The Defendant Has Nothing to Say
What shall we conclude then? Do we have any advantage? Not at all! For we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin. As it is written:
“There is no one righteous, not even one;
there is no one who understands;
there is no one who seeks God.
All have turned away,
they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
not even one.”
“Their throats are open graves;
their tongues practice deceit.”
“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”
“Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”
“Their feet are swift to shed blood;
ruin and misery mark their ways,
and the way of peace they do not know.”
“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin. Romans 3:9-20
Three features should be noted in the passage before us: the ungodliness of sin, the pervasiveness of sin and the universality of sin. Having touched on the first two, we now come to the third
(3) the universality of sin
‘There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God … there is no one who does good, not even one.’ The repetition hammers home the point: twice we are told ‘all’ have gone their own way; four times that ‘no one’ is righteous and twice that there are no exceptions, ‘not even one.’
Paul has mounted these scriptures, one after the other, ‘so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God’ (3:19). This is a picture of what a defendant would do in a trial if he had nothing more to say. He would put his hand over his mouth. Sometimes court officials would strike a prisoner on the mouth if they thought the defendant was obviously guilty and should not be attempting to defend himself. This happened to Jesus in John 18:22 and to Paul in Acts 23:2. So when Paul says ‘so that every mouth may be silenced’ he is imagining not only that the Jews have joined the Gentiles in the dock but that both groups together are left without a defence. The whole world is accountable to God. The defendant recognises they must now face God as their judge.
‘Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin’ (3:20). Paul might have been wondering if some Jews would discount his list of descriptive sins from the Old Testament because in context they were not all spoken of Israel. Paul’s point was that they were all taken from the Jewish scriptures and so were initially spoken to those reading these scriptures, namely the Jews. What is written in the law (here meaning the Hebrew Bible as a whole) applies naturally to the people of the law.
The law exposes humanity’s sinfulness but does nothing to cure it. The defendant, given the opportunity to give his defence, is speechless because of the weight of evidence brought against him.
So this is the point Paul has been moving toward. The idolatrous and immoral Gentiles are ‘without excuse’ (1:20). Critical moralists, whether Jews or Gentiles, equally ‘have no excuse’ (2:1). The special status of the Jews does not exonerate them. In fact all the world’s inhabitants, without exception (3:19) are defenceless in the face of God’s righteous demands. All have known something of God and of morality – through Scripture in the case of the Jews and through nature in the case of Gentiles – and all have disregarded and even stifled their knowledge to justify going their own way. The conclusion: all are guilty and rightfully condemned by God.
As Christians we need to grasp something previously noted – the way Paul describes sin in 3:9. He doesn’t say all people ‘commit sins,’ inferring this is just something we do. Nor does he even say that all people are ‘sinners’ emphasising the pervasiveness of sin. He says that all people are ‘under the power of sin.’ They are helpless under sin’s rule. Sin is a tyrant that holds us in chains. Only Christ can break those chains and does break those chains in the life of all who trust in Him (Romans 6:14,15).
He breaks the power of cancelled sin
He sets the prisoner free
His blood can make the foulest clean
His blood availed for me
Charles Wesley