God is one for all, and therefore He saves everyone: both Jews and Gentiles, circumcised and uncircumcised, clean and unclean (for He does not turn away from the leper). He saves all by faith, not by works. But what does this faith consist in? It turns out that for God to become salvation for us, we must not only listen to His words but also do them. What a paradox! On the one hand - only faith; on the other - by not doing God's will, we risk ending up under the wreckage of our own life.

Reflecting on the Torah and the Kingdom, Paul turns to one of the key biblical concepts: the concept of righteousness. He says that with the coming of Christ into the world the situation in this respect changed radically: now righteousness has been revealed in all its fullness together with the Kingdom that the Messiah brought (vv. 21-22). Previously righteousness was attained with God's help, but still through human effort; now it has entered the world through Jesus and has become part of that life of the Kingdom which He brought with Him and to which everyone can now be joined, if only he is ready to trust Jesus (v. 24). And this righteousness brought into the world by Jesus is incomparable with the righteousness revealed even by the greatest righteous people of the former age: the fullness of righteousness means freedom from sin, and before the coming of Jesus Christ into the world no person was free from it (v. 23).

It is not accidental that the apostle connects this fullness of righteousness with the concept of redemption reflected in the Torah (vv. 25-26): just as one who ransomed a slave gave him freedom from slavery, which the slave would never have attained by his own efforts, so also Jesus, revealing to the world the fullness of righteousness, freed from the power of sin those who sought this righteousness but could not completely free themselves from sin by their own strength. And the fullness of righteousness brought into the world by Jesus is inseparable from the fullness of the Kingdom: it frees the faithful from every sin, because it is incompatible with any sin just as the Kingdom is incompatible with any evil (v. 25). It is no accident that Paul calls what Jesus did for His faithful a "sacrifice of mercy": the corresponding Hebrew word meant precisely the readiness to give the one toward whom mercy is shown something that he plainly has not deserved, something to which he has no right either by law or by an agreement concluded between the parties.

If this is so, if righteousness cannot be attained by any "works of the Torah" (v. 28), then the Torah itself becomes truly universal: righteousness is acquired only through the faithfulness that binds the one seeking righteousness to God through Jesus Christ (vv. 27-28). Here there is no difference between Jew and Gentile: the former Gentile who has trusted Jesus and through Him received the Kingdom receives the same fullness of righteous life as the Jew who from childhood was accustomed to following the Torah (vv. 29-30). But this by no means diminishes the significance of the Torah: the Torah is not simply a text; the Torah is the spiritual law that determines a person's relationship with God for as long as the person himself exists. Such a Torah remains unshakable even after the coming of Christ into the world, because it remains the foundation of a person's spiritual life not only in our world, not yet transformed to the end, but also in the Kingdom.

The Torah, at least the inner Torah, in the apostle's words, only reveals to a person his own sinfulness; by it "sin is known." But where is the way out? What can free a person from sin? Paul answers: righteousness that is greater than the Torah. The Torah and the Prophets bear witness to God's righteousness; in Paul's time this was the name for what we today would call Holy Scripture. Only the manifestation of this divine righteousness ("the righteousness of God") can free a person from the power of sin. Here Paul remains faithful to the rabbinic tradition: the Torah was never an end in itself; it was needed as a means of establishing a person on the path of righteousness.

But into the traditional rabbinic understanding of the problem of Torah and righteousness the apostle introduces a new, messianic interpretation: he speaks of the manifestation of the Messiah's righteousness, the righteousness of Christ, and of faithfulness to Christ ("faith in Jesus Christ") as the only possibility for a person to share in this righteousness. God's righteousness has been revealed to the world by Christ; the blood He shed becomes for those faithful to Him what sacrificial blood was for believing Yahwists of the pre-Christian era.

At that time the blood of a sacrificial animal offered for the sin of a particular person cleansed that person from the consequences of the sin he had committed and opened to him the possibility of sharing in God's righteousness in the relative measure that was open to people before the coming of Christ. Now the Messiah Himself opens to everyone who has entrusted himself to Him the whole fullness of God's righteousness possible for a human being, a fullness made available to the world through His path and His sacrifice.

It is no accident that the apostle speaks of redemption, of ransom: the Savior's death on the cross, the blood He shed, became payment for human sin in the same way that the blood of the animals slaughtered at the altar had previously become payment for human sins. As animals then gave their lives in order to open a path to God for a person, so now the Messiah gives His life in order to open for a person the path into the Kingdom.

But then both purification and sharing in God's righteousness were partial; now they become complete. And this is not because the "works of Torah" can somehow help a person, but because God's righteousness has been revealed to the world by the One who Himself bears it in all its fullness. Yet the Torah is not devalued by this, at least if we are speaking of the inner Torah. Faithfulness to Christ is unthinkable without the path of righteousness and outside it, and therefore it is unthinkable without the inner Torah as that spiritual dynamic without which there is no path of righteousness. That is why the apostle says that everything he has said about salvation through faithfulness to Jesus Christ by no means devalues the Torah, but only establishes it all the more.