“That Every Mouth May Be Stopped”

Posted on February 12, 2020 by .....

Romans 3:19-20 “Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin.”

“That Every Mouth May Be Stopped”

The spiritual condition of silence – the effect of knowing the law, or the effect of knowing the truths of God’s word, the effect of knowing our true sinful state before God and what we deserve as a result of that guilty sinful state should be “that every mouth may be stopped,” it should silence us. Whenever someone reads God’s law, no matter how loyal, how kind, how generous, or how thoughtful they are, their response should be only that: I am a sinner. I have nothing to say to God, no defense to make or offer to make. I am in desperate trouble.

This is a bleak, stark truth, but hard truth is better than sweet lies. Hard truth saves souls, sweet lies send people to hell. Preachers and Bible teachers that speak hard truth are demonstrating love to people, “preachers” and Bible “teachers” that speak sweet sounding lies, are demonstrating the opposite. Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century mathematician, philosopher and Christian apologist, put it this way, “Nothing offends us more rudely than this doctrine, yet without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible to ourselves.” A silent mouth is thus a spiritual condition. It is the condition of the person who knows that they cannot save themselves.

“The way to God is wide open. There is nothing standing between the sinner and his God. He has immediate and unimpeded access to the Savior. There is nothing to hinder. No sin can hold you back, because God offers justification to the ungodly. Nothing now stands between the sinner and God but the sinners ‘good works.’ Nothing can keep him from Christ but his delusion… that he has good works of his own that can satisfy God… All they need is need. All they must have is nothing… But alas, sinners cannot part with their ‘virtue’s.’ They have none that are not imaginary, but they are real to them. So grace becomes unreal. The real grace of God they spurn in order to hold on to the illusory virtues of their own. Their eyes fixed on a mirage, they will not drink real water. They die of thirst with water all about them.”[1]

[1] (Gerstner, 1997)