26/02/2025
Don Carson: I don’t love God with heart and soul and mind and strength. If Jesus says this is the commandment of first importance, then I’m guilty of breaking the primal command. Aren’t you? In fact, loving God with heart and soul and mind and strength might be thought in our culture to be a bit fanatical, right-winged, but God says, “Listen! Don’t you understand? That’s the way I made the created order in the first place. If you don’t see it, that’s already itself a mark of how fallen this order is!”
No wonder, then, these quotations say, “They have all turned away; they have together become worthless.… Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit. The poison of vipers is on their lips. Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.” I know many of us come from fairly civilized backgrounds where there’s not all that much cursing and bitterness unless we bang our thumbs with a hammer or get sacked from work and we think it’s unjust.
Any of us with all of our civilized behavior, put us under enough pressure and deep down in the backs of our minds, even if we’re disciplined enough not to let it actually escape from our mouths, are busy swearing away in our minds. The truth of the matter is, “There is no fear of God before their eyes,” the text says, so we are still in line with the whole drama of the whole Bible. How do such people get restored to God?
There are a lot of different ways of thinking through this ugliness. Let me read you briefly part of the testimony of a philosopher named Budziszewski. He writes, “I have already noted in passing that everything goes wrong without God. This is true even of the good things he has given us, such as our minds. One of the good things I’ve been given is a stronger than average mind. I don’t make the observation to boast; human beings are given diverse gifts to serve him in diverse ways.
The problem is that a strong mind that refuses the call to serve God has its own way of going wrong. When some people flee from God they rob and kill. When others flee from God they do a lot of drugs and have a lot of s*x. When I fled from God I didn’t do any of these things; my way of fleeing was to get stupid.
Though it always comes as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to achieve. God keeps them in his arsenal to pull down mulish pride, and I discovered them all. That is how I ended up doing a doctoral dissertation to prove that we make up the difference between good and evil and that we aren’t responsible for what we do.
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In this lecture, Don Carson explores the concept of God’s justice and righteousness, particularly as presented in Romans 3:21–26. Carson explains that all humans are guilty before God because of their sin and that justification comes through faith, not works. And faith is available to all. Carson highlights that faith must be rooted in the truth of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection and is essential for salvation, excluding any boasting of personal merit.
He teaches the following:
How Romans 1 argues the universality of human guilt before God
• A contrast between Paul’s view and humanity’s contemporary self-perception
• The absurdity of balancing good deeds and bad deeds for justification
• The heart of all evil is rebellion against God
• How rejecting God leads to self-destructive behaviors
• God’s righteousness is provided through Christ Jesus as the propitiation for our sins
• How God’s justice is demonstrated in both forgiving us and punishing sin
Listen to the Carson Center Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. For a full episode transcript: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/podcasts/carson-center/god-declares-guilty-just/
