Going Under

All people, whether Jews or Gentiles, are under the power of sin.   Romans 3:9

Have you ever had one of those days when you worked hard, but at the end of the day, the work to be done was greater than when you started? The pressures were piling up, and you didn’t feel you had the ability to rise above it. You began to feel overwhelmed, and eventually you might have even felt like you were going under.

That’s the picture Paul uses when he says that all people are under sin. Ponder the word all. It crosses cultural barriers—Scots, Swedes, Poles, and Texans are all under sin. It includes people who are single, married, separated, divorced, and widowed. It embraces people at every point on the economic spectrum, from peasants in Mongolia to executives in Manhattan. It includes you and me.

Paul also speaks about people who are “under the law” (Romans 3:19, ESV). This is God’s world. Our Creator writes the rules. Sin is breaking the rules that God has written.

In a recent survey on values and morality, only 17 percent of Americans defined sin as a violation of God’s will. That means 83 percent of those interviewed do not really understand what sin is. They grasp that sin is doing something wrong, but they do not understand that it is doing something wrong as defined by God.

If each of us were free to make our own definitions of right and wrong, life would be a lot easier! I love the story of the man who tried archery for the first time, and then came back claiming that he’d hit the center of the target every time. When his friends asked him how he did it, he said, “It’s easy—I just shoot all my arrows, and then I paint circles around each one!”

God paints the targets; we don’t. “Shoot at this,” he says. “You shall have no other gods before me. Do not covet. Be holy because I am holy.” God is the lawgiver, defining right and wrong. Sin is breaking his commandments; it’s a personal offense against God.

For further reading, see Psalm 51