still being condemned as a sinner? 8 And why not “do evil so that good may come”—as some people blasphemously say about us, and as some allege that we say? People like that, at least, deserve the judgment they get!
Jews as well as Gentiles are guilty of sin
9 What then? Are we in fact better off? No, certainly not. I have already laid down this charge, you see: Jews as well as Greeks are all under the power of sin. 10 This is what the Bible says:
No one is in the right—nobody at all!
11 No one understands, or goes looking for God;
12 all of them alike have wandered astray,
together they have all become futile;
none of them behaves kindly, no, not one.
13 Their throat is an open grave,
they use their tongues to deceive,
the poison of vipers is under their lips.
14 Their mouth is full of cursing and bitterness,
15 their feet are quick when there’s blood to be shed,
16 disaster and wretchedness are in their paths,
17 and they did not know the way of peace.
18 They have no fear of God before their eyes.
Scripture quotations from The New Testament for Everyone are copyright © Nicholas Thomas Wright 2011, 2018, 2019.
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