“All Have Sinned”
“ALL HAVE SINNED”
ROMANS 2:1-4
What do we see if we honestly look into our own heart?
In the following chapter Paul makes one of the great evangelical statements of Scripture: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (3:23). Christianity maintains that at some point of time man, self-conscious and free, set his will in opposition to God’s will, and that ever since then the rest of humanity has followed suit. Nor can individual people shift the burden of that responsibility on to history, heredity or environment.
We are all, in our more candid moments, conscious of the fact that we bend more easily to ill than good, that we seek with greater ease the good of self than the good of others, that even our virtues are based more on fear of punishment than on love of good, and that pride, self-assertion, arrogance, the very element and essential of all sin, mingles itself like a pervading poison with all our pretence and practice of good. In short, to apply a famous dictum, if there were no doctrine of the fall and of original sin, “it would be necessary to invent one.”
Paul finds it necessary, before proceeding to this assertion, to meet an objection. He has described in vivid terms the moral breakdown in contemporary society, but he is also conscious of a counter-argument, and pictures himself in debate with an objector. There were, firstly, good pagans. We have mentioned Seneca, destined like many Christians to die at Nero’s hands. He wrote at the same time as Paul was writing, and his attitude to moral evil was so uncompromising that Tertullian spoke of him as “often one of us.” But Seneca, for all his goodness, illustrates Paul’s point. His tutelage of the youthful Nero led him into horrifying compromises which betrayed all his aspirations, and revealed his dire need.
Secondly came the Jew, confident in his election, certain of his righteousness, proud of the Law. Paul will soon proceed to show what the Law really signified, and the hollowness of all Jewish pride.