Chris­tians often quote Romans 3:10 as proof text that all human beings are sin­ners. The prob­lem is they never check the psalm from which it is quoted from. Rather than using this verse as a pointer back to Psalm 14 where it gains a very dif­fer­ent mean­ing, they read it out of con­text, and then they read the new, alien mening back into the psalm. Wasn’t the new sup­posed to explain the old?

Let us deal with the passage.

Rom 3:10 as it is writ­ten: “None is right­eous, no, not one; 11 no one under­stands, no one seeks for God. 12 All have turned aside, together they have gone wrong; no one does good, not even one.”

Surely, it says humans are sin­ners, or does it? This is a qoute from Ps. 14, so let’s see now what it actu­ally says:

Ps 14:1 To the choir­mas­ter. Of David.
2 The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” They are cor­rupt, they do abom­inable deeds, there is none that does good. 3 The LORD looks down from heaven upon the chil­dren of men, to see if there are any that act wisely, that seek after God. 4 They have all gone astray, they are all alike cor­rupt; there is none that does good, no, not one.
5 Have they no knowl­edge, all the evil­do­ers who eat up my peo­ple as they eat bread, and do not call upon the LORD? 6 There they shall be in great ter­ror, for God is with the gen­er­a­tion of the right­eous. 7 You would con­found the plans of the poor, but the LORD is his refuge. 8 O that deliv­er­ance for Israel would come out of Zion! When the LORD restores the for­tunes of his peo­ple, Jacob shall rejoice, Israel shall be glad. [When the LORD brings back the cap­tiv­ity of His peo­ple — MKJV]

The very first thing we notice is that the unright­eous in the pas­sage is the
one who says “There is no God.” What is their character?

- they have gone astray (lost their ways)
– they are cor­rupt
– they do not do good
– have bad influ­ence on the Jew­ish peo­ple (“eat up my people”)

Well, sud­denly we also have the right­eous men­tioned beside the wicked. While the wicked will be in great ter­ror, God is with the gen­er­a­tion of the righteous.

So the verses quoted in Rom. 3:10 can­not be taken to mean that every­one is a sin­ner in the whole world, that is not what Ps. 14 means. (The psalm is not really that of David, for cap­tiv­ity is men­tioned, though those who con­tend that the psalm is David’s argue that v. 8 was later added.)

From the above we shall under­stand that terms such as “none” and “all” are exag­ger­a­tion — just as every­where in the Bible -, they can­not be taken to mean “not a sin­gle one” or “every sin­gle one”.

Sin­ner by def­i­n­i­tion is the one whose life is CHARACTERISED by sin, that is, he or she has to sin repeat­edly. So the thief keeps on steal­ing and the liar keeps on lying.

On the con­trary, the right­eous may fail seven times, but he always gets up seven times.

Prov. 24:16 for a right­eous man falls seven times, and rises again; but the wicked are over­thrown by calamity.

The right­eous, there­fore, who though fails occa­sion­ally, ALWAYS restores his walk with God and lives a care­ful life. This is the dif­fer­ence between the sin­ner and the right­eous. The sin­ner sees no need to change his life. The right­eous does.

In the first cen­tury Gen­tiles were very sin­ful. Sex with a young boy was con­sid­ered the great­est of plea­sures, and the souls of those who enjoyed such sex went straight to heaven upon death. Hav­ing sex with tem­ple pros­ti­tutes (called vir­gins) was a reli­gious duty. Idol wor­ship was rampant.

How­ever, today such things are mostly untrue. There­fore, we can­not call every­one a sin­ner unless we can clearly point out where they sin perpetually.

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