The Biblical Witness to the Depravity of Man (Rom. 3:9-18)

 

In an essay entitled, “On the Reading of Old Books,” C. S. Lewis argued that we need to read old books, and that for every modern book read we should follow it with an old one.  The reason for this, he said, is that “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.”  He went on to clarify, “Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.”  The point is that when we read old books, we can already see their mistakes, and they can help us to see ours.  This is good and sound advice, I think.

However, I suppose it’s still possible to read an old book that does share many of the same mistaken assumptions as our modern books.  This is not an infallible strategy.  That is, unless you are reading the Bible.  For the Bible does not share any mistaken assumption of any age.  The reason I say this is because it is, as Paul himself just put it, “the oracles of God” (Rom. 3:2).  When we read the Bible, we should say, “Let God be true, but every man a liar” (4).  The Bible is our burning bush.  The words of Scripture are the words of God, so that when the author of Hebrews quotes the psalms, written by King David a thousand years before, he can still say, “The Holy Spirit says.”  

Why do I say that the Bible is God’s word?  Well, that is certainly the Bible’s witness to itself.  As the apostle Peter put it, “the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Pet. 1:21).  “All Scripture is given by inspiration from God” (2 Tim. 3:16).  And I think it is its own best witness.  There is a self-authenticating witness of the Bible to itself, which has been testified to again and again throughout history, as men and women have met God in its pages.  But there is another reason you should accept the Bible as God’s word.  It is because Jesus rose from the dead.  Now if you think that’s a non sequitur, think again.  The resurrection of Jesus from the dead vindicated his claim to be the Son of God.  It did much more than that, of course, but it at least did that.  And as the Son of God, he is able to tell us with certainty what to think about the Scriptures of the OT and NT.  And here is what he said.  He accepted all the OT as the word of God.  He said that the Scriptures could not be broken (Jn. 10:35).  He said that even though heaven and earth passed away, not a jot or tittle of the law of God could pass away (Mt. 5:17-19).  And he gave his apostles authority to give us the NT.  If Jesus is God’s Son, the incarnate Word of God, then the Bible is God’s message, the written word of God.

We need to remind ourselves of these facts because the Biblical witness to human nature is not kind to us.  It cuts across modern assumptions about human nature and it cuts across a lot of old ones too. In every age, people tend to want to think of themselves more highly than they ought to think.  We want to think that no matter how bad we are, we are still good in our hearts.  People really believe this, and you will hear people say, who have made a total mess of their lives, “But God knows my heart.”  Well, yes, he does, I agree with that.  But I can tell you that God doesn’t agree with you that your heart is very good.

How do I know that?  I know it because it is the pervasive testimony of the Bible that man is bad.  It is the testimony of our text, here in Romans 3.

Let’s remember what Paul is doing here.  From chapter 1, verse 18, he has been arguing for our need of the righteousness of God (1:17).  We aren’t righteous; we are ungodly and unrighteous and as a result we are under the wrath of God (18).  Now since we are so apt to dismiss this as true of other people, but not ourselves, the apostle goes on to parade, as it were, the entire human race, Jew and Gentile, before the judgment seat of God.  Gentile society is dealt with first in chapter 1, followed by the self-righteous moralizers, both Jew and Gentile in the first part of chapter 2.  This is followed by Paul’s intense scrutiny of his fellow Jews in the second half of chapter 2.  After answering some objections in 3:1-8, the apostle comes back to the main point, and in the verses before us sums up his argument. 

What we have in these verses is not just directed to Jews or to Gentiles but to the entire human race.  This is the apostle’s bottom line, as it were, of the human condition.  When we step back and look at mankind as a whole, both past and present, this is what you see.  And what you see is this: “There is none righteous, no, not one” (3:10). And we need to take this seriously, because it is only as we take it seriously that we will appreciate the message of the gospel.  People don’t appreciate the message of the gospel because first and foremost they don’t appreciate their need of a Savior, and they don’t appreciate their need of a Savior because they don’t understand just how bad they really are.  These verses are a mirror to help us see that.

How important it is then that we understand the message of these verses.  And in them I see at least three major themes. The first is the universality of sin, the second is the nature of sin, and the third are the effects of sin.  Let’s look at these three things as we consider these verses.

The Universality of Sin

One of the things this passage teaches unmistakably is the universality of sin.  The apostle is saying that there is not a single human being on the planet that is without sin.  He does not limit his argument to age, ethnicity, nationality, or ability.  Note the repetition of this point in verses 9-12: “What then? are we better than they? No, in no wise: for we have before proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin; As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.”  This means that you and I are sinners.  Whatever Paul says here about sinners, it is describing all of us by nature.  You can’t get any more relevant than this.

Now someone may still dispute that Paul is saying this, and here’s the way they might try to do it.  Paul is quoting here in the first verses (10-12) from Psalm 14 and 53.  But in these Psalms a distinction is made between “all the evildoers” (Ps. 14:4) and “the generation of the righteous” (5).  So even in these Psalms, not everyone is viewed as corrupt and evil: there are righteous people.  It seems as if the psalmist is restricting his accusation of not doing good to the enemies of God, not to the people of God.  In other words, the all who are unrighteous are all the enemies of God’s people.

However, there are a couple of things to say to this.  First, David who wrote these Psalms did not see the Israelites, or even himself, as sinless. David is constantly asking God for mercy and forgiveness, and he even acknowledges that he was born a sinner (cf. Ps. 51:5).  So whatever distinction there is between God’s people and the rest of the world, it’s not that one is a sinner and the other isn’t.

Second, Paul doesn’t just draw from Psalm 14 and 53, but also from Psalm 5:9 and 140:3 (verse 13), Psalm 10:7 (verse 14), Isaiah 59:7-8 (verses 15-17), and Psalm 36:1 (verse 18).  It’s not always clear who is being referred to in these passages, but in the Isaiah passage it is clear that the prophet is addressing, not the Gentiles, but Israel.  In other words, Gentiles are sinful (Ps. 14) and Jews are sinful (Isa. 59).  If there are any righteous people, it is therefore not because of what we are by nature but because of the grace of God.  Which means that what Ps. 14 and 53 say about the enemies of God’s people is actually true of God’s people too apart from the intervention of God’ s grace.  Hence the universal language of Psalm 14 is applicable, as Paul clearly understands it, to everyone, no exceptions.

I’m convinced that many in the church don’t understand this.  The way some people talk, you would think that we are all born sinless and pure, and that any sin that we commit is only because we’ve picked up bad habits from those around us.  This idea is what’s behind a lot of this “God knows my heart” talk, as if their heart is good when their fruit is bad.  But that simply doesn’t do justice to what Paul is saying here.  I’ve already said it, but I’ll say it again: Paul is putting no limitations to the universality of sin.  The fact that Paul repeatedly says that there is no one righteous must mean that there is no one righteous.  We are sinful from birth.  It’s not enough to say that we are sinners because we sin.  We must also say that we sin because we are sinners.  And if your doctrine of man doesn’t allow you to say that, you have an unbiblical and defective doctrine of man.

So let this sink in.  As we go on now to consider the nature of sin, we need to remember that this applies to all of us apart from Christ and the remedy that the gospel gives us in him.

The Nature of Sin

There are at least four ways Paul uses these OT Scriptures to develop the doctrine of sin.  He does so in terms of sins bondage, its blindness, its betrayal, and its badness.

The Bondage of Sin

Note how the apostle begins here: “What then? are we better than they? No, in no wise: for we have before proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin” (Rom. 3:9).  Paul begins by saying that though Israel had many advantages like the  written word of God, they are still no better than the Gentiles in terms of sin.  He has already “proved” (a better translation would be “charged”) that all men, Jew or Gentile, “are all under sin.”

The expression the apostle uses here is important.  He doesn’t merely say that humans are “in sin,” though that is true.  He says they are “under sin.”  He uses almost identical language elsewhere, where he talks about being under sin, but ties it to slavery (“sold under sin,” Rom. 7:14) and imprisonment (“imprisoned [concluded, KJV] under sin,” Gal. 3:22).  In other words, to be under sin is to be in bondage to sin, to be under sin as a master.  

Another way we can see this is that salvation is described in the Bible and by the apostle Paul at least partly in terms of being delivered from the bondage of sin.  So Paul will say in chapter 6, “Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin” (6).  And then in verse 14, “For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace.”  So those who are not saved do serve sin, sin has dominion over them, they are in bondage to it.

What does it mean to be in bondage to sin?  Well, it doesn’t mean that we are its unwilling slaves.  Unfortunately, we love the chains that sin puts around our hearts.  We still do what we love.  We are in love with sin, though the forms that sin takes may vary from person to person.  Some people are in bondage to the sins of the flesh, and others to sins of the mind.  But it is still bondage to sin, whether it’s lust or pride or selfishness or greed.  

And it doesn’t mean that we’re not responsible for our actions.  We are not in bondage in the sense that we don’t do what we want, or that we’re forced to do what we don’t want to do.  We are responsible when we act according to our desires.  The problem is that our desires are sinful, and at the root of it all is a hostility toward God and a corresponding desire for self-sovereignty.  

What it means is that we are so in love with ourselves and our sins and our justly condemned rebellion against God that unless God does something for us, we will perish in our sins.  The Biblical doctrine of sin doesn’t teach that grace is like a life-raft that’s there if we need it.  Rather, it teaches us that apart from the sovereign grace of God that reaches down and grabs us out of the water, we will assuredly drown.  It teaches us the imperative need we have of divine intervention, not just of help along the way, but of life-giving and creating and sustaining power that frees us from the chains of sin and makes us free.  Again, anticipating Paul a bit, listen to the way he contrasts what we were before God saves us and what we are after: “For when ye were the servants of sin, ye were free from righteousness. What fruit had ye then in those things whereof ye are now ashamed? for the end of those things is death. But now being made free from sin, and become servants to God, ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life” (Rom. 6:20-22). 

The Blindness of Sin

But this is not all the apostle has to say.  He goes on to speak in terms of sin’s blindness: “As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: there is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God” (3:10-11).  Again, we have to be careful we don’t ourselves misunderstand what Paul is saying here.  He is not saying that people don’t know anything about God.  Paul has already said that the things of God are clearly revealed from heaven.  But the problem is that they reject this knowledge. They turn to idols.  They substitute the creature for the Creator.  They don’t understand who God is and what God requires because they pervert all the ways God has revealed himself to them through sin.  

One of the ways you hear this is when people say things like, “My God isn’t like that,” when you tell them what the Bible says about God.  They don’t want to hear it.  They don’t understand it because their affections are disordered.  

And as a result they don’t seek God.  Now Paul is not saying that anyone who claims to be seeking God or who claims to be searching for the truth is really seeking God.  A person can claim to be a seeker and even put a lot of effort into it when it’s really just a disguise for self-promotion and self-worship.  They aren’t looking for the true God; they are looking for something to affirm them in their self-chosen life-style.  The apostle warns Timothy about false teachers who have “a form of godliness” while denying its power in their lives, who are “ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:5, 7).  These guys were ever learning – always on the search for “truth,” but the apostle says they never get to it.  Why?  Because for all their effort, it’s only in the end a front.  Maybe they’ve convinced themselves they really mean it all, but God knows the heart.

The fact of the matter is that people don’t seek God.  No one does apart from a work of divine grace in the heart.  We are blind in our bondage to sin.  As a result, we love what God hates and hate what God loves.  Paul unpacks this even further to the Ephesians when we describes how the “Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart: who being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness” (Eph 4:17-19).  

The Betrayal of Sin

Then the apostle goes on – you see how he is interested that we get this – “they are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one” (Rom. 3:12). Sin then causes us to betray God.  This is way sin is at its root, isn’t it?  Sin is cosmic treason.  It turns us out of the way God has created and commanded us to go.  We “are all gone out of the way.”  Not just some of us but all of us.  And as Isaiah puts it, what this means is that we have chosen our way over God’s way: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way” (Isa. 53:6).  We have betrayed God.  We owe him obedience; instead, we wander off in our own direction, not wanting God to rule over us.  And how is that going to end well for us?

The Badness of Sin

Finally, we see sin portrayed in terms of its badness: “they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one” (12).  To be unprofitable means to “go bad” like rotten fruit or sour milk.  It means we have become useless and corrupt.  Not in the sense that we can’t be productive citizens of the state.  There are plenty of people who produce a lot of good things for society who nevertheless are godless and unrighteous.  They may even donate to charity and give their time to soup kitchens.  That is not where the badness lies.  The problem is that we tend to look at badness only on a horizontal level.  There is of course a horizontal dimension to our badness, which the apostle will go on to lay out for us in verses 13-17.  But the main thing that defines our badness is the vertical dimension of our sin.  How do we relate to God?  Do we truly love him?  Are we humble before him?  Do we seek to please him, do we keep his commandments?  Have we put our trust in Christ?  These are the questions we need to be putting to ourselves, because this is where our badness begins.

Now in verses 13-17, as we said, the apostle goes on quoting the OT, but now showing us the horizontal fruit that sin produces, how not seeking God leads to mistreating our fellow man.  If you don’t love God you won’t truly love your fellow man as you ought.  And that brings us to our last point. 

The Effects of Sin

The apostle lays out for us the effects of sin in terms of the way we use our mouths, feet, and eyes.  Or, to put it another way, he shows us how sin affects us in our words, ways, and worldview.

In our Words

“Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips: whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness” (Rom. 3:13-14).  First of all, our throat is an open sepulchre, for it opens up down to our hearts, which apart from the grace of God through Christ working in us, can be like graves where our spiritual death is most manifest.  The Lord Jesus taught this, didn’t he?  He tells us that “those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: these are the things which defile a man” (Mt. 15:18-20).  And this kind of heart leads to deceit and to words that bite and cut and kill like the poison of an asp.  

But how we tend to overlook our mouths!  “Ah but,” someone might say, “I’ve never cheated on my wife, or murdered anyone, or stolen anything in my life.  I’m okay!”  But our Lord says, “O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things. But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned” (Mt. 12:34-37).  Every idle word!  By our words we will be condemned!  He’s not talking about men here, but God.  Take heed how you talk!

It is by our words that the hatefulness of our hearts are exposed.  We can turn on a dime, can’t we?  Speak so graciously one minute and the next we are biting people’s heads off.  We say things that we may forget but the people we say them to carry the scars those words made in their hearts for the rest of their lives.  

I once saw a young man who had been bitten by a rattlesnake.  He lived to tell about it, but the scar it left extended almost along the full extent of his arm.  He will carry that with him for the rest of his life.  In the same way, people carry the scars made from the poison carried by our words which have bitten their way into the soul.  Hence the apostle James writes, “And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell. For every kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, and of things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed of mankind: but the tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison” (Jam. 3:6-8).

How then we should mimic the psalmist who wrote, “Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth; keep the door of my lips” (Ps. 141:3)!  Beware of “cursing and bitterness.”  God says it’s the sign of a wicked heart.  Examine yourselves, brothers and sisters!  

In our Ways

But of course sin tends to spill over from our mouths down to our feet, from our lips to our lives, and so the apostle continues: “Their feet are swift to shed blood: destruction and misery are in their ways: and the way of peace have they not known” (Rom. 3:15-17).  Now the apostle is not now saying that every person is a murderer.  He is saying that the heart of those who are estranged from God is a murderous heart and that given the opportunity this is exactly what they world do to their enemies.  I think it was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who said that when he was imprisoned in a Soviet gulag, he saw a guard beat a man to death, but that at the same time he realized that he could have done it too. It was a moment of moral clarity for the man, something a lot of us dismiss out of hand.  I think he was also the one who said that the line between good and evil runs through every man’s heart.  It’s not for no reason that when our Lord began to untangle the Law of God from its misinterpretation, the very first place he started was with the command, “Thou shalt not kill.”  But what does he do with it?  He talks about anger!  In other words, our Lord is saying that just because you don’t lay a hand on someone doesn’t mean your free from breaking this commandment.  If your heart is pulsating with hate and anger and malice against someone, then you have already broken this commandment in your heart.  And God sees that.

I would be remiss at this point not to say something here about abortion.  In this country we tend to think of ourselves as the good guys.  But our government has permitted and in many cases even promoted the slaughter of over 63 million unborn babies.  The only other countries on this planet other than the US and Canada who have the same kind of permissible attitude towards abortion are China and North Korea.  Think about that.  This is murder pure and simple, on a scale unimaginable by the worst tyrants in human history.  God does not wink at the spilling of innocent blood.  But we do.  Why?  Because this is what sinful people do: their feet are swift to shed blood, destruction misery are in their ways.  As God’s people we are supposed to be a witness against this.  This is one reason our church is pro-life in its official documents.  And we should demonstrate this commitment as believers in our own lives as well as in the causes and ministries we support and the political leaders we vote for.  And we should be praying that God would cause to cease in our land the murder of millions of children.

“And the way of peace have they not known.”  Doesn’t this describe the world in which we live?  Wars and rumors of wars?  Riots in the streets and civil unrest.  Our culture is a culture which is plagued with anxiety.  We are the anxious generation.  It is the effect of sin.  Even the godliest of people can struggle with it.  But more fundamental than inner peace, and behind all the lack of other types of peace – whether relational or civil peace – is the problem of peace with God.  This is what the world fundamentally lacks.  There is a universal lack of peace because there is a universal problem of alienation from God.  Paul reminds the Ephesian Christians that this is precisely where they were at before they came to Christ: “Wherefore remember, that ye being in time past Gentiles in the flesh, who are called Uncircumcision by that which is called the Circumcision in the flesh made by hands; that at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:11-12).  No hope without Christ, and therefore no peace.

In our Worldview

And then Paul circles back to the vertical: “There is no fear of God before their eyes” (18).  What is the worldview of sinful men and women?  It is this: no fear of God before their eyes.  Fear of God is not fright of God, though the wicked should be frightened of him if they will not repent.  It denotes a humble reverence before God that is completely consistent with love, trust, and obedience. This is what is lacking in the eyes of those who are not saved.  It’s not even in their field of vision.  God may be on their lips, but he’s not before their eyes.  You can be a very religious person even and lack this. He is excluded, as John Murray put it, “from the whole horizon of our reckoning.”  Instead, their minds and thoughts are full of other things – self-pleasing, self-promotion, self-serving.  It is the root of all other ills both in our lives and in the world around us.

Conclusion

How are we then to respond to these verses?  Well, first of all, we need to be reminded of how deep, how fundamental, how terrible our sin is.  This is the problem of the human race; every other problem stems from this.  And we need to understand this in order to see that we need something more than a pep talk, we need something more than positive thinking and motivation to reverse the corruption of sin in our hearts and lives.  We need nothing less than the supernatural intervention of God through Christ.  But thank God, this is where Paul is headed.  Yes, all have sinned and come short of the glory of God (3:23); we need to realize that.  And we need to realize that alongside this bad news is the good news of the gospel, that God saves sinners: “Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (24).

Where are you today?  Has this message convicted you of sin?  Do you realize the bondage and the blindness of your sin, that by it you have betrayed God?  What should you do?  Are you like those who heard Peter preaching on the Day of Pentecost, who “were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do?”  Listen to the answer of Peter to his audience; it is my answer to you as well: “Then Peter said unto them, Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost” (Acts 2:37-38).