“All under the power of sin” is not a place we want to begin.  It isn’t very flattering.  But we can’t buy our way out or even work our way out: you know, all that overtime, the side hustles to pay off the debt?  So, people throw up their hands and say forget it, then.  If I can’t clear the debt, burn the mortgage, then forget it.

As I was thinking about what Paul has been saying, “All under the power of sin,” I decided to find out what the theology of the internet says.  Does the Bible teach that people are good?  Now, what is our answer?  The AI assistant, combing the internet thoroughly, assured me in large, bold, blue letters that Yes, the Bible teaches that people are good.  Well, that’s comforting.  What led the AI to make that beautifully reassuring, confident assertion?  The gist was that, because we can do good, we are good.  That’s not much of an argument, and it isn’t biblical.  Turn it around: because we can do evil, we are evil.  Nobody thinks much of that argument.  You’re good if you do good . . . well, I guess that works in the movies, and that’s salvation enough for some.  In the movies (the ones we like and that get Oscars, anyway), every evil person is actually just a misunderstood good person.  That’s another way of saying there really is no such thing as evil, just misunderstandings: Auschwitz—a silly misunderstanding!

If we are able to do good, how does this happen?  Why are we able?  Because people are good!  But that’s not the answer Scripture gives and it’s not the direction Paul is pointing in what we heard today.  And it isn’t the case that Paul is just morbid, just wears a black veil that darkens everything in his field of vision.  Come on, man, cheer up!  Get a life!  Paul emphasizes the essential point that no one is righteous: without Christ, no one is right with God.  It’s not one nice thing or another that one person or another does, beloved: it’s what sort of relationship—if any—each of us has with God.  Are we working on it?

In comparison to God, who is good?!  So, let’s not compare ourselves to God!  Just look at that tax collector over there, or that filthy homeless guy mumbling to himself, wheeling around town in that wheelchair.  I know I must be good because I know I’m better than those people!  We can always find someone to help us feel better about ourselves.  Then we find Jesus.  The standard matters, beloved, the basis for comparison.  I come out looking pretty good, in my own eyes, depending on who I compare myself to.  So, I’ve got to choose, wisely!  I’ve got a well-developed bias in favor of myself.  I’m much more attractive than some people, much nicer, much smarter, and so on.  It all sounds so pathetic, when it gets put like that.  So, we don’t put it like that; we just live that way.

Back in Illinois, a difference of opinion emerged at a meeting of presbytery: What Jesus says matters, not what Paul says.  Yes?  We might feel inclined to nod, because Paul is not Jesus; neither is John, or James, or Peter, or Jude.  But let’s dig a bit deeper.  There are times when Paul specifies and makes plain that he is sharing only his opinion—informed and considered, but possibly also missing something.  The rest of the time, he is writing as the called, commissioned apostle of Jesus Christ, writing in the Spirit.  In the Spirit, Paul’s words and the words of Jesus have the same weight, because they are by and in the Spirit.  The Spirit is not a spirit of falsehood but the Spirit of Truth.  In many cases, those who attempt to dismiss the apostle’s words because he is not Jesus, want to dismiss things Paul says that these people do not especially like.  The role of women in worship and church governance, for example.  That day in Illinois, homosexuality was the point in contention.  Well, we know of course the Bible is all wrong about that, after all, because . . . because it just has to be.  Anything less would simply be unkind.  Jesus is okay with it; I’m just sure about that in my heart . . . my stubborn, unrepentant heart.

Paul insists no one is righteous, no one is good.  Oh, that’s just dreary, pessimist, Puritan Paul, spouting off!  But wait—he is quoting the Bible, the Old Testament, in which we read that no one is good.  And Jesus, our perfect, sinless lamb—Jesus says that no one is good except God (Mk 10:18, Lk 18:19).  What kind of Jesus is this book trying to push on us, anyway?  Let’s just fashion our own Jesus.

All in this world under the power of sin.  That sounds scary, though . . . even if it is true?  Is it?  Does it have to be?  If it were not true, you and I would not need Jesus, because, after all, you and I are good, as we know.  And God loves us no matter what, as we know.  So, let’s just do whatever, as we do.  Jesus did not walk among us merely to do some things and say some stuff.  He came as our salvation.  Surely, good people do not need salvation.  Yet even “good” people need Jesus, because no one, except Jesus, is perfectly, faultlessly good.  Well, perfection is unattainable, unrealistic!  What sort of standard is that?!  In God’s version of that baking show, Nailed It, none of us fare very well.  This is harder than I thought . . .

All under the power of sin.  Helpless?  No, not helpless, but not looking around for help.  Under the power, under the influence.  Don’t raise your hand, but have you ever been under the influence?  Don’t nod or laugh, or pastor will know.  But we know.  No one is at their best, then.  We’re positively dangerous, then, to ourselves and to others.  Under the power of sin, sin instructs us to jump, and we laugh like fools and say okay.  We don’t question why, or where.  We experience the consequences, and grumble, groan, but we don’t stop.  We continue to do the very thing.  We may even hear a voice somehow, somewhere inside saying stop—as we don’t stop.  We know God’s law.  God’s law does not cause us to stop.  “God says don’t do that!”  I know!  (We say, as we’re doing that, again).

“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’” (3:10-11).  Not even one?  Well, I’d like to think that many people are seeking God; only, I’m afraid that many seeking God aren’t finding the god they want.  We want to find the god we want.  What god do we want?  One who won’t tell us to stop what we don’t want to stop; one who will demand nothing we aren’t willing to give; one who won’t tell us we are wrong and He only is right.  Oh, we’re all right, in our own way . . .

None who understand that no one is righteous, which for us basically means good—maybe godly, too, but mostly good.  We know lots of good people, yet God says no one is good.  Does He mean good enough for God?  That standard, again—it’s too high!  We need a realistic standard: one we can all attain, nice and low.  Maybe we can just be good enough for one another.  And we are good towards one another, often.  Then, there are those other times . . . we don’t even measure up to our supposedly realistic standard.  What shall we do?  Lower the standard again?  Give us low standards, for God’s sake!

When and if a person enters into understanding—which can only come because God is at work—that person will seek God.  No one seeks God—that doesn’t seem accurate.  It feels as if that couldn’t have been true even in Paul’s day or when Jesus was on earth.  Many came to Jesus.  And many people, even among his own followers, also parted company with him, as John tells us (Jn 6:66).  People don’t seek God, because they know—sense—that finding God, the real, true, and only God, means change.  People say they want change, but what they mean is they want comfort.  The sought after change will be something different, will feel better, happier, than the sorrow and burden under which they currently labor.

Some want to be told the thing they want to do is really okay.  They don’t want genuine change; change is scary: change conducts us into what is unfamiliar and unknown.  Change involves work and failure and learning.  Change requires recognizing, admitting, and embracing truth—truth often will implicate us: you and I are complicit in some untruths, half-truths.  Change always requires sacrifice, a personal cost.  Lots of people exercise, once in a while.  How many exercise—get that heart rate up, break a real sweat—daily?  We want God to mean comfort, and He is that, abundantly, but the comfort He offers is the comfort of change, holiness.  Once we begin to understand this and commit to the journey that changes us—the walk with Christ—we will begin to know true comfort.  God’s comfort is for those who want the comfort God offers.  False comfort, sentimental mush comfort, does no good.  Beyond these doors, people are even now ruining themselves with what can’t provide true comfort.  A drug is a drug is a drug.

“All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one” (3:12).  Well, dang!  But until this point is admitted, nothing more can be done or built.  Grace needs material with which to work.  When Paul writes “all,” he is making no exception for himself.  Always present was the memory of his great zeal in hunting down Christians to drag them off in chains for trial, and sentencing; his approval of the stoning to death of Stephen, standing there watching, hearing, as each stone pummeled.  Always present for him was the memory of his core conviction that Jesus people were just the worst.  Totally misguided, even as he believed he was following the way of truth, righteousness, and love for God—that’s what Paul (Saul at the time) was.  Lord knows he needed change!

Paul calls upon the witness of Scripture that people have “together become worthless.”  Have you ever owned something that turned out to be worthless?  Often, these things come as free gifts, like those free pens handed out by sales reps that last maybe for half a page of writing.  Worthless—I can’t help but think of fool’s gold, iron pyrite: Look, look—gold!  I’m rich, rich, rich!  Oh, how to break the news?  What is worthless does no good, does not do what it is supposed to do, does not do what it was sold to us as being able to do.  Is anybody here still taking aspirin as a preventative for a heart attack?  You know that isn’t the standard of care anymore, right?  It hasn’t been for several years.

Paul writes that people have together become worthless, which tells us there was a time when people had their right worth, full, true worth—then something happened.  Paul would point us, for starters, to Genesis 3, Genesis 6, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel.  People liked other stories better; they liked other things more.

Psychologists inform us that our personal perspectives are biased—imagine that.  If each of us has a bias, then what is true?  God knows!  The bias, as they tell us, is towards a goal, some desire we want to fulfill, some satisfaction we are seeking, even some fiction we dearly want to be true.  We interpret the world around us and the people around us in light of that happy goal.  And it’s a broken world filled with broken people drawn in by pretty, comforting half-truths.  Well, a half-truth isn’t a lie.  Is it?  The half-truths serve us so well.  And the full truth?  That’s like looking in the mirror first thing in the morning—we’re not ready yet!  We haven’t put our face on!  That can’t be me.  That’s not really me.  Not the me I want to be or let others see.

One of the clearest demonstrations of how we have strayed from our purpose may be heard in what people say, how people speak to one another.  The thwarted purpose of humanity, human worthlessness, comes through vividly for Paul in how people (mis)use the blessing of language.  That misuse is never hard to find, and it’s never far from us.  Paul draws from the psalms to paint a strong, vivid picture of the trouble: “Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit.” [Psalm 5:9]  “The poison of vipers is on their lips.” [Psalm 140:3] “Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.” [Psalm 10:7 (Septuagint)] (3:13-14).  Social media, anyone?  We say it just isn’t so.  Then we listen to politicians.  We see and hear deeply angry people on the news, night after night, cursing, kicking, advising others how best to do harm to those who deserve to have harm done to them.  And we all know who they are!  The news shapes what counts as knowledge and truth; the editing of the news broadcast shapes how we feel about what we see and hear.  We hear a lot of anger these days: strong, negative emotions.  Upset!  Unhinged. Everyone is upset.  If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.  We remember angry things people have said to us.  We remember things we have said.

James laments the trouble.  So does Jesus: “anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the court.  And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell” (Mt 5:22).  What’s a raca?  It’s an Aramaic word, the language the Jews of Jesus’ day spoke.  William Barclay tells us the word is “almost untranslatable”: “because it describes a tone of voice more than anything else.  Its whole accent is the accent of contempt.  To call a man Raca was to call him a brainless idiot.”  The word expresses “arrogant contempt.”[1]  Oh, that tone of voice.  Yes, we’ve known it, felt it.  “With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness.  Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing.  My brothers and sisters, this should not be” (James 3:9-10).

Paul talks of “open graves.”  The real danger of an open grave wasn’t so much falling into it accidentally, but that an open grave was a source of pollution and profound uncleanness.  I daresay we’ve all been spattered with some verbal pollution and uncleanness, whether aimed at us or just scattershot.  The children learn the unclean words, quickly: where, from whom?  Deceit, cursing, and bitterness—the tongue reveals what’s in the heart, as Jesus tells us.  How we live is a mirror reflecting what is in us.  Let’s not be shocked.  Let’s be prayerful.  Stephen Crane, famous for The Red Badge of Courage that maybe, like me, you had to read in high school, was also a poet.  In his brief life he wrote some terse, intense poems.  One is titled, “In the Desert”: “In the desert / I saw a creature, naked, / bestial, / Who, squatting upon the ground, / Held his heart in his hands, / And ate of it. / I said, ‘Is it good, friend?’ / ‘It is bitter—bitter,’ he answered; / ‘But I like it / Because it is bitter, / And because it is my heart.’”

In these early chapters, Paul has come back frequently to how far gone humanity is.  He wouldn’t return to it, lay all this weight upon it, if there wasn’t so much resistance to the notion.  Oh, it’s not as bad as that.  He’s exaggerating.  Yes, there’s some bad, alright—but there’s a lot of good, too!  Maybe so, but there’s precious little righteousness.  It’s not one nice thing or another that one person or another does, beloved: it’s what sort of relationship—if any—each of us has with God.  That’s been the key and remains the key.  Righteousness is a right relationship with God, a vital relationship.  That’s not so easy to come by.  We may think otherwise because, after all, here we are.  But what brought you here?  Who brought you?  If we’re so good, why would we need to be here, of all places?  What’s on offer for good people, here?  All that’s being offered here is medicine and therapy for broken people.  Church is rehab: not always so fun or so easy.  We say we value health, yet we do so little to maintain or improve it.  And we know why.

Paul recalls the words of Isaiah: “the way of peace they do not know” (3:15-17).  The way of peace?  That is righteousness; that is holiness.  Everyone has ideas about what counts as righteousness and what counts as holiness, just as they have ideas about love and truth.  The point, however, is to accept and practice what God says counts as righteousness and holiness, which requires at least two key elements, working together: fear of the Lord, and faith.  Fear without faith is miserable and paralyzing.  And what is faith with no corresponding fear of the Lord?  There will be no vital, transformative faith, where there is no fear of the Lord.  In this instance, I take fear of the Lord to mean taking God at His Word, taking God seriously, not casually blowing God off: all bluster and no follow through.  Big ‘ol teddy bear.  As we survey the news, I can’t say that things look remarkably different from the scene Paul saw through the lens of Scripture: “There is no fear of God before their eyes” (3:18 [Psalm 36:1]).

Humanity needs something else, someone more, over us, with us, in us.  You and I know who He is.  He promises to meet us, here.  Thanks be to God.

[1] William Barclay.  Gospel of Matthew.  1956.  Daily Study Bible.  Philadelphia: Westminster P, 1975.  139.