1Being therefore justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ; 2through whom we also have our access by faith into this grace in which we stand. We rejoice in hope of the glory of God. 3Not only this, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces perseverance; 4and perseverance, proven character; and proven character, hope; 5and hope doesn’t disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.
6For while we were yet weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7For one will hardly die for a righteous man. Yet perhaps for a good person someone would even dare to die. 8But God commends his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
9Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we will be saved from God’s wrath through him. 10For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we will be saved by his life.
11Not only so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation. 12Therefore, as sin entered into the world through one man, and death through sin, so death passed to all men because all sinned. 13For until the law, sin was in the world; but sin is not charged when there is no law. 14Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those whose sins weren’t like Adam’s disobedience, who is a foreshadowing of him who was to come.
15But the free gift isn’t like the trespass. For if by the trespass of the one the many died, much more did the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abound to the many. 16The gift is not as through one who sinned; for the judgment came by one to condemnation, but the free gift followed many trespasses to justification. 17For if by the trespass of the one, death reigned through the one; so much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one, Jesus Christ.
18So then as through one trespass, all men were condemned; even so through one act of righteousness, all men were justified to life. 19For as through the one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the one, many will be made righteous. 20The law came in that the trespass might abound; but where sin abounded, grace abounded more exceedingly, 21that as sin reigned in death, even so grace might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
In Rom 10:3, Paul states that Jews who reject Jesus seek to establish their own righteousness: i.e. to earn God’s favor by their own efforts to obey the Mosaic law (cf. Rom 10:5). This righteousness Paul declares worthless when he asserts that no one can be justified by the works of the law (Rom 3:20; Gal 2:16). Because “all have sinned” (Rom 3:23), he reasons, all who seek salvation by the law are subject to a curse (Gal 3:10; Deut 27:26), and the Jews’ quest to obtain salvation through their own righteousness is correspondingly doomed to failure.
What Jews, like all human beings, need, according to Paul, is “the righteousness of God” (Rom 1:17; 3:22; 10:3; 2 Cor 5:21; Phil 3:9): i.e. the righteousness of Christ, which God imputes, or credits (Rom 5:18-19), to all believers in Jesus (Rom 1:16-17; 4:5). In comparison with this righteousness, Paul counts all of the achievements, whereby he sought to please God before his conversion, as loss and dung (Phil 3:7-8). He gladly forsakes them in order to “win Christ, and be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith” (Phil 3:8-9). In order to attain salvation, Paul teaches in Romans 10 and elsewhere, the unbelieving Jews likewise must forsake all pretensions to their own righteousness and receive by faith the imputed righteousness of Christ.