Romans: The Story of God Bible Commentary

images/img-37-1.jpg LISTEN to the Story

¹What advantage, then, is there in being a Jew, or what value is there in circumcision? ²Much in every way! First of all, the Jews have been entrusted with the very words of God.

³What if some were unfaithful? Will their unfaithfulness nullify God’s faithfulness? ⁴Not at all! Let God be true, and every human being a liar. As it is written:

“So that you may be proved right when you speak
and prevail when you judge.”

⁵But if our unrighteousness brings out God’s righteousness more clearly, what shall we say? That God is unjust in bringing his wrath on us? (I am using a human argument.) ⁶Certainly not! If that were so, how could God judge the world? ⁷Someone might argue, “If my falsehood enhances God’s truthfulness and so increases his glory, why am I still condemned as a sinner?” ⁸Why not say — as some slanderously claim that we say — “Let us do evil that good may result”? Their condemnation is just!

⁹What 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. ¹⁰As it is written:

“There is no one righteous, not even one;
¹¹there is no one who understands;
there is no one who seeks God.

¹²All have turned away,
they have together become worthless;

there is no one who does good,
not even one.”

¹³“Their throats are open graves;
their tongues practice deceit.”

“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”
¹⁴“Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”

¹⁵“Their feet are swift to shed blood;
¹⁶ruin and misery mark their ways,

¹⁷and the way of peace they do not know.”
¹⁸“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

¹⁹Now 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. ²⁰Therefore 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.

Listening to the texts in the story: Deuteronomy 7:9; Psalms 5; 10; 14; 36; 51; 59; 116; 140; 143; 147; Isaiah 59:7 – 8; Proverbs 1:1; Ecclesiastes 7:20.

Paul now tries to anticipate the objections of his imaginary Jewish interlocutor. If it is true that the inherited privileges of the Jewish people (i.e., their monotheistic worship, divine election of the nation, and receiving the Torah) have had a null and void impact in making Israel any better than the pagan nations, then is the failure not really Israel’s but actually God’s failure? If Israel falters, has God failed to be faithful to his chosen people? If Paul is right, is not God’s faithfulness put under a cloud of suspicion because God has reneged on his covenant promise to sustain and save Israel? Furthermore, if the logic holds that Gentiles and Jews alike are caught in evil and are justly condemned, then why bother following the Jewish way of life?

That is the issue at hand, and this is not the only place where Paul takes it up. Romans 3:1 – 20 is really a microcosm of the argument that Paul will rehearse later in Romans 9 – 11. There he will attempt to demonstrate that Israel’s failure to believe in the gospel does not nullify God’s faithfulness, since God’s electing purposes run through Israel and are bigger than Israel. Not only that, but Israel’s rejection is the mechanism that leads to Gentile inclusion, and Gentile inclusion will lead to Israel’s eventual reconciliation with God. Thus, divine faithfulness to the patriarchs, to Israel, and to Christ-believers all holds firm.

It is worth remembering that 3:1 – 20 rehashes a familiar theme in the biblical story, namely, God’s rebuking of Israel for her waywardness and his revulsion at the conduct of the nations. The culturally dominating image of God as some kind of long-bearded, benign old man with the voice of actor Morgan Freeman, who can easily have the wool pulled over his eyes and has a live-and-let-live view of things, is dismantled by a cursory reading of the Old Testament. The totality of God’s government of the universe leads inevitably to the application of his justice in terms of both vindication and judgment. God’s judgment, as we saw in 1:18 – 30, is not a disproportionate feat of rage. Rather, divine wrath is the response of God’s holiness toward moral evil.

Judgment in the Old Testament is always a middle term between warnings on the one hand and deliverance on the other. The preliminary phase, prophetic warning, is God’s advanced notice that the nation has lost its way and must turn back immediately or risk punitive consequences. Ezekiel provides a good example when he tells the exiles, “Therefore, you Israelites, I will judge each of you according to your own ways, declares the Sovereign LORD. Repent! Turn away from all your offenses; then sin will not be your downfall” (Ezek 18:30). Paul draws on the Psalms and Isaiah to show that Israel and all humanity need to hear the divine “no” to their sin before they can receive the divine “yes” through Jesus Christ. Importantly, God’s faithfulness to Israel and his mercy to the nations do not obviate the reality of God’s contention against sin, for people must turn away from sin and turn to God for forgiveness if judgment is to be avoided.

The argument in 3:1 – 20 can be split up in two parts, both beginning with the question of Jewish “advantage.” On that question, Paul gives a “yes and no” answer. In vv. 1 – 8, Paul answers affirmatively, upholding Israel’s privileged role as custodian of divine oracles, but countenancing it with a particular qualification. God’s faithfulness is not contingent on Israel’s faithfulness to that vocation. What is more, it is spurious and sacrilegious to insist that God’s faithfulness to Israel precludes the possibility of God’s judging of Israel. Paul rejects the premise that for God to be faithful, upright, and true, he must accept Israel whether in the right or in the wrong. If that were the case, God would have no grounds to prosecute the world in its rebellion because God’s own moral compass would be skewed.

Then, in vv. 9 – 18, Paul answers negatively, saying that there is no Jewish advantage, on the grounds that Jews and Gentiles are both condemned by the weight of the sin that presses on them. This point is then proved by a catena of texts from the Psalms and the prophet Isaiah. God’s election of Israel entails their special relationship with God and their unique vocation as the covenant people. It does not mean that Israel will be excluded from judgment, for God will judge the entire world.

Then, in vv. 19 – 20, Paul comes to his climactic conclusion concerning the entire span of the argument set out in 1:18 – 3:20. No one will be declared righteous before God by adopting the Jewish way of life as given in the Torah. While the Torah gives knowledge of sin, it is powerless to effect liberation from sin. That in turn sets the stage for the next move in Paul’s argument in Romans. Exactly how, then, will God’s righteousness be disclosed? How will God’s intent to rectify creation and be faithful to Israel come to fruition? Where should one look for it and what will the result be for Israel and for the world?

Paul has just pointed out (1) how Jewish privileges will not provide a sure escape from God’s judgment on the appointed day (see Rom 2:16 – 24); (2) that is because the covenant sign of circumcision is only effective in the context of covenantal obedience; in which case (3) Paul creates the possibility that Gentile obedience can be reckoned as circumcision or covenantal membership (see 2:25 – 29). If that is true, then someone might well ask, “What advantage, then, is there in being a Jew, or what value is there in circumcision?” (3:1). Paul’s argument in Romans 2 has raised the question as to whether Jewish identity can ever be grounds for assurance. To put it bluntly, one could ask of Paul, what is the point of being Jewish then? Why not apostasize from Judaism as some aristocratic Jews did, like Tiberius Alexander or the great-grandchildren of Herod the Great?¹

Whereas one might expect that Paul will give a negative answer to the question, he does the opposite; he provides a positive affirmation of Jewish identity: “Much in every way! First of all, the Jews have been entrusted with the very words of God” (3:2). Paul will list other benefits of Jewishness later on (see 9:4 – 5), but here he focuses on Israel’s custodianship of the “words of God.” Israel has been entrusted (pisteuō) with the oracles of God (logia tou theou). This is far more than Israel running a chain of bookstores that stock editions of the Hebrew Bible. The words in question are in fact the “promises of God,” on which Paul majors — the promises made to the patriarchs about creating a one-world-family through Israel and her Messiah (see 4:12 – 18, 9:6 – 13; 11:28; esp. 15:8 – 12). Abraham was promised to be a father of many nations. Therefore, Israel’s job description was to be kings and priests of the world, to turn Canaan into a new Eden, and to lead the nations into the worship of God.

Sadly though, Israel had mixed fortunes in fulfilling that task. As time went by, they either imitated the worst of the nations or else prided themselves in their separation from the nations — neither of which was conducive to being a kingdom of priests and a light to the nations. Israel was not faithful to this covenantal task to which God’s election bound her.

That is why Paul adds: “What if some were unfaithful? Will their unfaithfulness nullify God’s faithfulness?” (3:3). This is getting down to the real point of contention. Can Israel’s failure to keep the Torah and to share the divine promises with the nations — the two go together as the former is the condition for the latter — be attributed to God’s unfaithfulness to Israel?² Predictably Paul cannot entertain such a notion that God is unfaithful. Thus he responds in v. 4 with “Not at all!” The Greek mē genoito is an emphatic form of negation in Greek combining a negative particle with an optative verb to signify Paul’s revulsion at the mere thought. Idiomatically we might say with the voice of a Mafia don, “Forget about it” or perhaps with the voice of a Californian surfer, “No way, dude.”³ Paul adds a proverbial thought allusive of Psalm 116:11 (LXX 115:2), “Let God be true, and every human being a liar.” He also adds a citation from Psalm 51:4 (LXX Ps 50:6), “So that you may be proved right when you speak and prevail when you judge.” The context of Psalm 51 is, of course, David’s adultery with Bathsheba, and David recognizes how God’s declaration of his wrong establishes that God is right. The net point is that God’s faithfulness or “righteousness” is manifested even through the sins of his people.⁴

Paul seems to digress for a moment in vv. 5 – 8 as he takes the time to respond to some counterassertions that deny that God can be both faithful to Israel and yet simultaneously judge the nation in the eschatological future. Significantly, Paul changes perspective from talking about the Jews in vv. 1 – 4 to speaking as one of them in vv. 5 – 8. Hence his use of first person pronouns in “our unrighteousness,” “wrath on us,” “my falsehood,” “I am condemned as a sinner,” and “Let us do evil.” Paul switches into a speech-in-character that identifies himself with unfaithful Jews and their national unfaithfulness, which is on par with the unrighteousness condemned in the earlier stages of the argument (see 1:18, 29: 2:8).⁵ Paul brings the attributes of God’s righteousness and truthfulness to the surface to see how they fair in light of some rather specious objections.

First, Paul asks as an objector, “But if our unrighteousness brings out God’s righteousness more clearly, what shall we say? That God is unjust in bringing his wrath on us?” (3:5). The premise for the objection is drawn from Paul’s citation of Psalm 51. If our sin proves that God is righteous, righteous in the sense that God was both the judge and the justifier of a sinner like David, then in what possible sense can God’s wrath against Israel ever be total or final?⁶ At the heart of the objection is the presumption that God’s righteousness rests on Israel’s righteousness, and if it not be so, God is not faithful. In other words, God’s faithfulness is thought to imply that Israel permanently possesses a get-out-of-judgment-free-card.

The sort of attitude that Paul is correcting is reminiscent of the time of Jeremiah, when the populace thought that the temple made them immune from divine judgment. Jeremiah mocked their mantra: “This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD!” and declared to them the divine warning that threatened them: “My anger and my wrath will be poured out on this place — on man and beast, on the trees of the field and on the crops of your land — and it will burn and not be quenched” (Jer 7:4, 20). Paul responds that such a charge is a merely “human argument,” one that requires an emphatic negation, “Certainly not.” Paul asserts in counterpoint that if that were true, “How could God judge the world?” (vv. 5b – 6). God’s Word clearly promises judgment for disobedience as part of the covenant (e.g., Deut 27 – 31), and if God reneges and refuses to judge Israel, he has no grounds to judge the rest of the world either. In Paul’s mind, God’s faithfulness to Israel means that judgment is for the Jew first and then the Gentile, rather than excluding Israel but falling on the Gentiles (see Rom 2:9)!

Second, Paul asks again as an objector, “If my falsehood enhances God’s truthfulness and so increases his glory, why am I still condemned as a sinner?” (v. 7). This reiterates the same point stated in v. 5 whereby Israel’s failure serves to prove God’s uprightness either as judge or as deliverer. God’s faithfulness to Israel seemingly guarantees an amnesty for all sinners within Israel. But some even go further and ask, “Why not say — as some slanderously claim that we say — ‘Let us do evil that good may result?’ ” Paul has probably heard that taunt more than once as his Torah-free gospel for Gentiles was regarded as promoting antinomianism (see Acts 21:20 – 21; Rom 6:2). If some Gentiles are seizing on Paul’s alleged antinomianism to justify their own antinomian theology, Paul seeks here to shortcircuit it. Ironically, Paul’s critique of Jewish presumption on God’s favor dovetails with Jewish critiques of Paul’s Torah-free gospel for Gentiles; both are said to cultivate indifference toward holiness and righteousness because God is faithful. In response, Paul vehemently declares that those who construct such arguments make God out to be fickle and have come to a point where “their condemnation is just!” (v. 8). Summing up vv. 1 – 8, Doug Moo is on the money when he writes:

Taken as a whole, then, the passage both affirms the continuing faithfulness of God to his covenant people and argues that his faithfulness in no way precludes God from judging the Jews. Provoking this discussion is the Jewish tendency to interpret God’s covenant faithfulness solely in terms of his salvific promises. Paul meets that conception with a broader and deeper view of God’s faithfulness — his faithfulness to remain true to his character and to all his words: the promises of cursing for disobedience as well as blessing for obedience.⁷

Paul returns to the question of Jewish advantage, and this time sports a negative answer. “What shall we conclude then? Do we have any advantage? Not at all!” (v. 9). Paul’s conclusion based on his preceding argument in 2:1 – 3:8 is that the Jewish advantages are, strangely enough, not really all that advantageous.⁸ Not because God’s faithfulness has failed, but because Jewish transgression of the covenant has put them on par with Gentiles. Paul provides this explanation, “For we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin” (3:9). Paul’s declares that God already has an accusation to be laid against Jews and Gentiles.⁹ Their behavior has occurred because both are “under sin.” The Greek text does not say “power” as does the NIV, NRSV, and CEB. However, the idea of sin being a hostile power that holds the world within the vestiges of its dark grip is certainly congruent with Paul’s thought. The expression anticipates what Paul will say later about the one who lives under the law, namely, that “I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin” (Rom 7:14).

Substantiation for the claim that Jews and Gentiles are under sin is made in vv. 10 – 18 with a dense collection of citations from the Psalms and one from Isaiah about the depravity of the human subject. Paul launches a barrage of scriptural evidence probably of his own composition and with a degree of interpretative freedom in his wording. The effect is that humanity is without righteousness, without understanding, and without kindness; they don’t seek God because they have turned away from God (Ps 14:1 – 3; cf. Ps 53:1 – 3; Eccl 7:20); their speech is full of deception and obscenity (Pss 5:9; 140:3; 10:7); people are consumed with bloodlust, wreak havoc everywhere, and do not know peace (Isa 59:7 – 8; cf. Prov 1:16); and humanity lacks the fear of God (Ps 36:1). This is what it means to be under sin, to act without excuse, and to shun God’s glory. In fact, there is an ignoble consistency across Romans 1 – 3 concerning the sins perpetrated by both Jews and Gentiles, which is precisely why both are captive under sin and are facing a charge from God.

The argument stretching from 1:18 – 3:20 now reaches its end: “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” (vv. 19 – 20). Paul’s summary here is largely hermeneutical; it is about the proper way to understand the meaning of Torah for Jews and Gentiles. Whereas the Jewish interlocutor reads the Torah as knowledge of God’s promises given to Israel and which is to be passed onto Gentiles, Paul hears in the Torah the tragic news of human subjugation in sin.¹⁰ The verdict of the Torah, echoed in the Psalms and in Isaiah, is that God’s right to judge is affirmed and no reasonable grounds for a counter-retort exists. God can rightly prosecute his contention against both a rebellious world and an unfaithful Israel. In the end, all of humanity is headed for a “forensic catastrophe.”¹¹

Like “a piece of Galatians falling out of the sky,”¹² Paul adds that the consequence of the universality of sin, the “therefore,” is that “no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law” (v. 20). The verb dikaioō is forensic and is ordinarily used in a declarative act that pronounces the rightness of a particular party in some matter of dispute.¹³ For Jews it meant in particular that they have a right covenantal standing before God. Paul is emphatic that no one, none of all or any flesh (pasa sarx), will be declared to be in the right before God on the basis of “works of the law.” The phrase “works of the law” (ex ergōn nomou) has prompted a sway of debate as to its meaning (see Rom 2:15; 3:27 – 38; Gal 2:16; 3:2, 5, 10).¹⁴ At the risk of simplicity, the main options are:

2. The social boundary markers of the law with specific reference to circumcision, dietary laws, and Sabbath (e.g., James Dunn, N. T. Wright)

3. Keeping the law with a legalistic spirit (e.g., Daniel Fuller, C. E. B. Cranfield)

The phrase is hard to discern because it is incredibly rare in Jewish usage.¹⁵ On the one hand, the “works of the law” seems to mean no more than the “works that the law requires” and embraces all 613 commandments of the Torah. On the other hand, the phrase cannot be divorced from its social context whereby faithful observance of the law would mean a separation from Gentile social spaces and require the maintenance of boundaries to preserve the purity of Jewish communities.¹⁶ On a third hand (if I can borrow one), the phrase also seems to reflect Jewish sectarian disputes about halakhah or the precise manner in which the Torah was to be interpreted and lived. Of these three options, I prefer to describe the “works of the law” as referring to the Jewish way of life as codified in the Torah.¹⁷

If that is the case, what Paul appears to be saying is that taking up Torah observance, in whole or in part, even to the point of proselytizing and joining a Jewish community, will not constitute a “righteousness” that avails before God. A proper reading of the Torah discloses its inability to deliver persons from the evil within themselves. Furthermore, the Torah really serves to declare God’s righteous contention against all transgressors; that is, the law brings “consciousness” or “knowledge” of sin.

Let us remember that the Gentile Christians whom Paul addresses probably had at one time or other some degree of affiliation with Judaism. They perhaps once envisaged their departure from paganism to(ward) Judaism as a way of deliverance, a deliverance based on coming to knowledge of the Torah and sharing in Israel’s covenantal promises. Yet Paul is telling these Gentile believers that their transference from a pagan life to a Jewish life was like running from the port side to the starboard side of a sinking ship. Paul’s argument is that there is something wrong with humanity — all humanity, Jews and Gentiles — that the Torah cannot fix. The place of the Jew and the Gentile is under sin and under judgment. Yet a tension remains because that is not the sum of the story. If God is the rectifier of creation and the faithful sovereign over Israel, how will God deliver Israel and even those among the nations in order to uphold his glory? Enter stage left, the other side of God’s righteousness: not the prosecution of divine wrath against humanity, but the provision of divine salvation through God’s Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Romans 3:1 – 20 proves that Israel has no right of reply to God’s verdict against their transgression of the Torah. Indeed, Paul puts their transgression of the Torah under a microscope to show exactly what this transgression looks like and how dehumanizing it is. In a nutshell, Paul gives a most ungrand tour on the sinful nature of the human heart as exposed by God’s Torah. In light of that, the topic of sin requires some further exploration as to how our understanding of sin shapes what we think about the human need and its resolution in Christ.

The area of “hamartiology” pertains to the study of the doctrine of sin.¹⁸ It is not the most popular doctrine for study, nor is it the most popular subject of sermons in my experience. According to Fleming Rutledge, “it is difficult, nowadays, to gain a hearing for Paul. All this talk about sin! Sophisticated people in the twentieth century long since gave up talking about sin — we talk about obsessive behavior, or neurotic patterns, or deviance, or pathology, or disorder, or whatever (I do this myself), but not sin.”¹⁹ Similarly, the famous clinician Karl A. Menninger once wrote a book called Whatever Happened to Sin? in which he observed how the language of sin had gradually faded out of usage as a consequent of the rise of the modern therapeutic culture that had gripped Western society. Now if feeling good is your goal, then admitting your sin or even reflecting on your sin was always going to inhibit fuzzy wuzzy feelings of personal self-validation. The upshot was that modern culture shoved sin under the carpet and tried to bury feelings of guilt with self-indulgent and self-affirming mantras. The vain attempt to deal with one’s own sins through a mixture of denial and hedonism was always bound to fail because, as the Bible says, “your sin will find you out” (Num 32:23 KJV) and “those who plow evil and those who sow trouble reap it” (Job 4:8 NIV).

But what exactly is sin? Paul has a lot to say about sin, its origins, its appearance, and its consequences. According to Romans, sin entered the world through the disobedience of Adam, with the result of introducing condemnation and death to all of humanity and of constituting Adam’s progeny as sinners (5:12, 16, 19). As a result everyone has sinned and fallen short of God’s glory (3:23). Furthermore, because humans rejected God, God gave them over to sinful desires (1:24). In this economy of sin and judgment the wages of sin is death (6:23). On either side of the Jew/Gentile divide we find sin because sin was in the world before the law (5:13), those who sin apart from law will perish, and those under the law will have their sins judged by the law (2:12) since the law brings knowledge of our sin (3:20). Sin even uses the law to arouse sinful passions and to foster lawless behavior (7:5 – 7). Inevitably, then, Jews and Gentiles are both under the power of sin (3:9). Finally, faith is the antithesis of sin since whatever does not come from faith is sin (14:23).

It is clear from Paul’s letter to the Romans, especially in the vice lists, that sin is both horizontal and vertical. Obviously sin has terrible consequences for the individual, his or her family, and society at large. Sin corrupts our desires, infects our attitudes, ruins our speech, perverts our sexuality, and drives our conduct. Sin is manifested in theft, anger, hatred, jealousy, lust, lies, greed, gossip, selfishness, and a thousand other sordid vices. Humanity at its lowest ebb is captive in sin like a fly in a spider’s web. Humanity in sin becomes little more than a brute beast that exercises base instincts for a mixture of survival and self-gratification. However, despite the horrible consequences that sin has for the individual, family, and friends, and even for social structures, we must not lose sight of the fact that sin is ultimately an offense against God. He is the primary party offended by our sin. Sin offends God’s sovereignty, holiness, and glory. Hence Paul’s words: “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Rom 1:21). Sin is like a form of cosmic sedition or a repetitive mutiny against God’s will as expressed in his common grace and providence over humankind.

I tend to think of sin as primarily about humanity’s feeble efforts to put themselves on the throne in place of God. One of the most commonly played songs at funerals is Frank Sinatra’s “I Did It My Way.” In many ways, the title of the song aptly summarizes the nature of sin. Sin represents the attempt to displace God and the desire to deify the self. Humans defy their Creator, shake their puny little fists at the heavens, and say, “I will do it my way.” Such an attitude means trying to usurp the prerogatives of deity, acting with impunity before the divine throne, and demanding immunity from any consequences that would warrant judgment. To insist, even in one’s funeral, to having done things “my way” is to insist on the right to define right and wrong or good and evil without reference to God. Rage, rejection, and rebellion against God combined with the deification of the self: this is the essence of sin. Sin, in the end, is a form of the “Frank Sinatra Syndrome,” where human beings delude themselves into thinking that their life was lived “my way” and not “God’s way.” If we usurp for ourselves the sovereignty of the God who is love, we will become obsessed with living a life ruled by anything other than the divine way of love. In the end sin leads to a consuming love of self with no room for the love of God and a diminishing capacity to love others.

Let me add that this leads to a bad situation for us. The English Puritan Ralph Venning wrote a small book called The Sinfulness of Sin. The title sounds tautological, I know. However, I think the title conveys an important point, namely, that sin is utterly consumed with its own nature of hostility toward the holiness of God. As Venning wrote: “sin is sinful, all sinful, only sinful, altogether sinful and always sinful.”²⁰ Humanity in sin becomes all sinful. In the domain of theology this tenet is usually called the doctrine of total depravity. That is not to say that human beings are incapable of goodness or that they are as maximally evil as they can be. No, total depravity simply means that from the cradle to the grave our natural inclination is toward sin, and sin is like a virus that infects every facet of our existence including desire, intellect, imagination, and behavior. Sin leaves us stranded in a sand pit of human misery where we sink deeper and deeper into its depths. Because we are consumed in sin, the solution must be to be consumed with something else. The abounding nature of sin in the human subject can only be defeated by the superabounding grace of God expressed toward us in Jesus Christ.

How would one preach a passage as confronting as Romans 3:1 – 20 to, say, an urban congregation full of Millennials and Gen-Ys who were reared on a bunch of political correctness and self-help mantras from postmodern priestesses? How do you convince a class of cultural narcissists whose consuming passion is twizzlers and Twitter that they are sinners and that they need the redemption that comes by way of Christ Jesus? How do you get them to look at their behavior through a biblical worldview and not just through the instantaneous gratification of Google glasses? I submit that what one needs here is not just some good biblical hermeneutics for handling the rhetorical jujitsu of 3:1 – 20 but also some good cultural hermeneutics for reading the values and struggles of people immersed in the often tragic complexities of twenty-first-century urban life.

In terms of preaching on “sin,” I cannot speak definitively about the USA, but I have learned from my experience in the UK and Australia that it is increasingly difficult to speak convincingly about “sin” to unbelieving audiences. It is difficult in a secular and post-Christian culture where younger generations are not only biblically illiterate, but the increasing number of “nones” (i.e., those folks with no religious connections) simply have no concept of what the words “God,” “sin,” “Christ,” and “salvation” even mean. Let me say that I am a Gen-Xer, and growing up as a “none” everything I knew about Christianity I learned from Ned Flanders of the TV sitcom The Simpsons. Not exactly a perfect introduction to Christianity and the Bible. Sad to say, the situation has only got worse for Gen-Y and the Millennials, who entirely lack a Christian frame of reference and even basic knowledge of how biblical language is echoed in modern idioms. To young people like these, you cannot just tweet them Romans 6:23, “For the wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord,” because the word “sin” has no resonance or affront.

To most unchurched folks, the word “sin” means something like “naughty but fun.” Sin is something opposed by moralizing geriatrics and happily indulged in by hip guys and gals who brazenly assert their independence against any authority that thinks can boss them around. Sin is one of those Victorian hang-ups that we need to get over so we can get on and enjoy life to the full.

For example, near where I used to live were two businesses that both used the word “sin” in their trading name. There was an adult product shop called Sinsational and a tattoo parlor called Sin the Skin. Reflect for a moment as to how the word “sin” is used by those two businesses as a marketing tool to actually entice people into their premises. The concept of sin here is not affronting or offensive; it is rather a point of attraction. I like sinning, so I should go and buy some adult sex products or get a tattoo (I’m not prejudging what people do to spice up their marital life or whether Christians should get tattoos, just saying that these businesses were using “sin” as a positive marketing device). Alan Mann does a good job of tracking this same trend in his book Atonement for a “Sinless” Society, where he points out that Western culture no longer has a meaningful concept of sin and guilt. People see themselves as basically good and victims of economic, political, and social forces. People are aware, however, that their real self (who they are) and their ideal self (who they wish they were) are not identical. Thus, they are more susceptible to feelings of shame and likely to respond to a message of atonement that focuses on becoming whole and healed persons.²¹

If that is where our culture is at with “sin,” then all bets are off, and we have to start from scratch. I suggest we stop using the word “sin” and find a new term to designate what is meant by the biblical words that we normally translate as sin, sinner, and sinful.²² My own suggestion is that we start talking about “evil” instead. Whereas the word “sin” can get easily brushed off by our biblically illiterate contemporaries as just a code word for religious moralizing, the word evil has far more connection and capital with audiences. That is because people know about evil; they’ve seen evil either on the TV or in their own broken neighborhoods, and deep down they are very, very afraid of evil.

Google has as their motto, “Don’t Be Evil.” Whether Google has actually lived up to their own motto is an open question, and some of the deals they did about filters and freedom with the Chinese government might leave us with pause for thought. But the notion of “evil” is on peoples’ moral compasses, and its very mention, like George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil,” immediately arouses our attention. Evil is something we feel obligated to run from and when able, to destroy. That is because evil threatens all that we value and love: life, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness. Christianity takes evil far more seriously than any other religion. In the Christian worldview, evil is not merely an outward illusion, not just the product of human desiring, not an eternal force in a symbiotic relationship with good, nor simply our name for the social and biological evolutionary forces that inhibit the propagation of our species. No, evil is an intrusive invasion into the good world that God created. Evil is not the way it is supposed to be. God’s plan to put the world to rights will be achieved by vanquishing evil once and for all, and that vanquishing began with the victorious death of the Lord Jesus Christ.

In all of our anxiety about evil, whether we associate evil with things like barbaric atrocities in Iraq or the sadistic kidnappers like Ariel Castro, we must inevitably confront evil within ourselves. We have to ask the question: Am I evil? Usually most people’s reaction to that question is, “No, of course not. There are seven billion people on this planet I haven’t killed, and I help the old lady next door with her internet connection.” But while we may not be evil in the same sense as a Joseph Stalin or an Osama Bin Laden, people will usually admit their moral imperfections and their capacity for evil. That’s when I love to quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”²³ Do you find the same struggle within yourself? What are you really capable of? Are you both victim and perpetrator of evil? These are the types of questions we need to be confronting people with in terms of their own capacity to see the evil within themselves.

I adore musical theater, so I loved Les Misérables, both the stage show and the movie, because the characters show the vastly different shades of humanity at its best and at its worst. I tell people that in my head, I like to think of myself as a modern Jean Valjean — someone who is strong yet merciful, driven and yet compassionate. However, what I think in my head is one thing, but down in my heart I know I’m more like a cross between the characters of Thénadiers and Javert, or a mixture of desperate brutality and cold self-righteousness. To use imagery from another musical, Whistle Down the Wind, an escaped convict tries to convince a teenage girl, who thinks he’s Jesus come back, that he is not really Jesus. So he tells her, “If you look deep down inside my eyes, do you see a savior, a prophet, or a priest, or do you only see the blackness there? That’s the nature of the beast.” A sober and honest evaluation of ourselves might prove that we are not likely to appear at the Hague for crimes against humanity any time soon. However, an examination of the deeper recesses of our hearts, where we lock away our most insidious desires, will prove that deep down is not Valjean but Javert, not a beauty but a beast.

Such introspection can be the catalyst for coming to faith as exemplified by a story I once heard from D. A. Carson about the conversion story of a successful career woman:

He [Mark Dever] introduced me to a woman. She was one of the editors of a Washington political weekly, she was about fifty, a PhD in journalism, a shrewd woman, divorced, two grown sons. He [Mark] said to her, “Tell Don how you got converted.” Well, it turned out that she was a self-confessed postmodernist through and through and through, a complete relativist; good and evil is defined entirely by your social structure. You can’t even say that Hitler was wrong because in his own lights he was right. There were a lot of people who did believe in Aryan supremacy. I don’t like it and from my point of view it was wrong, but from his own perspective he thought what he was doing was right. And that was the frame of reference.

Eventually she came along to a Bible study on the book of Mark that he [Mark Dever] had set up, an evangelistic Bible study, not because she was terribly interested. . . . She liked literature and this was studying the Bible, it was literature. Then she went off to Papua New Guinea four to five years ago during one of those political changeovers. And while she was there, just before she left, there was a priest who was arrested; he’d been there for thirty-five years or so, and just before he was due to retire and go back to America, he was arrested for paedophilia. Turned out that, as the case unpacked, he had sodomized at least 200 boys.

For some reason this story grabbed her. When you start thinking of all the damage this would do to the boys and probably their marriages and because abused people often become abusers and all the people they might abuse. Where does this all end? It just really grabbed her and she came home really shaken by this and she told Mark all of this and Mark smiled and said, “Was it wicked?” And she said, “Well, probably this priest was himself abused by someone; probably he’s a victim himself. There are reasons why people do these kinds of things.” Mark said, “The Bible says that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation. All that you’ve told me is that sin is social. It is not merely individual. Sin has social dynamics that affect other people. I’m not asking whether or not there are things that help to explain why this man did certain things; the question is, the things that he did, were they wicked?”

She just couldn’t get away from the question. Was it wicked? Was it wicked? She was losing her sleep. She was not able to concentrate. One night some weeks later she woke up in the middle of the night, and this question was coming through her mind again and again and again. Was it wicked? Was it wicked? She stared out the window, she couldn’t say “yes,” but she couldn’t believe “no.” Finally, in a burst of intensity she said, “This was wicked. This was evil.” Then it dawned on her. But that means that there is a category for wicked, maybe it means that she is wicked. Some time later she became a Christian.²⁴

What I take away from that story is that once people find a category to hang their sense of moral “oughtness” on, as C.S. Lewis called it — whether that is sin, shame, evil, or wickedness — the reflexive thing for them to do is to reflect on what planet they sit in that moral universe. “Who am I?” they can ask, in a universe where there really is right and wrong and where there really is good and evil. The best strategy we can use in preaching the gospel to the unchurched is not to throw churchy language at folks about “sin” and “transgression,” but to find a way to connect them to a moral universe, a moral universe in which God is judge and they are culpable to God for their shameful behavior. Then and only then will redemption, rescue, and reconciliation begin to make sense.

In preaching Romans 3:1 – 20 to an audience, especially one filled with Millennials and Nones, the challenge is to describe convincingly Paul’s message about how humanity is both washed adrift in a sea of evil and yet also acts as seafaring marauders within it. Furthermore, we must declare with Paul that this evil, corporate and individual, must meet with the judgment of God. Evil is not something that is limited to dictators and mass murderers; rather, evil lurks within the recesses of our minds and finds a highway of delight in the veins of our own bodies. What is more, God’s response to evil is his righteous rage and his holy justice. If God is to put this evil-ridden world to right, he must put us out of it. The solution to evil is not a purified ethnicity, not moral effort, nor even good education. The moral degeneration and ethical dystrophy of human existence requires something far more effective than rules and regulation; it needs redemption and renewal. But from where can such a saving justice come?

1. Josephus, Ant. 18.141; 20.100. On Jewish apostasy more generally, see Stephen G. Wilson, Leaving the Fold: Apostates and Defectors in Antiquity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004), 23 – 56.

2. Note that Paul says that “some” (tines) were unfaithful, not that all Israel was unfaithful, an important point that will feed into his remnant theology later (see 9:27; 11:5).

3. See other translations “God forbid” (KJV), “By no means!” (NRSV, ESV), “Absolutely not!” (NETS, CEB), “Out of the question!” (NJB), and “May it never be!” (NASB). On the optative mood here, see Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar beyond the Basics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 482; Stanley E. Porter, Jeffrey T. Reed, and Matthew Brook O’Donnell, Fundamentals of New Testament Greek (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 373 – 74; Stanley E. Porter, Idioms of the Greek New Testament (2nd ed.; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), 59 – 61.

6. Commentators differ on whether God’s righteousness here refers to his saving justice or to his punitive justice. On the one hand, Romans 1:17 and 3:21 could indicate a reference to God’s saving justice. On the other hand, the context of judgment in 3:1 – 20 could suggest God’s punitive justice. To complicate the matter further, Psalm 51, from which Paul takes his cue in Romans 3:4, includes both God’s punitive justice (Ps 51: 4) and his saving justice (Ps 51:14). Now I have to confess that tracing the logic of Paul’s thought here is like trying to nail jelly to the wall and the jelly fights back UFC style. My own mind went back and forth over 3:5 – 8 and I wrote several different exegeses about it. In the end, the argument seems the most coherent if 3:5 – 8 speaks of a punitive righteousness that is juxtaposed with divine fidelity. In other words, Paul is a dialectic theologian, holding God’s punitive justice and saving justice in deliberate tension.

8. Paul uses three different words in Rom 3:1, 9 for “advantage” or “value”: perissos (“abundance”), ōpheleia (“benefit”), and proechō (“to be in a prominent position”). See BDAG 805, 869, 1107.

9. Here the verb proaitiaomai means “to reach a charge of guilt prior to an implied time” or to “accuse beforehand” (BDAG 865).

11. D. A. Carson, “Atonement in Romans 3:21 – 26,” in The Glory of the Atonement: Biblical, Theological and Practical Perspectives (ed. C. E. Hill and F. A. James; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), 120.

13. Cf. Bird, Saving Righteousness of God, 17 – 18; Moo, Romans, 79 – 90; Wright, Justification, 90 – 92; Stephen Westerholm, Perspectives Old and New on Paul: The “Lutheran” Paul and His Critics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 261 – 84.

14. Cf., e.g., Robert Keith Rapa, The Meaning of “Works of the Law” in Galatians and Romans (New York: Peter Lang, 2001); Jacqueline C. R. de Roo, Works of the Law at Qumran and in Paul (NTM 13; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2006).

16. Interestingly Ambrosiaster defines the “law” in 3:21 as “law of the sabbath, the circumcision, the new moon, and revenge,” and in 3:28 he defines “works of the law” as “circumcision or new moons or the veneration of the sabbath” (Bray, Ambrosiaster, 28).

17. Watson, Beyond the New Perspective, 19. I’ve also argued elsewhere (Michael F. Bird, “What if Martin Luther Had Read the Dead Sea Scrolls? Historical Particularity and Theological Interpretation: Galatians as a Test Case,” JTI 3 [2009]: 117) that while works of the law means “works that the law requires,” it is impossible to eliminate the social and ethnic connotations of the phrase: (1) A cursory glance of Menahem Stern’s Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism shows how pagan authors were confused and disgusted by Jewish separation from Gentiles demanded by their distinctive way of life (e.g., Tacitus, Histories 5.5). (2) Several pieces of literature assume a default setting of Jews separating from the Gentiles (e.g., Acts 10:28; Gal 2:11 – 14; Ep. Arist. 139). (3) It is surely interesting that in the second century when Justin Martyr discusses the Torah with Trypho the Jew, the first point Justin brings up is Jewish separation from Gentiles (Dial. Tryph. 10). (4) Without reducing Paul’s remarks about “works” to Jewish attitudes of exclusion and superiority, it is hard to avoid the fact that in Romans and Galatians Paul addresses the question of Jewish boundary makers and rites of passages vis-à-vis Gentile Christians.

20. Ralph Venning, The Sinfulness of Sin (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1965), 31.

21. Alan Mann, Atonement for “Sinless” Society: Engaging with an Emerging Culture (Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster, 2005).

22. For a summary of the main Hebrew and Greek words for sin, see Clayton N. Jefford, “Sin,” in EDB 1224 – 26.

23. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918 – 1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (New York: Harper Row, 1974), 1.168.

24. Don Carson. DC 37 Eliza Ferrie Lecture Series 2001. Sydney, Australia. “Righteousness and Justification in Paul.” Tape number 4. Dated 20 – 08 – 01.

Thematic Links between Romans 3 and 9 – 11
The question of Jewish privileges	3:1 = 9:1 – 5
Has God failed?	3:3 = 9:6; 11:1 – 2
Some Jews failed/Some Jews faithful	3:3 = 9:27; 11:5
Is God unjust?	3:5 = 9:14
Righteousness of God	3:5 = 10:3
Why does God condemn?	3:7 = 9:19
Equality between Jews and Gentiles	3:9 = 10:12
Israel’s failure in the Torah	3:9 = 9:30 – 10:21

Recurring Vices in Romans 1 – 3
Unrighteousness	1:18, 29; 2:8; 3:5, 10.
Wickedness	1:30; 2:9; 3:8.
Denying the truth	1:18, 25; 2:8; 3:4.
Without excuse	1:20, 29; 2:1.
Arrogance	1:22, 29 – 30; 2:1 – 5, 17, 21.
Rejecting God’s glory	1:21, 23, 30; 2:23; 3:11, 18.
Debased thinking	1:21, 28, 31; 2:4; 3:11.
Sexual sins	1:26 – 28; 2:22.
Sins with idolatry	1:25; 2:22.
Violence	1:29, 30; 3:15.
Sinful speech	1:29; 3:7, 13 – 15.
Blasphemy	1:30; 2:24; 3:8.
Unfaithfulness	1:31; 3:3.
Sins in the heart	1:21, 24; 2:5, 15.
Strife	1:29; 2:8.