[Sidenote: Ver. 9.] =What then? are we superior?[31]= Say =not= so =at all (μηδαμῶς).= Thus now he proceeds, taking the word finally from his supposed antagonist. Who are the "_we_" and with whom are "we" compared? The drift of the argument admits of two replies to this question. "_We_" may be "_we Jews_"; as if Paul placed himself in instinctive sympathy, by the side of the compatriot whose cavils he has just combated, and gathered up here into a final assertion all he has said before of the (at least) equal guilt of the Jew beside the Greek. Or "_we_" may be "_we Christians_," taken for the moment as men apart from Christ; it may be a repudiation of the thought that he has been speaking from a pedestal, or from a tribunal. As if he said, "Do not think that I, or my friends in Christ, would say to the world, Jewish or Gentile, that we are holier than you. No; we speak not from the bench, but from the bar. Apart from Him who is our peace and life, we are 'in the same condemnation.' It is exactly because we are in it that we turn and say to you, 'Do not ye fear God?'" On the whole, this latter reference seems the truer to the thought and spirit of the whole context.
=For we have already charged Jews and Greeks, all of them, with being under sin; with being brought under sin,= as the Greek (ὑφ᾽ ἁμαρτίαν) bids us more exactly render, giving us the thought that the race has fallen _from_ a good estate _into_ an evil; self-involved in an awful superincumbent ruin. [Sidenote: Ver. 10.] =As it stands written, that there is not even one man righteous; there is not a man who understands, not a man who seeks his (τὸν) God. All have left the road; they have turned worthless together. There is not a man who does what is good, there is not, even so many as one. A grave set open is their throat,= exhaling the stench of polluted words; =with their tongues they have deceived; asps' venom is under their lips[32]; (men) whose mouth is brimming with curse and bitterness. Swift are their feet to shed blood; ruin and misery= for their victims =are in their ways; and the way of peace they never knew. There is no such thing as fear of God before their eyes.=
Here is a tesselation of Old Testament oracles. The fragments, hard and dark, come from divers quarries; from the Psalms (v. 9, x. 7, xiv. 1-3, xxxvi. 1, cxl. 3), from the Proverbs (i. 16), from Isaiah (lix. 7). All in the first instance depict and denounce classes of sins and sinners in Israelite society; and we may wonder at first sight how their evidence convicts all men everywhere, and in all time, of condemnable and fatal sin. But we need not only, in submission, own that somehow it must be so, for "it stands written" here; we may see, in part, how it is so. These special charges against certain sorts of human lives stand in the same Book which levels the general charge against _the human heart_ (Jerem. xvii. 9), that it is "deceitful above all things, hopelessly diseased," and incapable of knowing all its own corruption. The crudest surface phenomena of sin are thus never isolated from the dire underlying epidemic of the race of man. The actual evil of men shews the potential evil of man. The tiger-strokes of open wickedness shew the tiger-nature, which is always present, even where its possessor least suspects it. Circumstances infinitely vary, and among them those internal circumstances which we call special tastes and dispositions. But everywhere amidst them all is the human heart, made upright in its creation, self-wrecked into moral wrongness when it turned itself from God. That it _is_ turned from Him, not to Him, appears when its direction is tested by the collision between His claim and its will. And in this aversion from the Holy One, who claims the whole heart, there lies at least the potency of "all unrighteousness."