The condition of every human being apart from the grace of God in Jesus Christ is described in Romans 3 beginning in verse 9. It is not a good picture. Verses 10 and 11 substantially summarize it all:  

There is none righteous, no, not one: There is none who understands, there is none who seeks after God.

This is a serious, indeed a devastating, picture of the race, because it portrays human beings as unable to do even one single thing either to please, understand or find God. It is an expression of what theologians rightly call man's "total depravity." The doctrine of total depravity is hard for the human race to accept, for one of the results of our being sinners is that we tend to treat sin lightly. We are willing to admit that we are not perfect. Indeed, it would take an extraordinary supply of arrogance for any mere human being to pretend that he is perfect. We do not do that. But this is a far different thing from admitting that we are utterly depraved in our ability to please God and that we are devoid of any true spiritual understanding. We are willing to admit that we wander off the path of moral virtue at times, but we won't admit that we are not even on the right path. Instead, we pretend that we are seeking Him. We therefore desperately need to come to terms with this bad tendency. Without a true and humbling knowledge of our sin, we will never come to know the meaning of God's grace. Without an awareness of our pride we will never appreciate God's greatness. Nor will we come to God for the healing that we need so crucially. The situation is a bit like our being sick and needing a doctor. As long as we think we are well (or at least almost well), we will not seek medical care. But if we know we are sick, then we will turn to the Great Physician, the Lord Jesus Christ, who alone is able to heal us.

How bad is it? Having used the analogy of being sick, let me hasten to add that our situation is even worse than being sick. When a person is merely sick, the situation is not hopeless. He may get better and survive. But these verses say that apart from the grace of God a person is not only spiritually sick, but dead. The uniqueness of the Bible's teaching can be seen by noting that in the long history of the human race, the world has typically viewed that man is either well or sick. There are minor variations, but there are only two principal views. That man is well is the view of optimists and, for that matter, that of most persons today. If they admit that anything at all is wrong with man, it is only because he is not as spiritually healthy as he could perhaps be. All he needs is a little moral guidance, spiritual vitamins, and perhaps an occasional psychological checkup. The second view that man is sick is the view of pessimists. They are convinced that to be healed, man must significantly improve themselves, work hard, tackle their ills, upgrade their morals, revise their wicked thinking and so on. Our text in Romans 3 declares, however, that man is decidedly not well, nor is he just sick; he is dead. We are as God declared we would be when He warned Adam and Eve, "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" (Genesis 2:17). Our first parents did eat of it, and they did die. So it is true of us. As Ephesians 2:1 puts it, we are "dead in (our) trespasses and sins." We are no more able to respond to God by ourselves than any corpse could when it is called to do anything.

The moral nature: none righteous That "there is none righteous, no, not one" does not mean merely that man is somehow less righteous than he needs to be to please God. Rather, it declares without reservation that from God's point of view, human beings have no righteousness at all. I cannot overemphasize the phrase "from God's point of view" because I want to make clear that it is from this viewpoint that we need to assess the situation. If we view the human condition from man's perspective, we will always conclude that at least some people are quite good simply because they are better than what we think we observe in others. Our problem is that we think of the good we can do. We consider our righteousness as being the same as God's righteousness, when it is actually quite different. We assume that by accumulating human goodness we can please God. That is the way the Israelites of old had thought. In Romans 10 Paul attributes their failure to find God for this very same reason. We read in verse 3, "For they being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God." To underscore our void of righteousness, God goes on in Romans 3:12, "They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.

The sinful mind: none understands The second pronouncement our text makes about human beings in their sinful condition is, "There is none that understandeth." No one understands the things of and about God. Again, we need to understand this as a lack of spiritual perception and not merely a lack of human knowledge. For if we think on the human level, comparing human understanding with human understanding, we will observe quite rightly that some people obviously understand a great deal. The best commentary upon this phrase is found in the first two chapters of I Corinthians. The Corinthians were mostly Greeks. So they prized the wisdom of the Greek philosophers, as all Greeks did. But Paul writes that when he was with them he did not attempt to impress them with such wisdom, but rather that he determined to know nothing among them "save (or except) Jesus Christ, and him crucified" (2:2). Why? He explains his decision in two ways: First, human wisdom has shown itself to be bankrupt so far as coming to understand God is concerned. He writes in I Corinthians 1:18-21:  

For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.

In making this indictment upon man's failure to find God by human wisdom, Paul was echoing what the best of the Greeks had concluded. The philosophers knew that they had been unable to discover God by philosophy.

Spiritually discerned. Second, spiritual things can only be known by God's Spirit. "But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned" (2:14). This does not mean that a person cannot have a rational understanding of Christianity or what the Bible teaches apart from the illumination of his mind by the Holy Spirit. In one sense, a scholar can understand and even explain theology just as well as any other area of human knowledge. An unbelieving philosopher can lecture accurately on the Christian idea of God. But if they had been asked their opinion of what they were so accurately presenting, they would have said that it was all utter nonsense. It is in that sense that they, not being spiritual, were unable to understand Christianity. If we return to Romans Chapter 1, we are reminded of the cause of this ignorance. It is not that the doctrine of God, or any other doctrine of the Christian faith, is difficult to comprehend. It is rather that we do not want to move in the direction these doctrines are leading us. So we suppress the truth about God, refusing to glorify or give thanks to Him, and as a result our thinking becomes "vain" and our foolish hearts are "darkened" (v. 21).

The Captive Will: None Seeks God Having spoken of our moral and intellectual failures, verse 11 moves to the area of the corrupt human will and concludes rightly: "There is none that seeketh after God" Here again, we must not think in merely human terms. If we do, we will conclude that "seeking after God" has actually been the history of our race. A study of primitive peoples by Robert Brow suggests that the human race has been consistently running away from ideas of a high and holy God. He argues that primitive peoples generally have a truer picture of God than we do, though they did not worship Him. They believe in a great and true God who stands behind their pantheon of animistic deities or lesser gods, but they do not worship this God because they do not fear Him as much as they do the immediate and hostile powers. Frederick Godet saw this and he concluded, "At the root of all pagan religions and mythologies, there lies an original Monotheism, which is the historical starting-point in religion for all mankind."--do not worship this God because they do not fear Him as much as they do the immediate and hostile powers. Frederick Godet saw this and he concluded, "At the root of all pagan religions and mythologies, there lies an original Monotheism, which is the historical starting-point in religion for all mankind."

Spurious argument. Let me focus on the way this principle works in our lives and society. Let's take a man who believes himself to be the perfect refutation of Romans 3:11. "But I do seek God," this man argues, "I have been seeking Him all my life. I was born into a Baptist home; but I could not find God in my home or church. When I grew old enough to select a church on my own, I joined the Presbyterian Church. I couldn't find God there. So I joined an Episcopal church. Over the years I have attended almost every kind of church there is. Still, I haven't found him." The answer to this man's argument is that he has not been seeking God at all. He has been running after some kind of religion with which he could feel at home. When he could not find that in one church, he went to another. If anything, he has been running away from God and has merely been using his religion to disguise his intentions.

Sought and taught by God Coming back to where I was at the beginning, I say that according to the Bible no one unaided by the Spirit of God: (1) has any righteousness by which to lay a claim upon God; (2) has any true understanding of God; or (3) truthfully seeks God. But what we do not have, what we cannot do and what we have not done God has done for those who are being saved. What has God done? First, God sought us. Like "The Hound of Heaven," God pursued us relentlessly. Some of us ran from God for a long time and can recall the days of our waywardness well. If God had not pursued us, we would have been lost eternally. We were so dead that we would never have come to God by ourselves.

No one ever becomes saved who has not been pursued and found by God. Second, God gave us true understanding. He did it by making us alive in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, as a result of which our eyes have been opened to see things spiritually, and we have found ourselves looking not only at God but at all life in an entirely new way. This does not mean that we understand all things perfectly. But what we understand concerning God and His ways now we do truly understand in the sense that we believe these things and respond accordingly. Last of all, God gave us a righteousness that we did not have in ourselves and, in fact, could never have His righteousness. It is the ground of our salvation. Having been sought and taught by God, and having been given the righteousness of our Lord Jesus, we have moved from our original state of total depravity to our eternal state of absolute blessedness in Christ. Dr. James Montgomery Boice was the speaker of the Bible Study Hour broadcast, 1716 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103, and pastor of the Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia.