What does Romans 3:3 mean?
Paul is staging a question-and-answer session between himself and an imagined critic of his words in chapter 2. Now he asks the next logical question: "What if some were unfaithful?" By this, Paul seems to be pointing to what he said in the previous chapter. The Jewish people were given God's law, but they did not keep it. As a nation and as individuals, every Jewish person had sinned. Nobody can keep the law perfectly, and even those who had been "entrusted with the oracles of God" (Romans 3:2) were not immune to sin.Paul's questioner follows by asking, does the unfaithfulness of some of the Jewish people nullify God's faithfulness to His people? Does their sin make His faithfulness pointless? In other words, does the fact that those under the law broke the law, that they sinned as all people do, mean that God will no longer be faithful to them?
In the following verse, Paul will answer this question with a loud and emphatic "no."
Romans 3:1–8 contains a series of questions which might have come from someone opposed to Paul's teaching in Romans 2. Using this challenge-response structure, Paul clarifies that being Jewish and circumcised still comes with great advantages. He also points out that God remains faithful to the Jewish people in spite of their sin. In fact, His faithfulness in the face of unfaithfulness increases His glory. That does not mean, however, that God wants human beings to continue to sin, as some were accusing Paul of teaching.
Romans 3 begins with a question-and-answer scheme. These are responses one might expect from someone opposed to what Paul wrote in Romans 2. Next, Paul quotes from a series of Old Testament passages. These Scriptures show that those writers also agreed that nobody, not one person, deserves to be called righteous. Paul declares emphatically that no one will be justified by following the works of the law. Finally, though, he arrives at the good news: righteousness before God is available apart from the law through faith in Christ's death for our sin on the cross.
