Romans 3:23-26
Today, let's spend some time reflecting on our key text in Romans 3. In the first three words we are confronted with the human dilemma, "for all have sinned…". Sin is not a word in much use today, sadly even among professing believers. We can read in this text that all have sinned and be little disturbed by it even if we except the truth of it. I think we are unaffected for two primary reasons: 1) We do not understand just how bad sin is. 2) We do not realize how terrifying God's righteous wrath is.
These two ideas go hand in hand. If we had any sense at how offensive and obnoxious our sin is to the almighty, creator, sustainer and one true God we would realize that his right and good response to our sin would be to destroy us in an eternal death. Coming at it from the other side, if we understood the terrifying and utterly horrific nature of God's righteous wrath against sinners, we would begin to fathom how loathsome our sin actually is.
For starters, let's just meditate on the radical offensiveness of our sin. Consider some key texts from the first three chapters of Romans. In Romans 1:18 we discover that we are not the open-minded, objective thinker that we inherently think we are. No, in fact we are actually suppressors of the truth. Rom. 1:18-23 puts it plainly enough, we all have a clear knowledge of the one true creator-God though creation but we will not recognize him. Apart from God's saving Grace we all willfully and stubbornly deny the very God who created us and sustains us!
We will have to continue this investigation into the blackness of our sin in my next post. Remember the goal, to properly see our sin so that we can properly rejoice with joy that God has propitiated his wrath through the once for all sacrifice of his son!