Based on Pastor David Jang's sermon on Romans 3:1–8, this in-depth exposition explores Jewish privilege and the meaning of circumcision, humanity’s excuses and theodical objections raised against God, and the gospel’s resolute conclusion—“By no means.” It dismantles the misunderstanding that frames God as the architect of evil, and leads us back to behold the God of love and faithfulness.
Pastor David Jang(founder of Olivet University)’s sermon on
Romans 3:1–8 does not persuade by stretching a short passage into a long
explanation. Rather, it persuades by decoding the poisonous potency hidden
inside the questions the text contains. Paul’s catechetical back-and-forth is
not a mere doctrinal lecture; it is a spiritual diagnostic report that
precisely traces the current of objections rising from the deepest chambers of
the human heart. When we encounter suffering, we ask: Why does a good God permit
evil? Why does a righteous reign not appear immediately as visible justice? Why
does the world remain crooked for so long? The questions themselves cannot all
be labeled irreverent. Lament and appeal are also the language of Scripture.
Yet the moment a question ceases to be a gesture of trust toward God and
becomes the posture of a courtroom—seating God in the defendant’s chair and
pronouncing Him guilty—it turns into an anti-God path wearing the name
“theodicy.” At precisely that fork in the road, Pastor Jang borrows Paul’s
language to speak. The core of the gospel is, before “a logic that explains
God,” “a truth that keeps us from misreading God.” And that truth sometimes
saves us not by “gentle explanation” but by a “firm boundary line” that refuses
compromise.
Paul’s opening question begins with Jewish privilege: “Then
what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision?” On the
surface it sounds like an evaluation of tradition. In reality it is a defense
mechanism that erupts immediately from those who have heard Paul’s sharp
critique. If Paul says that “a Jew outwardly” and “circumcision outwardly” are
not the essence of salvation, people instantly counter: Then why did God
command circumcision? Why did He give election? Why establish institutions at
all? Pastor Jang observes that the same counter-question returns in almost
identical form inside the church today. If baptism is not ultimate, why be
baptized? If worship is not the essence, why gather? If office and title are
not the substance, why appoint them? Human beings love “signs,” but we tire
easily of loving the “reality” to which the signs point. And the moment a sign
is mistaken for a shield that protects my self-righteousness, that sign stops
being a window revealing the gospel and becomes a curtain hiding it.
Paul’s answer is unexpectedly simple—and heavy: not that
there is no advantage, but that there is “much in every way,” and “to begin
with, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God.” Here Pastor Jang
emphasizes the grain of the word “entrusted.” It is not ownership but
stewardship. Not a basis for boasting, but the weight of responsibility. To be
entrusted with the Word does not mean I possess the right to decorate myself
with God’s will; it means I bear the duty to display God’s will to the world.
Yet the reason a community can hold the Word and still lose the essence of the
Word is that it seeks self-justification through Scripture rather than
reverence for God through Scripture. So Paul’s logic does not end with blaming
Jews; it returns to Christians. Being long inside the church, knowing the Bible
well, being fluent in theological language—none of these can substitute for
truthful obedience before God. Like the apocalyptic image that says, in effect,
“Do not measure the outer court, but measure what is within,” the gospel always
aims first not at the outside world but at the interior of the one who
believes. When faith settles comfortably inside the protective shell of
institutions, the name of God becomes, on the lips of unbelievers, a word of
mockery. Then circumcision becomes uncircumcision, and baptism becomes hollow
formalism.
To sharpen this logic, Pastor Jang shifts our gaze to the
realities of the early church. As the gospel expanded beyond Jews, a movement
arose that shook the community by insisting, “You must be circumcised to be a
Christian.” This is why Paul warns against the “mutilation” and declares that
the true circumcision worships by the Spirit of God, boasts in Christ Jesus,
and puts no confidence in the flesh. And when Colossians 2 announces that a
“circumcision not made with hands” has been fulfilled in the cross of Christ,
it is not merely a declaration that a ritual has been set aside—it is a
declaration that human religious pride has been set aside. Pastor Jang notes
that the spirit of the Reformation flows here straight out of Paul: Sola Fide,
Sola Gratia, Sola Scriptura. These are not claims that form is worthless; they
are boundary lines warning that form cannot replace substance. The moment we
switch the seat of the sign and the seat of the reality, faith is no longer the
way of salvation but the way of self-deception.
From here the passage moves directly into the heart of
theodicy: “What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the
faithfulness of God?” The question looks logical. If those who received the
covenant do not believe, has God not failed? If the chosen people wobble, does
God’s plan wobble with them? Pastor Jang says this logic conceals a subtle
human psychology. We would rather shift responsibility to God than admit our
unbelief. Once the structure forms—“It’s not that I cannot believe; it’s that
God is not trustworthy enough to believe”—unbelief stops being something to
repent of and becomes a tool for self-justification. In that moment we are not
asking God a question; we are drafting an indictment against God. The questions
that swirl around the tree of the knowledge of good and evil often drift in the
same direction: God could have prevented it but did not, therefore God is
responsible. It may sound like a search for the reason for suffering, but it
easily becomes a device for relocating the responsibility of sin.
That is why Paul’s first answer is decisive—and why Pastor
Jang holds it like the title of the whole sermon: “By no means!” Faith is not a
philosophical system that supplies a smooth solution to every question. Rather,
faith is a moral intelligence that discerns which questions lead us toward life
and which questions lead us toward destruction. Before questions that make God
an accomplice of evil—questions that paint God as the planner of injustice—the
church cannot “elegantly compromise.” “Let God be true though everyone were a
liar” is not cynical contempt for humanity; it is a restoring word that moves
the center of trust from human beings to God. Human truthfulness often sways
with self-interest, and human justice quickly defends “my side” first. But God
does not stand upon our shifting excuses; He stands upon His unchanging
character. Paul even summons the confession of Psalm 51: God is righteous in
His words and blameless in His judgments. Before the reality of our sin, we
must return from being those who put God on trial to those who are put on trial
by God.
At this point Pastor Jang pulls a historical event into the
sermon, recreating the tension of the text within lived reality: the early
church’s near schism over circumcision—the Jerusalem Council. In Acts 15, the
church did not merely draft an administrative compromise; it made a decision
that guarded the essence of the gospel. Against attempts to lay the yoke of
Moses upon Gentile believers, the leaders—Peter and James included—confirmed
the freedom of the gospel with the force of a question: Why place on the
disciples’ neck a yoke that neither we nor our fathers were able to bear?
Pastor Jang cites this because it exposes something crucial. The claim “Without
circumcision you cannot be saved” wears the costume of piety, but in practice
it turns grace into a condition—and that is a form of violence. If the church
yields to that violence, the gospel collapses into institution, and God is
misread not as a loving Father but as a manager of regulations. The Jerusalem
Council did not proclaim “the abolition of form” so much as it proclaimed “the
priority of grace,” and that spirit is precisely what meets us in the resolute
sharpness of Romans 3.
Paul’s dialogue does not stop, because human excuses do not
stop with a single round. “But if our unrighteousness serves to show the
righteousness of God, what shall we say? That God is unrighteous to inflict
wrath on us?” Here the question becomes more dangerous. If my unrighteousness
makes God’s righteousness shine brighter, then is it not unjust for God to
judge me? The logic expands further: “If through my lie God’s truth abounds to
His glory, why am I still condemned as a sinner?” Pastor Jang calls this
“self-justification wearing the mask of clever theology.” The notion that sin
is needed because grace is displayed against sin ultimately breeds the
horrifying conclusion: “Let us do evil that good may come.” This is why Paul
cuts it off in verse 8 with a single stroke: those who speak like that are
justly condemned. The gospel does not instrumentalize evil. God does not
approve evil, nor does He treat evil as raw material to prove His goodness. God
hates evil, judges evil, and at the same time raises good even out of the ruins
of evil. The difference may seem subtle, but it decisively separates Christian
ethics—and our very understanding of God.
One particular danger Pastor Jang warns against is “a
theology that preserves omnipotence and loses love.” To say God is all-knowing
and all-powerful and therefore everything is part of God’s plan can, in some
contexts, be a devout confession of divine sovereignty. But the moment that
sentence pushes human sin itself into God’s blueprint, it becomes language that
frames God. The same kind of question erupts around Judas’s betrayal: If Judas
had not betrayed, would there have been no cross? Then was Judas’s sin
necessary—almost meritorious rather than blameworthy? Pastor Jang says such
thinking flips the gospel upside down. The Gospels do not portray Judas as a
puppet programmed to betray. Rather, the door of repentance remained open to
the end, and the Lord loved him to the end. The cross is not the success story
of “predestined evil”; it is the event in which rejected love remains love to
the end. God does not design evil to manufacture good. God bears the
consequences of the evil human beings choose, and in that very place opens the
road of salvation. Omnipotence cannot be severed from love, and omnipotence
without love degenerates from a life-giving gospel into a fatalism that
frightens and subdues people.
Paul’s resolute negation begins with “By no means!” because
theodicy is not merely an intellectual puzzle; it is a matter that redirects
the soul. The heart that suspects God of injustice usually does not arise from
a shortage of logic, but from wounds, resentment, and despair. So Pastor Jang
does not read this passage as an argument of the intellect alone. He looks into
the depths of the human psyche—how easily anger toward God hardens into
hatred—and warns how quickly that hardness collapses into ethical ruin: “Then
doing evil is acceptable.” A theology that makes you hate God ultimately
destroys you, too. But when we return to the confession that God is true,
righteous, and faithful, we finally begin to acknowledge our sin as ours. And
at that point repentance begins. Repentance is not emotional self-torture; it
is spiritual maturity that takes back the place of responsibility. The moment
Adam said, “Because of the woman You gave me,” transferring blame, sin became
more than an act—it became the rupture of relationship. Repentance reverses
that rupture by restoring the place where I stand again before God as who I
truly am.
Pastor Jang brings the text back into today’s church and
asks: What posture do we have as those “entrusted with the Word”? Has the Word
become an ornament that grants authority to my claims, or a sword that cuts me
open and makes me new? What we have been entrusted with is not superiority but
mission. When we lose that mission, the language of the church can sound to the
world not like gospel but like hypocrisy. Just as Paul said, “Because of you
God’s name is blasphemed among the Gentiles,” so even now, if believers fail to
testify to the gospel through their lives, the world will mock God. This is why
“circumcision of the heart” speaks not only of private inner devotion but also
of the public character of the community. A covenant engraved on the heart must
show itself in the grain of life. Baptism is not a mechanical pass that
replaces faith in the heart; it is meant to be a sign proclaimed before the
community that faith has truly taken root. When the sign hides the reality, the
sign becomes not an instrument of salvation but a certificate of
self-deception.
In the end, the sermon reaches a conclusion that leads us
deeper than a logical account of theodicy. “By no means!” is not only a
sentence of rebuttal; it is a sentence of confession. God does not plan evil.
Human beings depart first. Yet God reveals Himself as love that pursues the
departed to the end. That love does not appear as violent coercion, but as
waiting, persuasion, and self-giving. Therefore the cross is not a calculated
stage where God tries to accomplish good through evil; it is the heartbeat of
God, exposing how cruel evil truly is while bearing that cruelty with love. We
still ask: Why does God not remove evil immediately? But Paul’s passage
transforms the question—from “a question that accuses God” into “a question
that trusts God while crying out.” The moment we stop framing God and instead
confess our own falsehood before Him, theodicy is no longer a philosophy that
collapses faith, but contrition that purifies faith. Then we can reject the
poisonous temptation—“Let us do evil that good may come”—and receive strength
to do good upon the confession, “God is true.” This is the dignity of the
gospel Pastor Jang repeatedly emphasizes through this sermon: Do not misread
the faithful God. Do not twist God’s righteousness into a license for sin. As
those entrusted with the Word, do not lean on the sign—return to the reality.
And in the midst of an age of suffering, do not place God in the defendant’s
chair; return to the Father’s embrace. Only there do human excuses finally fall
silent, and God’s truth makes us human again.
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