“There is no one righteous, not even one…”
—Romans 3:10
That’s not exactly the verse you’d expect to find printed beneath a beautiful sunrise on an inspirational Sunday morning graphic.
Paul isn’t trying to make us feel particularly good about ourselves in the opening chapters of Romans. Quite the opposite. He has been systematically dismantling our favorite ways of convincing ourselves that we’re doing just fine.
By the time we arrive at Romans 3, nobody gets a pass.
“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…”
And finally, the verse most of us recognize:
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
All.
That’s an uncomfortable word.
Paul isn’t dividing humanity into good people and bad people. He’s not comparing the respectable with the scandalous, the churchgoer with the skeptic, the person whose failures are carefully hidden with the person whose broken story everybody knows.
He levels the field. None righteous. All have sinned. All fall short.
If righteous sounds like an especially religious word, perhaps we can simplify it. Paul isn’t saying nobody ever does anything good. He’s saying none of us measures up perfectly to the goodness, holiness and glory of God. Whatever our stories look like, somewhere along the way every one of us has fallen short.
And if Romans 3 stopped there, Sunday worship might be a rather gloomy affair.
But it doesn’t.
After twenty verses describing the human condition, Paul arrives at verse 21:
“But now…”
There it is. Two words. One enormous breakthrough.
“But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known…”
What we couldn’t produce, God provides. What we couldn’t achieve, God gives.
Paul continues:
“This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.”
Then, immediately after telling us that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, Paul finishes the sentence:
“and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”
Don’t rush past that.
We frequently quote Romans 3:23 by itself: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” And it’s true. Painfully true. But Paul doesn’t put a period there.
The thought continues.
All have sinned and are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.
Our falling short is real. But so is grace.
The gospel begins with what God has done for people who could never repair the breach themselves. Paul says we are justified freely. By grace. Through the redemption that came by Jesus. That is the Gospel. The Good News. Jesus.
And that is a call for wonder, awe, and worship.
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