Lesson 9
Romans 3:19-20 · Mike Doyle · May 20, 2018
Romans (2018-21), No. 18
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/49261910146989

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Okay, we have matriculated to Romans chapter 3 verse 19. So somebody, read 19 and 20, because we're just to sort of give you a, these are the last two verses of the indictment, so to speak, of all men being guilty before God. And so 19 and 20, of the last two. So somebody read 19 and 20.

Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be closed, that all the world may become accountable to God. Because by the works of the law, no flesh shall be justified in his sight. Through the law comes the knowledge of sin. So, he says in verse 19, the question is, is he speaking to the Jews only?

Or is he speaking to Jews and Gentiles? Both. Who thinks both? Who thinks just Jews? Just Jews. He says to all the world. Notice what he says, up until verse 9, He talked to Jews only. Then he goes from 10 through 18, he's talking to both. But then in 19, when he says, what does it say right at the beginning? I speak to those who are under the law.

Who are they? The Jews. Were the Gentiles ever under the law? No, they weren't. So he's back on the Jews, and the reason he's doing that is because he wants to make sure that the escape door out the back is closed. That they don't, in any sense, have the reality that, well, we have a little bit of an advantage because of the law that was given to us. The point is that they don't escape. Because what's the purpose here? From chapter one to hear, what is God trying to show, or Paul trying to show?

That all are under sin? Every single human being is put into this corral of being under sin. And under sin is not, yeah they've all sinned, but being under it is a whole different viewpoint. Being under sin means what? It's you're in it, and it controls you. You're under sin. the three groups of people, whether you're just an ordinary common variety sinner like Courtney. No, I'm extraordinary. He's an extraordinary sinner.

Or you're someone who has created your own set of rules and your own set of moral character, or you're the Jews who have a law given to them by God. All three of those groups, he's putting them all now in the corral of being under sin and sin controls them totally, not just a little bit, controls them totally.

A couple of verses, Deuteronomy 5 says, Here, O Israel, the statutes and judgments which I speak to your ears this day, and he's telling Israel, pay attention, Pay attention to what I'm saying to you. So, speaking of both Jews and Gentiles, second question, why would God want to stop every mouth? Read the verse again, 19 and 20, both. See that? Why would He want to do that? So they can listen. You know, that's a great answer, because that's really, I think, what it is.

You will notice in circumstances of people that are arrested or they're accused, they talk until they get to where? The courtroom, the place of judgment. Some of them are dumb enough to talk in the courtroom. Really the whole idea is that if you're under law or you're a Jew, You're going to keep talking about how some good things that you've done, you're going to keep rattling your mouth, right? And you want everybody to hear, and you don't want people to know about your badness.

And the Pharisees were a perfect example of that. They always talked about how wonderful they were, and how good they were, yet they were, the Lord Jesus called them, whited sepulchers, whited graves. Or like that last week we studied those seven things there, that your mouth is an open grave. It would be okay if it was a closed grave, but an open grave isn't cool.

So, Jews were not only sinners, but they were transgressors. What makes you a transgressor? The sin nature. Think about it. Everybody is a sinner, right? But only the Jews were transgressors. Because they had the law. That's right. A transgression is a violation of a statute. They were the transgressors. And so we, as Christians a lot, can be accused of being transgressors because we're trying to keep some sort of biblical law or some sort of this little black box behind your left ear that says, these are my rules and I'm doing pretty good. A transgressor is a violator of the law.

So it's important to understand that the Jews not only were sinners, but they were also transgressors of the law. And they gloried in that law. Because we have the advantage of the book of Romans and Galatians, I think we sometimes entertain the thought, well, I wouldn't have been as dumb as those Jews were. Really? We don't even have the law and we're dumb as they are.

So the issue here is when you're brought into the presence of a judge and you're there to be sentenced, you're quiet. The judge gets to talk. So when you have a just penalty executed against you, what do you get to say? Do you like those like 20-20 shows on TV and where they have a whole hour long and they take an actual case, murder case, and then they kind of go through the whole thing and then they have the trial at the end and the person is either found guilty or not guilty and they interview the accused all through and he proclaims or she proclaims her innocence. But when the jury says you're guilty and the judge says, okay, I'm going to sentence you, they don't talk.

It's now the judge's turn to talk. And that's what's happened here. That's what God is doing. He's bringing all Jews to the point where He's going to execute judgment and they don't get to talk. And they can't talk because they're exposed. They've been a judge guilty.

Some of you who came to Christ later in life, you probably thought you were doing okay until you met Christ in the gospel and then you realized well I wasn't doing too well and at that point you had to be quiet and listen. So God puts Jews and actually all of us in a position where our mouths are stopped and he does that for what purpose? Why do you think he does that? Why does he get all of us to shut up so he can talk? Self-judgment. No, think about it now.

Why does God want you to be quiet and listen? So you know what it's all about, what Jesus did and nothing about us? It's about the blessing that's there, not about the condemnation. And he can't talk to you about the blessing until he gets you to be quiet.

That's right. It's really interesting. I found this paragraph that says, But though humbling is a moment in our history when first our mouths are stopped, only then are we prepared to listen undividedly to God, prepared to receive blessing, so that the very object of the law was to close every mouth, to place all of the world under God's judgment. so he could bless them. That's why. Isn't that something?

He wants you to be quiet. He's got the indictment in place, but we're going to find out starting next week with Courtney and the verses going on from 21 forward. They're all blessings. That's really why he wants you to stop talking. It's really cool, a God of grace, that's what he does. Those of you who have children, there are times you have to get them to shut up so you can tell them the grace.

So why would not any works of the law justify a man? Question three. Why couldn't a man comply with the law and be justified? Because works imply merit. Works imply merit. And that's not what God's looking for. Yeah, that's the other thing. If God can't get you to be quiet, then you don't ever know what God is really looking for. Because you have it built into you, every human being has it built into them, who come from Adam, that they're short of what God requires. And they have to do something to appease God in order to get him to not be so severe with you or to bless you.

Years ago, I think Denver was one of the only cities that had this, at the Denver Museum of Natural History, the Aztec display. It was really cool. Don and I went to it. What was interesting about it is the religion was around blood sacrifices. And the top of the line blood sacrifice to their God was a virgin human being. And wherever they were killing them, there must have been a lot of them. And it was for the crops to grow, for God to be kind to them, that they would be prosperous and all that kind of thing.

Where do you think the idea of appeasement to God came from? I don't think that the Jews transferred the Old Testament to him, do you? There in Central America. How did they get that idea? One, that God needed to be, he was upset, that he needed to be at peace somehow, and oh wow, we evolved to blood sacrifice a human being. How did they figure that out? What do you think? think it's built into them by sin? I think so. They didn't have access to Old Testament or Jewish sacrifices or anything like that. So I think it's built into every human being who comes from Adam that, well, things aren't quite right.

And I've got to come up with some way to make God bless me somehow. So I create a set of rules and I create a religion. So let's say as a Jew, God gives me the religion, and so I have from the true God from heaven, I have this requirement called the Mosaic Law. And I have the idea that if I comply with every one of its tenets, I will be accepted by God.

What's the problem with that? There's a couple I can think of, but what do you think? The Bible says that the blood of bulls and goats doesn't take away sin. Okay. What about you personally? What can you do of your own effort to be justified by God? Believe in Jesus and what he did. Is believing something you get merit for? No. Well, then that takes it totally out of the category of you being able to do anything for you to be justified. That's true. There's nothing. There's nothing you can do.

Let's say you could do it. Let's say that there was a Jew who kept all tenets of the law. Would he have a right to go stand before God and say, hey, look, I got them all. And God says, yeah, you did. What's the problem with that? He's still a sinner. Still a sinner. But think about this. Who does the justifying? God does it. You don't do it. God does it. So he sets the ground rules. And if a man were able to keep the entire law, he would be justified in what relationship to God? In himself. And himself isn't good enough.

Do you see that? If I could totally keep the law and I could go before God and say, look God, I got it all done. I did every 600 and however many there are. I didn't miss a one. I'm standing before you. I'm totally righteous in myself. What would God say? Sorry. Because only God justifies. He's the only one who can do it.

And He does it not based on performance. Do you see that? I don't think that's... None of you are nodding your heads yes, so you must not see it. Well Christ did. Huh? He kept the law. Who? Christ. Yeah. And what happened to him? He got crucified. He was crucified. I was thinking that the Jews were the ones that asked for the law. That's right. So it seems like your premise that That wasn't what God was ever looking for. He was never looking for law keepers. That was not even close. No, that's right.

I have a sense through studying these two verses that God took upon himself, I'm going to be the judge and justifier. I'm going to take that role. Which means you're not going to have it, man. I'm going to do it. And yet built into man in the natural realm of things under Adam is this desire to be righteous before God in my own efforts. It seems that it's built in like that.

I grew up in Catholicism and that's really what Catholicism is all about. To follow the rules so that you can be righteous before God and even with his help. But you have your skin in the game. I was thinking of going back to the Incas and all that, that not under the law, they didn't ask for the law, but they built into them, Romans 1, they know there's a God. And the first thing that they do is, I'm thinking they're blaming God just like Adam did.

You gave me her, she's the one who did it. Sure. And you know, when the Incas, two things, one, self-effort. It's up to them. And they're blaming God for everything. The crops, the weather, the, you know, you did this, I need to do something. They're blaming God, and then they're doing self-justification. None of which will do anything. But that's the sin nature. It wants to do it, and it blames God.

And so they're demonstrating exactly what the Jews and everybody else does. The Jews just said, we'll give you a law. Which, okay, I'll give you a law, and you still can't do it. And what's interesting about that, I don't think the man realizes what's happening. He doesn't have a clue that that's what's really going on. So God gives the Jews a law.

What was the purpose of the law? It's the deeds of the law. No flesh will be justified. But by the law is the knowledge of sin. I'm doing pretty good until the law shows up. Because I'm excusing myself or accusing myself and whenever I accuse myself I put a little holy water on it and move on. We're good. But what the law does is expose sinfulness.

So when the Jews said, give us the law, what God really said to them, I'm going to give you the thing that's going to expose your sinfulness. They said, no, that's not what we mean. I think Moody says that The law is like a big mirror that God sent down to man and said, look at yourself. All started though with that big mirror, which back in chapter 1 we were talking about, I had this impression in my mind that Lucifer sat in front of the mirror and thought, hey God, you did a really good job with me.

What do I need you for? I got this. That's the big sin. I got this. And so when you start, when you begin with, I got this mentality, what happens? The Bible says your mind is darkened and you don't get it. How does God open up your understanding about getting it?

To the Jews, he gave them the law. And most of them, even that didn't wake them up. But that's really what the law was given for. So the works of the law cannot justify a man, even though it's God's law. The big reason is that God is the justifier. He wants that job. He doesn't want you to do it. He wants you to trust Him to do it. So, question four. If keeping God's law bails me nothing for righteousness in His sight, why did He give it? Now there's another answer.

What the law does is it binds a man to judgment and it doesn't give him any avenue of escape. The other thing it does is it also binds the actions of God. If God gives you a law, what happens is from your side it binds you to God's judgment, because you're under it. You find out that by keeping it, there's no avenue of escape. But from God's side of the ledger, it binds God to action. What does it bind him to do? Justify it. No, no. Make a sacrifice. Well, no, no. Think about, no, we're not that far yet. You guys always want to jump to the good part. What does it cause God to do? Condemn us. He restricted himself to that. Condemn us and condemn the Jews who are under the law.

And so God is perfectly righteous and right when he does that because the principles are there. The law is there. So you have to take it a step at a time. We always want to jump two or three steps ahead and say, gee, God's a good guy. When he ties man to it, man doesn't have any gate. He also ties himself to it, so he has to condemn us because he's righteous. Maybe I'm jumping to the end and summarizing a bit.

Law keepers always forget the next verse, but now that faith has come, we're no longer under a tutor. The law was to point us to Christ, and fully. And that's summarizing the whole process, which is, okay, you have a law, you cannot be, there's nothing that the law will do, except expose you as a sinner, and there's nothing that you can do. There's nothing in yourself, there's nothing that you Let's do a little clarifying on that verse.

Does that verse speak to Gentiles that they must have the Mosaic Law? Were Gentiles raised to be under the Mosaic Law to lead us to Christ? So could you say that that verse applies only to Jews? Well, how about me, the Gentile? What is he talking about there in terms of law? The conscience. conscience is an accuser or an excuser of my action, but I think Christians automatically will take that verse and say we are aligned with the mosaic law, well I can't find anywhere in scripture where it says we are as Gentiles. So what law is he talking about? I think he's talking about laws of principle.

I can't remember what that is. Is it right about that? Well, in Romans chapter 1, the last verse, it talks about that. You have law unto yourself. See, that's where it comes from. So it's important to understand that the Reformed people will use that verse to say, see, we Gentiles are under the Mosaic law.

No, we're not. And never were. But the law principle, by us not being able to keep it, but by keeping us from going off the cliff is to lead us to Christ. For what reason? Christ and God want to be the justifier. You don't get to do it. Even if you take whatever, the next verse excludes law. Which they always forget. Now that faith has come, there is no longer a need for the tutor of the law.

Newell says a very interesting thing. He says, God is greater than law. I like that. For law is merely his servant to accomplish a full exposure of sin in order that he might display his own righteousness apart from the law and transcendency above it. That's really cool. So could you say that that would apply like to David? Sure. That he just went to God even though he had done all kinds of things.

David is a great example of what a sinner is supposed to do even under the mosaic system. You are supposed to go directly to God and that was what the law was really designed to do was to get you to go directly to God and seek forgiveness and trust him that he would. God's own ability to fully and gloriously triumph over sin on behalf of those who were in bondage to the law on account of sin. I like that a lot, that God is bigger than the law.

Reformed people don't think that. They think the law is the penultimate and that we believers have been saved and given the Holy Spirit in order to comply. But as we're going to find out that God took the entire environment of law and set it aside and created a new environment in which believers are to live in and that environment would in fact deal with sin. What was that environment? Grace. That environment is grace.

Romans 6.14 says what? Sin won't have dominion over me anymore. Why? Because I'm not under law, I'm under grace. We'll address grace as we go forward here.

The law has incredible excellencies, if you really are a student of it. The law is holy, it's righteous and it's good. And we know if we are honest that God spoke all these words of the law, therefore the heart's only relief is to hear God's own word about the law. concerning the seven questions, and this is really good out of Moodle, he says in chapter Romans we'll give an answer. To what nation did he give the law? Israel. Why he gave the law is a good question. Three, what the law's ministry was. What was the law's ministry? What was it designed to do? Sure, that's right.

How was it set aside or annulled for another principle entirely? How did God set it aside? How did he set aside law so that he could bring in grace? How did he do it? Christ fulfilled the law. It was in the cross. He did it with the cross. When Christ died, death means separation. He died to the entire first creation. All of it. All these three categories of sinners that we've been talking about, all over here. Christ died to that whole creation. He was resurrected into the new creation. And this new creation operates only on grace.

There's no law there at all. And there's no sin either. So, here we are as human beings. We've got one foot over here and another foot over here, right? When in actuality, we're really here, but we have the sin nature still in us, and we live in a fallen world with dying bodies. That seems like, you know, God, you didn't do a complete job, how come I'm stuck? And you think in a certain faith, you see. That's right.

Because how do you live over here? What do you do over here to live and function? You live by faith. You live by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God about the new creation, not about the law. If believers understood what the law was really all about, they would leave it alone.

But at the same time, you can't. How do I say this? A lot of times you find people say, well, I'm not going to do that anymore. And my question is, well, what are you going to do now? They don't know what they're going to do now, but they know they're not going to do that anymore.

You've got to know where you're going before you can abandon where you've been. You see that? You've got to abandon the law and realize that it isn't going to do you any good before you'll trust God about this grace thing. It's interesting. Once you say, I'm not going to do that anymore, what have you just done?

Put yourself under a law. and it isn't going to work out for you, sorry, but if you go away from it and say, I'm going to walk in the Spirit now and I'm going to rest by grace in the Lord, then you've got a chance, because you've turned from one to the other. The next one is, what is meant by the words under grace? Oh, that's a great question. What is meant by those words under grace? Don't answer it. I'll let Courtney answer it next week. Six, how the walk in the spirit takes the place of walking by external enactments. Where are you? This is my answers. Are we looking at this too? It's part of the answer to question four.

How that only those not under law is the righteous state of the law fulfilled. If you're not under the law, then the righteous state of the law is fulfilled. If you're still under it, it isn't. Do you understand that? How did the law get fulfilled in each one of you? The law searched you out, found you, grabbed you by the throat, put you up on the cross and crucified you. Done. Is it fulfilled? Yeah, it's fulfilled.

If a criminal is given a death sentence and he's on the way to the gallows and he falls down and has a heart attack, do they pick him up and still stick him in the gurney? Well, do they? No, they don't. Why? He's dead. So why are you messing with the death part when you've already died? Okay. Question five. That's on your sheet. Question five.

Now it is apparent that to bring men off from their false hopes and their law obedience, three things must become evident to them. What are they? And this is out of Newell. The first one is that law, having been broken, can only condemn. The second one is that even were men enabled now to begin keeping perfectly any law of It could not make up for past disobedience or remove present guilt.

And that's again a reformed position. Well, I'm saved now. I've been indwelt by the Holy Spirit. My sins have been forgiven, but now I'm enabled to keep the law. No, you're not. No, you're not. And three is that keeping the law is not God's way of salvation or of blessing. It's not how he does things.

So the knowledge of sin comes through the law, right? It reveals what God approved in man and what God disapproves in man and forbids. It curses man I'm sorry, causing the man to undertake obedience and condemning him for the failure to obey. I gotta tell you, as smart as those Jews were, as smart as Moses was, you think he ever read it?

You think those guys ever really took a good hard look at what God just gave them? It would have scared me to death. I would have said, I don't want any part of this. This is a death sentence for me, for sure. Did they read it? Yeah, they wrote it down, they had it. Think about it. Did they really comprehend what God had just given them? They'd skip over the ones they couldn't do. Yeah.

So there's a verdict that God puts on every son of Adam. I'm going to read this to you. Every mouth stopped, all the world guilty before God, or as the margin reads, become subject to the judgment of God. That is what God says of every unconverted soul.

Not a word to say, and under judgment, like a prisoner who has been accused, his case looked into and proven guilty, so that by the deeds of the law no flesh shall be justified in his sight, because the law only brought home the sin and unveiled the sinner and brought him to guilt before God." I know I'm pounding hard on the law in these two verses in the last few weeks, but I think we have to understand going forward from verse 321 forward that grace begins there and grace is what we're after. You can't revert back and pick up little snippets of the law.

Grace is what we're after. We want to live under grace and we don't know grace until 321. We have no idea. Have any of you ever lived under grace before you were saved? I'm not talking about somebody being gracious to you. I'm talking about living under this umbrella of grace. Have no idea. Not a clue about what that's about. Where you live in an environment where God's unmerited and unlimited blessing are on you all the time. Don't know what that's like. And I must say that believers don't understand it either. They don't understand very much about what it is to live under grace. There's always this huge tendency to, you know, God just tell me what I did wrong and I'll fix it.

Or I'll confess my sins and then you're going to give me credit for confessing my sins. Right? Do you get credit for doing that? Do you get credit? I mean, why in 1 John 1 that doesn't say you ask God for forgiveness? Why doesn't it ever say that? So why confess? I mean why confess? Do I have to? If I don't, am I condensed? Think about it. Just believe. He wants us to recognize it. He wants us to agree with him. That's exactly right. He wants us to be spiritually intelligent people who understand about sin and also understand about grace.

And so what's the consequence of sinning as a believer? There's a loss of fellowship. There's a loss of intimacy with Christ. And as a believer goes on and grows, that intimacy is experienced more and more and is more and more valuable. So when you sin, you detect it right away, and you have the Spirit of God in you, and you don't like being there.

Because that's over here. I'm not over here anymore. There's nothing but condemnation here. I want to live in resurrected life, in grace. Okay. Let's do the last question. Has God ever changed His plan for man? You mean the cross wasn't plan B? Or plan A-1? For me it was. For you it was?

So you're all in agreement that God has never, God hasn't ever changed his plan for man. Has he ever changed it? From Adam to Noah? From Noah to Moses? From Moses to Abraham, or Abraham to Moses, Moses to the cross, Moses to Christ, the cross, resurrection. Isn't there a lot of changes there? Aren't there? Dispensations. Dispensations. So, doesn't it seem like he has some?

What was that? It was always before the world was created, God had to plan that his son would die. He's always wanted man to have faith in what he has revealed. That's right. He's had different economies, he's had different people, dispensations or whatever you want to call it. That's the one constant. He wants man to live by faith. That's what he wants. And he's never changed that.

Was Adam saved? Yes. Did Adam demonstrate faith in God? Yes. How did he do it? He accepted the coverings. He accepted God's remedy for his own sin. See that? It took faith to do that. So, like it or not, you're going to see Adam in eternity, and evil will be there too. So, God always wanted man to live by faith. He wanted Adam, even though he was innocent, to live by faith. To trust him, even though he was being tempted to trust God, what he said. That has never, ever changed. And that's always been in play. Even the Jewish nation, Under the mosaic system, God wanted them to live by faith. Faith in what? The wall? What was their faith to be in? Christ finished work. That's right, the coming Redeemer. They were to trust Him about their sins and about the system He put in place. They were to trust Him.

I must say, the biggest problem I see in Christianity today is that's the problem. We want to live by emotions, experience, feelings, events, warm fuzzies, but we do not want to walk moment by moment based on what God has told us. We don't want to walk that way. We just refuse to do it. Just trust Him and what He says. A couple of things here.

By beginning with man on a faith principle from Abel onward, then conditioning Israel's relationship and blessing upon their legal obedience, and then changing back again since the cross to the way of simple faith apart from the law, no, there has been no change.

Neither was the law a thing additional to faith to secure God's favor. It wasn't, was it? It never was to incur God's favor. It was to show your sinfulness and to condemn you. Nor was God disannulling or foregoing a commandment and evidence that he had been seeking and expecting righteousness in man and the law that now since the law had failed. Did he change? No. It was the same principle. He resorted to grace apart from the works of the law. Did he do that? He didn't resort to it. He always had it in play. Always in play.

The law came in simply that the trespass may abound. So I think it's important for us to get our arms around the fact that God operates now simply under grace and we function by faith. That's it. That's the total plan. We live under grace and function by faith. That's how we do it. But that won't happen unless you understand Romans 6.

Or understand Romans 3.21 going forward. Or even Romans 1.

The power of God unto salvation is the gospel. So, let's both, Father how we thank you for your word, we thank you for all your blessings. We ask that you would constantly be opening up our understanding to what it is, what your grace is, and we can rest in the provision for us. We pray in your son's precious name. Amen.