Romans 3:9-20 – Romans

Reading is Romans chapter three, verses nine through twenty.

What then are we Jews any better off?

No, not at all.

For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin, as it is written.

None is righteous, no not one.

No one understands, no one seeks for God.

All have turned aside.

Together they have become worthless.

No one does good, not even one.

Their throat is an open grave.

They use their tongues to deceive.

The venom of asp is under their lips, their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.

Their feet are swift to shed blood, and their paths are ruin and misery, and the way of peace they have not known.

There is no fear of God before their eyes.

Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God.

For by works of the law, no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes a knowledge of sin.

And so reads God's Word.

Mark is off preaching at a different church this morning.

He's preaching at our daughter church in Redeemer, filling in for Duncan.

And so when Peter said City Church is on tour, it starts even this week.

So here we go.

But if you've got that passage that Jared just read, by the way, Jared uh and I are both American, both have ginger beards and are both smashingly handsome, but we are not brothers.

Jared read that.

So if you can have that open in front of you, uh either in a paper Bible, there's more down here if you want to grab one, um, or on an app or on the phone or whatever like that, uh, we'll be reading from the English Standard Version right here.

So Romans chapter 3, we'll be starting with verse 9, going all the way through to verse 20.

Romans 3 · chapter mention

All right.

Straight up.

Here we go.

But I have a question as we start, something for us to think about here.

Uh it seems appropriate because we are in a cinema and we are in a movie screen here.

So my question for you is this Have you ever watched a trailer for a movie?

Watched a trailer, watched previews for a film, and then gone and actually watched that film and felt like I didn't really get the whole picture, or I didn't really know what I was getting into when I saw that preview.

I think about um the movie Drive with Ryan Gosling.

I don't know if you've seen this movie.

It's from about, you know, 12, 13 years ago.

But uh if you watch the trailers for it, if you watch the previews, it looks like a really fun, kind of high-energy car chase movie, you know, a lot of fun, a lot of cool, really stuff going on with it, stunts and whatever.

But if you actually sat down and watched it, you'd find it was it was this really kind of moody, kind of sullen, slow-paced drama where nobody ever smiles and you know, everybody just kind of goes about this daze that they're going on.

Not nearly the same, right?

Or how about, you know, one of my personal favorites there, the uh Will Smith movie, The Pursuit of Happiness.

You remember this happiness with a Y in it, because they spelled it wrong?

Um it was described and it was it was pitched as this triumphant feel-good movie, right?

That we have this beautiful thing.

I read a review shortly after the movie came out, and it it summed it up well.

It says, the only way that this is a feel-good movie is if you skip most of it and come in about 10 minutes before the end.

Okay.

So we we have these experiences with the world of cinema, of course, but maybe you feel that that's where we are with the book of Romans, right?

We had the Apostle Paul going way back to chapter one, you know, several weeks ago when we started this, he keeps talking about the gospel.

Right?

Gospel means good news, right?

And and in in chapter one, he talks about verse one, the gospel of God.

Verse nine, the gospel of his son.

He says that he's eager to preach the gospel.

And he says that he's not ashamed of the gospel.

So this is this is shaping up really well.

This is gonna be a book all about this good news.

But about halfway through chapter one, about 17 verses into the mix here, we start into this long dissertation that is basically a collection of all kinds of bad news.

Right?

So we have 17 verses proclaiming good news, followed by now 64 verses of bad news.

So, what we've been trying to do in all of this is try to get a handle on the question: who is able to stand before a holy and perfect God?

Let's review it.

Let's go back through all of the stuff that we've seen so far.

Because the second half of chapter one looked at what we might call the immoral person.

Okay?

This is someone who is kind of fundamentally against God's rule in their life, you know, vehemently opposed to it.

It says that they've exchanged the truth for a lie, says that they've exchanged what's natural for what's unnatural, it says that they've exchanged worship of the Creator for worship of created things.

And the ruling, what's our ruling on this person?

Perhaps no surprise.

They're under sin and they're subject to God's wrath.

So, I mean, maybe that's maybe that's understandable, it all makes sense.

So we bring in another contestant, another player comes onto the field here, and we see the beginning of chapter two, we have maybe the moral person.

Maybe someone who followed this Roman philosophy of stoicism, right?

Live with generosity, not just thinking about yourself, adhere to a strict ethical and moral code.

But we saw in chapter two, even though there's all of this good behavior on the outside, God looks to the secrets of our heart.

And so what's the ruling on this person?

Well, hmm.

Again, under sin, subject to God's wrath.

Well, that might have come as something of a surprise to the first readers of this book, but there's still one more contestant to enter the arena, the second half of chapter two.

We have now a member of God's covenant community, member of his chosen people, someone who knows the law, someone who studies the Old Testament scriptures, goes to synagogue, someone who's been circumcised, gone through all of the stuff.

But even though they know God's law, Paul writes, they can't keep it either.

So we see the same ruling for the Jewish person under sin, subject to God's wrath.

Now, remember, Paul's writing this letter to a church that he doesn't know.

This is not people that he's familiar with, but he's had enough interactions with people, he's had enough time sharing the gospel, particularly with Jewish folks, that he knows that this is gonna shake people up.

This is gonna be something that surprises them.

So it's almost like at the end of chapter two, he almost calls like a timeout, right?

There's a play stoppage.

We're gonna review the rules, gonna look at the tape, we're gonna see what's going on here, bring everybody on up to speed.

So last week, Mark was looking at a series of these kind of implied questions.

And these implied questions that the Jewish readers of this book would have had, and not just that Paul was having some kind of straw man argument with himself, these are probably questions that he got everywhere he went, every time he was engaging with Jewish people who were engaging with the gospel.

And so the conclusion last week was that, yeah, while the Jews have an advantage in terms of knowing about God, it still doesn't undo this universal problem of sin.

There's no kind of get out of jail free card just because you belong to the nation of Israel.

And that brings us to where we are today.

Okay.

So before we get into today's passage, which I'll spoil it a little bit for you, this is the last of the bad news.

We've had five weeks in a row looking at the bad news that Paul has for us in this.

This is the last one.

We're gonna get into some good news next week.

Spoiler alert, okay?

But the question we have to ask ourselves, the question we have to look at uh to figure out how to engage with this.

You know, I think it would be real easy for us to just kind of skim through this, you know, read it with one eye closed, okay.

We've seen all this bad news.

Let's leave it.

Let's let's let's let's move on to something a little bit more upbeat.

But I'd encourage us all to do what we can to engage with the bad news.

I mean, obviously, it's it's part of God's word, so it's important, it's there for a reason.

But I think that reason is to get us primed, to get us ready for the grace that's gonna be coming starting next week.

Spoiler alert.

Okay.

This section of the letter is kind of like a group photo that shows all of humanity.

If you're ever in a group photo, what do you do when you see it when you see that group photo?

The first thing you do is you look for yourself.

Right?

So let's do that.

Let's let these these five uh passages that we've done over the last five weeks be that group photo.

Let's look carefully at these examples that Paul has trotted out for us.

Where do we see ourselves?

What can we identify from our own experience?

Because I have to think, if we're honest with ourselves, if we're really engaging with it, we're gonna see a lot that we recognize.

Do I sometimes live like God isn't there?

Yeah.

Do I sometimes deny the truth?

Do I sometimes value created things more than the creator?

Yeah.

Every time I sin, that's what I'm doing, that's what I'm living out.

Do I sometimes sin in judgment of others smug in my own moral superiority?

Yeah.

Do I sometimes feel like, oh, of course God chose me?

Why wouldn't he?

Where do you see yourself?

Where do you see yourself in this group photo?

We should really come through these chapters.

This is basically two solid chapters from the middle of chapter one to the middle of chapter three.

We should come through these seeing that each and every possible argument has failed.

It's been deconstructed before our eyes.

This doesn't work.

This doesn't work.

This isn't gonna make us right with God.

We should be leaning in.

We should be waiting for the other shoe to drop, okay?

If none of this stuff works, if none of this is gonna get us right with God, what will?

So as we come to today's passage, yeah, it's more bad news, but remember what we're here for.

Let's see how Paul wraps up this whole section of bad news before moving along to, spoiler alert, good news next week.

Okay?

Stay with me.

All right.

Our first point, we're looking at a final verdict, a final assessment that Paul is giving here.

And it's not going to come as a surprise if you've been paying attention.

All of us are under sin and subject to God's wrath.

You can see this in verse 9.

It says that we've already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin.

Inside the nation of Israel, outside of the nation of Israel, doesn't matter.

All are under sin.

He's really finishing up his answer from the prior passage, really, from last week's, to the question of what advantage the Jews might have.

Now, don't be thrown off because here he says, you know, are Jews any better?

He says, no, not at all.

And that might seem to contradict what he says just seven verses further up there, where he says that the Jews have an advantage that's much in every way.

I guess it just means it depends on what you mean by advantage.

Best way I can break it down is to think of the old expression, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

Think about that horse.

Think about a horse that's been led to water.

Does the horse who's been led to water have an advantage over, say, a horse that's stuck out in the middle of the desert, the desert somewhere?

Of course he does.

Of course he does.

He knows right where that water is.

Right?

He knows that all he's got to do is put his head down, put his lips to the water, and drink it down.

But is that actually an advantage if the horse never actually takes a drink?

Not really.

I mean, the horse might be miles closer to water than one that's off someplace in the wilderness.

But if he refuses to drink that water, he's not going to have any better solution to the thirst that he has.

It's the same thing to the Jews that Paul's addressing in this letter here.

So all that exposure to the revealed truth about God is a great advantage.

They knew who God is, they know what he's like, they know what he expects.

But if that doesn't drive them to life-changing faith, then they're no better off than a non-Jew who's never heard of the Bible.

The message is like this: if you're looking for your ethnicity to exempt you from accountability, then you've got it wrong.

You're missing the point.

Last week Mark drew the connection, uh, the parallel for us, because I don't know that many of us are from the nation of Israel, are from that ethnicity there.

But he drew the parallel of, you know, is there an advantage to being born into a Christian family?

And the answer is, yeah, of course there is.

You start off life knowing who Jesus is, maybe going to church and being part of the community and the family of faith.

But in the same way, if a child of believing parents is looking to their heritage or their lineage to make them right with God, it's just, it's just not going to work.

And in that same way, the advantage is no advantage at all.

So we all have to consider here whatever our age, whatever our lineage, whatever our ethnicity, am I relying on something apart from faith in the risen Lord Jesus to make me right with God?

Our standing before the Lord is not based on whether we've been baptized, whether we're church members, whether we're from a religious background or not.

Any of those things can be very good things for us.

But if it's not, uh it's not going to replace that living, growing personal faith and walk with Jesus.

So, yeah, all of humanity stands guilty before a holy God.

No surprises there.

That's our first point.

All walks of life are under sin, subject to God's wrath.

For our second section here, Paul brings in the Old Testament record.

Now, why does he do this?

We've got all of these quotations, and they're from the Psalms, and I think Isaiah is in there.

I think there's a couple of reasons.

I think he's still kind of got his eye on the on the Jewish reader who's reading this, who would have known these readings, would have known these truths.

He's saying, hey, even your own scriptures, your own texts are testifying against you.

But I don't think it's only for the Jew.

I think he's also bringing the Gentiles into this discussion as well.

I think he wants everyone to see this isn't some new thing that he's just kind of making up on the fly.

This isn't an innovation that's brought on, you know, by this new group of Christians here.

This is something that goes all the way back to the fall of man.

This is something that's always been the way it was.

People have always been unable to please God in themselves.

And we'll see this in a few different ways.

So have that open in front of you because there's some great stuff in here.

Our first subpoint, there'll be four, is that the thoughts and intentions of our hearts condemn us.

When I say condemn us, I mean they they testify against us.

They point us to the fact that we're not living up to God's standards.

Take a look at verse 10.

Verse 10 says, None is righteous, not one.

Verse 11 says, No one understands, no one seeks for God.

Verse 12 says, All have turned aside.

Remember the song we just sang, right?

No one is good, not even one.

The uh worship team, we're gonna very helpfully leave out the good part of the of the chorus there and just have it say, you know, no one is good, not even one.

But of course we know there's more to it there that God can make us daughters and God can make us sons, which we'll see starting next week.

Spoiler alert.

But right down to the core of us, right down to who we are, the very identity level, we're against God.

This is in places that people can't see about us.

People, it's not visible outside of ourselves.

Paul will call this the inner being when we get up to chapter 7.

But this is where all of our sinful choices originate.

You can see this all the way back in the Garden of Eden.

You had the first couple, you had Adam and Eve, and before they ever took a bite of that forbidden fruit, it started in their hearts, started in their thinking.

You know, they were starting to doubt what God had told them.

They were starting to look for something better than what God had offered them.

And then, of course, that manifested itself in behavior.

But all of sin starts in our hearts, in our minds, in places that no one can see.

All of our sins do this, and so that's our first little sub-point there that our our thoughts and the intentions of our heart speak against us here.

Second, we see Paul move into stuff that's visible, or maybe we should say audible, because you can see imagery in verses 13 and 14 that look at all these different parts of the body that are involved in speech, right?

We've got the throat and the tongue and the lips and the mouth.

So the second subpoint here is that our words condemn us.

We know this about ourselves.

We don't have any questions.

Do we speak words that cut each other down sometimes?

Yeah.

Do we speak words to each other?

Do we speak words about each other that are harmful?

One of the sad truths of the human experience, maybe you maybe you've experienced this yourself, I'm sure you have.

Our words are most likely to cause harm, most likely to cause hurt to those that we love the most.

Those that are closest to us, those who have the most time invested in the relationships with us.

And we are most hurt by words that come from people who are closest to us.

It's an ugly truth.

It's one we we wish weren't true, we wish we always said the right things.

I love it when I say the right thing, but there's so often that I don't, right?

And if you don't believe me, ask Doreen.

Our words condemn us.

Third, third subpoint there, 15 to 17, we see some violent imagery.

Shedding blood, bringing ruin and misery, forsaking the way of peace.

This is speaking into behaviors, actions.

Now, you might look at this and say, well, this isn't me.

This, I'm not a violent person, I've never shed anyone's blood, you know, I've never done any of this stuff, but that doesn't really undo what these verses are telling us here.

I mean, we could look at, we could look at Jesus' words in the Sermon on the Mount, right?

In Matthew chapter 5, Jesus is preaching and he's talking about the commandment not to commit murder.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

And he says, Well, you feel good because you haven't committed murder, but murder is deeper than you think it is.

He says, if you hate someone, if you wish they were dead, you know, if you if you harbor hostility or fantasize about their demise at a heart level, that's the same as sticking a knife in them.

And even without this, in our modern world, we might not club people over the head or stick them with blades.

But do we find ways to cut each other down, to assassinate character, make people look bad, bring people down so that we can make ourselves look better?

Think about maybe in the workplace.

But can you think about relationships that are ruined and miserable?

Like it talks about in verse 16 there?

Can you think about times in verse 17, like where you chose escalation instead of peace and reconciliation?

I can.

So our actions condemn us.

Fourthly, and finally, in this little section here, we see that there is no fear of God in their eyes.

That's verse 18.

And this just points us to a broken value system, one where we just we just kind of don't care what God says.

I I don't wanna I don't wanna give us a wrong idea of who God is in this.

When we think about the fear of God, that can seem like some terrible thing, like God is this sky tyrant who sits on his throne on high and just wants to instill fear and terror and and panic.

In everyone's heart.

That's not the God of the Bible, right?

Even just a chapter ago, we were reading that it is God's kindness that brings us to repentance.

Right?

And we can see all through scripture references to God being merciful, merciful, and gracious, and you know, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love.

It's not that God is sitting up on his throne just wanting everyone to be an abject fright.

But what this verse is pointing us to is a value system where people do whatever they want and give no thought to there being consequences, no thought to there being judgment.

It kind of points us back to the end of chapter one with the immoral person there.

So here we see that our drives and our value system also condemns us.

So let's review this whole point here.

Our thoughts, our intentions, our words, our actions, our drives, and our values all testify against us.

They all demonstrate that we're unable to meet God's perfect standard.

They condemn us, and this is hard to swallow.

I was talking to someone this week who said that before she came to faith, she used to get offended when someone would say, Oh yeah, Jesus died so you could be forgiven.

She's like, forgiven for what?

I never did anything.

But the more we dig into this, we see that there is a deep truth.

None of us is meeting the standard.

What other people see condemns us.

What other people can't see condemns us.

We can look at it even in terms of relationships.

We can split it up a different way if we want.

And we can say that the first and the last subpoint are about our relationship with God.

Right?

How do we relate to God?

We don't seek Him, we don't fear Him, we don't please Him.

And the ones in the middle are all about how we relate to one another, how we speak to one another, how we treat one another.

It's almost like because we're not right with God in this vertical axis that we're also not right on this horizontal axis.

So all of it points to all of our experiences and all of ourselves, and it's gone back all the way to the Old Testament, all the way to Paul's time, and continues to today.

If we think we've never done anything wrong, it's because we don't have the right view of God's righteousness, his holiness.

It's very human.

I do this, you know.

It's very human to talk about all the things that I never did.

Well, I never I never stole anything, I never killed anybody, you know.

Look how great I am.

And if there's stuff over here that, yeah, I do this stuff, but everybody does that.

Or it's understandable why I do this, right?

We do this, we rationalize, we minimize.

And this can work when we're when we're comparing ourselves to each other, to people that we see, that we know, but it can't work when we when we apply them to God's standards.

So what do we do, right?

What do we do when we've seen all this all this crushing weight of bad news?

How can we apply these verses?

And I think the best way that we can apply them is like I was saying at the beginning, this is a group photo, right?

Where do you see yourself in it?

And we can take these things on board as making Paul's point, right?

And just finishing up his argument here that all are under sin and all are subject to God's wrath.

Still with me?

Pretty heavy, right?

But we're gonna get to we're gonna get to some good stuff, and I promise not to leave you on a low note.

So, the final couple verses in our passage look at the law.

So, Paul was talking about the law back in chapter two, and then he kind of got off on a sidetrack to talk about the Jews and what advantages they did or did not have.

But essentially the discussion back in chapter two was looking at the Jews who have the law, the Gentiles who don't have the law.

And his point there is that it's not a question of who did or didn't receive the law, it's who actually follows the law, who actually obeys the law.

And of course, as we've seen, none of us really can do it perfectly.

But that brings up a question for us, and we have to be, we have to be wondering here as we come to verses 19 and 20, what then is the point of the law?

Right?

Why is it there?

We might not like the answers that we see first here.

Look at this.

It says verse 19, the law is there so that every mouth may be stopped.

Ooh, that means I won't have any way to talk my way out of the fact that I'm a lawbreaker and I'm not right with God.

Won't have any arguments left to make.

Paul has gone through, you know, 64 verses here of arguments to be made and put them all down one by one.

Right, the law speaks clearly.

Uh, it makes us all accountable to God.

We can see in verse 20 it says that no one is able to be justified by following the law.

Wow.

So we've got this law that can't even justify us.

But if we go on to the last phrase in our passage here, there's a little bit of hope here.

Let's take a look at it.

At the end of verse 20, it says, Through the law comes the knowledge of sin.

And this one phrase suddenly reframes everything, the last five weeks' worth of passages that we've been looking at here.

Suddenly, this whole discussion is no longer about my good works, about my following the rules, about my doing good stuff, my my pedigree, my religious identity, my ethnicity, any of these things.

It's not about any of that.

The law isn't there to make me a good person.

It's not there to make me a good enough person, certainly not able to make me a person right in God's sight.

The law doesn't do that.

The law can't do that.

No one is going to be able to stand before God and point to their adherence to the law as justification for their life.

But using the law to know that I'm not making it, there's something we haven't thought about in these chapters.

So, the best way that I can think of to look at this is the law is like an indicator light.

It's like a warning light on the dashboard of your car.

If I'm driving my car and all of a sudden the Czech engine light comes up, that tells me that there's something wrong.

That doesn't fix the problem, but it tells me that there is a problem.

Solving it is a matter of I gotta take it to a mechanic and a garage and get it sorted out there, or fumble my way through trying to fix it myself.

If we look at what's required in the law and compare it to what we can do, that is a big-time warning light in our own lives.

We can see there's a mismatch, there's a problem.

But the law was never meant to be the solution to that problem.

It's never meant to fix that problem.

The law, for all of its good moral lessons, can't make us moral.

So we can stop trying to justify ourselves by how well we keep the law.

It's never going to be enough when we're talking about a holy and perfect God.

But if the warning light drives us to look for a different solution, well, maybe there's some good news coming up in this letter after all.

Back to the beginning of verse 20.

Just for a second, it says, For by the works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight.

This is really a summary of the whole section that we've been on here, these five weeks of bad news sermons.

You might be thinking, gosh, Paul, you could have led with that, could have saved us a lot of time, could have saved us a lot of uh wading through all of these bad news sermons.

But really, we've looked high, we've looked low, we've dug through the Bible record, we've examined everything in great detail.

This key verse here, it's not so much giving us something new to think about as it is pulling everything together.

Paul has been, you know, if this were a maths exam, Paul's been showing his work.

And now we get to the conclusion here.

And that's where we end the passage, right?

That's where it ends.

In fact, this whole section of bad news is done after this week.

Like I said, the point of working through all of this business is, you know, we're all under sin, subject to God's wrath.

And the idea is that we are to be utterly convinced of our own inability to solve this.

We're meant to be so undeniably aware of the great problem of our sin.

And we're supposed to be so ready, so desperate to hear what this solution will be.

If we can't overcome our sin by being good, by following the law, by doing the right things, by even being one of God's chosen people, how can we?

Where is this alleged good news we keep hearing about?

Well, I shouldn't do this, but I'm gonna do it anyway.

I shouldn't spoil what's coming.

But if I just give you a taste, then it's not a spoiler as much as it is a teaser, teaser trailer, right?

So we're gonna give you a teaser for next week.

If Mark, if Mark asks, this is this I didn't spoil anything, all right?

Look at verse 21.

Just check that out.

Have that in front of you here.

It says, but now, the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law.

Read it again.

But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law.

Think about that.

Apart from the law, apart from this law that wasn't able to justify us, apart from the law, God's righteousness.

In other words, we've spent two solid chapters looking at how none of us can be righteous enough by following the law.

But, and the but is such a great word to have in this part of the book here.

But now the righteousness of God, apart from the law, has come.

Guys, don't miss next week.

Okay, don't miss next week.

We're gonna start to see how all of this pays off and how all of this works out in our lives, because we're gonna start to see what's been promised from the beginning of this letter, the gospel.