Beginning

Good news about the new king

1 Paul, a slave of the Messiah, King Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for God’s good news, ² which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the sacred writings— ³ the good news about his son, who was descended from David’s seed in terms of flesh, ⁴ and who was marked out powerfully as God’s son in terms of the spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead: Jesus, the royal Messiah, our Lord!

⁵ Through him we have received grace and apostleship to bring about believing obedience among all the nations for the sake of his name. ⁶ That includes you, too, who are called by Jesus the Messiah.

⁷ This letter comes to all in Rome who love God, all who are called to be his holy people. Grace and peace to you from God our father, and Messiah Jesus, the Lord.

Paul longs to see the Roman Christians

⁸ Let me say first that I thank my God for all of you, through Jesus the king, because all the world has heard the news of your faith. ⁹ God is my witness—the God I worship in my spirit in the good news of his son—that I never stop remembering you ¹⁰ in my prayers. I ask God again and again that somehow at last I may now be able, in his good purposes, to come to you. ¹¹ I’m longing to see you! I want to share with you some spiritual blessing to give you strength; ¹² that is, I want to encourage you, and be encouraged by you, in the faith you and I share. ¹³ I don’t want you to be unaware, my dear family, that I’ve often made plans to come to you; it’s just that up to now something has always got in the way. I want to bear some fruit among you, as I have been doing among the other nations.

Good news, salvation and the justice of God

¹⁴ I am under obligation to Greeks and barbarians alike, you see; both to the wise and to the foolish. ¹⁵ That’s why I’m eager to announce the good news to you, too, in Rome. ¹⁶ I’m not ashamed of the good news; it’s God’s power, bringing salvation to everyone who believes—to the Jew first, and also, equally, to the Greek. ¹⁷ This is because God’s covenant justice is unveiled in it, from faithfulness to faithfulness. As it says in the Bible, “the just shall live by faith.”

Humans reject God and embrace corruption

¹⁸ For the anger of God is unveiled from heaven against all the ungodliness and injustice performed by people who use injustice to suppress the truth. ¹⁹ What can be known of God, you see, is plain to them, since God has made it plain to them. ²⁰ There are, of course, things about God which you can’t see, namely, his eternal power and deity. But, ever since the world was created, they have been known and seen in the things he has made. As a result, they have no excuse: ²¹ they knew God, but didn’t honor him as God or thank him. Instead, they learned to think in useless ways, and their unwise heart grew dark. ²² They declared themselves to be wise, but in fact they became foolish. ²³ They swapped the glory of the immortal God for the likeness of the image of mortal humans—and of birds, animals and reptiles.

Unclean desires, dishonored bodies

²⁴ So God gave them up to uncleanness in the desires of their hearts, with the result that they dishonored their bodies among themselves. ²⁵ They swapped God’s truth for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed forever, Amen.

²⁶ So God gave them up to shameful desires. Even the women, you see, swapped natural sexual practice for unnatural; ²⁷ and the men, too, abandoned natural sexual relations with women, and were inflamed with their lust for one another. Men performed shameless acts with men, and received in themselves the appropriate repayment for their mistaken ways.

Darkened mind, darkened behavior

²⁸ Moreover, just as they did not see fit to hold on to knowledge of God, God gave them up to an unfit mind, so that they would behave inappropriately. ²⁹ They were filled with all kinds of injustice, wickedness, greed and evil; they were full of envy, murder, enmity, deceit and cunning. They became gossips, ³⁰ slanderers, God-haters, arrogant, self-important, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, ³¹ unwise, unfaithful, unfeeling, uncaring. ³² They know that God has rightly decreed that people who do things like that deserve death. But not only do they do them; they give their approval to people who practice them.

God’s coming judgment will be impartial, the same for all

2 So you have no excuse—anyone, whoever you are, who sits in judgment! When you judge someone else, you condemn yourself, because you, who are behaving as a judge, are doing the same things. ² We know that God’s judgment falls, in accordance with the truth, on those who do such things. ³ But if you judge those who do them and yet do them yourself, do you really suppose that you will escape God’s judgment?

⁴ Or do you despise the riches of God’s kindness, forbearance and patience? Don’t you know that God’s kindness is meant to bring you to repentance? ⁵ But by your hard, unrepentant heart you are building up a store of anger for yourself on the day of anger, the day when God’s just judgment will be unveiled— ⁶ the God who will “repay everyone according to their works.”

⁷ When people patiently do what is good, and so pursue the quest for glory and honor and immortality, God will give them the life of the age to come. ⁸ But when people act out of selfish desire, and do not obey the truth, but instead obey injustice, there will be anger and fury. ⁹ There will be trouble and distress for every single person who does what is wicked, the Jew first and also, equally, the Greek— ¹⁰ and there will be glory, honor and peace for everyone who does what is good, the Jew first and also, equally, the Greek. ¹¹ God, you see, shows no partiality.

How God’s impartial judgment will work

¹² Everyone who sinned outside the law, you see, will perish outside the law—and those who sinned from within the law will be judged by means of the law. ¹³ After all, it isn’t those who hear the law who are in the right before God. It’s those who do the law who will be declared to be in the right!

¹⁴ This is how it works out. Gentiles don’t possess the law as their birthright; but whenever they do what the law says, they are a law for themselves, despite not possessing the law. ¹⁵ They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts. Their conscience bears witness as well, and their thoughts will run this way and that, sometimes accusing them and sometimes excusing them, ¹⁶ on the day when (according to the gospel I proclaim) God judges all human secrets through Messiah Jesus.

The claim of the Jew—and its problems

¹⁷ But supposing you call yourself a “Jew.” Supposing you rest your hope in the law. Supposing you celebrate the fact that God is your God, ¹⁸ and that you know what he wants, and that by the law’s instruction you can make appropriate moral distinctions. ¹⁹ Supposing you believe yourself to be a guide to the blind, a light to people in darkness, ²⁰ a teacher of the foolish, an instructor for children—all because, in the law, you possess the outline of knowledge and truth.

²¹ Well then: if you’re going to teach someone else, aren’t you going to teach yourself? If you say people shouldn’t steal, do you steal? ²² If you say people shouldn’t commit adultery, do you commit adultery? If you loathe idols, do you rob temples? ²³ If you boast in the law, do you dishonor God by breaking the law? ²⁴ This is what the Bible says: “Because of you, God’s name is blasphemed among the nations!”

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,

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:

¹⁹ Now we know that whatever the law says, it is speaking to those who are “in the law.” The purpose of this is that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be brought to the bar of God’s judgment. ²⁰ No mere mortal, you see, can be declared to be in the right before God on the basis of the works of the law. What you get through the law is the knowledge of sin.

The unveiling of God’s covenant justice

²¹ But now, quite apart from the law (though the law and the prophets bore witness to it), God’s covenant justice has been displayed. ²² God’s covenant justice comes into operation through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah, for the benefit of all who have faith. For there is no distinction: ²³ all sinned, and fell short of God’s glory— ²⁴ and by God’s grace they are freely declared to be in the right, to be members of the covenant, through the redemption which is found in the Messiah, Jesus.

Jesus’ death reveals God’s covenant justice

²⁵ God put Jesus forth as the place of mercy, through faithfulness, by means of his blood. He did this to demonstrate his covenant justice, because of the passing over (in divine forbearance) of sins committed beforehand. ²⁶ This was to demonstrate his covenant justice in the present time: that is, that he himself is in the right, and that he declares to be in the right everyone who trusts in the faithfulness of Jesus.

The God of both Jew and Gentile

²⁷ So what happens to boasting? It is ruled out! Through what sort of law? The law of works? No: through the law of faith! ²⁸ We calculate, you see, that a person is declared to be in the right on the basis of faith, apart from works of the law. ²⁹ Or does God belong only to Jews? Doesn’t he belong to the nations as well? Yes, of course, to the nations as well, ³⁰ since God is one. He will make the declaration “in the right” over the circumcised on the basis of faith, and over the uncircumcised through faith.

³¹ Do we then abolish the law through faith? Certainly not! Rather, we establish the law.