MSG Bible Verse of the Day

About the The Message

The Message is not a translation in the traditional sense — it is a paraphrase, written by pastor and scholar Eugene Peterson directly from the Hebrew and Greek into vivid, contemporary, conversational English, published in stages between 1993 and 2002. Peterson's goal was to strip away centuries of familiar 'church language' and let readers encounter passages they had heard a hundred times as if for the first time, in the cadence of ordinary speech rather than formal scripture. That makes The Message unusually good at cutting through numbness — a well-known verse that has stopped registering in a more literal translation can suddenly land differently in Peterson's phrasing. It is best read alongside a more literal translation rather than as a primary study Bible, since paraphrase necessarily involves more of the translator's own interpretive choices than a word-for-word or thought-for-thought rendering. Many readers keep The Message specifically for that jolt of familiarity-breaking clarity, using it devotionally rather than for detailed doctrinal study.