Jesus, the One who cleanses

Young and old, everybody, live in the Bible! The Bible will do you well. It will carry you. It will guide you. It will lead you everywhere - to Him, from Him, through Him, for Him.

From my personal relationship with Truth, with Him - I am not as moved by faddishness anymore. I am not as eager to say anything particularly relevant. I have seen some fads come and go. I have seen some growth strategies come and go. I have seen all kinds of stresses come and go and I fall back again and again and say: If my life is going to count for anything with His Body, it has to be a steady state, constant, long-term feeding of the word of God. That will be the key. If I leave behind a legacy, it will be perseverance in telling the truth about the Bible.

And so, may we GROW and persevere, is my prayer as we dig in.

As Romans 3 opens, Paul has just argued in Romans 2:25 that if a Jewish person does not follow the Law of God, then his "circumcision has become uncircumcision." That is, he is no different from a Gentile. Not only that -he said in 2:27 that Gentiles who do follow the Law of God will in the last days stand in judgment over Jewish people who have treated the Law as a mere letter, instead of letting it have its inward transforming effect by the Holy Spirit. He said all this to make plain that Jews, as well as Gentiles, are all under the power of sin and in need of the great life-giving gospel that Paul preaches about the gift of God's righteousness (1:16-17) - namely, that no matter how much sin you brought into this room today (Jew or Gentile), you can have a right standing with God because of Christ's death and resurrection if you will put your trust in

him. That's been the point so far in Romans: Jews and Gentiles alike need the gospel and God gives his own righteousness freely to those who trust his Son.

But now Paul takes a kind of detour in Romans 3:1-8. He has said something that is very provocative and that will not go unchallenged, namely, that some Jews are not really Jews and some Gentiles can really be Jews, even if they are not circumcised. The problem is that this seems to call into question the special position of Israel as God's chosen people. And that means it would call into question the whole Old Testament. And if Paul's gospel does that, it will not stand.

They say, in effect, (now get this!), if our sin (like David's sin), our unrighteousness, shows or magnifies God's righteousness when he judges us, then really, we are not the instruments of sin, we're the instruments of God's glory to magnify his righteousness. So he would be unrighteous to condemn us. He would be condemning us for the very thing that magnifies the glory of his righteousness in judgment. Now if that sounds like a word game, it is. In fact, in arguing this way (Paul might say), you entangle yourselves in thre

e contradictions of your own beliefs.

There is condemnation of Jews and Gentiles, and there is justice. And these two things do not contradict. This is where we began. Who are they whose condemnation is just? Those who play games with the Word of God. More specifically in this case: those who see two true things in the Word of God that they can't reconcile and deny that this can be. For them it was, on the one hand, God is faithful and God is righteous and God is true to his glory, and, on the other hand, God judges his very own chosen people and condemns them along with the Gentile world. Two truths, for them irreconcilable. What advantage then would the Jew have? So they try to reject one of these truths. And the result is sophistry - tricky reasoning, word games. Today we might call it spinning. And to this Paul says, "Their condemnation is just."

To which my exhortation is: Don't play games with the Bible. Be as careful as you can in handling the Word of God. And when you can't reconcile one true thing with another true thing, wait and pray and study and seek the Lo

rd. In due time, they will be reconciled - to Him, from Him, through Him, for Him.

As we come to the end of this great indictment of the human race that began back in Romans 1:18, this whole section of the letter up through this text is to show that all people everywhere are under the power of sin, and cannot get right with God apart from the gift of righteousness that God gives through faith in Jesus Christ (Romans 1:16-17). We see it here in the summary statement of Romans 3:9b, "We have already charged that both Jews and Greeks are under sin." "Jews and Greeks" means "everybody" -because "Greeks" stood for what many people considered the best of the non-Jews. All of them - all people - are "under sin." Under the power of sin. Not just sinning occasionally, but enslaved to sin.

Then as we look at Paul's final, summary diagnosis in this section, keep thinking: this is good, this is good. Because for all this bad news about my true condition, there is a remedy. And the only reason for telling me the bad news is so that I will understand the remedy and take it - namely, the righteousness of God, freely given to those who really trust in Christ.

There are two main questions I want to try to answer in verses 9-18. One is: How does Paul support verse 9 and the sinfulness of all men on th

e basis of the Old Testament in all these quotations in verses 10-18? And the other is: How does he describe the state of being "under sin" in these verses? Or: What can we learn about sin, and about ourselves, and about the Gospel from the way Paul talks about sin in these verses?

I think the first answer goes something like this: Paul doesn't mean that every one of the six Old Testament quotes has the whole indictment in it, but that taken all together they have the whole indictment. It seems that the first quote (in verses 10-12), for example, from Psalm 14, is mainly an indictment of the Gentile world, because later it refers to Israel as the righteous generation. In other words, without the special grace of God -without the special revelation of his saving work revealed to Israel - people are not righteous, no not one. Only when God breaks into our lives and gives the special grace of faith and forgiveness through a substitutionary sacrifice can we get right with God, and be called "righteous." Paul knew that happened for the Old Testament saints. We know he knew this, because in Romans 4:3 he quotes Genesis 15:6, "[Abraham] believed in the LORD; and He reckoned it to him as righteousness."

When Paul quotes the Old Testament that "There is none righteous, no not one," he means that,

by nature, apart from saving grace, we are unrighteous.

He does not mean that there was no way to get right with God and have a right standing with God in the Old Testament. So that's my answer to the first question: How does Paul support the universal claim of sinfulness in verse 9 by quoting these six Old Testament passages which speak of righteous people as well as wicked people? He shows that both Jews and Gentiles are characterized as deeply corrupt and that the only way out of that corruption is by God's gracious gift of faith and forgiveness that sets a person right with God (which, we know now, is) on the basis of the substitutionary sacrifice that would one day come in Jesus Christ.

Now the other question: How does he describe the state of being "under sin" in these verses? Or: What can we learn about sin, and about ourselves, and about the Gospel from the way Paul talks about sin in these verses?

Being "under sin" is first and foremost a ruined relation with God. Not, first, a ruined relation with other people. Verses 10-18 begin and end with this point. Verse 10-11: "There is none righteous, not even one; there is none who understands, there is none who seeks for God." And verse 18: "There is no fear of God before their eyes." Everything in between these verses has to do with the meaning of sin in human relations. But at the beginning and the end being "under sin" means that we have no fear of God and we don't understand him and we don't seek him. Verse 11: "There is none who understands, there is none who seeks for God."

Fix this firmly in your mind, sin is mainly a condition of rebellion against God, not mainly a condition of doing bad things to other people. This is why it is so sad and so pointless when people argue that they are pretty good people, and so don't need the Gospel. What they mean is that they treat other people decently: they don't steal, kill, lie much, or swear much, and they give to some charities. But that is not the main question. The main question is: Do you love God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength? Do you love his Son, Jesus Christ? God is the most import

ant person in the universe. It is not a mark of virtue to do nice things for people while having no love or reverence or passion for God.

Sin is, first and foremost, a resistance to finding joy in God. And that resistance results in a darkened mind that then suppresses the truth and does not understand God. So the mind that is "under sin" does not seek God and does not know God and does not fear God. And it doesn't matter what we do for people; if we treat the King of the universe with such disdain, we may know that we are profoundly "under sin."

Being "under sin" means that our relations with people are ruined, even though God's common grace may restrain us from treating people as badly as we might. In verses 13-14, Paul describes the way sin ruins our words, and in verses 13-14, he describes the way sin ruins our actions - "throat . . . tongue .. . lips . . . mouth." Verses 13-14: "Their throat is an open grave, with their tongues they keep deceiving, the poison of asps is under their lips; whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness." Graves have to do with death and venom is poison that has to do with death, and that is what deception and cursing produce: death. The mouth was meant to give life. But sin turns it into a place of poison and death. O, ma

y this diagnosis of our lives "under sin" make us want to be saved! O, may we long for redeemed tongues and mouths that give life and not death!

Then, in verses 15-17, being "under sin" is not a way of speaking, but a way of acting: "Their feet are swift to shed blood, destruction and misery are in their paths, and the path of peace they have not known." This is what happens when God is not sought or known or reverenced. If God were to slacken his restraining bands in this world, it would descend into anarchy. That's why there are governments and police and armies. By nature we would take vengeance on every offense, and our feet would run to shed blood, if we were not restrained. We see it, for example, in the looting of societies where the infrastructure collapses. And we would see it here. Because this is what it means to be "under sin." Human relationships are ruined.

Finally, if this is who we really are by nature - people who are "under sin" and therefore, as Romans 1:18 says, under the wrath of God - then is it not THE BEST NEWS in the world that the entire point of the book of Romans and the whole Bible and of Christianity is that - God, in his great mercy, has made a way of salvation from sin - the power of sin and the penalty of sin? We are just centimeters away from it. Romans 3:21-22 - "But now apart from the Law the righteousness of God has been manifested, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe."

Jesus is PRECIOUS because of WHO HE IS. The Lamb that takes away the sin of the world… but we are mere humans and guilt is a universal experience. Everybody at some time or other has had the bad feeling of not doing what he ought to have done. Even people who deny that there is any such thing as right and wrong are trapped by the law of God written on their hearts. They set out to prove there is no such thing as right and wrong and that all ethics are relative and arbitrary, but wind up saying it is right for you to agree with them and wrong for you not to.

No one has ever successfully erased the sense of ought that God writes in every human soul. Our moral sensibilities may be perverted so that they are the very opposite of God’s, but everyone senses that he ought to do certain things and not others. And we all know we have not done all we ought to have done, or felt all we ought to have felt. And at some time or other this has made us feel bad. The failure to do what we ought to have done we call guilt. And the bad feelings that often accompany it we call guilt feelings or a bad conscience. There are at least three ways contemporary people try to solve the problem of guilt: intellectual ways, physical ways, and religious ways.

I think if we took the time and were very careful, we could show that none of these ways of dealing with guilt (intellectual, physical, or religious) is satisfactory. Our heads may be easily diverted from the depth of our guilt, but our hearts are not so lightly healed. And we all know deep down there is something inauthentic about the self-asserting, dollar-hungry, intimidating executive who meets you at the top. We know alcohol and drugs and compulsive entertainment and noise are not the way to life and peace. And we ought to know, who have heard the gospel of Jesus Christ, that the debt we owe to God cannot be paid off by our paltry virtue.

But instead of trying to show the inadequacy of all this, I want to build on what we began in the last two messages. The point of the last two messages was that the biblical portrait of Jesus is true. It is historically rooted and defensible. And it is rationally compelling to the open mind. No man ever spoke like this man, Jesus (John 7:46). He can be trusted. He is true. He endorsed the Old Testament, and it is he who speaks by his Spirit in the New Testament.

Therefore, it is enough for us to hear from him through his apostle, Paul, how God has dealt with our guilt. It is the best news in all the world. It is the only strategy that owns up to the truth of God’s righteousness and the depth of our debt before him. Once you have been grasped by God’s way of dealing with your guilt, every other way will seem thin and superficial and utterly inadequate by comparison. And you will rejoice with me that “Jesus Is Precious Because He Removes Our Guilt.”

Remember now, God’s word, the Bible, shows us the way! So let’s look together at Romans 3:19–29. All I want to do is let this text speak because it has tremendous power to persuade and win our hearts. Let me sum up five observations from the text, and then we will look at it more closely to follow Paul’s line of argument.

First, all persons, whether Jew or Gentile, are held personally accountable by God for their sin (verse 19). Second, the resulting relationship of human guilt and divine indignation cannot be made right by works of the law (verse 20). Third, God, on his own initiative, has undertaken to seek our acquittal freely (verses 21–24). Fourth, the way he has done this is by putting forth Jesus Christ to redeem us by his death and demonstrate the righteousness of God (verses 24–26). Fifth, this gift of justification only comes to those who trust in Jesus (verses 22, 25, 26).

I urge you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God (2 Corinthians 5:20). Turn away from all the intellectual, physical, and religious tactics the world uses to evade its guilt, and rest in Jesus. Jesus is precious because he alone removes our guilt - what a love is this!

To Him - From Him - Through Him - For Him. Happy Reading, precious Biblenerds!