Greeting
1 From Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle and set apart for the good news of God. 2 He promised this before through his prophets in the holy scriptures 3 concerning his Son. As far as the flesh is concerned, the Son was of the ancestry of David, 4 but he is actually the one powerfully identified as the God-Man, according to the spirit of holiness by the resurrection of the dead: Jesus Christ, our Master. 5 Through Him we obtained favor and a commission to bring those in all the other nations into faithful compliance for the sake of his Name, 6 along with you who are also called by Jesus Christ.
7 To all who are in Rome, loved by God and called holy ones: Favor and peace to you from God our Father and Master Jesus Christ!
Paul wants to see them in person
8 First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ concerning all of you, because your faith is being announced all over the world. 9 God, to whom I offer divine spiritual service for the good news of his Son, is my witness of how I never stop mentioning you 10 in all my prayers, pleading that somehow, sometime, in some way, the will of God would permit me to come visit you. 11 I very much want to see you so I can share some spiritual gift with you, to anchor you. 12 In this way you can all be a comfort to each other through your faith and mine.
13 Now I don’t want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, of the fact that I wanted to visit you many times but was prevented until now, so that I would have some of the same results among you as among the rest of the other nations. 14 I am indebted to both Greeks and barbarians, the wise and the foolish; 15 that is why I was eager to bring the good news to those of you in Rome as well. 16 I am not ashamed of this good news, because it is the power of God for salvation to all who believe— first to the Judean and then to the Greek. 17 This good news is revealing God’s righteousness, beginning and ending in faith. As it is written, “The just will live by faith.”
God’s anger toward sinful Gentiles
18 God’s rage is being revealed from heaven against every kind of irreverence and unrighteousness committed by people who unjustly suppress the truth. 19 And it’s because what can be known about God is obvious among them, since God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible qualities can be seen by means of the creation of the world; we catch a glimpse of them— as well as his unknowable power and divinity— by his achievements, so that people are without excuse. 21 They know God but give him no honor and show him no gratitude.
So their thinking became futile and their stupid minds were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise they were made fools instead, 23 and they traded the honor of the incorruptible God for things made in the images of people, flying creatures, four-legged creatures, and reptiles. 24 For that reason God handed them over to the desires of their hearts, into the filth of polluting their bodies among themselves. 25 They turned the truth about God into a lie and worshiped the creation instead of the Creator— who is blessed forever, absolutely!
26 So God handed them over to their disgusting passions: Women traded natural intimate relations for unnatural, 27 and men abandoned natural intimate relations with women to be inflamed with lust for other men, spawning indecency. They were then directly paid back as they deserved for their perversion. 28 Since they did not see a reason to give God recognition, God saw a reason to hand them over to an unreasoning mind so that they would do inappropriate things. 29 They have been filled with all kinds of unrighteousness, evil, greed, and malice; they are saturated with envy, murder, rivalry, treachery, and depravity; they gossip 30 and trash talk; they hate God; they are arrogant, contemptuous impostors; they invent new forms of evil; they set themselves against their parents; 31 they are stupid and honor no agreements; they are devoid of natural feelings and have no mercy. 32 Since they know what is right, those who make a habit of such things are deserving of God’s death sentence. Yet they not only do these things, they also approve of everyone else who makes a habit of them.