DIVISION I. § 4. CHAPTER III. 9-20.
Sin and condemnation universal.
At this point the direct argument with an opponent is dropped; and St. Paul restates what he has so far been occupied in proving. It is not that Jews are in a worse position than Gentiles. It is that all together are involved in the same moral failure. To deepen the impression that this is a true statement, St. Paul culls from various psalms and from Isaiah a series of passages describing a general state of depravity, moral blindness, apathy, failure, unprofitableness, falsity, hatred, and outrage against God and man. These utterances of the book of 'the law' (here used for the Old Testament scriptures generally) are meant for those first to whom this law belonged. They condemn Jews as well as Gentiles. They show all equally to be under divine judgement. They prove that if the written law could teach men God's will, it could not, by the works that it enjoined, enable him to satisfy God. It had its function only in teaching him to know his sinfulness by contrast to his plainly declared duty. The conclusion is then that all men, Jews and Gentiles alike, are involved in sin, are under the wrath of a holy God, and are in utter need of a deliverance which they are incapable of procuring for themselves.
What then? are we in worse case than they? No, in no wise: for we before laid to the charge both of Jews and Greeks, that they are all under sin; as it is written,
There is none righteous, no, not one;
There is none that understandeth,
There is none that seeketh after God;
They have all turned aside, they are together become unprofitable;
There is none that doeth good, no, not so much as one:
Their throat is an open sepulchre;
With their tongues they have used deceit:
The poison of asps is under their lips:
Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness:
Their feet are swift to shed blood;
Destruction and misery are in their ways;
And the way of peace have they not known:
There is no fear of God before their eyes.
Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it speaketh to them that are under the law; that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may be brought under the judgement of God: because by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for through the law cometh the knowledge of sin.
1. The 'Scripture proof' which St. Paul here offers of universal human corruption is, according to a recognized Hebrew practice, made up by stringing together a number of separate texts,—Ps. xiv. 1-3, v. 9, cxl. 3, x. 7, Isa. lix. 7, 8, Ps. xxxvi. 1. They represent the impression made by human wickedness upon the righteous observer. The estimate covers Israel as well as, indirectly, the world at large[[1]]. It is thus an authoritative rebuke to Jewish self-complacency. It is as if an English preacher were to rebuke similar self-complacency in Englishmen by a collection of passages from standard English authorities, in which our nation was judged, in common with others, in a manner most humiliating to its pride. It is this, though, inasmuch as the psalmists and prophets were and are believed to have spoken under the inspiration of the Spirit of God, it is also something more.
It is well known that, as the quotations in the New Testament have frequently affected the Greek text of the Old, so here this conglomerate of quotations came to be attached altogether to Ps. xiv in some Greek MSS., increasing it by four verses. Thence they passed into the later Latin Vulgate. Thence into Coverdale's Bible and into the Great Bible, and so into the Prayer Book version of the Psalms. But our present Bible version remains true to the Hebrew original.