Rom 3:10-25
10 as it is written: “None is righteous, no, not one; 11 no one understands; no one seeks for God. 12 All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.” 13 “Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive.” “The venom of asps is under their lips.” 14 “Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.” 15 “Their feet are swift to shed blood; 16 in their paths are ruin and misery, 17 and the way of peace they have not known.” 18 “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
19 Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. 20 For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.
21 But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— 22 the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.
Something I read earlier today, reminded me that many fail to see or understand the true nature of man and God and misunderstand the message of scripture, the statement was “... the main messages of Christianity - love, compassion, acceptance and non-judging. ..."
It is clear from the start that “None is righteous, no not one”, Eccl 7:20 “Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins. 1 John 1:8: ”If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” Eph 2:1-3: ”1 And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— 3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.”
Truth be told if we are observant and honest about ourselves and others we don’t need the bible to tell us these things, we can find it out by the lies we tell, by the unloving ways we treat fellow men and women, how we so often take what we feel we deserve at the expense of others, the list could go on, we all know the adage “I’m only human” this being an admission that we fail at even what we consider to be right by our own meager standards never mind according to the perfect holy standards of God. What I am trying to highlight is that we have a problem: we are broken, all of us, some of us are broken in ways that are different from others, we are a deviation so bad that nothing good we do, can justify the wrong we do. Actually the problem isn’t even so much in what we do but what we are, we don’t become sinners by doing sin, we sin because we are sinners. Our nature is twisted so we do twisted things. Rom 5:12 “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned. ” It isn’t a choice it is a fact of our nature, we inherit it.
The problem with our sin is that it separates us from God, like any criminal who commits a crime a penalty has to be paid, that penalty is of course death : Rom 6:23 “For the wages of sin is death,” Death is a word much misunderstood and I don’t have the time here to go into depth other than to say it is not a pleasant thing or even the absence of life but something far worse according to Jesus’ words in Matthew 13:49-50 “49 So it will be at the close of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous 50 and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
The solution to this problem cannot be found in ourselves, we cannot lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps, we can only be rescued from our fate of death by someone who does not deserve the same death taking the punishment: Rom 3:24-25 “24 and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.“ Christ brings us that redemption, only an infinite omnipotent God can take an infinite punishment and rescue us from what we have earned.
THAT is the main message of Christianity, in fact, that message is there since the fall of man, there needs to be a sacrifice of innocent life to make a covering for us Gen3:21 “And the LORD God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.” and before you wonder where is the innocent life here, ask yourself where the skins came from.
Whilst God does rain His blessings down on the just and the unjust, and we all benefit from His hand and the remnants of his nature in our lives, and have some level of love and compassion it is so broken that mostly we do good things for our own benefit, i.e. we give love to receive it, or we do charity to feel good about ourselves, true love and compassion which are sacrificial and not seeking reward of any kind, and are often the cause of persecution, are out workings of Christ’s work in us.
The other part about ‘acceptance and non-judging’ needs to be understood in a bit more detail and not taken as universally applicable, there are some things we are to accept and some things we are told that are not acceptable, there are some things we are not to judge and some things we are to judge, we are to rebuke sin, but we are also to encourage those that have fallen that there is forgiveness if they repent, this doesn’t necessarily mean amnesty in this world but it means amnesty for eternity. If one who comes to faith has committed a crime, they should pay the price for that crime. We have to accept that we have sinful nature but that doesn’t make it acceptable to sin, it only makes it understandable. We are not to judge the faith of one another, only God can do that, but we are to judge the works we do and challenge whether those works evidence faith or not, and we are to encourage one another to better works.
Even though it may be understandable why we sin we should nevertheless strive not to, we shouldn’t take ‘sin’ and call it ‘not sin’ even though our very human nature makes us incapable of not sinning. We are not to justify our sin or our nature by words such as ‘That’s the way I am’ or even ‘That’s the way I was born’, we are called to fight the fight against our sinful nature, though we won’t win the war until we cast off these bodies we live in and are resurrected to the new life. We are called to cast off our nature and put on the nature of Christ. Rom 7:21-25 ” 21 So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. 22 For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, 23 but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin. “ Paul's point here being that there is a battle, a conflict, going on within us and that victory is found only in God through Christ. In this life we won’t succeed perfectly, but we must nevertheless set the goal and aim at it with all strength, walk forward with all might and when we fall stand up again and continue the fight against our sinful nature. This is not something we can do in our own strength, we need to rely on Christ to provide us strength and perseverance, and we need to trust in Him and in Him alone anything we add is as filthy rags (menstrual cloths). Isaiah 64:6 "We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment."
More than that we are called to reach out in love to those still trapped and blind in their sin and call them to accept the work Christ has done, and turn away from their sinful lifestyles, and strive to live lives worthy of God’s perfect standard. What kind of love stands by and allows another to continue unwittingly on the wide road that many follow that leads to the fiery furnace. It is not love to let them go their own way, no matter how much they kick and scream that they want their own way. It is love to try to turn them onto the narrow path through Christ that few will enter by even when they mock, insult, outvote and persecute. Matt 7:13-14 “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. 14 For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”
A final note we are to call sin what it is and not find it acceptable, but we are to love enough to share God's rescue plan with those that fall and practice it, share the truth in love.
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