All have turned aside from the right path; they have every one of them become corrupt. There is no one who does what is right--no, not so much as one."

Under utterly hopeless circumstances he hopefully believed, so that he might become the forefather of many nations, in agreement with the words "Equally numerous shall your posterity be."

For since we have become one with Him by sharing in His death, we shall also be one with Him by sharing in His resurrection.

Do you not know that if you surrender yourselves as bondservants to obey any one, you become the bondservants of him whom you obey, whether the bondservants of Sin (with death as the result)

But now that you have been set free from the tyranny of Sin, and have become the bondservants of God, you have your reward in being made holy, and you have the Life of the Ages as the final result.

Did then a thing which is good become death to me? No, indeed, but sin did; so that through its bringing about death by means of what was good, it might be seen in its true light as sin, in order that by means of the Commandment the unspeakable sinfulness of sin might be plainly shown.

Even as Isaiah says in an earlier place, "Were it not that the Lord, the God of Hosts, had left us some few descendants, we should have become like Sodom, and have come to resemble Gomorrah."

How then does the matter stand? It stands thus. That which Israel are in earnest pursuit of, they have not obtained; but God's chosen servants have obtained it, and the rest have become hardened.

And David says, "Let their very food become a snare and a trap to them, a stumbling-block and a retribution.

And if some of the branches have been pruned away, and you, although you were but a wild olive, have been grafted in among them and have become a sharer with others in the rich sap of the root of the olive tree,

My meaning is that Christ has become a servant to the people of Israel in vindication of God's truthfulness-- in showing how sure are the promises made to our forefathers--