A Study of Romans 3:9-31
Hello everyone! Today we are coming to the beating heart of Scripture, a passage in which the Bible’s deepest truths pulse through its lines. It is the blazing center of theology—Romans 3:21 – 31. Theologian Charles Hodge wrote, “There is no passage in the Scriptures of more fundamental importance than this.”
The Scottish theologian James Denney wrote, “Romans 3:21-26 is the most important paragraph ever written.” Dr. N. T. Wright said, “In Romans 3:21-26, we come to the central paragraph of the letter [to the Romans], and perhaps to Paul’s entire theology.” Dr. Martyn Lloyd Jones, who was converted to Christ while studying this passage, later called it, “the theological heart of the letter [to the Romans]…and the very center of all Scripture.”
I don’t want to hurry through this. I’m not going to go as slow as Dr. Lloyd-Jones did. He took 12 years and 366 sermons to go through Romans, and he spent a long time on this paragraph. I’ll not devote hundreds of podcast episodes to this. But we must think of Romans 3:21–26 as the gravitational center of biblical revelation; all the doctrines of Scripture orbit this sun. Remove it, and the galaxy of Christian truth collapses into darkness.
Let’s quickly review where we are in Romans and work our way up to verse 21.
When you open your Bible to Romans, you find it is the very first of all the letters or epistles in the New Testament. This is by divine design, because it’s foundational to all the others. The first seventeen verses of the letter comprises its prologue. Then in Romans 1:18, Paul launches into the body of the book, telling us that the entire human race is hopeless before God, and every human being on earth is facing His wrath and His judgment because there is a thread of evil, wickedness, and sin in every one of us. The Old Testament teaches the same thing. Jeremiah 17:9 (NKJV) says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.”
That is essentially what Paul is saying in Romans 1:18 – 3:20. Before we can appreciate the love and grace of God through Jesus Christ, we have to realize our own hopeless, hellbound, hideous condition.
Derek Prince wrote, “In the field of medicine, if a doctor cannot diagnose a condition, usually he cannot provide a cure. The diagnosis of the human problem, therefore, is of supreme importance. The Bible’s diagnosis is given in one short word: sin. So far as I have been able to discover, no other book in the world, unless it derives from the Bible, diagnoses the problem of sin. Certainly no philosopher ever arrived at that diagnosis. It is unique to the Bible. If we had received nothing else from the Bible, we should be eternally grateful for the diagnosis of the human condition.”
The apostle Paul talks about this in four stages:
- In Romans 1:18-32, he says the pagan culture around us is evil to the core.
- In Romans 2:1-16, he says that people who appear to be morally upright are evil to the core.
- In Romans 2:17 – 3:8, he says that the Jewish people are evil to the core.
- And now, in Romans 3:9-20, he is going to say that you and me and everyone on this planet are evil to the core.
Look at chapter 3, verse 9: What shall we conclude then? Do we have any advantage? Not at all! For we have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under the power of sin. 10 As it is written:
And now Paul is going to give us an Old Testament tour of verses about the sinfulness of humanity. He is going to quote from Psalm 14, Psalm 5, Psalm 140, Psalm 10, Isaiah 59, and Psalm 36. Listen to this rapid-fire series of deadly indictments against you and me and everyone we know:
“There is no one righteous, not even one;
11 there is no one who understands;
there is no one who seeks God.
12 All have turned away,
they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
not even one.”
13 “Their throats are open graves;
their tongues practice deceit.”
“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”
14 “Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”
15 “Their feet are swift to shed blood;
16 ruin and misery mark their ways,
17 and the way of peace they do not know.”
18 “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
Now we come to Paul’s summarizing conclusion in verses 19 and 20: Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. 20 Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin.
Have you ever totaled your car? When a vehicle is so damaged it cannot be repaired, the insurance company declares it a ‘total loss.’ This is Paul’s verdict in Romans 3: humanity is totaled. Not dented. Not damaged. Totaled.
And that brings us to the most important paragraph ever written—Romans 3:21. Paul will not let us hear the good news until all our human arguments have died on our lips. He seals the courtroom, he silences the defendant, and then—when the whole world stands guilty—he opens a hidden door in the courtroom wall that leads into grace. Verse 21 says: But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify.
This goes back to the theme of the book in Romans 1:17, where Paul said, “For in the Gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written, ‘The righteous will live by faith.’”
Here is what the Lord is telling us. He is Himself utterly and totally pure and perfect, uncontaminated and undiluted, flawless and as pristine as the clouds of glory that envelop Him. Nothing with even a trace of evil can survive in His presence. In the Old Testament Law, we have a reflection of His character. But we cannot keep the Law. We cannot match His character. And so we have no means of escaping His wrath. But God’s wrath is matched by His love for us, and so He devised another way for us to appear before Him righteous and pure, stainless and sinless, and, as a result, have eternal life in Heaven. We have very strong indications of this in the prophecies of the Old Testament. Verse 21 again: But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify.
There is a translation of the Bible known as the Complete Jewish Bible, which was created by a Messianic Jew, and that translation renders this verse: “But now, quite apart from the Torah, God’s way of making people righteousness in His sight has been made clear—although the Torah and the Prophets gave their witness to it as well.”
The Living Bible puts it even more simply: “But now God has shown us a different way to heaven—not by ‘being good enough’ and trying to keep His laws, but by a new way (although not new really, for the Scriptures told about it long ago).”
There is hope after all! There is another way!
In my library, I had a handful of commentaries by a man named Frederic Godet. He was born in Switzerland in 1812, and he grew up in a Christian family. But his Christianity was cultural and intellectual, not a real life-giving faith. While a young man he wanted to enter the ministry, but he was not a born-again young adult. All around him in Germany were liberal theologians and rising forms of German rationalism and skepticism.
Godet later recalled that it was during his years as a young theological student—moving between Basel, Bonn, and Berlin—that Romans 3 first gripped him with overwhelming force. Immersed in an academic world where biblical authority was being questioned on every side, he found himself suddenly confronted by Paul’s sweeping indictment: “There is none righteous… no, not one.” Godet said it felt as though Paul had led him into God’s courtroom, where every pretension to goodness was stripped away. But it was the “but now” of Romans 3:21–26—the revelation of God’s righteousness in Jesus Christ—that brought him to what he later called “the decisive surrender of the heart.”
Godet knew the theories of the German rationalists. He could recite Strauss and Schleiermacher. But he could not escape Paul. And Romans 3 broke him open. From that moment, he wrote, “the gospel became for me more than doctrine—it became life,” and this encounter with Romans became the spiritual foundation of all his later preaching and commentary work.
As I pondered this, I thought of an amazing verse in the Old Testament that seems to apply to this, although I’ve seldom heard it quoted. In 2 Samuel 14:14, we read, “Like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be recovered, so we must die. But that is not what God desires; rather, he devises ways so that a banished person does not remain banished from Him.”
I honestly don’t know how to make this as vivid as it really is. We don’t hear very much about the wrath of God and about Hell, and we are strangely ambivalent to it. How can we describe it?
Charles Hadden Spurgeon, more than any other preacher or orator who has ever lived, had a way of drawing pictures with his words; pictures and images that are vivid and forceful. He spoke about Hell in a number of his sermons. I looked up some of his descriptions, and he said things in a way I never could have conceived. Oh, to have had his vocabulary and imagination and tongue!
Spurgeon said, “Think, sinner, of the wrath to come! It is no trifle. The anger of a man may be borne, but the anger of God—who shall dwell with the devouring fire? Who shall abide the everlasting burnings? When God’s wrath flashes forth in lightning bolts of vengeance, when His fury smokes against the sinner, when the pit opens wide its mouth to swallow up the guilty—then shall you know what the wrath of God means. It will be anguish, darkness, horror, despair. It will be the thunderbolt of justice finding its mark, and the sword of the Lord drinking deep of the blood of the lost.”
Spurgeon said, “Forever! Oh, that men would think of that dreadful word! If they would but meditate on the eternal duration of misery, surely they would be shocked into a sense of their danger. Forever is written on every chain that binds the lost; forever burns in the fire that torments them; forever reigns in the terrible litanies of their despair. Forever! Oh, dreadful word! The soul asks, ‘When will my sorrows have an end?’ and the echo answers, ‘Never, never, never.’”
He said, “What is it to be cast away from God? It means to have the heart left to its own corruption, the conscience to its own torment, the memory to its own upbraiding, the soul to drink the gall of its own sin. This, with the wrath of God resting upon it, and never to be lifted—this is to be cast away.”
And he said, “To die without Christ is to be without hope forever. You shall have no friend in hell to comfort you; no ministering spirit to whisper words of peace; no promise to cheer your soul; no refuge to flee to. You will be shut up in darkness, shut up in despair, shut up with the devil and his angels. And this shall be the bitterest thought of all: ‘I might have been saved, but I would not.’”
But now, Paul answers, apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22 This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.
This gift of righteousness, of being made righteous, of being declared righteous, of being qualified after all to stand in the presence of God as His child, as His friend, as His servant, and as the one He loves, this righteousness is given—not earned or merited or deserved—but given to us.
How? Through faith in Jesus Christ! To whom? To all who believe.
What does it mean to believe? It means to rely and to reply. We decide we have no other option than to rely on the merits of Jesus Christ and reply to God, saying “I accept the gift you have offered me. Nothing in my life is more important than what Jesus had done for me and what He means to me.”
When I was growing up, we often sang an invitational song at the end of the church service, and the words said:
Come, every soul by sin oppressed,
There’s mercy with the Lord;
And He will surely give you rest
By trusting in His Word.
Only trust Him, only trust Him,
Only trust Him now!
He will save you, He will save you,
He will save you now.
Years ago I met the Irish evangelist and scholar, Dr. J. Edwin Orr. In one of his books, he told this story: During the 1904 Welsh Revival, a coal miner from the valleys—known in his village for his drinking, profanity, and violence—wandered into a chapel service late on a cold evening, still wearing his sooty work clothes and carrying the smell of coal dust with him. He sat near the back, arms crossed, determined not to be moved.
The preacher that night did not deliver a sermon. He simply stood and read Romans 3:19–26 aloud—slowly, carefully, unmistakably. As the words poured out—“so that every mouth may be stopped,” and “But now the righteousness of God is revealed…”—the miner later said it felt “as if someone opened a window into hell and slammed it shut again, then opened one into heaven.”
“In one moment,” he testified, “I saw my doom. In the next, I saw my Deliverer. Those words—‘But now’—were like a rope thrown down into the pit where I had lived my whole life.”
That night he trusted Christ. Within weeks, men across the coal pits noticed his transformed speech, gentleness, and joy. The revival historians later wrote that many miners came to Christ not through eloquent sermons but simply through hearing the thunder of Romans 3 followed by the music of verse 21—“But now…”
But what is behind this gift? How can God do this? We saw earlier that He has devised a way for banished people to be restored to Him, but what is that way? How does God explain it to us? Let me close today by simply reading the remainder of the chapter. Next week, we’ll dig into it a little deeper, but the power is in the quoted words of Scripture verbatim. Romans 3 continues:
There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. 25 God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— 26 he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.
27 Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. Because of what law? The law that requires works? No, because of the law that requires faith. 28 For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law. 29 Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too, 30 since there is only one God, who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith. 31 Do we, then, nullify the law by this faith? Not at all! Rather, we uphold the law.
When Paul reaches the end of his long indictment in Romans 3:20, the whole world stands guilty and silent before God. And then, with two words, the gospel breaks like dawn: “But now…” Those are the two most hopeful words ever spoken to the human race.
- “But now”—God has intervened.
- “But now”—there is righteousness for the unrighteous.
- “But now”—there is a way back for the banished.
- “But now”—there is cleansing for the guilty, mercy for the rebel, and justification for the condemned.
Every person who has ever been saved has walked through the doorway created by those two words. And that door is still open.
John Chrysostom, who lived in the 300s and died in 407, called Romans 3 “the very cathedral of the Christian faith.” Will you enter that cathedral? Will you rely and reply?
Wherever you are right now—whether driving your car, sitting in your home, or listening in a hospital room—those two words reach you: “But now…” This righteousness is given—freely—to all who believe. Will you make Romans 3 your own testimony? Simply pray these words sincerely and make this prayer your own:
Dear Lord, I confess I am a sinner who has fallen short of Your glory. I cannot save myself. But I believe You died and rose again for me. I put my faith in You alone. Forgive me, cleanse me, and make me righteous in Your sight. I receive You as my Savior and Lord. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”
Only trust Him, only trust Him now.
He will save you. He will save you now.