No Fear of God

Introduction

I’m sure lots of you will have heard about modern artist Damien Hirst’s latest work of art – a platinum skull encrusted with over 6100 flawless diamonds. To make sure people could appreciate it to full affect Hirst commissioned a specially constructed viewing room that’s entirely black –its only against this black background that the true beauty of the diamonds can be appreciated.

Hirst was applying a well known principle – when people want to display something brilliant like a diamond they often display it against a dark, black background. Against a black background the diamond can be appreciated in all its glory. Jewellers understand this so when you go looking for a diamond ring you’ll find they’re almost always displayed against a black background.

In a similar way when Paul wrote the book of Romans, a letter focused on the brilliance of God’s grace, he begins with the black back ground of human sin and God’s wrath. For the last couple of weeks we’ve been following Paul’s argument that all people are under sin. This week we come to the conclusion of the black background – the conclusion that no one can be right with God by what we do. It’s not a nice comfortable passage, but it’s necessary for us to understand if we are to appreciate God’s grace in all its brilliance. So let’s pray and ask God to make his word clear to us this morning:

If you’ve been here for the last couple of weeks you’ll remember that Paul has been speaking about God’s wrath against sin. In chapter 2 verse 12 he divided the world into two sorts of people – the Jews, who had the law of God; and everyone else who didn’t. Both groups are destined to come before the judgement seat of God, 2:16, and they will both be judged by God according to their works. The Jews, who had the law, will be judged against its standard, and the rest will be judged apart from law, according to what they knew of God’s standards. This raises the question – ‘then what advantage is there in being a Jew?’ and Paul answered that question in 3: 1-8, the passage we looked at last week. The advantage of being a Jew is having the very word of God, the law. But having said that, having the law is no immunity from prosecution under the law, in fact it is the exact opposite. The law prescribes judgement for sin. This answer gives rise to a new question – well then are the Jews better off (or worse off)? This question leads us into our passage today. Paul’s answer can be broken into three parts, and these are my three points this morning:

First, Jews are no better off because they are under sin, just like everybody else;
Second, The Law Condemns Israel and therefore everybody is Condemned; and
Third, No one can be right with God by what they do

Firstly, JEWS ARE NO BETTER OFF BECAUSE THEY ARE UNDER SIN, JUST LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE.

Look at verse 9:

9 What shall we conclude then? Are we any better? Not at all! We have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin.

Notice that Paul says they are under sin, not sins. The problem is not that we occasionally do the wrong thing, or even that we don’t consistently do the right thing, the problem is that we’re under sin. Sins are the things that we do, but sin is the attitude of our hearts, the bias that leads to the wrong things that we do. It’s the attitude that rejects God’s rule in favour of self-rule, as such it can be called rebellion against God. It’s this attitude, this rebellion that gives rise to all the wrong things we do, our sins.

The problem Paul points to is that we are under sin. That is, we are subject to sin, governed by it. Sin is our master. This is the great irony of sin – in throwing off the rule of God we don’t make ourselves free, we just come under a new ruler. We’re no longer ruled by God, now we’re ruled by sin.

Paul has been arguing this point since chapter 1:18, here he takes it further by bringing together a string of quotes from the Old Testament which speak of the sin of Israel.

Read with me from verse 10:

10 As it is written: "There is no one righteous, not even one; 11 there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. 12 All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one." 13 "Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit." "The poison of vipers is on their lips." 14 "Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness." 15 "Their feet are swift to shed blood; 16 ruin and misery mark their ways, 17 and the way of peace they do not know." 18 "There is no fear of God before their eyes.

These quotes from the Old Testament support Paul’s accusation that all are guilty of sin. Notice how vs. 10-12 doesn’t leave any room for quibbling. We are all condemned by what it denies– there is no one righteous, there is no one good – and by what it affirms – all have turned away.

Verses 13 – 17 highlight two representative areas of sin, what we say and how we treat others. Finally verse 18 gets to the heart of the matter – fundamentally all sin is an outworking of rebellion against God. Since we don’t fear God we don’t live the way he says we should.

Putting all these quotes together like this underlines Paul’s point emphatically – Paul thinks it’s essential we grasp this point before we go any further. You may never have thought of yourself as ruled by sin, you may even find the idea offensive. But how else can you explain the way we behave? It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to work out that the world’s a mess. Just read the newspapers – there’s murder, rape, war, kidnapping, theft, road rage, you name it. But where does that mess come from? The mess comes from us – people are the problem, we just can’t stop doing the wrong thing.

Maybe you’re sitting there thinking ‘sure people are the problem – but it’s not really fair to tar us all with the same brush’. Not sure those quotes apply to you? Well let me ask you: Who here has never lied? Who has never led someone to believe something that wasn’t strictly the case? Who has never said something bad about someone behind their back? Who has never used flattery to get something they wanted? Who has never led a conversation towards some juicy bit of gossip, Who has never criticised or complained or put someone else down or ridiculed an idea or made fun of someone or, or … I think you get the point.

And again, why is it that relationships go wrong so easily? Why can’t we remain friendly with everybody? Why do children’s games so often go sour, friendships so often turn into bitter rivalries. And why doesn’t it stop when we grow up? Why do so many marriages end in divorce – people who loved each other dearly bicker in court over who gets to keep the TV and the DVD, and who looks after the kids. And why are we so quick to criticise people when they make a mistake, even though we know that we make the same mistakes ourselves? And why is peace just so hard to maintain? Maybe these verses do describe us after all.

The truth is, when we stop and think about it we all know that we’re not predisposed to do the right thing, we’re predisposed to do the wrong thing. Try as we might, as much as we want to get things right, we find ourselves making the same old mistakes over and over and over again. We just can’t seem to stop going wrong – and that’s exactly the point that Paul has been making in Romans 1 -3. We all, Jew and Gentile, religious and non-religious alike, we’re all under sin.

Well its not a pretty picture, but it gets worse, because if we’re under sin we are under God’s condemnation. This is the next point in Paul’s answer:

Secondly, THE LAW CONDEMNS ISRAEL (VERSE 19A) AND THERFORE EVERYBODY IS CONDEMNED (VERSE 19B)

Paul has been specifically addressing his own people, the nation of Israel, the Jews. We might ask why does Paul go to such lengths to show that the Jews are under sin when a large portion of his audience is not even Jewish? The answer comes in verse 19. Have a look there, Paul says :

Now we know that what the law says it says to those under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God.

Paul says two things which bring out the underlying logic of his argument in the book of Romans so far. They are: first that the law speaks to those under the law; and second, that in so doing it speaks to the whole world, making us all accountable to God.

The logic is this – the law condemns sin. But Israel is under sin. Therefore Israel is condemned by the law, and if Israel is condemned then how much more will everyone else be condemned. As we heard in vs. 1-8 Israel, the Jews, had an advantage over the rest of the world. They received the very oracles of God, they had the law and as such they were guides to the blind, a light to those in the darkness, that is, to the rest of the world. Of all the nations only Israel had a relationship with God – he was their God and they were his people. Only Israel knew what God required of them because God had told them in the law.

So as a beacon of light, what did Israel show to the nations? Just this, that they were incapable of keeping the law. They were unable to do what God required of them. As God’s special people they were an example of what happens when sin meets the perfect requirements of God – sin is condemned in sinful men. Consider their history: God chose them as his people when they were just a small family. He nurtured them and made them into a great nation. Along the way he revealed his saving power in rescuing them from Egypt in the exodus. He gave them his law. He removed nations from before them to give them their own land. He gave them kings and prophets and priests. But despite all this, they continually failed to live as his people. In the end all their advantages stand as testimony only to their singular failure to meet God’s requirements.

In all this the nation of Israel is not being held up for ridicule, but for our sober reflection. It’s not that Israel failed where others would have succeeded, but that Israel represents the failure of all the nations. If Israel failed and comes under God’s condemnation, then how much more will the rest of us be condemned? This is the second half of verse 19 – Israel is condemned by the law for the very purpose of silencing every mouth, of making every nation, every person accountable to God.

The imagery here is that of the court room, when the defendant has nothing to say in their defence, their guilt is obvious. In this courtroom God is the judge and we and the Jews are the defendants. If I can stretch the image a little they’re up first and we’ll be up for judgement shortly. As we watch they’re condemned for doing the very same things we do. Their condemnation sends the strongest of signals to us – if they didn’t get away with it, there’s no way we’re going to!

If I could personalise that a little bit, when the glaring light of God’s judgement shines on your life do you think that God will declare you right with him? Do you think God will be happy with the way you lived? No he won’t, we’re just like Israel, we’re under sin, and we have to face the fact that we’ll be condemned by God, just as Israel has been condemned by the law.

So Paul’s argument has been:

First, Jews are no better off because they are under sin, just like everybody else;
Second, The Law Condemns Israel and therefore everybody is Condemned;

So now he comes to the inevitable conclusion, if all are under sin and the law brings condemnation for sin then:

Thirdly, NO ONE CAN BE RIGHT WITH GOD BY WHAT THEY DO

So this is my final point, No one can be right with God by what they do

Have a look at verse 20:

‘Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his [God’s] sight by observing the law; rather through the law we become conscious of sin’.

No one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by observing the law, no one. On the day when God judges all of us, not one of us will be found ‘not guilty’ by observing the law. In other words, no one will be judged to be in the right with God by what they have done. You see if no one is declared right by keeping the law then no one will be declared right by any other action or behaviour. The law is the only system of behaviour that God has said will make us right with him – if we keep it perfectly. And since we’re all under sin, none of us can do it. So there’s no hope for any of us on the basis of our behaviour. On the basis of law, of weighing behaviour, we will all be condemned.

What does the law achieve then, if it is of no use in making us right with God? Precisely this – the law is given so that we might become aware of sin. Israel might never have realised that they didn’t match up to God’s standards if God didn’t make them so clear in the law. Because God made it clear to them they were able to see just how far short they fell. From looking in on that drama we can all see that we fall short of God’s standards just as badly as they did. So the law makes clear to us that when it comes to being good enough for God we simply don’t have a leg to stand on.

Think of it this way, someone once said ‘if you aim at nothing you’re sure to hit it’ –so management gurus and church growth experts always say we need to set measurable targets so that we can assess our performance. Well, think of the law as God’s way of giving us a measurable target – and when we assess how we are going against that measuring line what we see is that we all fall short, well short.

This is vital for us to understand because we keep trying to pretend to ourselves that we can be good enough for God. We say that if we just pray daily and make a pilgrimage to Mecca, or if we meditate enough or go to church enough: get baptised and take communion, or if we just keep our head down and keep out of God’s way, then everything will be OK. We come up with all kinds of nonsense – and as a result we just get ourselves further into trouble. Religion, works we do to get right with God, can only ever be a dead end, a distraction.

This is what Paul has been driving at for the last 2 chapters or so of Romans. He wants us to understand, to recognise and to admit to ourselves, that no one, not one of us, is good enough for God. When our lives are measured against God’s standard of perfection we’ll all be found wanting.

I said at the beginning that we’re looking at the black background. Here it is in all its blackness – all people are under sin, therefore all people are under God’s condemnation and there is absolutely nothing we can do to make it all alright. We’re in deep, deep trouble.

That’s the black background, what’s the diamond? God has created another way.
Look back at Romans 3:19:

19 Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. 20 Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin – there’s the black background, we’re all under sin and all under God’s condemnation – 21 But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22 This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,24 and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

That’s brilliant news – God has provided a way for sinners to be right with him. More of that next week.