“What then? Are we any better off? Not at all! For we have already charged that both Jews  and Greeks are all under sin, 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. All have turned away; all alike have become worthless. There is no one who does what is good, not even one. Their throat is an open grave; they deceive with their tongues. Vipers’ venom is under their lips. Their mouth is full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and wretchedness are in their paths, and the path of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

The Gospel is good news. But before it’s good news, it’s hard news. In our journey through Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, we are almost to where the great apostle starts to unpack the good news. For the last few weeks, though, it’s pretty much been all hard news. We’ve got two last stops to make on Paul’s journey through the hard news. The next one is a kind of summary that offers a final setup to the good news. This one, though, is where Paul finally lands with both feet on the hard news and doesn’t hold back. Brace yourself. This one is tough.

Paul started off condemning the sinfulness of unbelievers who, in spite of having every reason to believe in God, choose instead to reject Him in favor of lesser things, foolishly denying His existence and embracing a lie. Verses 18-20 of chapter 1 are pretty stinging: “For God’s wrath is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and unrighteousness of people who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth, since what can be known about God is evident among them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made. As a result, people are without excuse.”

These folks deny what is right before their eyes in order to justify their unbelief. It is a willful ignorance of the most damning sort. Essentially, they gaslight themselves into a world that is marked by all sorts of ideas that are as dangerous as they are silly. The fruits of this path become their own form of judgment from God.

From here, Paul turned to the people who, hearing this initial condemnation, pat themselves on the back, thinking they are safely ensconced behind their religion. They’re not living lawlessly like these other poor fools. They have a set of rules that clearly mark out their path and leave them confident that they are walking the path of righteousness. The trouble is, having a set of rules – even a good set of rules – and actually keeping that set of rules are two different things. And if you break the set of rules you have adopted for yourself because of the religion to which you have given your devotion, then you are a rulebreaker. You are different only in number, not degree from the folks you might otherwise be tempted to look down on who don’t have your set of rules.

If you are the kind of person who thinks or has ever thought your religion is going to save you, Paul’s got bad news. You’re no better off than the first set of folks He was talking about.

Our last three stops with Paul in Romans have taken us through his responding to some hypothetical objections to his arguments. Here, at last, he lands on the conclusion that has become pretty inescapable by this time. “What then? Are we any better off?” Are we who follow Jesus somehow inherently starting in a better place than the Gentiles and Jews we have condemned so far? “Not at alL For we have already charged that both Jews and Greeks are all under sin.” There is no one who is not covered by this broad condemnation. The conclusion that is impossible to escape is this: everybody’s guilty.

And lest we think Paul is going rogue in making things up here, especially for the sake of his Jewish background audience, he goes on to show from the Scriptures how this is not a new idea. God hasn’t suddenly decided to turn on anyone, least of all His own people, just because Jesus has arrived on the scene. This broad condemnation of sin and sinners has been around for a very long time.

“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; all alike have become worthless. There is no one who does what is good, not even one.” That blanket pretty much covers everyone. All of us have sinned. No one has not fallen into that trap. This means that everyone is separated from God when they are operating on their own. We don’t naturally do the things that would put us in a good relationship with God. And, once that relationship is broken, we don’t have the means of restoring it accessible to us.

When we sin, we are taking our lives from God, the one who created them to whom they naturally and rightly belong, and declaring ourselves independent of Him. This is all a delusional flight of fancy, of course, but we insist on it all the same. Having taken what belongs to God, though, the only way to be made right with Him is to give it back. But if we give our lives to God, then we don’t have them any longer. And if you don’t have life, then you have death. Thus, as Paul will spell out in more detail later, the result of sin is death. It’s death because we separate ourselves from the source of life, and it’s death because for us to try and reconcile ourselves to Him means giving up our lives. It’s a lose-lose situation.

And yet we keep on pursuing this path. We commit ourselves wholeheartedly to the life. “Their throat is an open grave; they deceive with their tongues. Vipers’ venom is under their lips.” The result of this is that we gradually devolve from the saints God created us to be in the beginning to mere sinners. We curse one another. We are prone to violence. We destroy everything we touch. And peace is inaccessible to us. “Their mouth is full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and wretchedness are in their paths, and the path of peace they have not known.”

The thing that lies at the absolute heart of the problem here is a lack of fear of God. We don’t respect Him as God. We don’t know Him as God. And so we live as if He is of no consequence. “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

The weight of this condemnation is heavy. We try to resist it, but the justice of it is impossible to escape. The only thing we can do is to deal with it. Accordingly, there are three approaches people take to dealing with the truthfulness of Paul’s arguments here. The first is to simply tune it out until our tuner stops working. If you ignore and otherwise disregard the just condemnation of sin long enough, your conscience will become numb to it. Sure, there will still be some occasions when a bit of guilt registers across your mental or spiritual or relational radar, but for the most part, you can just tune it out.

This is certainly a tempting path to take. But the trouble is that ignoring the weight of sin and God’s just condemnation doesn’t make it go away. It will sit there waiting for you, growing as you keep walking a path of sin. Perhaps you manage to escape any kind of a reckoning in this life. But there is a day coming when that reckoning will arrive whether you want it to or not. And on that day, the tragic folly of your willful rejection of the truth will be set unavoidably before you, and the consequences will come fully due. You’ll be fully and finally given over to what you have chosen for yourself, but it won’t be the prize you imagined it to be. This isn’t a good path to walk.

The second approach is to lean into self-righteousness as a means of dealing with it. Here, we find a set of rules we feel like we can manage to keep, and keep them…well…religiously. We embrace religion in some form or fashion and hope that this will deal with our guilt. The trouble here is that religion by itself doesn’t destroy our guilt. It merely pacifies it for a time. Our efforts at rulekeeping can act as a balm for our aching consciences, but the balm wears off after a time. We have to reapply. And, like a drug, the effect lessens over time. It takes more religion to achieve the same effect the longer we use it. We become more self-righteous. More fanatically committed to our religion. More Pharisaical in our approach to the people around us. And in the end, it still won’t be enough.

There’s only one approach that actually solves the problem for us. We run into the arms of the One who offers us a way out of our sin. We turn to the One who paid the price for us and now offers us the reconciliation, restoration, and righteousness we need in exchange for our willingness to accept Him for who He is, that is, to put our faith in Him, and to live as He directs. But here I’m getting ahead of myself. That good news is still lying ahead of us.

For now, here’s a song that captures what Paul is talking about here pretty well. It’s called “Everybody’s Guilty,” and is from the band Waterdeep. This recording is from a live album recorded at a venue I’ve seen them play at more than once. It’s called New Earth, and it’s in the basement of an old church in the Westport neighborhood of Kansas City. It’s not around anymore, but it was a major location on the Christian music scene in the 1990s and early 2000s. It hosted a lot of great shows. Including this one. Enough on that. Here’s Waterdeep.