Day 3 — The Starting Point: Who Jesus Is, and What He Has Done
Today’s Passage: Romans 3:9-20
Romans is a letter. A man named Paul wrote it around the middle of the first century to people in the city of Rome, most of whom he had never met. It was carried there by hand and read out loud to a room, because not everyone in that room could read. Keep that in mind as you go. These are not private notes. They were spoken into a space where people sat listening for what was being said about them.
Paul has been building something for two chapters. He opened with a charge against people who want nothing to do with God, and his religious readers would have nodded along with every line of it. Then he turned around and laid the same charge on them. Now he stops arguing and sums up, and he does it in a way that is hard to answer: he quotes their own Scriptures back to them. Almost every line in verses 10 through 18 comes from the Psalms and from Isaiah, from the books they had been raised to trust.
What comes out of that stack of quotations is not a ranking of people. It is something else, and the last two verses say what it is for.
As you read, hold this: Paul’s charge is not that some people are worse than others, but that all of us are under sin, and the law that shows the problem was never able to cure it.
Context Two kinds of people in one room
The church in Rome had Jews in it and non-Jews in it, and the two groups had very different histories. “Greek” here does not mean someone from Greece. It was shorthand for everyone who was not Jewish, the whole rest of the world. The Jewish believers had grown up with the law, meaning the Scriptures God gave Israel through Moses: His instructions, His covenant, the mark that set them apart from every nation around them. Having the law was not a burden to them. It was an honor, and proof that God had spoken to them and not to everybody. So when Paul says that Jews and Greeks alike are all under sin, he is leveling something his first readers did not think could be leveled. The words he reaches for next are courtroom words. A first-century listener would have heard a trial.
Romans 3:9 (BSB)
⁹ What then? Are we any better? Not at all. For we have already made the charge that Jews and Greeks alike are all under sin.
The “we” in that question is Paul and his own people. He asks it about himself first, which is worth noticing, because everything that follows he is including himself inside.
And look at how he describes the problem. Not “Jews and Greeks alike have all done wrong things.” Under sin. It is the language you would use for a country living under an occupying army. Something is over us, and it has a say in how we go about our day. That is a different picture from a scorecard with some bad marks on it. A scorecard you could improve.
Romans 3:10-12 (BSB)
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.”
“Not even one” comes twice, at the top and at the bottom, like a frame nailed around the middle.
The honest objection arrives at once, and it is a fair one: you know good people. A neighbor who shovels your walk. A grandmother who never had an unkind word in her. Paul is not saying that no one is ever kind, and it would be dishonest to make the text gentler by pretending that is all he means. He is saying something narrower and harder. Righteous means right with God, measured against Him and not against the person next to you. And “no one who seeks God” cuts deepest, because it says the search does not start with us. Left alone, we do not go looking.
“Turned away” is a road word. It is not standing still in the wrong place. It is walking, with your back to someone.
Romans 3:13-18 (BSB)
¹³ “Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit.” “The venom 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 lie in their wake, ¹⁷ and the way of peace they have not known.” ¹⁸ “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
He walks down a body. Throats, tongues, lips, mouths, feet, eyes.
Most of it is about talking. That is easy to skim past on the way to the dramatic line about shedding blood, but it is the bulk of the list. An open grave is a hole in the ground with the smell of death coming out of it, and that is what he says our speech is like. Not our worst hour. Our ordinary conversation.
Then the last line, which holds up all the others. “There is no fear of God before their eyes.” Fear here does not mean cowering. It means a settled, weighty sense that God is real and that we will answer to Him. Before their eyes: in view, part of what you are looking at when you decide anything. Paul’s claim is that God is simply not there when we look. Not argued away. Just absent from the picture.
Romans 3:19-20 (BSB)
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 justified in His sight by works of the law. For the law merely brings awareness of sin.
Here the exemption closes. Whatever the law says, it says to the people who have it. The Scriptures Paul has been quoting are not ammunition to aim at outsiders. They were addressed, first, to the ones holding them.
And they were given with a purpose stranger than you would expect: so that every mouth may be silenced. Picture a courtroom where the defense finally stops talking. Not shouted down. Not bullied into it. Just out of things to say.
Word study "held accountable" — hypodikos (Romans 3:19)
Greek: ὑπόδικος (hypodikos), pronounced hoo-POD-ee-koss. Strong’s G5267.
It is a legal word, built from “under” and “judgment”: a defendant standing liable, with the case already made and no answer left to give. Our English word “accountable” sounds like a review at work, something you can prepare for. This is the moment in the room when the talking stops.
Then verse 20, which is the hinge the whole day turns on. No one will be justified, that is, declared to be in the right by the Judge Himself, on the basis of keeping the law. And the reason: the law merely brings awareness of sin.
That is what it was for. It shows you the problem. It does not touch it.
A thermometer will tell you that you have a fever. It has never once lowered a temperature. You can buy a better thermometer, take your temperature more often, become very disciplined about taking your temperature, and stay exactly as ill as you were. If Paul is right, then the one tool everybody reaches for, trying harder, being better, cleaning up, is a measuring instrument and not a medicine.
Which leaves the obvious question standing wide open, and he knows it. The letter does not stop here. But today does.
Study notes A line from Israel's own prayer book
Long before Paul, a king of Israel had already said it in a prayer, about himself, with nobody arguing with him:
"Do not bring Your servant into judgment, for no one alive is righteous before You." Psalm 143:2 (BSB)
He is not asking for a fair hearing. He knows what a fair hearing would produce. He is asking for something else, and he does not yet say what.
Today’s Decision
Read verses 10 through 12 once more, slowly, out loud if you are somewhere you can. Read them as being about you rather than about anybody else, which is the harder way to read them and the way Paul read them.
You do not have to agree with them today. If you speak to God at all, you can say exactly that, in your own words: that you have read this, and you do not know yet whether it is true. That is an honest place to stand, and it is a better one than pretending.