Romans 3:9-20 (NIV)
What shall we conclude then? Are we any better? Not at all! We have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin. As it is written:
“There is no one righteous, not even one;
there is no one who understands,
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 his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin.
The Jewish people believed that because they possessed the oracles of God, they were more favored than any other nation on earth, more loved and more precious in God’s sight. Paul himself held this view before his life-transforming encounter with Jesus outside of Damascus.
But now Paul points back to those same oracles of God, Psalm 14:1-3, 5-9, 140:3, 10:7, 36:1 and Isaiah 59:7-8, all of which were pointed squarely at the Israelites and their historic unfaithfulness to God’s law. As Paul pointed out clearly in Romans 2:25-29, merely possessing the law is of no benefit at all if you don’t live by it.
This does not mean that the Jewish people were worse than the gentiles. It merely demonstrates that they were just as lost. Their knowledge of the law, if anything, made them more blameworthy in their sin than the gentiles who had little idea of what God actually required of them.
But, as Paul points out in verse 20, it was not necessarily a matter of rebellion by all the Jewish people. Some were very devout and tried with all diligence to keep the requirements of the law. The problem was that the law was an external set of rules that had no power to change the heart. And with a bad heart, which all human beings are born with due to inheriting original sin from our first parents, failure in keeping God’s righteous commandments is the norm, even among those who want to obey God. Thus, the main thing that the law succeeds in doing is to show people, both Jews and gentiles, where we fall short, creating a consciousness of sin, but no solution.
Father, even today, when we focus on the law, the rules and requirements in the Bible, we find ourselves in the same bind. We have many copies of the Bible and are proud that we are Your people because of our faith in Jesus. But in our own strength, we find that we are unable to live the life of Christ, and we end up merely convicted by our inability to keep “the rules” while finding no way in the written word to do better. So, we end up merely trying to do better, fail, repent, and continue that cycle every day. Thank you that, in addition to Your precious Scriptures, You have also given us Your Holy Spirit to not only guide our steps, but to give us the power to obey You from the heart. Amen.