For when they had come to know God, they did not give Him glory as God nor render Him thanks, but they became absorbed in useless discussions, and their senseless minds were darkened.

Their hearts overflowed with all sorts of dishonesty, mischief, greed, malice. They were full of envy and murder, and were quarrelsome, crafty, and spiteful.

They were secret backbiters, open slanderers; hateful to God, insolent, haughty, boastful; inventors of new forms of sin, disobedient to parents, destitute of common sense,

The privilege is great from every point of view. First of all, because the Jews were entrusted with God's truth.

What then were the circumstances under which this took place? Was it after he had been circumcised, or before?

For already, while we were still helpless, Christ at the right moment died for the ungodly.

But God gives proof of His love to us in Christ's dying for us while we were still sinners.

For if while we were hostile to God we were reconciled to Him through the death of His Son, it is still more certain that now that we are reconciled, we shall obtain salvation through Christ's life.

For as through the disobedience of the one individual the mass of mankind were constituted sinners, so also through the obedience of the One the mass of mankind will be constituted righteous.

And do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?

Well, then, we by our baptism were buried with Him in death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from among the dead by the Father's glorious power, we also should live an entirely new life.

But thanks be to God that though you were once in thraldom to Sin, you have now yielded a hearty obedience to that system of truth in which you have been instructed.

You were set free from the tyranny of Sin, and became the bondservants of Righteousness--

For when you were the bondservants of sin, you were under no sort of subjection to Righteousness.

For whilst we were under the thraldom of our earthly natures, sinful passions-- made sinful by the Law--were always being aroused to action in our bodily faculties that they might yield fruit to death.

and even then, though they were not then born and had not done anything either good or evil, yet in order that God's electing purpose might not be frustrated, based, as it was, not on their actions but on the will of Him who called them, she was told,

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."

To what conclusion does this bring us? Why, that the Gentiles, who were not in pursuit of righteousness, have overtaken it--a righteousness, however, which arises from faith;

while the descendants of Israel, who were in pursuit of a Law that could give righteousness, have not arrived at one.

And why? Because they were pursuing a righteousness which should arise not from faith, but from what they regarded as merit. They stuck their foot against the stone which lay in their way;

And Isaiah, with strange boldness, exclaims, "I have been found by those who were not looking for Me, I have revealed Myself to those who were not inquiring of Me."

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,

and if you were cut from that which by nature is a wild olive and contrary to nature were grafted into the good olive tree, how much more certainly will these natural branches be grafted on their own olive tree?

but just as you were formerly disobedient to Him, but now have received mercy at a time when they are disobedient,