Unless a Rescuer Shows Up, We Are Dead.
Romans 3:9–20
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. As it is written:
“There is no one righteous, not even one;
there is no one who understands;
there is no one who seeks God.
All have turned away,
they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
not even one.”
“Their throats are open graves;
their tongues practice deceit.”
“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”
“Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”
“Their feet are swift to shed blood;
ruin and misery mark their ways,
and the way of peace they do not know.”
“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
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. Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin.
Scripture has bleak passages and hopeful ones—this passage in isolation is one of the bleakest: “None is righteous, no, not one” (v. 10). The passage declares, without mitigations, that our relationship with God is irretrievably broken from God’s perspective. There is nothing we can do to fix our relationship with him. The indictment of humanity’s pervasive rebellion and sin in the passage includes many damning details. Let us look at just two: “No one seeks for God” (v. 11) and “There is no fear of God before their eyes” (v. 18).
God is saying to a lost humanity, “Whatever you (humanity) think our relationship is, I say we don’t have one. You may say you seek me, but, really, you do not. You have no proper awe or fear of me. You don’t act like I am God. You are in a state of rebellion against me. You are cut off from me, and since I am the living God, you are cut off from life itself. You are dead in your sins.”
Thus, the story we are in is not a story in which we heroically do our part and then things turn out well for us in the end. The story we are in is one of “as good as dead unless some outside rescuer pulls off a miraculous rescue on our behalf.” We are people on the wrong side of a catastrophe: we are beyond hope of doing anything to rescue ourselves. Think of being trapped in a collapsed building, and the only hope is that somebody comes and digs us out before we die of thirst.
Lent is a time to meditate on the truth that Jesus is our needed rescuer and that he pays the steepest price for our rescue. This Son of God and Son of Man is the one who will (who has), on our behalf, suffered the effects of being cut off from God, who will die separated from God, so that God can unite us to true life in and with Himself. Jesus rescues us from the sins the passage brings as devastating charges. Instead of us being convicted of these charges, he will take the full condemnation of the charges and pronounce us innocent in his stead.
Do we believe it? Do we believe that the bleakness of this passage applies to us? Or do we secretly harbor a sense that we might rescue ourselves? When we behold Jesus heading to the cross, do we see our only possible rescuer, who saves us, and gives us life at the cost of his own life?
