All under sin. Romans 3:9-18 V.9. The answer to Jewish objections is made plain. Divine justice has a standard from which there can be no deviation. God is just in everything He does. The indictment is in from the Supreme Judge of all because we are "all under sin." Not just guilty of sin, or bound by sin, but all under sin. All of us human beings, no matter what our background, religious creed, race or cultural heritage, by nature have been brought under the evil power of sin and are by nature in that terrible state. No one is innocent.
V.10. “There is none righteous, no not one!” This is what God sees looking down from heaven on sinful humanity. No one can earn the right to be righteous before God. This doesn't devalue the worth of a human being, but our natural condition of sin makes us unacceptable to be righteous before God [Psalm 14:1-3]. By His grace God makes righteous those who believe in Him by faith. These Old Testament quotations prove all are guilty before God. This list of fourteen counts against us leave all of us, Jews and Gentiles, exposed to the righteous wrath of the Holy God.
V.11. In ourselves no one has ever been able to stand before God in his or her own righteousness. If we truly understood divine things by our human nature, we would have been so humbled we couldn't say a word. But instead, all kinds of people write or speak of their explanations of God. The temples built for worshipers to attend, are not because people are seeking after God. They are seeking after a god of their own imaginations who can be bent by their own will and can be accepted on their own terms.
V.12. The Sovereign, Holy God is not sought after, but is being avoided for He convicts the sinner of sin, righteousness and judgment. In an act of self-will, they have deliberately turned away from the way of God contrary to what God has clearly defined. The whole race of man has made that awful turn. The result of all of this, as the Universal Judge looks upon us, is that we are all together and totally unprofitable; unfit for any use that was planned for by God. There is corruption rather than holiness. Instead of goodness and kindness, there is selfishness and cruelty. By divine standards, we are all condemned.
V.13. Then the all-seeing Physician puts a tongue depressor in our mouths and looks down our throat to see the state of our spiritual health. A terrible scent of death comes from our inward parts. The tongue itself cannot be trusted to speak the truth. The words that lie just behind our lips are filled with fatal poison just waiting to be released and kill others with false accusations or falsehoods spoken as if they are true words [Psalm 5:9; 140:3].
V.14. Those who hear and believe those words will not only be lost but in bitterness of soul, will curse men and God for the deception and misleading words [Psalm 10:7].
V.15-17. The Great Physician then looks at the extremities and sees that their feet are unrestrained and they run to eliminate any who do not agree with them or condemn them and their actions in any way. Their reaction against righteousness and truth is to kill it once and for all [Isaiah 59:7-8].
V.18. God now looks upon mankind with the eyes of one who sees from eternity to eternity. To Him all of history is one eternal "now." The history of mankind is basically measured by the wars and misery caused by the destruction of conflict. Peace that lasts is foreign to humanity. Wisdom and righteousness get in the way of the unregenerate human will, and self-will leads only down the road of misery and suffering. These lead to ruin to both parties involved in conflicts. Peace interferes with man's ambition, so is not experienced by humanity as a whole, and never has been.
The last indictment of unregenerate humanity is the worst one of all [Psalm 36:1]. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." In mankind's moral stupidity there is no reverence for God, no sense of the greatness and power of God, no acknowledgment of the authority of God over men, let alone the whole universe. All the natural man sees is what he wants to see. For some it is material gain that is before his eyes. Others see only pleasure. Still others see only what will gratify the flesh. The Just, Holy and Almighty God is not considered, because the natural man only sees with the eyes of his fleshly desires, not with the eyes of faith. So, the Supreme Judge; the Great Physician and the God of history can only indict us by saying, "There is none righteous, no not one." "The is no fear of God before their eyes." What a warning this is to all who read these words!