Romans 3:9-20 The Grim Diagnosis

Of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsek preaches his series in the Book of Romans, A Righteousness from God. Let's listen in.

Worship, Growth, and the Authority of God’s Word

All right, well, good morning to everybody. Welcome to Recast Church. As Dave said, I'm Don Filsek. I'm the lead pastor here. And I am glad that we are together to worship God this morning. I hope that's part of the reason that you've gathered together.

Also, to connect with his people, that's fundamental to what we are all about here. And then to hear from God through his holy word, to really get to know him from the way that he's revealed himself to us through scripture.

Our goal as a church is that everyone here would be growing in faith, growing in community, and growing in service. That's kind of our tagline as a church. And we've been at that for going on 10 years now.

We're still in the process. That is not a line that we believe we're gonna cross. That's a place that I hope that we are even 10 years from now, that as a church, we're still growing in faith, growing in community, growing in service.

That's kind of the long game of the Christian life is that we would be constantly a people of growth. Not talking about how many people are sitting here, talking about growth in our lives, of trusting God more, more connection to his people, more connection to understanding about how God has put us together so that we can serve one another.

And I really am a firm believer, as you can see, by kind of the way that the church is structured in our gathering when we get together on Sunday mornings. I believe that most of the growth that we experience comes to us through God's word.

Really, ultimately, through his spirit, bringing his holy and true word into our hearts with its transforming power. And so that's part of why we do things the way that we do here. You'll notice that we're a little bit heavily loaded on the teaching portion of this.

Not that I think that my words are all that important, but at the end of the day, God's word is indeed that important and that we would keep our focus there is fundamental. Obviously, we also have some opportunities to worship him together and that's great and I love that as well.

And so we organize a service around those things for our strength and for our encouragement and our connection and community. So we're gonna dive back into the book of Romans this morning and let God continue his indictment of us and what really proves to be a pretty severe text this morning, just to be honest, potentially maybe the most direct indictment of all of us, of the whole human race, found in the entirety of scripture, the most direct teaching about our fallenness and our brokenness before our creator.

The apostle Paul has told us that we need the gospel which brings a righteousness from God. He established that back in Romans chapter one verses 16 and 17 and so he established that what our hearts need is a righteousness that comes from him, not a righteousness that we muster on our own or are able to produce on our own.

And that righteousness is necessary because God's wrath, it was said, will be poured out on all those who practice unrighteousness and ungodliness. All of those who do not honor God the way that he wants to be honored, so a broken relationship this way and then also an unrighteousness and injustice toward each other.

And that's the nature of the human heart is a broken relationship with others and a broken relationship with God. And then he set about in chapters one and two to explain that Gentiles and Jews, Gentiles meaning non-Jews and then the Jews as well, have different struggles.

The religious person has a different struggle than the irreligious person. The religious sinner and the in-your-face pagan sinner are in the same boat, Paul has said through these couple of chapters.

And now that he's danced around the edges sewing up all of the loose threads at the edges, now he is going to be less subtle in showing us that we are all sinners. He's going to bring it all to us here in a kind of crescendo of sorts in this text.

He's not gonna be subtle and he's gonna level the final, complete and comprehensive indictment on every single human. Our text this morning says some radical things. They are hard things to hear said about ourselves and maybe even potentially hard to hear about those that we love, to hear about those who are out in the world that we care about or people that we know that are outside of Christ that you might be able to identify as fairly good people.

But there are things that must be said to help us correctly diagnose our problems. And my hope is that nobody is quick to rush out and get a second opinion after this diagnosis. The text is a crescendo at the end of a long line of argument that began back in Romans chapter one, verse 18.

And the conclusion is simply this, that humanity without Christ is worse off than we could even imagine. And so let's open our Bibles if you're not already there. Romans three, verses nine through 20 is our text this morning.

Romans three, nine through 20. We're gonna read that in its entirety. If you've got one of those scripture journals, you can read it in there. I'll follow along in there. If you've got an app or a device, you can open that up and follow along in that.

But recast, it is a privilege to read God's word. Sometimes it's a pain to read God's word. Sometimes it strikes us in our hearts and cuts us a little bit. And I would suggest that as we read this and doubts come into your mind about whether this text is true about everyone, recognize that that is just God identifying where we need correction.

So let's read together Romans three, nine through 20. What then? Are we Jews any better off? This is the Apostle Paul saying this. What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin.

As it is written, none is righteous. No, not one. No one understands. No one seeks for God. All have turned aside. Together they have become worthless. No one does good.

Not even one. Their throat is an open grave.

They use their tongues to deceive. The venom of asps is under their lips. Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood. In their paths are ruin and misery, and the way of peace they have not known.

There is no fear of God before their eyes. 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.

For by works of the law,.

No human being will be justified in his sight since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

Let's pray.

Father, what a convicting text. What a convicting thing to read, to actually identify and to see the status of our hearts without Christ. And it takes us faith to even believe that because our wicked hearts would choose to self-justify so quickly.

We would even seek to be more compassionate than you, to seek to be more justifying of others than you are, to seek to see you as less holy than you are, to see ourselves as more righteous than we are.

So Father, I pray that you would give us a right understanding of this so that we would get the gospel right, we would get ourselves right,.

We would get you right,.

And we would understand and even be able to praise you better in light of your awesome holiness and the great salvation that has been worked on our behalf through the cross of Christ. Father, how dire and desperate is a situation of the human heart without faith in Jesus?

And so Father, I pray that that might ignite our worship together this morning, that our voices would be raised up in maybe just a little bit louder, a little bit more enthusiasm, a little bit more emotional engagement because we recognize what we have been saved from and what we've been saved to, the very righteousness of Christ gifted to us, the unrighteous, the ones who did not do good, the ones who did not seek after you, the ones who used our mouths to curse and to harm and to hurt, and the ones who were swift to violence.

And Father, you've redeemed us, and you're changing us day by day and moment by moment. We praise you for that and ask that you would receive these songs as worship to you together this morning.

In Jesus' name, amen.

Yeah, you can go to be seated, but remember if at any time during the message you need to get up and get more coffee or juice or donuts, you're not gonna distract me, so take advantage of that. And then please keep your Bibles if you lost your place, turn over to Romans 3, nine through 20.

That's our text for this morning, and that's what we're gonna walk through. And so our goal is to keep our focus and our attention on God's word as much as possible over the remainder of our time together.

The Need for a Correct Diagnosis of Human Sin

I wanna start off with a question. I don't want you to answer it out loud. How bad are you? How bad are you? Apart from Christ, apart from his spirit residing in you, apart from the work that God is doing in you and has done for you through the cross, what are you?

The text is gonna paint the picture of a human being as a monster, and that's us. Apart from Christ, what are you capable of? What are the depths of your depravity? What are the depths of your sin? Is that a good feel-good start to this message?

You can kinda see where we're going. How many of you know we need to hear this message? How many of you know that we need a real assessment of who we are so that we know how bad things are, so that when the light shines, it shines all the brighter in the darkness, the backdrop of what we are without Christ?

Just to contemplate even for a moment, to spend time here as a church thinking about our condition before Christ broke into our life with grace and mercy. You see, I'm convinced that if we get this wrong, if we misunderstand this from the beginning, there's a lot at stake in misunderstanding the very nature of a human heart apart from Christ.

If we get this wrong, fundamentally, we will go askew in so many areas, as a church, as an individual, as a Christian. We will be at risk, first and foremost, of getting the gospel wrong if we misdiagnose the problem.

If we get the wrong diagnosis, then we don't rightly understand what the remedy is. And the gospel will make less and less sense the more you think about it, if all we need is a little bit of reform, a little bit of fix in our lives.

Second of all, I think we'll be at risk of missing the amazing grace of the cross. How glorious is our salvation? Is it just a little thing that you needed? Did you need a Band-Aid, or did you need a wholesale, full-on rescue attempt, where the one who was sent to rescue you died in the process?

Third, we're gonna sacrifice some of the deepest motivations for evangelism if we misunderstand the depravity and the nature of a human apart from Christ. And lastly, we will likely get the wrong mission for the church.

We're gonna come back to those four things here at the end of the message. But that's what's at stake, to misunderstand fundamentally what we need if we misdiagnose this, if we get it wrong. And this text is gonna diagnose the problem of the brokenness that we all experience, we all know to be true.

Every human being that's ever walked this planet knows that something isn't quite right. How many of you already knew that before you walked in here this morning? Something's a little busted, something's a little skewed, something is off.

Now, there's many potential diagnoses, right? And the world is coming up with diagnoses all the time. Some would assume that the problem is knowledge. We just don't know enough. We haven't matured enough into knowledge.

And so if we could just be educated and more informed, we could fix the world with education. Some assume the problem is scarcity, a scarcity of resources, not having enough stuff. And so the solution may look like eugenics or population control or redistribution of wealth.

Some assume that the problem is that we haven't advanced scientifically yet far enough, and so they're awaiting the arrival of the far-advanced aliens to guide us into all the new technologies.

There you go. But this is no joking matter.

Because Paul begins in verse nine, clarifying where all of his argument has brought us. And a recap is good. He reminded us that the Jews had been given the very words of God in the text last week. He'd been bouncing back and forth, equal opportunity criticizer, criticizing the Jews, criticizing the non-Jews, identifying the sinfulness of every human being, the religious is indicted, the irreligious is indicted, all of us breakers of the law of God, even those who were not given the written law, still breaking the law written on their own hearts, still not even keeping their own standards, not keeping their own laws and their own rules that they agree to.

And so he begins in verse nine with a question. Since the Jews were given the written law, are they any better off? Well, he's carrying off from where he left off last week in our last text. And it's important to understand that the phrase better off is not denying that there's any advantage to the Jews.

Just last week, he mentioned that there is a benefit to being Jewish. There is a benefit to that people group in the Old Testament having been given the very words of God. That's a privilege. How many of you think having access to God's word is a privilege?

Is that a good thing? That's a glorious thing. That's a beautiful thing. But this better off here, what does he mean by the Jews not being better off and really ultimately saying, in essence, nobody is better off than anybody is where he's driving for.

And this better off is to be understood in the context of his long argument all the way that was begun with the problem back in chapter one, verse 18. In chapter one, verse 18, he set up a problem and now he's been arguing about what the ramifications and the results are of that problem.

And it is simply this. This is the problem that you and I hope to be better off about. It is that God's wrath is being poured out on all unrighteousness and ungodliness. How many of you see that as a problem?

If God's wrath is always consistently poured out on ungodliness and unrighteousness, how many of you recognize the hot water that you're in? We're in trouble if his wrath is poured out on unrighteousness and ungodliness because we're unrighteous and we are ungodly.

That is the conundrum that the gospel is set forth to solve. That is what, how many of you wanna be better off than that? And he's saying, in the law, in the rules, in the natural order of things, no one is better than anyone else.

Did you know that if you're at the highest point of a sinking ship, you're still in trouble? And isn't that kinda like what we're doing when we're trying to look better than everybody else, when we're trying to fake it and we're trying to use law and rules to try to make ourselves look better than those people or than this people or than you or than me?

And so all you're doing is you're scrambling for the high point of the sinking ship.

That's all that it is.

It's all pretense and it's all silliness at the end of the day. It's foolishness is what it is. That main problem, his wrath is being poured out. Better off here means getting out from underneath the just wrath of God towards everything that is sin.

The Jews are not better off in this sense, he says. And Paul is stepping back at the end of verse nine and admiring his handiwork. He's saying, I feel like I've already charged pretty well and established that everyone is under sin.

I think you can go back and if you doubt it, if you don't think that he, if you're sitting here and you're kinda questioning this and you're kinda wondering, am I really that bad? I'm probably not really that bad.

Let me encourage you along with what Paul is kind of suggesting here is to go back and reread these past two chapters and look for yourself in there.

You'll find yourself there. You'll find your sins.

You'll find your tendencies. And if that's not enough,.

Just continue on through this message.

And I think you're gonna be able to see yourself in this message as well. You see the diagnosis is here at the very beginning in this chapter, I mean in this text, in this portion of the chapter. Our problem is not that we sin from time to time.

You see, I think many of us have a tendency to think my problem is that I do bad things. But our problem is that all humanity is enslaved to sin. We are owned by sin. As the text says, as Paul says it here, a phrase that might be missed on many of us as we read it, he uses the phrase under sin, all humanity under sin.

Sin rules over the human race without Christ. It is complete and utter control of sin over our natures and the way that we respond to things and the way that we do things. So now in verses 10 through 18, Paul's gonna back up his diagnosis.

His diagnosis simply that all of humanity is under the rule and reign of sin apart from Christ. And so 10 through 18, he backs that up by quoting various Old Testament passages, expressing the symptoms that point to this dire and grim diagnosis.

In verses 10 through 11, he identifies three things that all humanity lacks. Apart from Christ, you do not possess these things in sufficient portions to be able to be saved or be right in God's eyes.

The first thing that all humanity lacks apart from Christ.

Is righteousness.

No one has righteousness apart from Christ. In other words, the first breaking is our morally, we are all morally broken inside. The comprehensive nature of this indictment isn't just doubled for emphasis, it's tripled.

Almost all of these are tripled in emphasis. In verse nine, he says all are under sin. In verse 10, none is righteous. No, not one.

Do you get the picture here?

Do you get the impression that Paul is going over the top to emphasize that no one comes out from underneath this indictment? There is no one you have ever met that is righteous apart from Jesus Christ.

And notice he begins by getting to the heart. He starts with our hearts, with our nature, not with our externals, not with our behaviors. We often think that the problem is just behavioral, it's acting out, but the problem begins with our hearts and what's broken in here.

We might expect him to attack the external behavior, and he will in a second, he'll do that for us as well. But first, we need a substantial identification that the deepest problem is in our hearts. It's not just the things that we do in a moment of weakness.

You see, we are not sinners because we sin. We sin because we're sinners. And we sin because of a lack of righteousness.

No one has it.

We are not a just people. We are not born inherently loving. We are not born inherently giving. We are not born other-centered. We are born self-centered. Now I take these truths by faith because as I read them and I study them, I see them in God's word and I believe firmly that this is God's revealed word declaring to us who we are.

And I take that by faith despite the fact that my mind will turn to potential exceptions. Does your mind do that? Are you a little bit more of a cynic.

When it comes to things?

Do you have to have things proven to you or shown to you? And some of you are already kind of starting to scratch your head. No one is righteous, are you sure? There's no one who is doing anything good?

Like what about really good and nice people who do kindness without Christ? What about a man in a military company who jumped on a hand grenade and saved his platoon or whatever? I mean, what about him?

And your mind turns to exceptions, but I believe firmly what is said here to be true, that a lack of righteousness is a genuine reality.

For all of humanity without Christ.

And I'm gonna take that by faith because I believe that the God who sees the human heart better than I can see anything, better than I can see you in this room, God can discern and assess the hearts of every human that has ever walked this planet, and I believe that he has rightly diagnosed that all of humanity without Christ lacks righteousness.

The second thing that all without Christ lack is understanding. It doesn't mean that they can't understand some things, but fundamentally there is a reality that they are not just broken morally, but we were broken mentally as well.

Human wisdom, what I think that this is really getting at is more oriented towards the gospel. Human wisdom will never arrive on its own at the gospel. You will never get there to the Lord Jesus Christ hanging on the cross by human wisdom.

That mode, that method of salvation is not man-made and it is not conjured up by the human mind. Nobody will reason their way into heaven, and the understanding of God's grace and mercy will be absent from anyone without Christ.

Have any of you ever just talked with somebody outside of Christ about the things of the gospel and got it and it just was like, just not making sense, it's just not connecting? Without a work of the spirit there, it's sometimes just like you're talking past each other.

You're just not even getting it. And even the very nature of the way that the world works, thinking about understanding, the way that the fabric of the nature of the world works is misunderstood by the person without Christ.

Without God at the center of it all, having created it all, without the proper diagnosis, we see fear running amok in the world. We live in a culture that has increasingly surrendered a biblical understanding of the fabric of reality.

I don't even know if a Christian worldview is the predominant worldview in our culture any longer. And so we see panic increasing as hope is placed in all kinds of things. I mentioned some of them in the introduction, a hope placed in population control or environmental salvation or politics to save us.

Without Christ, humanity skips the true understanding of God's good intention for his creation, which he's bringing about through his redeemed people. You see, politics isn't bad. We need more Christian politicians.

Environmental concern is a great thing and concern for those less fortunate than us is commanded. Do you hear that? But all of these good things are completely and utterly impotent saviors. They cannot save you.

And a whole host of other things that humanity is scrambling for without understanding, without even acknowledging, oh, I'm looking for a savior here. I'm looking for something to save this planet, save these people, to save myself.

And our lack of understanding, humanity consistently turns to the wrong things to save. The third and final thing that all humanity lacks before Christ breaks in and maybe potentially one of the hardest things to take on in this passage is that it says no one seeks after God.

No one seeks after God. This took a little bit more thought on my part over the week and a little bit more reading, a little bit more research to go. Is there no one? Is there no one out there that's looking for God?

No one is seeking him. Nobody really wants to get to know him. That doesn't yet? What does that imply? Well, first, let me back up. We are all broken morally, we are all broken mentally, and in this one, we are broken, a big word, volitionally or in our will.

The idea that nobody seeks after God might resonate with some of you as just patently untrue. There's gotta be somebody out there, somebody who's looking for him, right? But I believe that what God is teaching us here is consistent with salvation being a work of God from beginning to end.

You see, what I would suggest is that anybody who's out there looking for God or who you would perceive to be looking for God in religion or in religious attempts, think about all of the world religions that seem to be pursuing God.

All of those religious attempts to get to God before the gospel breaks into a life and the blinders are removed from eyes and the light is poured in, all of that religion is not really at all about finding God.

It is about finding self, about finding myself, and that's proven time and time again by many religious Christians who set out not to find the true and living God, but a God who will serve them. And they've invented a God rather than seeking the God who truly is.

And I believe that's the status of the human heart apart from Christ breaking in. Apart from his spirit, apart from his revelation, apart from him removing blinders from eyes, we have no hope to truly pursue him.

So fundamentally consider what this implies for our message to a completely broken world. The picture that is being painted here is dire of the world around us, but think about what message we have to carry to our coworkers, to our family members, to our friends, to the kids who play Little League with our kids and to the world around us.

What is our message?

What do we have to bear?

To those who have no righteousness, we bring to them an offer of the righteousness of Christ. To those who lack understanding, we have been given the true and living word and the true and living gospel that can call a sinner to repentance and call a wayward, broken sinner into the family of God.

To those who lack a pursuit of the true and living God, we offer a relationship of love, forgiveness, and grace with the God who has pursued them. The God they weren't even pursuing,.

But he has been pursuing them.

See, the gospel is a perfect fit. It's a perfect remedy for the disease that humanity has contracted. But that's not it. We know that's not the end of our text because he's gonna go on and he's gonna pile on.

The Outward Signs of Sin in Speech, Violence, and Godlessness

More and more and more.

In verse 12, we see three more indictments. He's gonna say all of us were on the wrong road.

We were going the wrong way.

All of us have become corrupted. The word corrupted there would be great to translate that, spoiled or rancid. No one does good, not even one, he says. The comprehensive nature of this accusation against humanity is like a dog pile after a fumble in a championship game and Paul is just heaping on indictment after indictment after indictment.

Everything piled on the one ball. See, he starts off, humanity isn't heading down the right road and then he goes on to say we are all like rancid, worthless food. It's like we ain't had nothing but maggoty bread for three stinking days.

Some of you guys.

But the last indictment in verse 12 makes us doubt again. Here we are back at doubts about whether or not the text is correctly assessing our hearts. You see, I'm convinced that we're so blinded to the depravity that when it tells us that no one does good, we doubt it.

We believe that there's gotta be somebody who does good. Someone out there has done something. How many of you know what I'm talking about? Am I the only one, because I could just skip a section here, if nobody else wonders about how in the world is it possible that no one out in the world does good?

Did some of you, how many, raise your hand if you think that you know somebody who does good, has done some good? Yeah, I think that all of us have that feeling in our guts, right? But I'm convinced that we are so blinded to the depravity of humanity that we have a hard time believing that the world is really this bad.

No one does good? Come on, Paul. You had to know someone who did some good before they were a Christian. And self-justification runs so deep within us as an impulse that our depravity shows even in our inability to assess things correctly on that level.

How hard it is to accept these truths about us and those out in the world around us. Raise your hand again if you know somebody, a non-Christian who does good. Raise your hand if you know a non-Christian who does some good.

No, you don't. That's what the text just said, you don't. It's a trick question, folks.

Were you reading the scripture?

You don't.

The reason we answer yes, though, in all honesty is because we think we can justify others. We think we are the assessors of what is good and what is not good. We see ourselves as the judge and the jury of goodness.

Now, before you get mad at me, though, let me clarify. Everybody's like, I saw you raise your hand. Some of you raised your hand, and now I know. But no, no, for real, I don't do this very often, but it's beneficial in this context for me to throw some Greek at you.

It's a very unique word for good. It is a very rare word for good that is used in the Greek language. It's only used 10 times in the New Testament. Now, and just, I'm gonna set that in some backdrop here.

But just like we have several synonyms for good in English, there's a bunch of different ways that I could declare to you someone you don't know, and you're gonna meet them tomorrow, and I wanna tell you that this is a good person.

I could say this person is good. I could use the word righteous.

I could use the word nice.

I could use the word kind. All giving you, painting you some kind of positive image of this individual you're gonna meet tomorrow, right? Are there a bunch of words in English that I could use to denote that this person is a good person?

Well, Greek is the same way. There's all different kinds of words in the Greek language for good. But I'd like to highlight three of them, including the last one, which is this word that's used here, the first.

The first word is the Greek word agathos. It means good and is used 94 times in the New Testament, translated primarily good in our language. The Greek word kalos means approximately good. A couple other translations that are more like kind or grace, but it's used 71 times in the New Testament for good.

But our word here is chrestotes. It's used 10 times in the entire New Testament. So you have over 160 times that when you read the word good in the English Standard Version of the Bible, 160 times that you read the word good,.

It is not this word.

It's a different word for good. But 10 times it is this word, chrestotes. And how is it used in these other times? Six times it is designated strictly as a character quality of God himself. Six of those 10 times, God has chrestotes.

It is about him. Three of those times it is used for something that a believer receives and can now express after coming to faith in Christ.

You can now chrestotes.

You can now be good because of his spirit resting within you. As a matter of fact, one of those times it's actually a fruit of the spirit. Some of you know that list and you go, oh, that's the word for goodness.

No, it's the one we translate kindness. But it's, I don't know why, but it's translated as kindness. But it's that fruit of the spirit that is good towards, in a genuine God-honoring way to the world around you.

And only one time is it used in this way as a negative for something that someone without Christ cannot do.

Do you hear that?

So that we have a better picture of what this goodness is that Paul is saying no one does. What is the good that no one out there in the world does? A God-honoring goodness. A goodness that is centered on honoring him.

How could they? They don't even believe in him.

They don't want to honor him. They want to honor self. So that an unbeliever could do agathos. An unbeliever could do kalos. But an unbeliever cannot do chrestotes. They cannot do anything out there in the world that is genuinely bringing a smile to the face of God.

That's the condition of a human apart from Christ. No opportunity to please their master and creator. Do you see why I wanted to go into the Greek on that? It helps us to understand how is it that nobody out there does good?

Well, it's a brand of goodness.

It's a God-honoring kind of goodness. In other words, I think it's possible,.

Well, I said it already,.

That a person could produce agathos or kalos, but not chrestotes. And so now in verses 13 through 17, Paul goes on to tackle two common areas of external sin as examples of our outward behaviors that indict us.

In verses 13 through 15, he gives us a dark tour of the apparatus of our speech,.

The way that we talk.

Our throats, our tongues, our lips, our mouths, all using anatomy of speech and identifying in what way we use them for harm. Our words are waiting to swallow others up in the grave. We are devastatingly violent with our words.