“But if by my lie God’s truth abounds to his glory, why am I also still being judged as a sinner? And why not say, just as some people slanderously claim we say, “Let us do what is evil so that good may come”? Their condemnation is deserved!” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Incorrect thinking leads to bad ideas. As we have talked about before, bad ideas lead to all sorts of unfortunate consequences. To put that another way: Ideas have consequences; bad ideas have victims. As Paul nears the point where he lands with both feet on the emphatic conclusion of this opening section of his letter to the Roman believers, he addresses one more round of incorrect thinking. Let’s take a look at this with him.

Some ideas are hard enough to understand that we have to keep coming back to them in waves in order to get our minds fully wrapped around them. Usually those waves consist of objections of one sort or another. Sometimes the objections are different. Sometimes they are all just variations on the same objections as we gradually work through our hangups and hesitations and doubts about accepting the truthfulness of this new idea. This all goes double for ideas that are true when we don’t want them to be.

The idea Paul was introducing here in the opening chapters of Romans is that everybody is guilty of sin in one way or another. Not to one degree or another, but in one form or another. There aren’t degrees of sin.

I remember clarifying my thinking on this years ago when a member of my former church was struggling to wrap his own mind around this idea. Although the practical impact of every sin is not the same, all sin is equally capable of separating us from God. If you were going to sin against me, I’d prefer you to tell me a lie about something insignificant over physically abusing me. The former sin is “smaller” than the latter. But both sins are equally capable of severing our relationship with God because both of them come out of a place of willful rebellion against the character and authority of God. Both are the result of declaring ourselves and our desires to be the ultimate guide for our lives rather than God and His.

You can pick the particular set of rules you want to live by. You don’t keep all of them all the time. You violate the standards you have set for yourselves. You make yourself the final arbiter of right and wrong rather than God. That’s sin. Everybody is guilty of sin.

That is a true idea, but it’s not a particularly fun or encouraging of an idea. It flies in the face of how we naturally think about ourselves. It flies in the face of what we want to be true about ourselves and about the world. So, we resist it. We come up with all sorts of reasons to resist it. Some sound reasonable. Most don’t. Most miss the point or are otherwise fairly naked attempts to merely divert attention elsewhere through one form or another of whataboutism rather than dealing with the actual problem.

Paul anticipated this resistance to his argument. That’s why he addresses three counterarguments here in the opening verses of chapter 3. If you’ve been paying attention to the last couple of posts, though, these counterarguments aren’t all that different from one another. They’re basically variations on the same theme. He knew his readers were going to be working to wrap their minds fully around what he was saying, so he dealt with what he knew would be some of their thinking. Now, these aren’t necessarily the three counterarguments we might raise to Paul’s point. But Paul wasn’t writing primarily for us. These were things he knew his intended and original audience might raise.

In the first counterargument, Paul dealt with the idea that God’s faithfulness could be undermined by our unfaithfulness. (It can’t.) Then he moved forward to the idea that God’s righteousness being highlighted by our unrighteousness means that He’s in the wrong to judge us for our sinfulness. (He’s not.) This third round looks pretty similar to the second.

If by our sinfulness – and in this case, specifically our dishonesty about the nature and state of reality – God’s truthfulness looks all the better, why are we getting judged as sinners. The simplest answer is that we are getting judged as sinners because we are sinners. God doesn’t need our help looking good. He’s God. He’s got that down just fine on His own. His glory is what it is. It can be highlighted and magnified, but it can’t be increased. It’s already at its maximum level.

God didn’t make us, He didn’t create the world, merely to make Himself look good. He’s not petty or insecure like we are. Instead, He created us so that He could share of His love with us. And because He made us to be vessels of His love, our doing things that remove us from the covering of His love is not something He’s willing to stand. Sure, our being wrong makes Him look all the more right, but that’s not the point of a relationship. He holds us accountable for our sin because to do less would not be loving on His part.

This, though, is where incorrect thinking can get us into trouble. If we buy into the incorrect idea that our sin makes God look better, this could lead someone to argue that sin is a net good. We should sin because God’s goodness is a worthwhile goal. We should just do whatever we please because God receives the glory either way. He receives it when we walk in righteousness. He receives it when He judges us as sinners. Why not sin?

The answer to that question is simple: Sin doesn’t lead to life. It doesn’t lead to eternal life. It doesn’t lead to life here and now. Sin causes destruction by its very nature. The form that destruction takes will vary depending on the sin and its circumstances, but destruction will always, ultimately be the result of sin. The kind of thinking Paul spells out here is shortsighted in the extreme. It is living only for this life as if there was no life after. Yet a life after this one is precisely what Jesus promised to those who follow Him on His path of righteousness. Choosing to walk a path of sin as if you were doing God a favor doesn’t ultimately do Him any favors, and results in separating you from Him both now, and, if you keep walking that path, forever. If someone knowingly chooses to do such a thing, their condemnation, Paul says, is deserved. They earned it.

Our sin does not result in God’s glory. It results in our death. Therefore, we should not sin. Of course, we can’t manage that on our own. That’s where Jesus comes in. We’ll get to that in more detail later on in our journey. For now, righteousness is always better than sin. Walk the path of righteousness today and encourage someone else to join you on it.