What shall we conclude then? Do we have any advantage? Not at all! For we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin. – Romans 3:9

Today's Scripture Reading (April 18, 2024):  Romans 3

We have a problem with the Bible. We tend to look at short chunks of it, and sometimes, we miss the message that the author was trying to teach us. And this is very true of Romans. Romans opens up like a bunch of rules. So, we quote Romans 1 as a listing of the sins of the world, which it is.

Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they continue to do these things and approve of those who practice them (Romans 1:24-32).

Here is the list of things that we should not be. Paul makes the point that these people are so stupid that even though they know that their behavior is worthy of death, they continue in that behavior anyway. At heart, we are rulekeepers. And so, the tendency is to pull out Romans 1 and say, "See, this is who you are. Don't you know that you are sowing the seeds of your own destruction?" And again, I think what bugs me is that we use this verse and a couple of others like a sledgehammer against certain behaviors and miss the condemnation of others, of which we are more likely to be guilty. We can stand up and say that we are not murderers, but can we be as emphatic about not being greedy gossips? I am not sure. Those words hit a little closer to home.

But Paul isn't done. He fires his guns against the world and condemns the fire that is there, and then, in his very next statement, he speaks about the Jewish community: the established church of his day.

Now you, if you call yourself a Jew; if you rely on the law and boast in God; if you know his will and approve of what is superior because you are instructed by the law; if you are convinced that you are a guide for the blind, a light for those who are in the dark, an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of little children, because you have in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth— you, then, who teach others, do you not teach yourself? You who preach against stealing, do you steal? You who say that people should not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? You who boast in the law, do you dishonor God by breaking the law? As it is written: "God's name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you" (Romans 2:17-24),

Paul, speaking to his Jewish friends in Rome, says, "I know you; you look down your nose at them because they break the law. But so do you. You just don't break the same law that they break. If you want to rely on the law, you had better be ready to rely on all of it. I know your argument."

The Jewish teachers had decreed that there are 613 Commandments. And while all of these 613 laws are equal, to paraphrase George Orwell, "some laws were made more equal than others." The Jews looked down on the Gentiles as lawbreakers. But the problem was that they weren't keeping the law either. They may not have been breaking the law of Romans 1, although the opinion was still out on greed, gossip, and slander, but that didn't mean they didn't break any of the law.

We are lawbreakers. The world is broken, and we are the ones who broke it. We started the fire that has engulfed the world. And the same argument that Paul had with the Jews fits us. We feel superior because we might not be Romans 1 lawbreakers, but that doesn't mean we don't break the law. We might argue that the laws we break don't make sense. Who cares if we shave the edges of our beards or tattoo our bodies? If we are men, who cares if we wear our hats inside the church, or if we are women, who cares if there is no hat on the top of our heads? How important can that be to our spiritual health? Those are unimportant laws. But if all laws are really equal, then the laws we break are just as grave as the Roman 1 law that we like to throw at sinners.

And so the Pharisees rose up. They became the lawkeepers of Israel. They believed that if all of Israel could keep all of the law, all 613 commandments, for just one day, God would send his Messiah. The Messiah didn't come because Israel could not keep the law. It was a hopeless task.

This is the theme of the first chapters of Romans, and it comes to a point in the ninth verse. ^"What shall we conclude then? Do we have any advantage? Not at all! For we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin" (Romans 3:9). None of us can say that we weren't the ones who broke our world. We did it. Maybe some did it more or worse than others, but does that really matter? We have all proven that we are unable or unwilling to keep the law.

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Romans 4