Parallel Bible results for "romans 4"

Romans 4

Hebrew Names Version HNV

1 What then will we say that Avraham, our forefather, has found according to the flesh?

2 For if Avraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not toward God.

3 For what does the Scripture say? "Avraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness."

4 Now to him who works, the reward is not accounted as of grace, but as of debt.

5 But to him who doesn't work, but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness.

6 Even as David also pronounces blessing on the man to whom God counts righteousness apart from works,

7 "Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, Whose sins are covered.

8 Blessed is the man whom the Lord will by no means charge with sin."

9 Is this blessing then pronounced on the circumcised, or on the uncircumcised also? For we say that faith was accounted to Avraham for righteousness.

10 How then was it counted? When he was in circumcision, or in uncircumcision? Not in circumcision, but in uncircumcision.

11 He received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had while he was in uncircumcision, that he might be the father of all those who believe, though they be in uncircumcision, that righteousness might also be accounted to them.

12 The father of circumcision to those who not only are of the circumcision, but who also walk in the steps of that faith of our father Avraham, which he had in uncircumcision.

13 For not through the law was the promise to Avraham or to his seed that he should be heir of the world, but through the righteousness of faith.

14 For if those who are of the law are heirs, faith is made void, and the promise is made of no effect.

15 For the law works wrath, for where there is no law, neither is there disobedience.

16 For this cause it is of faith, that it may be according to grace, to the end that the promise may be sure to all the seed, not to that only which is of the law, but to that also which is of the faith of Avraham, who is the father of us all.

17 As it is written, "I have made you a father of many nations." This is before him whom he believed, God, who gives life to the dead, and calls the things that are not, as though they were.

18 Who in hope believed against hope, to the end that he might become a father of many nations, according to that which had been spoken, "So will your seed be."

19 Without being weakened in faith, he didn't consider his own body, already having been worn out, (he being about a hundred years old), and the deadness of Sarah's womb.

20 Yet, looking to the promise of God, he didn't waver through unbelief, but grew strong through faith, giving glory to God,

21 and being fully assured that what he had promised, he was able also to perform.

22 Therefore it also was "reckoned to him for righteousness."

23 Now it was not written that it was accounted to him for his sake alone,

24 but for our sake also, to whom it will be accounted, who believe in him who raised Yeshua, our Lord, from the dead,

25 who was delivered up for our trespasses, and was raised for our justification.

The Message Bible MSG

1 So how do we fit what we know of Abraham, our first father in the faith, into this new way of looking at things?

2 If Abraham, by what he did for God, got God to approve him, he could certainly have taken credit for it. But the story we're given is a God-story, not an Abraham-story.

3 What we read in Scripture is, "Abraham entered into what God was doing for him, and that was the turning point. He trusted God to set him right instead of trying to be right on his own."

4 If you're a hard worker and do a good job, you deserve your pay; we don't call your wages a gift.

5 But if you see that the job is too big for you, that it's something only God can do, and you trust him to do it - you could never do it for yourself no matter how hard and long you worked - well, that trusting-him-to-do-it is what gets you set right with God, by God. Sheer gift.

6 David confirms this way of looking at it, saying that the one who trusts God to do the putting-everything-right without insisting on having a say in it is one fortunate man:

7 Fortunate those whose crimes are carted off, whose sins are wiped clean from the slate.

8 Fortunate the person against whom the Lord does not keep score.

9 Do you think for a minute that this blessing is only pronounced over those of us who keep our religious ways and are circumcised? Or do you think it possible that the blessing could be given to those who never even heard of our ways, who were never brought up in the disciplines of God? We all agree, don't we, that it was by embracing what God did for him that Abraham was declared fit before God?

10 Now think: Was that declaration made before or after he was marked by the covenant rite of circumcision? That's right, before he was marked.

11 That means that he underwent circumcision as evidence and confirmation of what God had done long before to bring him into this acceptable standing with himself, an act of God he had embraced with his whole life.

12 And it means further that Abraham is father of all people who embrace what God does for them while they are still on the "outs" with God, as yet unidentified as God's, in an "uncircumcised" condition. It is precisely these people in this condition who are called "set right by God and with God"! Abraham is also, of course, father of those who have undergone the religious rite of circumcision not just because of the ritual but because they were willing to live in the risky faith-embrace of God's action for them, the way Abraham lived long before he was marked by circumcision.

13 That famous promise God gave Abraham - that he and his children would possess the earth - was not given because of something Abraham did or would do. It was based on God's decision to put everything together for him, which Abraham then entered when he believed.

14 If those who get what God gives them only get it by doing everything they are told to do and filling out all the right forms properly signed, that eliminates personal trust completely and turns the promise into an ironclad contract! That's not a holy promise; that's a business deal.

15 A contract drawn up by a hard-nosed lawyer and with plenty of fine print only makes sure that you will never be able to collect. But if there is no contract in the first place, simply a promise - and God's promise at that - you can't break it.

16 This is why the fulfillment of God's promise depends entirely on trusting God and his way, and then simply embracing him and what he does. God's promise arrives as pure gift. That's the only way everyone can be sure to get in on it, those who keep the religious traditions and those who have never heard of them. For Abraham is father of us all. He is not our racial father - that's reading the story backwards. He is our faith father.

17 We call Abraham "father" not because he got God's attention by living like a saint, but because God made something out of Abraham when he was a nobody. Isn't that what we've always read in Scripture, God saying to Abraham, "I set you up as father of many peoples"? Abraham was first named "father" and then became a father because he dared to trust God to do what only God could do: raise the dead to life, with a word make something out of nothing.

18 When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn't do but on what God said he would do. And so he was made father of a multitude of peoples. God himself said to him, "You're going to have a big family, Abraham!"

19 Abraham didn't focus on his own impotence and say, "It's hopeless. This hundred-year-old body could never father a child." Nor did he survey Sarah's decades of infertility and give up.

20 He didn't tiptoe around God's promise asking cautiously skeptical questions. He plunged into the promise and came up strong, ready for God,

21 sure that God would make good on what he had said.

22 That's why it is said, "Abraham was declared fit before God by trusting God to set him right."

23 But it's not just Abraham;

24 it's also us! The same thing gets said about us when we embrace and believe the One who brought Jesus to life when the conditions were equally hopeless.

25 The sacrificed Jesus made us fit for God, set us right with God.