Romans 3:3-4

For what if some did not believe?

Man’s unbelief and God’s faithfulness

I. Man’s unbelief; its various forms; impenitence; scepticism.

II. God’s faithfulness; His Word remains true; cannot fail of effect; must be glorified. (J. Lyth, D. D.)

God justified though man believes not

We have here--

I. A sorrowful reminder. There always have been some who have not believed.

1. This is stated very mildly. The apostle might have said “many” instead of “some.” Remember that all but two who came out of Egypt fell in the wilderness through unbelief; but the apostle does not wish to unduly press his argument, or to aggravate his hearers. Even in his own day he might have said, “The bulk of the Jewish nation has rejected Christ. Wherever I go, they seek my life, because I preach a dying Saviour’s love.” Yet this is a very appalling thing, even when stated thus mildly. If all here except one were believers, and it was announced that that one would be pointed out to the congregation, we should all feel in a very solemn condition. But there are many more than one here who have not believed. If the unconverted were not so numerous they would be looked upon with horror and pity. As they are so numerous, there is all the greater need for our compassion.

2. The terms of Paul’s question suggest a mitigation of the sorrow. “What if some did not believe?” Then it is implied that some did believe. Glory be to God, there is a numerous “some.”

3. Yet it is true that, at times, the “some” who did not believe meant the majority. Read the story of Israel through and you will be saddened to find how again and again they did not believe, and it may be that, even among hearers of the gospel, the unbelievers preponderate.

4. This unbelief has usually been the case between the great ones of the earth. In our Saviour’s day they said, “Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed on Him?” The gospel has usually had a free course among the poor, but “not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble,” are called.

5. Some who have not believed have belonged to the religious and to the teaching class. The Scribes and Pharisees rejected Christ, although they were the religious leaders of the people. And now we may be preachers, and yet not preach the gospel of Christ; we may be members of the Church, and yet not savingly know it.

6. The same may be said if we take the whole range of the nations favoured with the gospel.

7. “What, then, if some do not believe?” Then--

(1) They are lost. “He that believeth not is condemned already.”

(2) There still remains, to those who hear the gospel, the opportunity to believe; and, believing, they shall find life through the sacred name.

(3) Let us, who do believe, make them the constant subject of our prayers; and bear our witness to the saving power of the gospel.

II. A horrible inference, viz., that their unbelief had made the faith, or the faithfulness of God, without effect.

1. Some will say, “If So-and-so and So-and-so do not believe the gospel, then religion is a failure.” We have read of a great many things being failures. A little while ago it was a question whether marriage was not a failure. I suppose that, by and by, eating and breathing will be a failure. The gospel is said to be a failure, because certain gentlemen of professed culture and knowledge do not believe it. Well, there have been other things that have not been believed in by very important individuals, and yet they have turned out to be true. Before the trains ran, the old coachmen and farmers would not believe that an engine could be made to go on the rails, and to drag carriages behind it. According to the wise men of the time, everything was to go to the bad, and the engines would blow up the first time they started with a train. But they did not blow up, and everybody now smiles at what those learned gentlemen ventured then to say. Look at those who now tell us that the gospel is a failure. They are in the line of those whose principal object has been to refute all that went before them. If any of you shall live fifty years, you will see that the philosophy of today will be a football of contempt for the philosophy of that period. I have to say, with Paul, “What if some did not believe?” It is no new thing; for there have always been some who rejected the revelation of God. What then? You and I had better go on believing, and testing for ourselves, and proving the faithfulness of God. The gospel is no failure, as many of us know.

2. Has God failed to keep His promise to Israel because some Israelites did not believe? Paul Nays, No. He did bring Israel into the promised land, though all but two that came out of Egypt died through unbelief in the wilderness. A nation came up from their ashes, and God kept His covenant with His ancient people; and today He is keeping it. The “chosen seed of Israel’s race” is “a remnant, weak and small”; but the day is coming when then they shall be gathered in; then shall also be the fulness of the Gentiles when Israel has come to own her Lord.

3. Because some do not believe, will God’s promise therefore fail to be kept to those who do believe? I invite you to come and try. When two of John’s disciples inquired of Jesus where He dwelt, He said to them, “Come and see.” If any here will try Christ, as I tried Him, they will not tolerate a doubt. One said that she believed the Bible because she was acquainted with the Author of it, and you will believe the gospel if you are acquainted with the Saviour who brings it.

4. Will God be unfaithful to His Son if some do not believe? I thank God that I have no fear about that. “He shall see of the travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied.” Suppose that you wickedly say, “We will not have Christ to reign over us.” If you think that you will rob Him of honour by your rejection, you make a great mistake. If you will not have Him, others will. This word shall yet become true, “The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ,” etc.

5. If some do not believe, will God change the gospel to suit them? Ought we to change our preaching because of “the spirit of the age”? Never; unless it be to fight “the spirit of the age” more desperately than ever. We ask for no terms between Christ and His enemies except these, unconditional surrender to Him. The gospel cannot be altered to your taste; therefore alter yourself so as to meet its requirements.

III. An indignant reply to this horrible inference.

1. Paul gives a solemn negative: “God forbid!” All the opponents of the gospel cannot move it by a hair’s breadth; they cannot injure a single stone of this Divine building.

2. He utters a vehement protestation: “Yea, let God be true, but every man a liar.” You know that if the majority goes in a particular direction, you are apt to say, “It must be so, for everybody says so.” But what everybody says is not therefore true. If God says one thing, and every man in the world says another, God is true, and all men are false. God speaks the truth, and cannot lie. We are to believe God’s truth if nobody else believes it.

3. He uses a Scriptural argument. He quotes what David had said in the Fifty-first Psalm,” That Thou mightest be justified in Thy sayings, and mightest overcome when Thou art judged.”

(1) God will be justified in everything that He has said. God shall also be justified when He judges and condemns men.

(2) A very startling expression is used here: “That Thou mightest overcome when Thou art judged.” Think of this enormous evil; here are men actually trying to judge the Divine judgments, and to sit as if they were the god of God. Still the verdict will be in God’s favour. It would be proved that He had neither said anything untrue, nor done anything unjust. Conclusion:

1. I want the Lord’s people to be brave about the things of God. There has been too much of yielding, and apologising, and compromising.

2. If you are opposed to God, I beseech you give up your opposition at once. This battle cannot end well for you unless you yield yourself to God. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

Let God be true, but every man a liar.

God trite

The primary meaning of “truth” in Greek is openness: what is not concealed; but in Hebrew, that which sustains, which does not fail or disappoint our expectations. The true therefore is--

I. That which is real as opposed to what is fictitious or imaginary. Jehovah is the true God, because He is really God, while the gods of the heathen are vanity and nothing.

II. That which completely comes up to its idea, or what it purports to be. A true man is a man in whom the idea of manhood is fully realised. The true God is He in whom is found all that Godhead imports.

III. That in which the reality corresponds to the manifestation. God is true because He really is what He declares Himself to be; because He is what He commands us to believe Him to be; and because all His declarations correspond to what really is.

IV. That which can be depended upon, which does not fail, or change, or disappoint. In this sense God is true as He is immutable and faithful. His promise cannot fail. His word never disappoints: it “abideth forever.” (C. Hodge, D. D.)

God’s truth

1. Will survive all human lies.

2. Will be amply justified.

3. Will be triumphantly vindicated. (J. Lyth, D. D.)

Standing to what God has said

I admire the spirit of the boy who mentioned something which his mother said. One said, “It is not so,” and he said, “It is so; my mother said it.” “But,” said the other, “it is not so.” Says he, “If mother said it, it is so; and if it is not so, it is so if mother said it.” And I will stand to that with God. If God has said it, it is so, and you shall prove to a demonstration if you like it is not so; but it is so, and there will I stand. “And be a fool,” says one. Yes, a fool; for such hath He chosen to seek to do things that make others who do not believe stand aghast: only believe thou, and stand thou to it, and it shall be impossible for thee, a child of God, to be driven to distrust thy Father. It ought to be so. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

The goodness and wisdom of God’s law unimpeachable

It has ever been held the highest wisdom for a man not merely to submit to necessity--necessity will make him submit--but to know and believe well that the stern thing which necessity had ordered was the wisest, the best, the thing wanted there. To cease his frantic pretension of scanning this great God’s-world in his small fraction of a brain; to know that it had verily, though deep beyond his soundings, a just law, that the soul of it was good--that his part in it was to conform to the law of the whole, and in devout silence follow that; not questioning it, obeying it as unquestionable. (T. Carlyle.)

Ideal standards of duty

The apostle had been showing the Jews that they had utterly failed of becoming truly religious by means of the old law. And the question arose, “What! was the law, then, good for nothing?” The law was good, but man was weak; therefore it did not work out that which its interior spiritual tendency would have wrought out if it had been unchecked. But then God attempted to do what He was unable to do! If the law was dishonoured in the conduct of the Jews, how should the Lawgiver retain honour? The tendency of the Jewish objector was to defend himself by bringing down the character and government of God; and the apostle answered, “Let the justice and goodness of God remain untarnished, however it may affect men’s reputation.” And the doctrine which we deduce from this passage is--

I. The tendency of the heart to seek to diminish the intensity of self-condemnation by lowering the standard of duty. All sense of self-condemnation arises from a comparison of one’s deeds, character, life and motives, with certain standards of duty. If there had been no law, there could have been no sense of violating law, and none, therefore, of sin. There is one thing which we bear less willingly than any other--namely, a sharp sense of shame in self-condemnation. There is no other feeling that seems to suffocate a man more than to be worried by his own accusing and condemning conscience. While, then, this feeling is so unbearable, it is scarcely surprising that men attempt to get rid of it. They pad their conduct, as it were, that the yoke may not bear so heavily where they feel sore. Therefore, men tell themselves more lies in this direction than in any other. They deliberately fool themselves--and for the same reason that men take opiates. “It is not good,” said the physician, “that yon should take opiates to remove that sharp pain. You had better remove the cause, and so get rid of the pain.” “But,” you say, “I must pursue my business; and, though it may not be the best thing, give me the opiate.” Men will not, if they can help it, bear the ache of self-condemnation; and by every means in their power they are perpetually trying to get rid of it. The ordinary method is to impair that rule of conduct, or that ideal of light, which condemns them. They attack that which attacks them. Men plead the force of circumstances for breaking the laws which are most painful to them. They attempt to show that they are not to blame. They plead that breaking the law is not very sinful. That is, to save themselves, they destroy the dignity and the importance of the law. Let us trace this tendency.

1. It begins in early life.

(1) A child that will not obey his parents’ injunctions begins, after a while, to find fault with the rigour by which he is held in check; and as he gets older he finds fault with, and endeavours to throw off, parental authority. “To be sure,” he says, “I have gone forth at untimely hours, had my own way in contravention of express authority; but then, I am not so much to blame. Who could live in a family screwed up as this is? A man must have some room.” What is all this but an attempt to excuse his own disobedience, by inveighing against the law under which the obedience takes place?

(2) When the young go forth to the training ground of life, they manifest the same tendency. The truant and dullard at school turns against the master, and at last against the school. He declares that it is not his fault. Or, if he admits that it is his fault in part, he pleads the provocation; and so the rebellious boy at school tarnishes the good reputation of the teacher, and inveighs against the school.

2. It runs through industrial forms.

(1) If in a trade or profession, a man prefers to sport rather than to work, and is indolent, and unsteady, when the pressure of blame and condemnation begins to come on him, he turns instantly to blame everybody and everything but his own self. Or perhaps the plea is urged that such and such a calling cannot be successfully followed without moral obliquity. What is this but destroying their reputation for the sake of shielding their own?

3. It finds its way into social relations. When men defy the public sentiment which expresses the social conscience of the community, and come under its ban, and begin to smart, they attack that sentiment. If it be a course of impurity that they have pursued, they charge sentiment with prudery; if they have been going in ways in which they have left truth far behind, they charge it with fanaticism. And, more than that, they do not believe there is anything in the community better than they are.

4. It pervades the pleas by which criminals seek to defend themselves. As men begin to violate the laws of the community, as they begin to suffer under the loss of reputation, they seek to excuse themselves from blame, and to fix it upon others. Even when the law cannot get its hand upon them; or when, getting it upon them, it cannot hold them; and when they begin to feel that the unwritten law, which no man can escape, the judgment of good men’s thoughts, the wintry blast of good men’s indignation round about them, and they are called “sharpers,” and are treated as such, they complain that it is an indignity heaped upon them; that it is a wrong done to them, and say, “Society is wrongly organised. If it were better organised, business would be conducted differently, and men would act differently. But how can you expect that a man will be right when everything is organised on wrong principles?”

5. It manifests itself in men’s arguments on the subject of vice.

(1) Here is a man who says, “I am no more intemperate than anybody else. I am frank and open. I drink, and show it. Just go behind the door and see what these temperance men do.” What is this but the plea of a man who, not satisfied with being a drunkard, is destroying the very ideal of temperance?

(2) Here is a man who has utterly gone from chastity. That is bad enough; but that is not all. He says, “Impure, am I? Well, I think I have company enough in this world. No one is pure. It is because they cannot, and not because they will not, that they do not run into excesses.” Such men stand inveighing against the memory of their very mother, and whelming the reputation of pure and noble sisters, and a man who has lost respect for womanhood in actual life may be considered as given over.

(3) There are those who pursue the same course in regard to probity. They are not themselves truth speakers; neither do they believe that any man does speak the truth. “I am a swindler,” says one. “But who is not? Every man has his price.” And what does he do? He destroys the very ideal of honesty by declaring that nobody is honest.

6. It may also be traced in men’s reasonings on the subject of religious truth. Men care very little what theology teaches, provided it does not come home to them, either as a restraint or as a criterion of judgment; but when they begin to be made uncomfortable; when for one or another reason the pulpit is a power, and they find it in the way of their ambition, or gain, or comfort; when theology begins to stir them up, and sit in judgment on them, then there is a strong tendency developed in them to find fault with the truth, and to justify themselves by adopting what they are pleased to call “a more liberal view.” And so men find fault with the fundamental principles of a moral government. And under such circumstances they go from church to church to find a more lenient pulpit.

II. The importance of maintaining our ideal of duty in spite of all human imperfections. The destruction of ideal standards is utterly ruinous to our manhood.

1. What is an ideal? A perception of something higher and better than we have reached, either in single actions, or in our life and character. Do I need to ask you what your ideal is, ye that have sought in a thousand ways to reach that very conception? The musician is charmed with the song that he seems to hear angels sing; but when he attempts to write it down with his hands he curses the blundering rudeness of material things, by which he cannot incarnate so spiritual a thing as his thought. The true orator is a man whose unspoken speech is a thousand times better than his utterance. The true artist is a man who says, “Oh! if you could see what I saw when I first tried to make this, you would think this most homely.” This excelsior of every soul; this sense of something finer, and nobler, and truer, and better--so long as this lasts a man can scarcely go down to the vulgarism. A man who is satisfied with himself because he is better than his fellow men. You never thought as well as you ought to think. You never planned as nobly as you ought to plan. You never executed as well as you ought to execute. Over every production there ought to hover, perpetually, your blessed ideal, telling you, “Your work is poor--it should be better”; so that every day you should lift yourself higher and higher, with an everlasting pursuit of hope which shall only end in perfection when you reach the land beyond.

2. But what if some mephitic gas shall extinguish this candle of God which casts its light down on our path to guide us, and direct our course up? What if the breath of man, for whom it was sent, should blow it out, and he be left in darkness to sink down toward the beast that perishes? Woe be to that man whose ideal has gone out and left him to the vulgar level of common life without upward motive. And yet, that which our text reveals, and revealing condemns, is universal--namely, the attempt of men to find fault with law, or with God, the fountain of law, with the ideal of rectitude, rather than find fault with themselves. Nay, “Let God be true, but every man a liar.” (H. Ward Beecher.)