Romans 3:9-12 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. 10 As it is written, “There is no one righteous, not even one; 11there is no one who understands; there is 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.”
Paul has made his case clear and given logical support. Now he turns to Scripture to add support to his thesis: everyone is “under the power of sin.” Everyone, Jew and the rest of the world, has sinned and turned away from God. There is no one who has escaped, except Jesus Christ (Hebrews 4:15). If we are honest with ourselves, we will realize that we are like the Gentiles in their rejection of God’s truth or the Jews stuck in pride and self-righteousness. The only way to ignore this is to harden our hearts against the conviction of the Holy Spirit. By rejecting this truth over and over again, we will soon not hear the Holy Spirit anymore. We will become spiritually blind. Another way to say this is that we will be dead in our trespasses and sins. We can fool ourselves into thinking we are good. We may have the wrong theology that tells us that if we do enough good, it will outweigh the bad and we can get into heaven. Paul is on his way in showing that the only solution is found in Jesus Christ. There is no hope outside of Jesus because everyone else is inadequate to overcome the sin problem. Sin will eventually lead to death (Romans 6:23). A good definition of sin is in v. 12: “all have turned away.” All of these verses give good descriptions of sin.
For older posts, click here.