Rom 3.1-20

Our Faithful God

Romans 3.1-20

Jason Procopio

We have a lot to see today, so we’re going to jump right in. Today’s text is extremely difficult, so I’m going to go ahead and spoil it for you now: this text is the culmination of everything we’ve seen these last few weeks, everything Paul has said since chapter 1 verse 18, all the way through the first half of chapter 3.

And we could summarize everything he’s said in one (admittedly compound) sentence: we have all sinned; we all deserve God’s wrath; and our faithful God is faithful and just to pour out his wrath on sin.

When we use that word “sin,” we’re talking about our innate instinct to rebel against God—our tendency to want to be our own masters, or as Paul put it, to worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator. Because of our sin, we deserve God’s judgment.

And right there, not even a minute into this message, I know I’ve lost some of you. But the faithfulness of God to punish all sin, to execute his judgment against sinful men and women, is a very good thing.

There are a lot of reasons why it’s a good thing. It’s a good thing because it’s just. It’s a good thing because we can have the assurance that justice will be done. It’s a good thing because it gives us an idea of what God is like, if he hates sin that much.

But here’s the biggest reason why his faithfulness to punish sin is a good thing—or at any rate, it’s the reason that reassures me the most. God is not unpredictable. God is not an abusive father, and his children are not abused kids, who never know if God is going to hug them or hit them.

God is predictable. He has told us exactly how he will comport himself, and he will not waver from what he said. He will not pour out wrath unjustly, and he will not judge us unexpectedly.

That’s where we’re going today, but before we start, let’s remember where we were last week, at the end of chapter 2.

Paul is addressing the possible hypocrisy of Jewish Christians who may be judging their Gentile brothers and sisters. The Jews, as we saw last week, were God’s chosen people, to whom he had given his law through Moses, as a way of demarcating them from the surrounding pagan nations. But now that these Jews in Rome have become Christians, the temptation to lord their place as Jews over the Gentile Christians in the church would have inevitably presented itself.

So Paul brings them back to basics, telling them that even though they judge their Gentile brothers and sisters, they are no better. They prided themselves in external signs that they belonged to God’s people (like circumcision), but if they disobeyed the law, those external signs meant nothing.

God's Faithless People (v. 1-8)

At this point, Paul anticipates a question from the Jews—he does that a lot in this letter, and in this text. It’s an understandable question. Romans 3.1-2:

Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision? 2 Much in every way. To begin with, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God.

We can see why he anticipated that question. Given everything he said at the end of chapter 2, it could seem that in a handful of sentences, Paul has taken the entire Torah, all the Law of Moses, and thrown it out the window, dismissed it as useless.

But, Paul insists, that’s not what he’s doing. He reassures his Jewish readers that there is value in being a Jew, there is value in circumcision.

The main value in growing up as they had, in having received this immense religious heritage, is that God has clearly spoken to them. “The Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God,” he says.

So many people long for a sign—some indication that a higher power is out there, that all of this is happening for a reason. The Jews had that. God spoke to them, clearly. He gave them the Law. He revealed his character to them. They knew what they were supposed to do. That is a beautiful gift.

The Law revealed God’s character to the people, and they were meant to reflect his character. It was this character that was to make them distinct from other nations, so that the nations would look at them and see how good God is, and desire to come to him. The Jews were entrusted with God’s Law, so that through their character, they might be a light to the rest of the world.

But instead they used God’s Law as a riot shield. They used it to push people away rather than bring people in. Instead of the humble confidence that revelation should have produced, their privilege came out in pride. Rather than realizing that they needed God, and that they HAD him, they judged others who didn’t have this same clear revelation from God.

In other words, their privilege had made them lazy. They had become so confident in their position that they began to neglect the holiness that this position should have produced in them.

And on top of that, since they had left the heart of the law behind, they had sometimes begun to adopt a twisted sort of logic. Paul shows us this logic through several hypothetical questions he asks. V. 3:

3 What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? 4 By no means! Let God be true though every one were a liar, as it is written,

“That you may be justified in your words,

and prevail when you are judged.”

5 But if our unrighteousness serves to show the righteousness of God, what shall we say? That God is unrighteous to inflict wrath on us? (I speak in a human way.) 6 By no means! For then how could God judge the world? 7 But if through my lie God’s truth abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner? 8 And why not do evil that good may come?—as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just.

We need to say right away that this passage is confusing. So if you were confused, don’t feel bad. Many commentators have noted that the beginning of chapter 3 is one of the most difficult passages in all of Romans.

It’s difficult because it’s hard to follow Paul’s train of thought. It’s like he’s hopping from one subject to another, giving a list of FAQs. And that is essentially what he’s doing. He’s starting to anticipate questions he’ll fully answer later on in the letter (particularly in chapter 6).

He uses these hypothetical questions to highlight the twisted logic God’s people have adopted. We might think he’s exaggerating to get his point across, but how often have we ourselves asked exactly these kinds of questions?

For example, we believe in God’s sovereignty over all things. So we say things like, “God uses everything—including our sin—for my good and for his glory.” That is true—we’ll get to that in Romans 8.

But here’s where we’re twisted: the next time we’re tempted to sin, what do we think? No, I shouldn’t do this…but God promised to work everything together for my good, didn’t he? So won’t he work out THIS sin that I’m about to commit for my good too?

We end up in a place where we say, “Okay… The cross of Jesus Christ shows God’s grace and righteousness. But my sin brought Christ to the cross… So from a certain point of view, my sin shows God’s grace and righteousness… So if my sin shows God’s grace and righteousness, shouldn’t I keep on doing it?”

This is the problem of the Jews that Paul has just spent a chapter and a half highlighting. They trusted in their statutes and their laws to save them, even though they couldn’t keep them; and they ignored the holiness that their laws were meant to produce, going so far as to find excuses to tell themselves that really, they’re not so bad.

So at this point, those of us who aren’t Jewish, we could begin to look down on the Jews here, and find them very lost indeed (the way we sometimes feel about the Pharisees in the gospels). But Paul won’t let us do that.

All Faithless People (v. 9-20)

If we think back to the beginning of this big section, at the end of chapter 1, Paul put his finger on humanity’s problem by speaking about our innate instinct to rebel against our Creator. Then in chapter 2, he focuses in a particular way on the Jews, to show that even though they are God’s chosen people, they have also rebelled against their God.

And now, Paul loops back around, and widens his scope once again. He goes back to the Old Testament, to show the Jews that the problem he highlighted in humanity as a whole, and the problem he highlighted in the Jews, are actually one and the same problem.

V. 9:

9 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, 10 as it is written:

“None is righteous, no, not one;

11  no one understands;

no one seeks for God.

12  All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;

no one does good,

not even one.”

13  “Their throat is an open grave;

they use their tongues to deceive.”

“The venom of asps is under their lips.”

14  “Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.”

15  “Their feet are swift to shed blood;

16  in their paths are ruin and misery,

17  and the way of peace they have not known.”

18  “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

Your Bible probably has v. 10-18 in quotes, or in italics. That’s because in these verses he’s quoting the Old Testament. But if you look at the notes in your Bibles, you’ll see that he’s not quoting one passage, but several. He’s giving us a mashup of several different passages that all say the same thing.

He gives this long list of graphic images—“their throat is an open grave, the venom of asps is on their lips, feet swift to shed blood”—that all say the same thing: NO ONE IS RIGHTEOUS.

That’s his point. That’s the point of the entire beginning of this letter. And in v. 19-20, he gives a kind of summary statement of everything he’s said, so that everyone—Jews and Gentiles alike—will be on the same page.

V. 19:

19 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. 20 For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

This is brilliant, but it’s tricky, so we’ll take it slowly. In these verses, Paul underlines three points that prepare the terrain for the good news he’ll begin to explain in v. 21 (which we’ll see next week).

The first point is that no one will be saved by the law.

This might catch us off guard, because Paul said in 2.13 that “the doers of the law will be justified” (that is, those who obey the law will be declared righteous before God). But here, he says that by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight. You see the problem: if the doers of the law will be justified, how is it that no human being will be justified in God’s sight by works of the law?

The answer is that there are no real “doers of the law”, other than Jesus Christ himself. Some do better than others, but no one gets it right all the time. So you’re not going to strengthen your case by trusting in your obedience to save you—your obedience to the law won’t save you, because your obedience is always partial and imperfect.

We’ll get into this a lot more in chapter 7 (and Paul will be a good deal more nuanced there): he’s going to take care to say that the law is a very good thing. But, as Thomas Schreiner puts it, when God gave the law, sinful human beings pulled it into the orbit of their sin: they took this good thing, and couldn’t view it properly. Their sin made them unable and unwilling to let the law guide and shape them, like a teenager who stays up all night playing video games, so can’t stay awake to listen in class.

The law cannot save us, because we have been corrupted by sin and are unable to follow it. But if that’s what the law can’t do, what can it do?

Paul’s answer is the second point: the law gives you knowledge of sin. Doug Moo writes: “[The] law gives to people an understanding of ‘sin’ (singular) as a power that holds everyone in bondage and brings guilt and condemnation. The law presents people with the demand of God. In our constant failure to attain the goal of that demand, we recognize ourselves to be sinners and justly condemned for our failures.”

This might seem complex, but really it’s not; a toddler can understand Paul’s logic. When our kids were little, I can’t count the number of times we had conversations like this:

“What did Daddy say?”

“Not to do draw on the walls.”

“And what did you do?”

“I drew on the wall.”

“So what do you deserve?”

“Consequences.”

That’s what he’s saying. The law told the Jews what they should do. It was all written out clearly for them, in black and white.

“What did God tell you to do?”

“To follow these laws.”

“And what did you do?”

“I didn’t follow these laws.”

“So what do you deserve?”

“Consequences.”

That’s what he’s talking about: the law can’t save you, because you can’t follow it. The law shows you all the various ways you have failed in your obedience.

So of course the final question is, what does this mean?

It means that everyone has missed the mark. (That’s the third point of his summary.)

Paul says in v. 19 that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law (v. 19)—that’s the Jews, who received the Law of Moses. It sounds like an odd thing to say, but he says it to set up a contrast, between the Jews, who had the Law, and the Gentiles, who didn’t.

In chapter 2, verse 15, Paul talked about Gentiles who occasionally do what the law requires, even though they haven’t received the law. He was talking about our conscience—the image of God reflected in our hearts, which through God’s common grace sometimes pushes us to do the right thing. How many people here have perfectly obeyed their conscience at absolutely every moment of their lives? Me neither.

The Jews have a conscience too, obviously, because they’re human beings like us. But in addition to their conscience, they also received God’s Law—they had a fuller picture of who God is and what he requires. And they will be judged by that standard, the standard they received from God.

So here is the big question—what is Paul talking about in v. 19? How could the Law, which was given only to the Jews, be a reason why every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world (Jews and Gentiles) held accountable to God?

The answer is deceptively simple.

Say you have two people in two separate cars, and they are both told to travel from Paris to a tiny village three hundred kilometers away. It’s during the strike, and gas stations are out of gas. Both of these people have just enough gas in the tank to get there, but the only way they can make it without running out of gas is to do it perfectly—no pit stops, no wrong turns.

One of these people has no detailed idea of where the village is, only that it’s somewhere east. So he drives to the east, but because he doesn’t have a map, he’ll run out of gas way off the mark.

The other person has a map—not a smartphone, not a GPS, but a paper map. And this person isn’t particularly good at reading maps. Some of us remember what life was like before smartphones; what happened every time? You’d take at least one or two wrong turns before making it. So this person will also run out of gas before he gets to the village. He won’t make it all the way there.

He’ll get a lot closer to the tiny village than the person who had a quarter tank of gas, but no map…but in the end, the result is the same. Neither of them will make it.

That is what Paul is saying here. If the Jews had God’s law, which clearly told them what they had to do in order to be declared righteous by God, and they still couldn’t do it, how much farther from God’s perfect standard must the Gentiles be, since they didn’t have the law?

We are all guilty, Gentile and Jew alike; we all deserve condemnation.

Paul didn’t need to go this far—I think his point was already pretty clear back in v. 10. But he wants to eliminate the tiniest bit of wiggle room; he wants to make it impossible to argue our way out of this inevitable conclusion: we are ALL faithless people.

Our Faithful God (v. 3-4)

This is the bad news we need to see before we get to the good news in the last half of this chapter. Every single human being who ever lived, Jew and Gentile, is guilty before God, because we did not achieve the high standards of holiness God requires, and we deserve his punishment because of it.

But we’re not done yet.

We need to go backwards a bit, to fully see the contrast Paul is setting up here: while we are unfaithful and inconsistent, God is faithful. V. 3 again:

3 What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? 4 By no means! Let God be true though every one were a liar, as it is written,

“That you may be justified in your words,

and prevail when you are judged.” 

I called this message, and this last point, “Our Faithful God.” When we hear the Bible say that God is “faithful”, we almost automatically imagine that it is talking about God’s faithfulness to save. That’s true…but that’s not all. That’s not even what this text is mainly getting at.

When Paul says, that the faithlessness of man won’t nullify God’s faithfulness, he’s making the point that God is consistent—God will always do what is in line with his character, and he will always do what is in line with his promises. He promises to do what is right, and he always does what he says.

So when we hear that God is faithful, we have to understand that this means he’s not only faithful to save, but also to punish sin.

It’s very difficult for us to see this as good news. We don’t like the idea of God’s wrath against sin, because it doesn’t seem to match with his love. We don’t like the idea of God’s justice against sin (at least not our sin), because it doesn’t seem to match with his mercy.

So because we have a hard time with this idea, we just ignore it. We focus on what makes us feel better.

And over time, if we’re not careful, at least in some areas of our lives, we begin living like what J.T. English calls “functional atheists”, because we don’t really believe that God is who he says he is. If we believed God is who he says he is—that he hates sin and is just to punish it—we’d stop sinning. We’d stop lusting. We’d stop slandering. We’d react to sin in our own lives the same way a germaphobe reacts to getting coughed on: we’d recoil at the very idea of it, because we’d be acutely aware of how hot God’s anger burns against all sin.

This is the struggle of the Christian life: to live less and less like atheists, and more and more like people who truly believe everything God says about himself.

This means that there is a tension that God calls us to maintain in our Christian life. We don’t want to live constantly terrified of God’s wrath, because he has promised that if he has saved us, he will keep us—and he will be faithful to that promise. We can have assurance of our salvation.

At the same time, we are called to not let our assurance lead us into complacency. As Paul said in 2.4-5:

Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? 5 But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.

This is what Paul is trying to help us avoid in these first two and half chapters. He’s getting us ready for what he’ll tell us in next week’s text. He’s helping us to see what we deserve, so that we can marvel at the fact that we’re not getting it. Because the result of such a realization produces gratitude for God’s kindness…which leads us to repentance…which leads us to grow to be like him.

So this text is for all of us today, whether we’re Christians or not.

For those of you here who don’t know Christ, Paul is inviting you to realize the state you are in, and the weight that you are under. God’s anger burns against all sin because he is just, and he will punish all sin, in two possible ways.

The first option is for him to punish you, because you have rejected him.

The second option is for him to punish Christ in your place, if you repent of your sin and trust in him.

I implore you: take the second option. That is why Christ came. He lived the life we should have lived, and he suffered God’s punishment against the sin of all of his people, in their place. If you repent of your sins and place your faith in him, you can know that your sins were punished on the cross with Christ two thousand years ago. So you can be free from them—you can live without fear of condemnation, and with gratitude for the gift you have received, growing in your knowledge of the great God who saved you. (We’ll give you the opportunity to do that in just a moment.)

For those of us who are believers, Paul is inviting us to embrace what God’s faithfulness means across the board—not just his faithfulness to us, but his faithfulness to himself, his faithfulness to who he is as God.

This might mean that some re-evaluation is in order. It is very easy to drift into the mindset Paul has been condemning for three chapters now: presuming on God’s kindness, leading to a hard and impenitent heart.

People often ask the question, “How do I know my faith is real?” The biblical answer to that question is simple: you know your faith is real if it leads you to become more like God.

We need to always live aware of the risk which comes with presuming on God’s kindness. If we presume on his patience with us as a pretext for continuing in sin, we run the risk of one day proving that all the time we looked like Christians on the outside, our hearts were actually hard and impenitent. We run the risk of showing that whatever obedience we had on the outside was not “the obedience of faith” (as Paul put it in 1.5), but simple adherence to a mold into which we easily fit—a way of making ourselves feel better, of smothering our conscience, so that we could sleep at night.

The antidote to such behavior is this realization: we deserve condemnation, we deserve hell, and God isn’t giving it to us. Instead, he gave us his Son, to take our condemnation on himself, that we might share in his reward.

Paul is calling us to remember what we deserve, that we might be amazed at what we received. He is calling us to remain vigilant concerning the sin in our own lives, that we might not presume upon his kindness, but rather grow because we have received it.

So perhaps the proper response to today’s text would simply be a moment of analysis and prayer—a moment where we can sit at our Father’s feet and ask him to show us the areas in our life where we have taken him for granted, and presumed upon his kindness. We need to think about it, and pray about it, and ask God to shake us out of our stupor, to once again be thankful for his grace, and grow through our gratitude.