Romans 3:1-20
“Held Accountable”
April 10, 2011 - Fifth Sunday in Lent

         Everybody hates the boss’s son. He comes to work when he feels like it; gets there late and leaves early. He won’t take directions, but is happy to hand out worthless advice to those who have more experience. He brings his dog into the clean assembly room. He sits with his feet propped up on a desk bigger than anyone else’s and place computer games and fiddles with his iPhone. And on top of it all, he makes more than all the other people who have been there longer and work much harder.

         In the first few chapters of Romans, Paul wants Jewish people of his time to quit behaving like the boss’s son. Last week at the end of chapter 2 we heard him arguing that merely external marks like circumcision do not make a person truly Jewish. It’s what’s inside that accounts, a spirit and character that actually do God’s will and obey all of God’s law. That kind of internal Jewishness comes by grace.

         So now as chapter 3 opens he has to confront the charge that he’s claiming Jewishness doesn’t matter at all. If the boss’s son can be more of a jerk than anyone else in the company, what good is it to be the boss’s son? “What advantage,” asks Paul, “is there in being a Jew, or what value is there in circumcision?” We might expect the answer for both the boss’s son and the Jew to be “None! Jerks are jerks whoever they are.”

         But verse 2 surprises us with the reminder that Jews are God’s chosen people and that their status remains an advantage “Much in every way!” The very first advantage they possess is that “the Jews have been entrusted with the very words of God.” They received God’s law directly and know the promise of the Messiah now being shared with the rest of the world.

         No matter what the boss’s son does, he is still the boss’s son. God’s chosen people are still His people. Just as it would be terribly presumptuous and personally disastrous at work to take on disciplining the boss’s son, it’s a horrible mistake to imagine that anyone has a right to meddle with the Jewish people. There is absolutely no excuse anywhere in the New Testament, especially not in Romans or any of the writings of Paul, for any kind of anti-Semitism. God loves His people as much as any human father loves his child and God will be as harsh with those who dare to malign or harm Jewish people as that human boss would be with those who mess with his son.

         No, what Paul wants us to understand is that God is going to hold everyone accountable, Jew or Gentile. The boss’s son is not going to get away with his goofing off forever. One day his dad will show up and straighten him out. In the meantime the rest of us ought not slack off or feel superior, because he’s our boss as well.

         That’s why verse 3 goes on, “What if some were unfaithful? Will their unfaithfulness nullify God’s faithfulness?” What if the boss’s son is a jerk? Will that make the boss a jerk?

         Paul answers in verse 4 with a little phrase in Greek that’s worth knowing. The words are “me genoito!” literally “May it never be!” It’s the equivalent of a vehement “No way!” or “Don’t even think about it!” in contemporary American. “Not at all!” is the translation in the TNIV.

         No, the unfaithfulness of anyone, even of God’s chosen people, does not at all make God out to be anything other than eternally faithful and true. “Let God be true and every human being a liar,” says Paul.

         That’s Paul’s response to anyone who wants to hold God accountable for what human beings have done, even for what they may have done in His name. Yes, there have been some terrible wars fought, some vicious crimes committed, some despicable offenses perpetrated in the name of faith in God, of faith in Jesus Christ. But that does not make God responsible for any of it.

         We might also pause here and say that one might argue that in the last hundred years, more people died cruel and unjust deaths at the hands of those who refused to believe in God than have died over previous centuries at the hands of believers. Just think of Stalin or Hitler or Pol Pot. It’s not as if atheists don’t have plenty of blood on their own hands.

         But be all that as it may, Paul goes on to quote Psalm 51:4, “So that you may be proved right when you speak and prevail when you judge.” Human sin and evil only shows up God as that much more righteous and true. An honest assessment of our own failings only makes it clearer that we deserve God’s judgment on us.

         Now in verses 5 to 8, Paul takes a moment to deal with what might seem a pretty silly little argument that goes something like, “Well, if our sin makes God look good, then what’s so bad about our sin?” Maybe, since it makes Him look so good, our unrighteousness actually helps God out and it’s really unfair for Him to judge us. Paul apologizes for the silliness and stupidity of this line of thought with the words in parentheses in verse 5, “I am using a human argument.” From God’s point of view this argument makes no sense at all. It’s only from a distorted human perspective that anyone could really buy it.

         Paul sums up this dumb way of thinking in verses 7 and 8 first with the silly question, “If my falsehood enhances God’s truthfulness and so increases his glory, why am I still condemned as a sinner?” To which Paul replies with a sarcastic, “You might as well say… ‘Let us do evil that good may result!’” It sounds dumb, but we may think that way more often than we realize.

         This dumb attitude is in the vicinity of all sorts of “spirituality” we find around us: New Age or eastern or Hollywood understandings of good and evil. We’re told that good and evil, light and dark are an eternal duality, yin and yang, balancing each other down through the ages. Remember the “Star Trek” episode where the good side of Captain Kirk gets separated from his dark side? Evil Kirk causes destruction, but good Kirk is weak and ineffective. It’s only by putting the two back together that they balance each other and give us the strong, decent man of action we all know and love. But from the Bible’s point of view, that’s baloney.

         Evil does not balance good. It only ruins what is good. Evil does not make us stronger. It only makes us weaker and more likely to do that which hurts ourselves and others. The very idea of doing evil to bring good makes Paul disgusted. “Their condemnation is just!”

         Remember that evil will never produce good when you hear Jack Bauer say that he’s “ready to do whatever it takes,” to save lives, then tortures someone. Remember it when we’re inclined to lie to avoid hurting someone’s feelings or to save ourselves a lot of trouble. Remember it when it feels like getting even with someone who hurt us will just help him realize his own sin. Remember it when our government tells us that putting people out of jobs or killing unborn infants or waging a war that kills innocent civilians or changing the definition of marriage will bring some greater good.

         Sure, our evil makes God look that much better. But He’s only going to be that much more ready to judge and punish those who think they should do something evil because it will have good results, because it never will.

         Of course, it’s all complicated. Our really difficult moral decisions are hardly ever black and white. We need to cut the budget and that’s going to hurt someone. We want to help protect people from tyrants and that means war. We want to avoid offending others and that means telling lies. We can’t seem to stay away from doing what’s wrong at the very same time we’re trying to do what’s right.

         That’s exactly why Paul comes to his conclusion in verse 9, “Are we any better off?” That is, are Jewish people any better off than Gentiles in the long run? “Not at all!” he says. “… Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin.” There’s an initial advantage to being Jewish, because God made right and wrong clearer in His law, but everyone ends up just as confused and sinful in the end.

         So then verses 10-18 cite a long litany of texts, mostly from Psalms, a couple from Isaiah, that express just how far gone all human beings are in sin. It begins, “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.” It’s what we’d like to say about Congress this weekend, but Paul says it about us all.

         Verses 13 and 14 put together quotations that place the evil in what we say, referring to throats and tongues and lips and mouths. Those of you who studied James last year know chapter 3 of his letter says the same, that our mouths are one of the greatest sources of evil on earth, full of destructive force.

         Verses 15 to 17 string together quotes pointing to the fact that we constantly take the wrong paths. Our feet turn down roads of hurt and we can’t seem to find the path to peace. Congress is only a reflection of the struggle we all have to get along and be at peace with each other. We can’t criticize them without looking at our own personal interactions and failures to deal fairly and openly and unselfishly with each other.

         Listening to all the reporters and commentators and the speeches and sound bites from the senators and members of congress themselves, one is tempted to wish for someone to stand up in the middle of it all and just shout, “Shut up!” then proceed to show everyone the mistakes they have made and hold them accountable for their lies, for their evasions, for all the shifty deals that have failed to help people they are supposed to serve.

         That kind of silencing shout is exactly what Paul tells us God has done by giving His law to the world through the Jewish people. “…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.” The purpose of the law is accountability, to make us completely and inexcusably aware of just how deeply we have failed to be what God wants us to be.

         Both our daughters, Susan and Joanna, have participated as jurors, case presenters and defendant advisors in Eugene’s Teen Court. It’s a redirection program for teenagers who plead guilty to minor offenses. They appear before a jury of their literal peers as people their own age hand down a sentence involving restitution, community service and other consequences. It’s a great way our community seeks to hold teens accountable among themselves.

         My sarcastic fatherly advice as I would drop one of the girls off to serve at Teen Court was usually, “Throw the book at them!” It’s an old saying that pictures handing down the most severe sentence possible by heaving at guilty offenders every penalty found in the book of the law. It’s exactly what God does with us in both the natural law we find in our hearts and minds and in the law taught to us in Scripture.

         The full penalty of the law, as Paul will go on to explain later in Romans, is death. As we read at the beginning of Lent, the penalty for failure to obey God from the beginning in Genesis was to die. The first human beings sinned and we have been dying ever since. That’s why our Old Testament reading from Ezekiel 37 and our Gospel reading from John 11 are both about death. In Ezekiel, God finds the people of Israel dead in their rebellion and exile. In John, Jesus finds Lazarus dead in his tomb.

         God holds us accountable. As we’ve been reading from Ecclesiastes on Friday morning, everyone comes to the same end. It doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor, relatively good or relatively bad, we all die. It’s the consequence for our sins. We all deserve it. “There is no one righteous, no not one.”

         Paul’s program here in this text is show that no one escapes accountability before God. It doesn’t matter if you are the boss’s son. The day of reckoning is coming. Literally, verse 20 says, “no flesh will be justified before him through works of the law…” “Works of the law” here means those parts of the law that mark a person as Jewish, things like circumcision and keeping kosher. It doesn’t matter if you have the same last name as the boss, you are still accountable and you will still suffer the penalty for not doing your job. For every human being, that penalty is dying.

         The message here is that we can’t count on law to save us from its penalty. The law dishes out the penalty. God uses the law to hold us accountable. But the law can’t do any more for us. It can’t make us righteous when we’re not. The law just shows us what the problem is. As Paul ends this part, “through the law we become conscious of sin.” It’s only by another way that we become conscious of the answer to sin.

         Jesus shows us the answer to sin gloriously in John 11. By responding to Lazarus’ death, He responds to all our dying. By grace and not by law, God raises up from death those who believe in Jesus Christ. Jesus shouting “Lazarus, come forth,” was the beginning of Jesus’ great shout of grace to every human being to silence our sinful mouths and to invite us out of our sin and death and into His life.

         In Ezekiel, it was by grace and not by law that God promised to raise Israel’s dry bones and put flesh on them and put breath back into them. They had broken the law; that’s why their nation was dead and exiled. It was only by grace that God would go beyond their accountability and lead them back into life.

         Yet the accountability has to be there. The law had to come first. You can’t get resurrected if you won’t admit you’re dead. You can’t be forgiven if you won’t confess that you’re a sinner. You can’t know grace until you know accountability. That’s why God holds us all accountable. So that He can hold us all in His grace.

         Let’s be accountable. We can’t be raised out of sin and death until we are. This Lent let’s be honest about our sins and submit to being accountable not just to ourselves, but to God. And then as Easter arrives, let’s enjoy the blessing of God’s answer to all the sin for which we are accountable. Let’s enjoy the grace of new life in Jesus Christ.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2011 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj