I want you go back with me to the New Testament once again. I want you to see how strong this pull is, and why we have to keep on top of it. If we do not, we are going to fall back.
Here the apostle Paul writes, and I am giving it to you now so that you understand that we have to be on the ball with what we have been given. We have to use it in a right and good way. We already saw a little bit of it there in the book of Judges, how that as soon as the leadership died, Israel fell right back.
The apostle Paul makes a clear comparison between the Israelites and the Gentiles. (I think I am an Israelite, but I am not sure.) He asks, are we Israelites better than Gentiles? Well, absolutely not. Nobody is better than anybody else. Everybody is plagued with the same problem. We are detached, separated from God by the carnality that is within us.
The Israelites are every bit as spiritually blind as they are. We Israelites may be even more guilty than they because we are judged by higher standards.
We are going to prove this. The New King James Version has as the topic heading of this section labeled as, All Have Sinned.
We are all sinners. We are all condemned - at one point.
This is why I think that the world is best at sinning. We have all done it. Everyone has done it. The whole world is convicted of sin. No one is righteous. No one seeks after God. They have all gone out of the way. No one has followed God's way of life.
So, these people cannot repent until God initiates it. One cannot repent and still follow the ways of this world. It does not work. They are opposites. Such a person has not truly repented.
Proverbs 14:34 is a pretty good place to start. There, Solomon tells us that, Sin is a reproach to any people. This is a pretty clear scripture about the scope of sin; sin is a shame - a disgrace - to everyone, not just to Israel. In Romans 3 Paul makes this absolutely plain.
Sin affects both Jews and Gentiles. Paul is quoting Psalm 14; he interprets the word 'all' to mean just that - all, everyone. He summaries a few verses down.
Please go back to Romans. I want to take you through this in a step-by-step manner. In chapter 3, Paul had just been speaking about the Jews versus the Gentiles, and he says:
Everybody's the same - both Jews and Greeks. Both worldly and Christian, you might say. Everybody has sinned.