Romans – A Treatise
Chapter Three
“FALLEN MAN”
Scripture Reading: verses 10-18
We are witnessing the dramatic spectacle of the trial of mankind, which is being enacted before the supreme court of the universe, God Himself on the bench. This is the summary of the case for the prosecution against two criminals that stand before the bar of justice – Jew and Gentile.
In Romans 1 and 2, Paul sets forth the moral background against which the guilt of each shall be regarded. On the part of the Gentile the testimony of the visible creation has been rejected and God reduced to images made like corruptible man, beasts and creeping things. On the part of the Jew the testimony that he has held in his hand the oracles of God, the divinely inspired writings of priest and prophet, given to guide his footsteps into the way of peace and understanding; but he, too, has gone headlong into Babylonish idolatry. Thus the cases of Jew and Gentile are rolled together into one, and in Romans 3:10-18 we have the common features of both. This is an indictment of mankind in general, not of Jew and Gentile, because there is no difference between them – they are both guilty before God.
This is God’s description of what is in our hearts, regardless of our religious or spiritual background. First, the sterling fact is presented, “there is none righteous, no, not so much as one.” Through Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) days, God looked down from heaven over and over again to see if He could find one of Adam’s race that walked in righteousness before Him, but He could not find one. In innocence, Adam was a creature of great beauty, but he yielded to the temptation of the devil and fell morally and spiritually. Abel came on the scene with a heart willing to recognize the need for sacrifice, acknowledging he was a sinner, but his own brother murdered him. One can trace the course of mankind down through the ages and find the dark stain of sin on every son of Adam. Abraham was taken out from the idolatrous peoples among whom he lived, and for a brief moment he shone as a man of faith, the friend of God, but his pathway also meandered into dark shadows of deceit and failure, passing on his heritage to Isaac. David was another bright light in the Hebrew Bible who shone with brilliant luster in the path of faith, but an ugly scar remains on the escutcheon of his glory because he fell into miserable sin. Even in those whose lives seem to be largely unspotted by personal sin, the consequence of Adam’s fall came in to cut them off – such men as Joseph and Daniel, whose careers were so eloquent of their faith in the living God. Yet death carried them away. It is a grim reminder that the guilt of sin is on the best son of Adam’s race who ever lived. The Lord Jesus Christ is only person who trod this earth of whom it could be said, “in Him was no sin;” “He did no sin;” He was “undefiled and separate from sinners.” But here in Romans 3, the indictment concerns not our Lord Jesus, who came of a different order. “The first man is of the earth earthy, the second man is the Lord from Heaven.” This indictment concerns each of us who inherit from Adam, our federal head, the sinful impulses that constitute sinners – an impulse in every one of our lives.
“There is none righteous, no, not one.” This indictment amplifies the charge: “There is none that understandeth.”1 That is, man’s guilt subsists not simply in his actions or activities. It springs from his evil thoughts. We are living in an age when the mind of man, his understanding, is being set on a pinnacle of such eminence one would think he was himself a deity. We are told that to emancipate mankind from difficulty, all we have to do is cultivate the mind, bringing out the inherent good that is there. God’s indictment of that concept is: “There is none that understandeth.” One will not find redemption by the cultivation of the human mind. It is not obtainable through education, culture, or ethics, no matter how desirable all these may be in the realm of social relations. A cultured sinner is not one step nearer to God than a depraved sinner. That has been amply demonstrated in the chaotic world in which we find ourselves today. Much of the holocaust of destruction that has been launched on mankind in past centuries has not come out of darkest Africa, or from the realm of Aborigines, but from the head of religious culture. “There is none that understandeth.”
“There is none that seeketh after God.”2 Man is too busy seeking after his own selfish lust to turn his eye toward God. Remember, this is dealing with the natural impulses of the unregenerate heart.
“They are all gone out of the way; they are together [that is, Jew and Gentile] become unprofitable.” “There is none that doeth good, no, not one.” The first indictment is that there is none righteous. Here it is: “There is none that doeth good.” By natural impulse, we fail to measure up to the exact requirements of our Creator. Beyond that, we fail to exercise the capacities toward positive good which God originally implanted in our being, thus showing the completeness of man’s fall.
Footnotes:
1 Paul here charged the Jew in an area where he might have supposed himself to be invulnerable; for, of all the sins the Jew considered himself above, it was spiritual ignorance due to a failure to seek God; and yet, right here it was in their own Bible. They neither understood nor sought after God. True, they knew many things; but they had never understood that their entire system was temporary, typical, and comparable to the scaffolding of a building, and due to be torn down when the great antitype was revealed. They had somehow missed the overriding fact that Judaism was not designed to be God’s permanent order of things. Their greatest specific error was doubtless their failure to understand the dual nature of the Messiah, the great Immanuel (God with us, or God in flesh) who would take away human sin (Matt. 22:41-45). They indeed knew what the Old Testament said of Messiah, but they split the prophecies into two categories, supposing that there would be two Messiahs, one of them the suffering priestly Messiah, and the other the glorious kingly Messiah; and it was that tragic error of not understanding that all of the Old Testament prophecies spoke of one Messiah, that blinded their eyes to the identity of the Christ when He came. But that was the fatal error that resulted in utter blindness, in a religious sense, of Israel’s leaders. Christ exclaimed, concerning this, “Ye fools, and blind” (Matt. 23:17,19), going so far as to say, “Woe unto ye lawyers! for ye took away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered” (Luke 11:52). They had so cluttered the Word of God with their traditions and interpretations that they had even lost the key of knowledge, which was hopelessly buried beneath the rubbish mountain of trivia regarding tithing of mint, anise, and cumin, and a thousand other things. Thus the great sin here charged, and scripturally supported against Israel, was their reprehensible ignorance of God’s Word.
2 What a paradox, the chosen nation who had received the revelation of God and who had studied it so meticulously, were, in all that study, not seeking God at all, due to the lack of any proper motive, and having forgotten the warning of Hosea, “Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord” (Hosea 6:3). Knowing what the Scripture says is one thing; following on to know the Lord is another. Since the Jews were not seeking after God, what was the point of all their study? Christ Himself pinpointed the trouble: it was this, that they desired the praise of men rather than the praise of God (John 12:43). Christ said, “Ye are they that justify yourselves in the sight of men; but God knoweth your hearts: for that which is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God” (Luke 16:15). Moreover, they did not seek to glorify God, but only to glorify one another (John 5:44).
