Romans 1:18 – 3:20
Nothing keeps people away from Christ more than their inability to see their need of him or their unwillingness to admit it. As Jesus put it: ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but those who are ill. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.’ He was defending his policy of fraternizing with ‘tax collectors and sinners’ against the criticism of the Pharisees. He did not mean that some people are righteous, so that they do not need salvation, but that some people think they are. In that condition of self-righteousness they will never come to Christ. For just as we go to the doctor only when we admit that we are ill and cannot cure ourselves, so we will go to Christ only when we admit that we are guilty sinners and cannot save ourselves. The same principle applies to all our difficulties. Deny the problem, and nothing can be done about it; admit the problem, and at once there is the possibility of a solution. It is significant that the first of the ‘twelve steps’ of Alcoholics Anonymous is: ‘We admitted we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable.’
To be sure, some people insist with great bravado that they are neither sinful nor guilty, and that they do not need Christ. It would be quite wrong to seek to induce guilty feelings in them artificially. But if sin and guilt are universal (as they are), we cannot leave people alone in such a false paradise of supposed innocence. The most irresponsible action of a doctor would be to go along with a patient’s inaccurate self-diagnosis. Our Christian duty is rather, through prayer and teaching, to bring people to accept the true diagnosis of their condition in the sight of God. Otherwise, they will never respond to the gospel.
It is this plain and unpopular principle which lies behind Romans 1:18 – 3:20. Before Paul can show that salvation is equally available to Jews and Gentiles (which he says it is in 1:16), he must prove that they are equally in need of it. So his purpose in this passage is to draw up ‘the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin’, so that everyone may be ‘held accountable to God’. He does more than bring an accusation; he marshals the evidence against us, in order to prove our guilt and secure our conviction. All men and women (Jesus being the solitary exception) are sinful, guilty and without excuse before God. They are already under his wrath. They already stand condemned. It is a very solemn theme. It is also the necessarily dark background against which the gospel shines brightly, and an essential foundation for world evangelization.
The way Paul demonstrates the universality of human sin and guilt is to divide the human race into several sections and to accuse them one by one. In each case his procedure is identical. He begins by reminding each group of their knowledge of God and of goodness. He then confronts them with the uncomfortable fact that they have not lived up to their knowledge. Instead, they have deliberately suppressed it, even contradicted it, by continuing to live in unrighteousness. And they are therefore guilty, inexcusably guilty, before God. Nobody can plead innocence, because nobody can plead ignorance.
First (1:18–32), he portrays depraved Gentile society in its idolatry, immorality and antisocial behaviour.
Second (2:1–16), he addresses critical moralizers (whether Gentiles or Jews), who profess high ethical standards but apply them to everybody except themselves.
Third (2:17 – 3:8), he turns to self-confident Jews, who boast of their knowledge of God’s law, but do not obey it.
Fourth (3:9–20), he encompasses the whole human race and concludes that we are all guilty and without excuse before God.
Throughout this long passage, in which the apostle gradually but relentlessly builds his case, he never loses sight of the good news of Christ. Indeed, ‘the righteousness of God’ (that is, as we have seen, his righteous way of ‘righteoussing’ the unrighteous) is the only possible context in which he could dare to expose the squalor of human unrighteousness. In 1:17 he has stated that ‘in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed’. In 3:21 he will repeat this statement almost word for word: ‘But now . . . the righteousness of God has been made known.’ It is in between these two great affirmations of the revelation of God’s gracious righteousness that Paul sandwiches his terrible exposure of human unrighteousness (1:18 – 3:20).