Expositor's Greek Testament (Nicoll)

Romans 3:20

διότι means “because,” not “therefore,” as in A.V. The rendering “therefore” is perhaps due to the difficulty which the translators had in putting an intelligible meaning into “because”. The sense seems to be: Every mouth must be stopped, and all the world shown to be liable to God's judgment, because by works of law no flesh shall be justified before Him. This last proposition that no flesh shall be justified in this way is virtually an axiom with the Apostle: it is a first principle in all his spiritual thinking, and hence everything must be true which can be deduced from it, and everything must take place which is required to support it. Because this is the fundamental certainty of the case, every mouth must be stopped, and the strong words quoted from the law stand where they do to secure this end. The explanation of this axiom is to be found in its principal terms flesh and law. Flesh primarily denotes human nature in its frailty: to attain to the righteousness of God is a task which no flesh has strength to accomplish. But flesh in Paul has a moral rather than a natural meaning; it is not its weakness in this case, but its strength, which puts Justification out of the question; to justify is the very thing which the law cannot do, and it cannot do it because it is weak owing to the flesh (cf. Romans 8:3). But the explanation of the axiom lies not only in “flesh,” but in “law”. “By the law comes the full knowledge of sin.” (ἐπίγνωσις, a favourite Pauline word: fifteen times used in his epistles.) This is its proper, and indeed its exclusive function. There is no law given with power to give life, and therefore there are no works of law by which men can be justified. The law has served its purpose when it has made men feel to the full how sinful they are; it brings them down to this point, but it is not for it to lift them up. The best exposition of the passage is given by the Apostle himself in Galatians 2:15 f., where the same quotation is made from Psalms 143:2, and proof given again that it applies to Jew and Gentile alike. In ἐξ ἔργων νόμου, νόμος, of course, is primarily the Mosaic law. As Lipsius remarks, no distinction is drawn by the Apostle between the ritual and the moral elements of it, though the former are in the foreground in the epistle to the Galatians, and the latter in that to the Romans. But the truth would hold of every legal dispensation, and it is perhaps to express this generality, rather than because νόμος is a technical term, that the article is omitted. Under no system of statutes, the Mosaic or any other, will flesh ever succeed in finding acceptance with God. Let mortal man, clothed in works of law, present himself before the Most High, and His verdict must always be: Unrighteous.

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Expositor's Greek Testament (Nicoll)

Romans 3:20

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