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I. PAUL HAD APPEALED TO THE CONSCIENCE OF THE JEWS, and in chap. Romans 2. affirmed and enlarged upon their guilt. He can scarcely be said to have proved it; he had only charged them with it; and yet through the conscience of those whom we address it is possible that a charge may no sooner be uttered than conviction may come on the back of it. There is often a power in a bare statement which is not at all bettered but rather impaired by reasoning. If what you say of a man agree with his own experience, there is a weight in your simple affirmation which needs no enforcing. It was this which mostly gained acceptance for the apostles. They revealed to men the secrets of their own hearts; and what the inspired teachers said they were, they felt themselves to be. This manifestation of the truth unto the conscience is the grand instrument still. That obstinacy of unbelief, which we vainly attempt to carry by the power of any elaborate demonstration, may give way, both with the untaught and the cultivated, to the bare statement of the preacher, when he simply avers the ungodliness of the human heart.

II. HE NOW REFERS THE JEWS TO THEIR OWN SCRIPTURES, and, in so doing, he avails himself of a peculiarly proper instrument. Thus Christ expounded what was written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in almost every interview the apostles had with the Hebrews, you will meet with this as a peculiarity which is absent when Gentiles only are addressed — e.g., Stephen, Peter, Paul at Antioch, Thessalonica, etc. He who was all things to all men was a Jew among the Jews. He reasoned with them on their own principles, and nowhere more frequently than in this Epistle.

III. IT IS THIS AGREEMENT BETWEEN THE BIBLE AND CONSCIENCE WHICH STAMPS UPON THE BOOK OF GOD ONE OF ITS MOST SATISFYING EVIDENCES. It is this perhaps more than anything else which draws the interest and the notice of men towards it. For there is no way of fixing the attention of man so powerfully as by holding up to him a mirror of himself; and no wisdom which he more prizes than that which by its piercing and intelligent glance can open to him the secrecies of his own heart, and force him to recognise a marvellous accordancy between its positions and all the varieties of his own intimate and home-felt experience. The question, then, before us is, Does this passage bear such an accordancy with the real character of man? It abounds in affirmations of sweeping universality, and a test of their truth or of their falsehood is to be found in every heart. The apostle has here made a most adventurous commitment of himself; for the matters here touched upon all lie within the well-known chambers of a man's own consciousness, and one single case of disagreement would be enough to depose him from all the credit which he has ever held in the estimation of the world. Of course, from the nature of the case, a withdrawment must be conceded in behalf of those who are under the gospel, yet we are prepared to assert that Paul has not overcharged the account that he has given of the depravity of those who are under law — whether it be the law of conscience, or of Moses, or even of the purer morality of Christ — insomuch that all who refuse the mysteries of His grace are universally in the wrong. Be assured, then, that there is a delusion in all the complacency associated with self-righteousness. It is the want of a godly principle which essentially vitiates the whole: and additional to this, with all the generosities and equities which have done so much for your reputation among men, there is a selfishness that lurks in your bosom; or a vanity that swells and inflames it; or a preference of your own object to that of others, which may lead you to acts or words of unfeeling severity; or a regard for some particular gratification, coupled with a regardlessness for every interest which lieth in the way, that may render you, in the estimation of Him who pondereth the heart, as remote a wanderer as he on the path of whose visible history there occurred in other times the atrocities of savage cruelty and savage violence. It were barbarous to tell you so had we no remedy to offer. Life has much to vex and to trouble it; and it were really cruel to add to the pressure of a creature so beset and borne in upon by telling him of his worthlessness, did we not stand before him charged with the tidings of his possible renovation (vers. 21-26).

(T. Chalmers, D. D.)

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KJV: What then? are we better than they? No, in no wise: for we have before proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin;

WEB: What then? Are we better than they? No, in no way. For we previously warned both Jews and Greeks, that they are all under sin.