No One is Righteous
Romans 3:9-18 (ESV)
What shall we conclude then? Are we any better? Not at all! We have already established that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin. As it is written:
“There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one. Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit. The poison of vipers is on their lips. Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know. There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
Notes on the Scripture
The passage is a veritable portrait of a person who does not acknowledge God or the Bible. It is the model of someone who lives according to his or her own understanding, a life dictated by animal desires, a life where decisions are made according to personal criteria, ignoring God and His Word.
By and large, such people control the media. The constant assault of non-Christian opinion and dialogue, unfortunately, affects us. It steers people who claim to know God, who are raised in the church or find Christ when they are older, to rationalize their unbiblical behavior. We tend to allow the world to dictate our morals and our values.
Spouses, for example, fail to love one another as the Bible has commanded them to do (and as they promised to do when they married), because the world puts an obsessive importance on their careers, their possessions, their appearance, or their self-development — and so they compromise; they conform themselves to the secular messages that bombard them. Our political leaders, our cultural leaders, and sometimes even our spiritual leaders make excuses and rationalizations for selfishness and sin. For advice, we go to Dr. Phil instead of Dr. Paul.
Read a newspaper or magazine, watch television, go to a movie, and ask yourself: “Is this the product of a society that loves God and respects the commandments and guidance of the Bible?” Nine times out of ten, the answer is no.
It is a battle. We need to do whatever we can to practice the teachings of the Bible in our own lives and to hold up the light of God's word before others, because silence is acquiescence. To do nothing is to concede the world to the darkness of atheism and the standards of selfishness and hypocrisy. We all have sinned and we will all continue to sin. But we don't have to rationalize sinful conduct; we don't have to preach that such conduct is all right, simply it is something we might have done or want to do; and we don't have to stand silent when such conduct is promoted by others.