Mirror, Mirror

Romans 3:1-20
October 12, 2008

The mirror has a way of telling us the truth about ourselves, doesn’t it? Sometimes, it’s truth we don’t want to see or know. Today, one more time before we get to the good news of the gospel, Paul holds up the mirror to mankind, Jew and Gentile alike, for the purpose of every person seeing the stark truth about himself/herself.

A contemporary theological issue in Judaism, at the time of Paul’s writing, was the theme of the righteousness of God. What did it mean to say that God was “righteous”? Jews understood God’s righteousness in terms of His faithfulness to them, faithfulness to the covenant He’d made with them to bless them, to be their God as they were His people. But then came a series of blows that fell upon Israel, being besieged and carried into exile by foreign powers, eventually annexed by the Romans as part of their Empire. So…what was God doing? Why would He allow these things to happen if He were a faithful/righteous God? One popular viewpoint was that God’s righteousness involved the chastening of Israel, for their own cleansing and discipline, but that in the end, He’d hold them immune from final judgment.

But another viewpoint was that God’s righteousness is to be found in His faithfulness, not so much to Israel or to any group of human beings, but to Himself, to the glory of His name. God will be faithful to His promises (“let God be true, and every man a liar”), but God promises severe cursing to those Jews who do not obey Him (Deuteronomy 28). Being entrusted with God’s Word does not make Israel immune to God’s judgment, because that very Word promises judgment on sin!

Paul takes the second position, that God’s righteousness entails His faithfulness to Himself and His character and nature, which includes the judgment of sin, regardless of who commits it!

I. FAQs* regarding the Jews - :1-8
(*Frequently Asked Questions)

A. Question: If having the law and the covenant of circumcision doesn’t get me closer to Heaven, what advantage is there in being a Jew?
Can you imagine what it must have been like to see firsthand the miracles of God, to be there when God parted the Red Sea, to see God perform mighty miracles? The Jews had the lineage of people who had done just this. And God had made His covenant with His people Israel. Does Paul’s teaching undermine that covenant? The Jews thought that their status as God’s covenant people was their security blanket. If it was not, then what advantage did they possess in having the law and the covenants?

Answer: Jews have many advantages, starting with having directly received the revelation of God.
Paul answers by pointing out both their access to the Word of God, and the awesome responsibility of the Word with which they’d been entrusted.

B. Question: Has God failed because His people, the Jews, didn’t live faithfully?
Is God not faithful to the promises He’d made? Jews seemed to believe that having the law and covenants shielded them from God’s judgment, that his fairness would be seen in not judging His people. Is God somehow to blame here?

Answer: God is not responsible for sin; He is the Standard of right.
Paul answers with an axiom of Christian understanding: “let God be true, and every man a liar”. God’s faithfulness is not compromised by our failures; in fact, God is the Standard-setter of what is right and wrong, of what is faithful and unfaithful, in the first place!

C. Question: If through the depth of my sinfulness,
God’s righteousness is more clearly seen, then why would God inflict wrath on me?
We’ve asked if God is a covenant-keeper, and if He is faithful. The third question is this, essentially: Is God just in punishing those whose disobedience serves, in part, to magnify His own love and grace? “Hey, when we sin, we just give God the opportunity to show Himself to be a gracious God! Doesn’t our darkness allow God’s light to shine more brightly? Why does He punish us for that sin?”

Answer: God’s holiness demands that sin be punished.
God is the just Judge of the world, and to impugn His justice is to undercut His competence to judge. He is the very definition of holy, and so to live in unrepentant sin, feigning to be concerned to further His glory by our sin, is the height of silliness.

D. Question: Why not do more evil, so that God can show Himself more gracious?
This argument is an extension of the last one, looking forward to future sin, and asking, “why not just sin up a storm so that God can show Himself to be a God of grace?” This would rationalize lawlessness and undermine any sense of God’s standard of holiness at all.

Answer: This is the warped reasoning of a person steeped in sin.
Paul doesn’t even attempt an answer at such an absurd suggestion; evil can never be encouraged under any circumstances or for any reason! God is righteous in all He does!

II. FATs* about all people - :9-18
(*Frequently Avoided Truths)

In these verses, Paul begins to wrap up this section of the argument with a compilation of quotes from Psalms and Isaiah; these words were originally applied, not to Israelites, but to pagans. Paul uses these quotes, though, to make the point that all alike are sinners.

All are “under sin”, meaning that, more than just the fact that we all sin, we are by nature its prisoners, that sin places us into bondage (Galatians 3:22). Why is this important? Because to get the right solution, we need to rightly diagnose the problem. Marxists believe that the basic problem with the world is that wealth is distributed unequally, and thus the solution is for the government to take over the economy to ensure what they would see as a just distribution of wealth. Other people believe that the greatest problem in the world is ignorance, and thus the solution that is advocated is education, as though education will solve all of our ills. I’ve got a Masters, and Meach is a teacher, but education isn’t the be-all/end-all answer. When it comes to sin, our problem isn’t merely that we commit sins—if we could then somehow stop sinning, in this view, our problem would be fixed. But our problem is deeper: we are “under sin”, prisoners to its effects and consequences, and we need release from both the power and the penalty of enslaving sin. Liberation—the ability to live free—is the ultimate answer.

Here’s Paul’s synopsis of our endemic sin:

A. Summary Statement – “Not even one”
B. My mind is messed up – “understanding”
C. My priorities are wrong – “seeks after God”
D. My direction is wrong – “turned aside”
E. My usefulness is nil – “worthless”
F. I say evil things
G. I act with malice and violence toward others
H. I do not fear God as I should

John Stott points out three striking truths about sin that come from this list:

• Ungodliness
None of us is like God; none of us naturally seek God; none of us by nature goes God’s way.

• Pervasiveness
Sin affects every part of us; this is what theologians call the “total depravity” of man. One theologian suggested an analogy of total depravity that has stuck with me ever since I first heard it; he said that total depravity means that if sin were blue, I’d be some shade of blue all over! Sin affects, and infects, every part of me.

• Universality
We’ve all got it, and we’ve all got it bad!

Finally, Paul takes the feet once and for all out from under the pious Jews, by making four explanatory statements about the law:

III. FESs* about the Law - :19-20
(*Four Explanatory Statements)

A. The Personal Effect of the Law – “Every mouth stopped”
We get the picture of a defendant in a courtroom, realizing that the case has been made, that any defense he could attempt to offer would be futile and silly.

B. The Comprehensive Effect of the Law – “whole world…accountable”
Having been found guilty, the whole world of human beings is now accountable to the justice of a holy God.

C. The Limit of the Law – “no human being will be justified”
Because we tend to have a high view of ourselves, we gravitate as human beings to ideas of salvation that involve the contribution of our own efforts toward that salvation. We may realize that we need a little help here and there, but the basic idea a lot of folks have is that with a little help from God, we can achieve what we need to achieve; you can “become a better you”. But the Scripture is clear: what you do has nothing…nothing…nothing to do with the accomplishment of salvation. What you fail to do never…never…never disqualifies you from it either, by the way.

“Justified”…Paul here introduces a term that will form the basis of the next part of his argument; what does the term mean? How is it that a person can stand before God justified? Suffice it to say that when Paul employs this term, he’s speaking of a holy God declaring you to be totally without fault, sinless, before His holy bar of judgment standing as if you had never even once committed a sin. He doesn’t tell us here how it happens, but he tells us here how it doesn’t: it doesn’t happen because you become a very, very good person.

D. The Purpose of the Law – “knowledge of sin”
Through the law, we become conscious of sin as to its nature, what it really is: the transgression of God’s righteous standard. The law makes us aware of the fact that we have transgressed. But it provides no elixir to cure the condition; it only diagnoses the problem in the first place.

Paul does us a great service here in holding up a mirror to our lives. He treats us with dignity, the dignity of people created in the image of God. He doesn’t suggest that we are victims who ought to look for scapegoats to blame and excuses to make; instead, he says that we are to blame, that we’ve made willful choices as free moral agents, that we’ve chosen to do the wrong thing over and over again.

But he doesn’t stop there. This is the end of the bad news before the coming of the good news, for Paul has already hinted at what is to come: we can stand before that same holy God as though we had never once committed a sin in our lives, that we can live…free!

Taking it Home
• Look at Romans 9:4-5. Besides having received the law of God, what are some of the other advantages that the Jews had as God’s covenant people? Does it make sense that they might assume that God would not hold them accountable on the basis of God’s promises?

• Galatians 3:21-22 talks about the purpose of the law of Moses. What are some of the things we find in that passage that Paul says are true of the law?

• Does Paul’s list seem excessively harsh in :9-18? Why or why not?

• John Stott says that this list, in :9-18, teaches us three things about sin:
o Its ungodliness
o Its pervasiveness
o Its universality
What does he mean by each of these?

• How is it true that “through the Law comes the knowledge of sin?

• Paul introduces the term “justified” in :20. What do you understand that word to mean?