“Mirror, Mirror”
Romans 3:1-20
October 12, 2008
It had been a long day for the clerk at the cosmetic counter. Having been on her feet all day, she was looking forward to going home. Just before the doors closed, a man came running up to her frantically and said, “Tomorrow’s my wife’s birthday and I don’t have anything for her. What do you recommend?” The clerk brought out a nice bottle of perfume worth about $100. He gasped and said, “That’s way too expensive!” So she held up a bottle that cost $50. He said, “That’s still too expensive. What do you have that’s less expensive?” She searched some more and found something for $25. The husband replied, “That’s still too expensive! What else do you have?” She then brought out the cheapest thing she had at the counter, a tiny $10 bottle of perfume. He was now exasperated and said, “You don’t understand. I want you to show me something cheap!” She quickly reached under the counter, pulled out a mirror, told him to look into it and said, “Try this!” (Brian Bill)
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. We sing a chorus from Psalm 36:
“Your love, o Lord, reaches to the Heavens; Your faithfulness stretches to the sky. Your righteousness is like a mighty mountain; Your justice flows like the ocean’s tide”. God, the Jews would say, demonstrated His righteousness through His faithfulness to them, that He was just and loving in doing that. And so the Jews assumed that God would always be on their side, 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? Sometimes, we ask similar questions, don’t we? Most of the theological issues of Paul’s day boiled down to this question: what do we mean when we say that God is “righteous”? 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. Yes, God would uphold the promises He’d made to Israel—but note Deuteronomy 28:1-6:
28:1 “And if you faithfully obey the voice of the Lord your God, being careful to do all his commandments that I command you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth. 2 And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the voice of the Lord your God. 3 Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the field. 4 Blessed shall be the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your ground and the fruit of your cattle, the increase of your herds and the young of your flock. 5 Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. 6 Blessed shall you be when you come in, and blessed shall you be when you go out.
And Deuteronomy 28:15-19:
15 “But if you will not obey the voice of the Lord your God or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes that I command you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you. 16 Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the field. 17 Cursed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. 18 Cursed shall be the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your ground, the increase of your herds and the young of your flock. 19 Cursed shall you be when you come in, and cursed shall you be when you go out.
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. Being entrusted with God’s Word does not make Israel immune to God’s judgment, because that very Word promises judgment on sin!
Paul told us, in chapter 1, that this righteousness of God was seen in the gospel of Jesus Christ, that if we want to understand God’s righteousness, we have to see it in the gospel. The first part of the gospel is God’s just judgment on sin, prior to the good news of God’s grace and forgiveness of sinners through Christ.
There are 9 question marks in 8 verses, summed up into four main questions, and so we look first at:
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. It’s hard not to consider the parallel between the great privileges the Jews had, and the many ones that we do, as 21st-century Americans, right? We have more access to the Word of God, through more varied forms, than any people in the history of the world, and if we believe that God will not hold us accountable for that, we’re kidding ourselves. The parallel goes a step further though; remember that “to whom much has been given, much shall be required”, we have a responsibility with that gospel, a responsibility to live it, but also to share it; just as the Jews had been privileged by God with that responsibility, so have we.
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.
But 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!
In the quote from Psalm 51 that Paul uses, David argued that God demonstrated His faithfulness in judging sin. And the writer of Hebrews reminds us, “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.” Hebrews 12:5-6
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?” God could, by this reasoning, judge no one at all, since He ultimately turns all sin to the praise of His name. Anybody could justify anything on the basis of this argument!
Answer: God’s holiness demands that sin be punished.
Paul is embarrassed by the silliness of this argument, and thus he throws in, parenthetically, “I speak in a human way”, indicating how far from God’s thinking this tortured reasoning is. 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?
Paul carries the argument to the nth-degree, but shows little patience for the person who would actually reason in this way. 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 justify an “anything goes” approach to living, that anything is justified as long as good results from it. 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!
Paul is not content just to share the gospel, just to proclaim that it is true, but he sees the need to defend it as well, to defend it against spurious accusations and questions that might arise in the minds of some. When the gospel of grace is rightly preached, there are people who will misunderstand and question it in a variety of ways! Why? Because as we’ll see in weeks to come, the true gospel is a radical thing, the idea that God could remain righteous and yet count as completely sinless people who are sinners through and through. Before we get there, though, the mirror:
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. He’s condemned the sinfulness of the pagan world apart from the law of God, on the grounds that God’s revelation of Himself in nature is enough to cause anyone to understand that there must be a God, but these people suppress that truth, shove it down, so as not to have to face its implications in their lives. Then, he takes on the hypocritical moralizers, the folks who imagine themselves “holier than thou” because they don’t engage in the depth of degradation that these pagans do; he argues that the hypocrites indeed do do some of these things, and that their hearts are filled with sin even if in fact their actions aren’t as consistently evil. Then finally, he takes on the Jews who place their faith in their covenant relationship to God, their possession of the Law of God, and their symbol of circumcision. Paul tells them that mere possession of these things doesn’t equate to the keeping of the covenant, to obedience to God; as we pointed out last week, we can see the speed limit sign, but it does us no good merely to know the speed limit, to have it in our minds; we have to obey it as well. And all people, in many ways, fail to live up to God’s righteous standard.
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.
Paul has just said that there is a lot of advantage in being a Jew; now, he says that there’s no advantage at all. Paul talking out of both sides of his mouth? No…he’s talking about two different things. There is advantage to the Jews in both the privilege and responsibility of having the Word of God, the covenant, circumcision, and the like. There is no advantage in the sense of God’s favoritism, though; alike with Gentiles and moral people everywhere, they are under the just judgment of God. And Paul enumerates the ways in which all people 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!
What we see in the mirror isn’t a pretty picture, but Paul is setting the tone for what is to come, recognizing that until we see ourselves as awful, we’ll never see Jesus as awesome or grace as amazing. 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. Here is a defendant whose only hope is to throw himself on the mercy of the court, because the case has been more than convincing. If even those under the law are guilty beyond question before the judgment bar of God, then all people, Jews and Gentiles, religious and pagans, are alike unable to make any serious argument as to their innocence before God.
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. But what Paul’s saying here is that you can’t make it on your own, that there are no good deeds, nor any combination of good deeds, that you can perform which will enable you to make it to Heaven, to receive forgiveness of sin, to stand before God justified.
“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? We’ll get into that more beginning next week, but 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.
How do we respond to this truth? How we respond will go a long ways toward determining our eternal condition. Do we suggest that Paul has overstated the case? Has he painted too bleak a picture, or has he even misdiagnosed the problem? Maybe it’s not sin that’s our problem; maybe it’s a lack of self-esteem, so that instead of being told we’re sinners in rebellion against a holy God, we need instead to think better of ourselves! Or maybe we just need somebody to blame, either our genes or our poor education or the fact that society has it in for me. Maybe we just want to change the subject all together, not considering our innate senses of guilt and shame, or maybe we should just try to drown them out with a bottle or a drug or a relationship or an experience.
No…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!
Table Talk
What do you think the reaction of most people would be to hearing this passage? Why? If these truths are not understood, can we really understand salvation? Why or why not?
