Nowhere Else

Romans 3:19-20 “Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. Therefore by the deeds of the law no flesh will be justified in His sight, for by the law is the knowledge of sin.”

The gospel is the source of the righteousness of God for believers in Christ. But, there is a real need to explain why human beings need the gospel; the reason being that you must know that you are lost before you can be found. You cannot help someone who does not believe that they need any help; they will reject you. So many do not know or understand about Sin and the estrangement it creates between people and their Creator, meaning that sinners need reconciliation with God. We understand that sin is a universal condition, affecting every man, woman and child. Nobody’s perfect, meaning that all, except Jesus, have broken the law of God.

Romans 3:23 “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

An article that I read explained that when we read the Law of God, we are convicted in our heart by our own failure to keep it. Facing this predicament, fallen people have the natural propensity to try to do better, to endeavor to build up a record of goodness and righteous works that outweigh the transgressions, like God’s grades on a curve. But, whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. Although we do grow in our obedience over the course of our Christian lives, we should nevertheless be convicted of how far short we fall of God’s standard when we read His Holy Law. If we seek to keep the law in order to be justified, we will fail because, in our sin nature, we break God’s Law every day in either thought, word or deed and the law does not give us what we need to be reckoned as righteous. Instead, it gives us the knowledge of sin, telling us that we are sinners in need of a Savior. The great Reformer Martin Luther says, “The law was given only that sin might be known.” But, the law does more than give us the knowledge of sin and convict us of sin. It also tells us what pleases God, and it resists sin, keeping people from being as bad as they possibly could be. God’s eternal moral law is contained within the Mosaic law, but also found within our conscience.

Romans 6:23 “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

The Law of God is meant to drive us to the Cross for Jesus’ atoning redemption, salvation and justification. We have a debt that we cannot pay, so Jesus Christ paid a debt that He did not owe for our salvation. We realize that we must continue looking to Christ alone for salvation, picking up our cross daily. Nowhere else. It is finished!

In Christ, Brian