No, Not One

Father in heaven, we pray because we are easily distracted. We’re thinking of the week before. We’re thinking of lunch. We’re thinking of the week to come. And even more concerning, we’re often hard-hearted. We’re hearers. We’re not really listeners. And so, we pray that your Word would sink deep into our hearts, we would have a soft heart and good heads to receive this Word. We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Romans chapter 3, verse 9 through verse 18. Romans chapter 3, beginning at verse 9. Continuing with Paul’s long argument about the universality of sin, both Jews and Gentiles. Coming now to the climax to his closing – almost closing – argument.

I had a birthday this past week. I turned 49. My kids said, “Don’t worry, you’re not old. You’re not 50.” So, I got that. It’s amazing, when you’re 35, 49 seems old. Now, 79 seems pretty young to me. 49. And this may not be true for anyone else but me, but I don’t always like looking at photos of myself. You’re all – yep, all the rest of you are really good-looking, so it’s all fine for you. But, you know, sometimes as you get older, you swipe those photos as I do, and I say, “I don’t like that photo. I don’t like that photo. I don’t like that photo.” And you continue – not you, I – because you’re all good-looking, but I tell myself, “Wow, what a bad angle. What a bad filter. The sunlight wasn’t right. Honey, why can’t you take a better picture?” And at some point you have to come to the realization if 10 out of 10 photos don’t look good, I may not look good. It may not be a user error. We may be beyond the remedy of natural photography. AI, I’m sure, can make it all fit. But it can be discouraging when you look at that and it’s one out of 10 that you find, and you say, “There it is.” Because what you realize, especially – we go around, and we mercifully don’t see ourselves most of the time, and you look, and you say, “This is a terrible picture,” and then someone trying to encourage you says, “No, that’s what you look like.” Oh, I wanted you to say you’ve never looked worse. The real you – the real me – in the photo can surprise us.

And what is true with visual pictures is even more true spiritually. If you get a real photo, a real mirror image of what you look like spiritually, it can be very discouraging. That’s what Romans has been doing. Second half of chapter 1, chapter 2, now into chapter 3, it is the Word of God held up like a mirror. I said at the very beginning of this series, one of the things to keep in mind if you are to receive this Word humbly is to receive it with the conviction that this book knows you better than you know yourself. God knows what I’m like better than I know what I’m like. Chapter after chapter, we’ve had this Word held up to us as a mirror, that we might look and see what we’re really like, because we have a spiritual photo in our head, which can be quite lovely. Now, we all know we don’t always get good spiritual photos, but that’s like a one out of 10. Nine out of 10 of those photos we think are really good. Romans is helping us to see that if we’re honest with ourselves, especially if you are outside of Christ this morning, it is not a pretty picture. The first line of John Calvin’s Institutes says famously, “Nearly all wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves.” Now, that knowledge of ourselves is sometimes misunderstood as if Calvin is saying, “You just need to get in touch with your true self.” What he’s saying is first you need to know about the majesty and the glory and the supremacy of God, and then once you see God in his majesty, you will be prepared to see you in your lowly state. If you and I are to have wisdom, it starts with those two things. Do you know who God is? And relative to God, do you know what you and I look like? That’s what the Word is doing, and this passage, perhaps as much or more than any other set of verses in the Bible, presents a mirror to us which shows a picture of the human race apart from Christ, and there’s no other word for it. It is an ugly picture.

Paul has been making the case as a kind of prosecuting attorney against the whole human race – first dealing with the Gentiles in chapter 1, then turning his attention to his fellow Jews in chapter 2 – and now, if you think about this, as a prosecuting attorney, he is very deliberately coming to his closing arguments. Verse 9, what then? So, here’s another question. Are Jews any better off? And he says, “No, not at all.” Now, that may seem like a contradiction to what he said. Look up above, verse 1, “What advantage has the Jew?” There he says, “Well, they have many advantages. Chiefly, they have been entrusted with the oracles of God.” So, which is it, Paul? Are the Jews better off or not better off? One of the great principles for interpreting the Bible is to remember the biblical writers are not stupid. So, Paul is not contradicting himself in the span of a few sentences. You can think of it like this: was there a privilege that the Jews enjoyed? Yes. Did they have partiality before God? No. Or to put it another way, their advantage was that at that moment in salvation history, uniquely among the peoples of the earth, they had been given the oracles of God. God had given them laws and promises and commandments and the Scriptures, but those advantages were responsibilities, and the fact that they had those advantages would mean no preferential treatment before the judgment seat of God. That’s why Paul can say it in both directions. If you mean an advantage, well, do you have privileges? Yes. Were they given preferential treatment before the judgment seat of Christ? No.

Which leads Paul in verse 9 to his thesis statement. Notice he uses the language as if he were an attorney. This whole scene, I’ve been arguing, in chapter 2 especially is a courtroom scene. One of the questions is whether God is the judge over us or whether we think that we get to be the judge over God. And all of these defenses have been marshaled for the people, especially the Jewish people, and time and time again, Paul has counteracted those defenses. And now, as a good attorney, he comes to his closing arguments, and he says, “Here’s the charge. Here’s the accusation. We have already charged that all – both Jews and Greeks – are under sin.” I want you to notice that key word there. “Under.” Now, why is that important? Because Paul is saying something more than just “all people are sinners.” It’s true, but he’s saying something even further than that. He says, “The argument I’m making, the accusation, the charge that I have laid at the feet of everyone, Jew and Gentile, is that we are all under sin.” What does it mean to be under sin? Two things. It means to be under the dominion of sin and to be under the guilt of sin.

Think about the first of those categories: to be under the dominion of sin. If you were traveling out of the country, and you got in some trouble, and you needed to find your embassy, the first question might be, “Where are you from? Do you have a passport? Or what country do you belong to?” Or maybe if you’re following the World Cup and who do you root for, you might say, “What flag are you flying? Who’s your team?” So, this language of “under sin” is saying the flag that flies over the life of every person apart from Christ is the sin flag. That’s your nation. That’s your team. That’s your commanding officer. You can think of it – because this language is often used of a military commander or perhaps a king or someone under whom we are authority (their authority over us). So, you are under. Your commanding officer, Paul says I’ve already charged for all of you, is sin. You are on team Adam or team Christ. You are in the darkness, or you are in the light. You are under sin, or you are under grace. And he says, “We have charged everyone – religious insider, religious outsider – apart from Christ, the flag waving over your life is sin.” Many people don’t think of it that way. Think I’m a pretty decent person. Sure, we all make mistakes. This is why you need the Word of God to tell you what you’re really like, that God knows you better than you know yourself. To be under sin is to be under the dominion of sin, and – I think this is chiefly what Paul means – it is to be under the guilt of sin. You see in verses 19 and 20, it speaks of those who are accountable to God. Verse 20, “By works of the law, no human being will be justified in his sight.” So, these terms have to do with guilt. Are you justified before God? Are you innocent before God? And Paul says, “No, everyone – Jew and Greek – is under not only the dominion of sin, that is the operative power in your life apart from Christ; not only that, but you are under the guilt of sin.”

You see what Paul does? He doesn’t start by simply saying, “Well, you’re all sinners.” Theology gets off on the wrong track, and there are some strands of the Christian church, broadly conceived, that think of sin much more lightly than we tend to do in the Reformed tradition. And I would simply say if you’re from one of those or you know friends and other sorts of traditions, the most important thing is not that you, you know, twist their arms until they say, “Yes, I’ll be a Presbyterian.” Bring them to the Bible. What do you do with Romans chapter 3? Because over and over, as we’re going to see, Paul’s argument is not just that you do bad things. Everyone understands that no one’s perfect. We all make mistakes. We do some things we shouldn’t. We’re broken. But Paul says more than that – not just that you do bad things, but fundamentally your identity, your state, your nature, is one that is under sin. In fact, as we’re thinking about the 250th anniversary of our country, one of the things that I think many of the founders understood with wisdom – and I would even make the case that they received these from various strands of Christian teaching and sometimes explicitly Reformed teaching – they had an understanding that when human beings come together, they tend to do things that are corrupt. And when they come together with great power, they tend to do things that oppress other people. They had a sense of the human condition, which was fallen. You’ve maybe heard me say before in different contexts, there’s sort of two different ways you can think about the purpose of human government. You can say, “What might human government be able to do if everybody was working together, and we all had the best ideas and the best motives, and we all came together? What great thing could we do? And let’s devise a government that harnesses all of that energy together to accomplish that great thing.” Or you could think of human government as that institution which frustrates all of the evil, wicked things that human beings tend to want to do together. So, rather than saying, “You know, how could we have the grandness and the greatness of the human experiment,” you think, “Well, what do humans do when they tend to get power, and how might we devise a system of government to frustrate that ambition and that sin?” I think by and large that’s what animated the founders of this country – was a realistic appraisal of human nature. Paul certainly has no rosy picture of what men and women and children are like apart from grace. So, that’s the big overarching charge: under sin.

Now before we look at the trees, I want you to notice some things in the forest. We’re going to go quickly through these verses in a few moments, but let me first make three general observations about this passage. First, these nine verses, verse 10-18, these nine verses are all drawn from Scripture. You can see that probably in your Bible with the way it’s laid out as kind of verses or poetry. You can see maybe you have a study Bible, or you have little, teeny squint print, which I can’t read anymore, to try to find where the cross references are. Paul – think of what Paul’s doing. Again, a law court. Paul has been citing a number of other sources, you might say. He’s talked about who we are in our nature and how we can observe certain things about God. He’s made arguments according to logic. He’s made arguments about conscience and what you know to be right and wrong. He’s talked about shared assumptions like that God will judge the world. He’s had a very intricate line of reasoning to make his points. And now he comes – so lots of different kinds of arguments – now, when it comes to his closing arguments, he turns to the most authoritative, and truly the only authoritative source: the Scriptures. And this, incidentally, shows us something about how you might make moral and religious arguments with other people. We see on the one hand we can do more than just cite Bible passages. Paul does a lot more than just cite Bible passages. He talks about what you know in your conscience and what you can observe and what you might see in nature, and he makes syllogistic arguments. And on the other hand, the final authority and the one that supersedes all others are the Scriptures. It makes sense, because he just mentioned in verse 2, they had been given the oracles of God, and now he’s going to quote from the oracles of God. And this would be especially effective if he’s thinking about his Jewish audience: how to seal this deal, how to make this argument most persuasive is to quote from their own Scriptures. And that’s what he does. He’s quoting from the Greek translation – the Septuagint, it’s called. And he quotes from seven or eight or nine different passages. It’s hard to know exactly, because these are some familiar phrases that appear in different places, but roughly seven or eight different passages, depending on how you count them. Verses 10-12 come from Ecclesiastes 7:20, from Psalm 14, from the parallel passage in Psalm 53. Verse 13 from Psalm 5:9, Psalm 140:3. Verse 14 from Psalm 10:7. Verses 15 and 16 from Isaiah 59:7-8, and verse 18 from Psalm 36:1. So, Paul has amassed together – likely from some previous study, but he may be reciting them from memory – we know at the very end of the book that he has a scribe who’s writing this down. I’d sure like to think that Paul had some notes, but he’s Paul, so maybe he just was doing this all, but this is likely the sort of thing that he taught in different contexts. Remember, he had been a teacher for many years. He had given these kinds of instructions, and this is likely the list of Scriptures that he used in other settings to convince the Jews about the universality of sin. So that’s the first thing. These nine verses are drawn from Scripture.

Here’s the second observation. There is nothing as comprehensive as this list in the rest of the New Testament. This is really striking. Here’s what I mean. 17 times in Paul’s letters, he uses the phrase, “It is written.” That’s what he does when he’s going to quote from the Old Testament, from his Bible. “It is written.” And in all of those times, there is nothing nearly so long as this. He never quotes as many passages as this. He nowhere offers such a comprehensive list of different passages, and it’s put together with great skill. You could follow the first stanza of his argument. It has two sets of three lines, and then there’s a second and a third stanza. They have two sets of two lines. But besides that orderliness, it says something about the importance of this doctrine that Paul, of all the doctrines that in all of his letters he wants to prove, this is the one where he, as it were – “beep beep beep” – he backs up the dump truck of Bible passages on this doctrine, which we sometimes call “total depravity.” The first T in TULIP, if you learned that. Total depravity. Now, that doctrine is often misunderstood. People often say I can’t believe in total depravity. I don’t believe that everyone is bad as they can be. That’s not what it teaches. Or that no one ever expresses any kind of interest in God. That’s not what it teaches. Or it’s misunderstood to suggest that human beings are robots, and we don’t make real choices, or that that Reformed Christians believe the image of God has been completely obliterated. Those are all misunderstandings. What we ought to believe about total depravity is what is taught in Romans chapter 3. And that’s the important part, when you may have friends from other traditions. I bet if you were to enter into Google or AI and just started asking the questions, does this group believe in total depravity? Catholics, Orthodox, Methodists, Pentecostals, even go farther out, go outside the Christian tradition, do Mormons? You could – most of those answers are going to be some variation of no. Once again, the point is not to wave the flag for our team, but to come back to the Scriptures and say, what do we do then with these Scripture passages? Why was it so utterly important for the Apostle Paul? I was reading one author who disagrees with total depravity who said that Paul is obviously using “hyperbolic language.” Or when he says no one, not one, no one, not one, over and over again, he does so because he means no one. No one. It’s not hyperbole. It’s Paul saying, if anything else – if the rest of Romans is going to make sense to you, if what he’s going to talk about justification and sanctification and election and reprobation and the necessity to live a holy Christian life, if all the rest of Romans is going to make sense, you have to get this right. And not only for just understanding a book of the Bible, but if you want to have true wisdom, if you want to know what salvation is about, if you want to know what you and I are like apart from Christ, Paul seems absolutely burdened with all of these Scripture passages. Everything about your theology is going to be veering off track if you don’t understand the total, comprehensive, complete spiritual inability of men, women, and children apart from Christ.

And then here’s what I want you to notice. This is just – we’re still in the general observations. I promise we’ll go quickly through the trees after noting the forest. Here’s the third thing I want you to note. Notice how Paul turns so deliberately to the personal. He’s been talking very generally about Jews and Gentiles. And one might have reached the wrong conclusion from, say, verses 6-10 that while the Jewish people in general were fallen and sinful, maybe somebody among them could actually live a life pleasing to God. Or in verses 14-16, he talks about the Gentiles who do not have the law by nature do what the law requires. Maybe somebody would misunderstand that and say, “See, Paul is saying there are some holy pagans out there, and they follow the conscience, and they end up being fundamentally good people.” Or in verses 26 and 27, he talks about a man who is uncircumcised who keeps the precepts of the law. Maybe there’s some people who actually do that. And there are some people. So, it’s really important that Paul says, not only am I talking broadly about Jews and Gentiles – yeah, yeah, you know, I get it. But what about me as an individual? He wants to make absolutely clear sin is universal, not just with peoples, but with persons. You can’t say, “Well, yeah, I get it. I get it. Yeah. Humanity is a real mess, but I’m not such a mess.” Now, that famous quip from Winston Churchill who said, “Yes, it may be that human beings are simply worms, but I do believe, madam, that I’m a glowworm.” That’s what some of you think. There’s a few glowworms out among us. Paul will have none of that. Notice how emphatic he is that every people, Jew and Gentile, and every person is under sin. He could not have been more emphatic. None is righteous. And maybe somebody’s thinking, “Yeah, I get it. You know, Jews and Gentiles.” “No, not one! I’m not talking about just a general condemnation of peoples. No one seeks after God. No one understands. No one does good.” “But Paul?” “No, not one. Put your hand down.” “Paul, there’s no such thing as a dumb question.” “There is in this classroom. Hand down. No one does what is good. Not even one.” All of the nots and the nones and the no ones are to emphasize the universality of sin is not just a general principle, it is a personal principle of your life and my life apart from Christ under sin.

So, let’s go through these verses quickly. Look at four things that no one does when they’re under the dominion of sin. Four things that are impossibilities when you are under the dominion of sin. That’s what total depravity means. Not that every person is as absolute as bad as they could be. Better phrase might be total inability, that we are completely unable. The depravity reaches to all of our faculties, and it renders us unable to do anything that is truly spiritually good. So, he says, here’s the first thing you can’t do when you’re under sin. You’re not righteous. That’s the fundamental conclusion that holds all the other ones together, there in verse 10. No one is righteous. That is to say, the argument that he’s coming to in the end of chapter 3, no one will be justified in his sight by law keeping.

Number two, no one understands. Now, we’ve already seen a sense in which – Romans chapter 1 – that everyone has some knowledge. They know that there’s a God. They may suppress that truth in unrighteousness. They have a conscience, which accuses them or defends them. So, Paul’s not contradicting the kinds of knowing that every human being has, but now he’s talking about when it comes to real, genuine understanding, the kind that can see clearly about God and his ways and his salvation, no one understands. Ephesians 4:18, our minds have been darkened. This means we can be very smart in one area and very dumb in another area. You can be an expert in your field and totally ignorant about God. Experts get a bad rap sometimes. I’m thankful for – when it comes to people who have to – doctors or somebody has to do a surgery or even somebody who’s got to change the oil in my car. That takes an expertise beyond my level. I’m thankful for experts, but just because you’re an expert in something doesn’t mean you’re an expert in anything else. My kids get very tired of the joke when somebody is sick or somebody gets hurt in the house and what should we do? And I say, “I am a doctor. I do have a doctorate in history. It will probably be very helpful right now.” That doesn’t make me knowledgeable in anything except “have Witherspoon, will travel.” That’s it. So, even in the field of history I’m ignorant about 99% of things, let alone medical field or computers or how to hang a picture in the house, all sorts of things. So, when you see really smart people, and they go on the TV show, and they say really dumb spiritual things, say, “Yeah, the Bible said that.” No one understands. If you don’t have your mind enlightened by the Spirit and the truth of God’s Word, you won’t really understand who God is. You won’t understand your state under sin. You won’t understand how to be saved. You won’t know what you need to do to be saved, and you won’t know the great danger that you’re in. That’s a lot of things not to know. No one understands. No one seeks for God. Again, someone may say, “Well, what about when Paul preaches in Acts 17, and he even says that there are some of the pagans, and he quotes from some of their poets that they’re seeking after God?” Well, Paul is talking about different kinds of seeking. It’s true there are people in the world who are curious about spiritual things. Maybe that’s part of your story. Or maybe you’re here this morning, and you would categorize yourself as a seeker. You have lots of questions. You’re open. So, there are those kinds of seekers – that is, someone who has questions, someone who’s honestly trying to learn. What Paul means here by seek is more what the prophets talked about or the psalmist, or think about Jesus. Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you. That language of seeking is the seeking that puts God first. It’s the seeking that has worship of the true and living God as our ultimate priority. That’s what he means. There is no natural person who seeks after God in that way.

And there’s no one who does good. Again, you may think even in the Bible – well, Cornelius in Acts chapter 10, he gets converted, but he was a God-fearer, and he seemed to be a decent man. You may think about your next-door neighbor – very friendly, they don’t know Christ. All of that is true. By God’s common grace, we can have moral decency on a surface level. What Paul is talking about here is that absolute good, the truest, deepest, ultimate good, that what you’re doing comes from the right heart, it’s the right thing, and you have the right aim. The sort of deed that God would say, “That is praiseworthy before me.” Paul says absolutely, there’s no one out there, your nicest neighbor, as friendly as you might be this morning as a non-Christian, and all the charities that you give to. It’s better than punching your neighbor in the face. But here’s the mirror that God holds up. He says, “You’re not good. Not in this ultimate sense. You’re not seeking after God. You don’t understand. You’re not righteous.” You see the summary there in verse 12. All have turned aside. So, none, none, none, no one, no one, no one. So, those are the things no one does, and then in the middle he says, well here are a couple of things that everyone does. Everyone has turned aside, and together they have become worthless. This isn’t my words. It’s God’s Word.

Notice, then, the effects of being under sin. So, there were four things you can’t do when you are under the dominion of sin. You can’t be righteous. You won’t understand. You won’t seek for God. And you won’t do something that is truly good before God. Then Paul, starting in verse 13, talks about the effects. Well, then what does it look like? And notice he goes through a series of six body parts – throat, tongues, lips, mouth, feet, and eyes. It’s very deliberately pulling, you know, and I just wonder – this is speculation – if when Paul is teaching this in the synagogues that maybe this was a helpful pneumonic device. How am I going to remember these Scriptures? I’m going to go through these different parts of the body. That’s how he pulled them together. It’s very deliberate. He’s attaching a spiritual malady to these different parts of the body. The throat is an open grave. It’s a disturbing picture. An open grave. You come, and you revisit a grave, and it’s been torn open. It would be putrid. It would be disinterred. It would be ugly. It would stink. Your throat – this is what it’s like in your speech. Your tongues, they’re deceptive. That means – sometimes it’s very obvious. Somebody the words that they use, you think everything you’re saying is ugly and putrid, and I don’t want to be around it. And if that were the case, well, it would be easy. But he says, “No, no, no. Sometimes they’re deceptive. The words may seem kind, but actually they’re devious.” And your lips – notice the venom of these snakes is under their lips. So, the words you say is like a poison in the veins of others. It ruins their day. It tears them down. It destroys their sense of right and wrong. It ruins their joy. And then their mouth, verse 14, is full of curses, bitterness. This is a mouth that’s full of resentment, malice, grudges. And notice here, four of the six items have to do with our speech. There’s more about this in Ephesians. There’s a lot more about this in the book of James, but I have to admit I tend to think of – and I use words for a living – but isn’t it easy for us to think about speech as yeah, use good words, don’t use potty language, don’t use swear words, but we can sort of excuse ourselves. The really bad people out there, well, they’re the two verses to come. Shedding blood, ruin and misery, destruction, violent people, murderers, adulterers. Four of the six body parts that Paul outlines here have to do with the words we speak, which is to testify to us. One of the worst ways that you and I sin is with our words. The control of sin – here’s another way to put it – the control of sin in your life is nowhere more evident than in the words that come out of your mouth. There’s lots of other things that you could hide. You might be able to hide what you’re looking at. You may be able to hide all the thoughts deep down and your feelings, your grudges, and even your hatred. But out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. Don’t ever think that those errant words, those sharp words, those tearing down words are somehow small little sins. Paul says, “You show the mastery over your life by the words that come out of your mouth.”

Then he mentions feet swift to shed blood. In their paths are ruin and misery. You can look at the whole history of humanity and see men and women do the vilest things to each other. I was traveling last – well, two weeks ago – with two of my daughters. Did a couple of ministry things in London, and then we did a lot of sightseeing. I spent some money on other people and had some coffees and did a lot of fun things. It was an amazing time, and we did go to some museums. And someone that we were staying with reflected and said, “Well, enjoy the museums. The museums will remind you again and again of the depravity of mankind.” It’s true. Even the ones that are about the heroes. We didn’t go this time, but we’ve been before – the Churchill War Museums. Oh, Winston Churchill. Not only did he have his faults, and he was a hero, but why did he have to be a hero? Because millions of people were being slaughtered. The Imperial War Museum – if you’re in London, I recommend it. It’s very immersive, and it’s mainly about the role of the British Empire in World War I, World War II, and then there’s a whole floor to the Holocaust. You think, does anyone need to be convinced that their feet are swift to shed blood? And those wars were in supposedly Christian Europe. That’s the human heart under sin, violence, bloodshed.

And then he finishes: the way of peace they have not known, and one more, there’s no fear of God before their eyes. The eyes are small, but it’s very significant and deliberate that he uses this as his final image, because what do you do? I have very bad eyes, so I have very thick glasses. Your eyes are the way in which you take in the rest of the world. We have some here who have very serious eye problems. We have people who have blindness. The way in which God means for us, when our body is working as it should, to take in the world is through the eyes. This is how you assess everything else. Everything else that you see, it all comes through – you talk about your heart, your head – but everything, the words on a page, what you see, the image here is of your consciousness. How you assess, how you make sense of the world comes in through your eyes, which is why he says there is no fear of God before their eyes. He says you’re under sin. Your whole way of making sense of the world is wrong. You’re not looking at anything correctly. You may have some real knowledge that helps people. You may be a tech bro. You may be a finance whiz. But the things that matter most, you have no fear of God before your eyes, and you’re not able to see God as he really is, the world as it really is, and your heart as it really is until you have the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom. This is a comprehensive diatribe against the fallen human race. Again and again proving our total and utter spiritual inability.

Think about the breadth of sin. Every people, every person. Think about the depth of sin in our world, that it affects your words, your sight, your actions, your understanding, your character. Jonathan Edwards, in his great book on original sin, said, “If the words which the apostle uses here do not most fully and determinatively signify a universality, no words ever used in the Bible are sufficient to do it. I might challenge anyone to produce any one paragraph in scripture from the beginning to the end where there is such a repetition, an accumulation of terms so strongly and emphatically and carefully to express the most perfect and absolute universality of sin.” He said nowhere else in the Bible is there even a paragraph like this, so emphatic, so repetitious, heaping up verses and terms to drive us to this irrefutable conclusion: apart from Christ, your understanding is darkened. Your aspirations are misplaced. Your sense of direction is confused and aimless. Your actions are not truly good. Your words are ugly and deceptive. Your speech is vile and bitter. Your actions cut others down. Your pursuits lead to the destruction of other people. Our lives know no lasting peace, and our eyes cannot see God as he really is. That’s the utter and complete and extreme predicament we find ourselves in. That’s the mirror, an uglier picture than the worst photo on your phone. And it’s true. This book knows you better than you know yourself. We will have wisdom, knowledge of God, and knowledge of ourselves. And if you really get this and you really believe it and God really preaches this to your heart, you can’t help but say Romans 7:24, “Wretched man that I am, wretched woman that I am, wretched old person that I am, wretched teenager that I am, who will set me free from the body of death?” This body with mouth and tongues and throat and lips and feet and eyes that are in defiance of the living God.

The only hope is that instead of being under sin, we could somehow be under grace. And the only way to be under grace is to be in Christ. It’s the only way to be under grace is in Christ, and the only way to be in Christ is through faith. And just as sin is a universal master over the human race, so this proclamation of the gospel is meant to be universal to every people and to every person, to everyone under the dominion of sin. The gospel says you can be under the dominion of grace, found only in Christ, only by faith. Marvelous grace of our loving Lord, grace that will pardon and cleanse within, grace that is greater than all our sin. What good news. Let’s pray.

Father in heaven, thank you for the Word, a true, faithful mirror. Turn us from the ugly picture of ourselves to the beautiful sight of Christ, and may we be found in him. And would you move us from being under sin to under grace? If we’ve never made that move before, would you do it now in our hearts? Help us to cry out to you. And if we have made that move before, would you remind us of who we are in Jesus and what sort of people we ought to be and with thanksgiving what we have been saved from by this marvelous grace? We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.