Romans 3:1-8

 

We have to keep this picture in mind as we study Romans--this relationship between God and man. God is righteous. That is the constant. This is the first and primary fact. And because God is righteous, his attitude towards unrighteousness is and always will be Wrath. This is a fixed and unalterable reality. Paul spent the ending verses of chapter 1 showing that the Gentile world was one of unrighteousness and that they were already, as a society, experiencing God's wrath. Chapter 2 is directed at the Jews and is aimed at showing, in short, that merely being Jews doesn't change this picture. The wrath of God would be revealed against the unrighteousness of Jewish man as much as on Gentile man--if anything, it would be worse, because the Jews had had more privileges and more responsibilities. 

Before Paul brings his points home to their conclusion, he stops here to answer some objections. You almost have to imagine Paul having a Q&A session with his audience. Though he is writing a letter now, he may be thinking of real conversations he had and of the questions and objections people had brought up to his doctrines. These verses form a sort of break or parenthesis in Paul's argument.

In this passage, there are three objections or questions which are brought up regarding Paul's argument up to this point. He deals with these questions very briefly here, but some of these will be more fully developed later in the epistle.

The first is in verse 1. Basically, the question is, What is the point of being a Jew? At the end of the last chapter, Paul said in very clear terms that being a Jew and being circumcised did not equal salvation or acceptance with God. There was no escape from the wrath of God in that way. What God is looking for is not nationality but obedience and righteousness--and He is looking for them wherever he can find them, whether in the Jews or the Gentiles. So did that mean that there really was no difference between the Jews and the Gentiles? This was a scandalous idea to the Jews. And even the Gentiles would find it strange that God went to all the trouble of establishing the Jews as a separate and special people if there was no point in it. And so this question--if Paul was right concerning the relative station of the Jews and the Gentiles, was there any advantage or blessing in being a Jew?

And Paul's answer is unqualified: “Much every way: chiefly...” The word “chiefly” can mean “firstly”—as if Paul started out to give a list of advantages the Jews had and never got around to giving any of the reasons except the first—which, with Paul, is not out of the question. But it can also mean “first” in the sense of “most important” or “chiefly” as the KJV gives it. A writer named Godet paraphrases it: “I might mention many things under this head; but I shall confine myself to one which is in the front rank.” 

There was one thing in particular that stood out regarding the Jews--one thing they had which was an advantage and a blessing. And it was that they had the oracles of God. The word oracle means a message from God or a god. The Jews had a revelation of God. They had received messages from God. Their entire history was a revelation from God. The Gentiles had some knowledge of God, but they did not have the oracles of God--they did not have a written, comprehensive, uncorrupted message from God.

This is an inestimable privilege. We should never underestimate what it means to have God's word. The following quotation comes from Professor Monier Williams. Williams explains how he started reading the sacred books of other religions and was impressed to find “many beautiful gems... bright coruscations of true light flashing here and there amid the surrounding darkness”; to find similarities between these books and the Bible. And he started to believe that they also revelations of God meant to lead up to the full revelation of the Bible. “Now there is a delightful fascination about such a theory, and, what is more, there are really elements of truth in it. But I am glad of this opportunity of stating publicly that I am persuaded I was misled by its attractiveness, and that its main idea is quite erroneous.... [T]hese non-Christian Bibles are all developments in the wrong direction. They all begin with some flashes of true light, and end in utter darkness. Pile them, if you will, on the left side of your study table, but place your own holy Bible on the right side--all by itself, all alone--and with a wide gap between.” (Quoted by Joseph Cook, quoted by Orr, The Problem of the Old Testament, 484-485)

There are truths in other places, but there is nothing else like the Bible. And we need to remember that, as Gentiles, we only have the Bible because of the Jews. Most if not all of the Old Testament was written by Jews, and most of the New Testament as well. It was the Jews who carefully and conscientiously copied out the Old Testament verse by verse, by hand. The Jews had a great privilege and a great responsibility and we, as Gentiles, owe them a lot. But the point to remember is that their privilege WAS a responsibility. They had the oracles of God and most of those oracles were commandments. God had chosen them for a purpose. He chose them specifically to be a holy people, not so they didn't have to be holy.

There was an advantage in being a Jew, but that advantage did not change anything which Paul said in the preceding chapter. They had been stewards of God's revelation and therefore it was even more necessary that they be faithful. 

This brings us to the second objection which is in verse 3. The text reads: “What if some did not believe? shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect?” The word without effect means to become idle, abolish, do away with, or make void. If you've ever been doing something on a computer and received the message: This program is not responding--that is the same idea as this word without affect. Basically, the idea is this: God had made certain promises to the Jews, specifically to Abraham. He had chosen the Jews and promised to be faithful to them. But they hadn't kept faith with God. They had broken his covenant. They had disobeyed his laws. They had even turned on and crucified his Son. Paul's point in the last chapter was that the Jews could not trust in merely having the law and the covenant if they didn't obey it--if they didn't keep faith. So here was the problem. On this side, we have man's faithlessness. Man had broken the covenant. On the other side, we have God. And the obvious question is this: if man's unfaithfulness could cause God's promises to fail, does that mean that man's faithlessness can nullify God's faithfulness? Will God break his promise to man just because man breaks his promise to God? Can man's actions, sinful or not, cause the program of God's faithfulness to become unresponsive?

And Paul's answer to this objection is: No. God forbid. Certainly not. By no means.  Because to Paul, the one central fact was God's faithfulness. Every single man on this earth might be a liar; lies might spread so far that nobody could tell the truth between the truth and the lie; there might be no one left who knew or cared about the truth. And yet God would still be true. God's truth, His trustworthiness, His essential reality was the fixed point at the center of Paul's universe. God is and has been and always will be true. God cannot and will not be unfaithful to his promise. The faithlessness of man CANNOT void or nullify or abolish the faithfulness of God. God's faithfulness will still be operative when every man has become unresponsive. But what it is interesting is the quotation that Paul uses to prove this point; he quotes from Psalm 51:3-4: “For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me. Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight: that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be clear when thou judgest.” Psalm 51 is a psalm of repentance--it is the prayer of a man who had committed a sin and was asking God for forgiveness. It is traditionally attributed to David following the matter of Bathsheba and Uriah.

And notice the tension we have here. On one hand, we have David's sin, a sin against God. And on the other side, we have God, judging and condemning that sin. David had broken his faith with God; he had behaved in a way inconsistent with faith in and loyalty to God. And God rebuked David, condemned him, and punished him. The wrath of God was revealed from Heaven upon the unrighteousness of David. Of course, he did find forgiveness, but that isn't the point here. The point is this. David had sinned. And for that reason God was right in judging him. God was faithful to His law by condemning David. If God had made an exception for David and swept his sin under the rug--then God would have been unfaithful. To be faithful to His law, His own nature, and everyone concerned, God had to judge and condemn David's sin. 

So, in other words, rather than man's faithlessness nullifying God's faithfulness, that faithfulness shows itself even more dramatically in man's unfaithfulness. For God to condemn and punish the Jews for their sins is not God being unfaithful but God being faithful--since, whatever was involved in God's promises to the Jews, it did not involve a blanket permission to sin. God gave Abraham many things; He didn't give him a blank moral check. God will be true though every man be a liar, and God will be righteous though every man be a sinner, and that means God, being faithful to His law and His promises, will bring punishment and judgment on sin, among his own people just as much as among the Gentiles. Man's sin does not make the faithfulness of God without effect--rather it gives an opportunity for God's faithfulness to be demonstrated. 

And that leads immediately to the third and final objection, which is verse 5. “If our unrighteousness commend the righteousness of God, what shall we we say? Is God unrighteous who taketh vengeance?” The word commend means to introduce or exhibit (Strong) and it can also mean to prove or establish. (Robertson's Word Pictures). The idea is this: if our sins give God an opportunity to show His righteousness, then doesn't that make our sin a good thing, since it has a positive effect? And if it's a good thing, isn't God then in the wrong for punishing us for it? Paul repeats the objection in slightly different words in verse 7: God is true even when all men are liars, and God's truth shines brightest in contrast to our lies, so doesn't that mean our lies shouldn't be condemned as sins?

Clearly, this is an objection Paul had met with before, but he seems embarrassed to even say it in print--note his qualifier “I speak as a man.” This is an objection that could only come from a human and a very limited human perspective. The question “Is God wrong to do such-and-such” is a question man asks; but in reality, it is an utterly meaningless question, since God, by definition, can never do anything wrong.

And Paul has two answers to it. First is verse 6: “God forbid: for then how shall God judge the world?” Remember that here Paul is specifically addressing the Jews. And while there is debate, I think his argument is something like this: Some of the Jews objected that the sins and unfaithfulness of the Jews were not worthy to be judged by God since, after all, God had used them to work out his own purpose. And Paul points out that, by the same logic, God would be unable to judge anyone, Gentile or Jew, since God is able to use all things to forward His plan. The Jews freely admitted that God would punish the Gentiles for their sins, and so there was no reason why God wouldn't punish them for their sins as well.

The other answer is verse 8. Paul points out that the logical result of this argument is the proposition: “Let us do evil, that good may come.” If sin isn't so bad because God can use it to forward His plan, then logically we should sin as much as we possibly can---that, the more sin the better, that we should work and strive with all our effort to do as many evil things as we can because God will work that out for His glory. 

And you just have to say that out loud to realize how both illogical and immoral it is. Paul says of those who advance such a doctrine that their “damnation” or condemnation is just. In other words, that attitude is unequivocally wrong and you shouldn't need a degree in theology in order to understand that it is wrong. It's self-evidently false.

It's also interesting in passing to point out that Paul subtly answers another objection. There were people who accused the Christian church in general--and perhaps Paul in particular--of teaching exactly that doctrine--the doctrine that sin was good because God would forgive it. After all, Paul's emphasis throughout his ministry was on grace.  And so it makes sense that some would interpret Paul as preaching this idea--that since God will forgive our sins our sins are good. And so, while condemning another fallacy, Paul sneaks in a repudiation of this false interpretation of his doctrine. 

What advantage then hath the Jew? That's the question Paul begins this section with. And he affirms that they did have an advantage--the advantage of having God's revelation. But that advantage, as great as it is, does not make any difference to the point of Romans. God will always be faithful and will always judge sin--even if it is among His chosen people, even among those he has made promises to, even when that sin is used to work out his glory--still, in all these cases, irrespective of all these objections, the righteousness of God continues to be revealed from Heaven against the unrighteousness of man. Nothing has changed and none of these objections are enough to shield off God's judgment.