Righteous Yet Not Sinless

When people hear that the Torah is the mark God set, a question comes back quickly, and it is a fair one: “So does having the Torah mean people do not sin? Is everyone who keeps it righteous? Paul says the opposite. There is none righteous, not even one.”

Behind the question lies a worry. If the standard is God’s commandments, and no one keeps them perfectly, then the standard can only condemn. It seems better to say that no one can be righteous by the Torah and leave it there.

The question bundles together several things that Scripture keeps apart, and they are best taken one at a time.

Nobody Is Saying That

First, consider the premise. No one says that having the Torah means not sinning. That is not the claim of this book, nor is it the claim of the Torah. As the last chapter showed, the Torah is how sin becomes known: “through nomos νόμος nom'-os(law) comes epignosis ἐπίγνωσις ep-ig'-no-sis(spiritual, complete knowledge) of sin” (Romans 3:20). The Torah shows where a life has gone crooked; it has never by itself made anyone’s life straight.

Second, consider the verses. Romans 3:10 and 3:23 are right as they stand.

Romans 3:10 as it is written: "There is no righteous one, not even one;

In verse 10 Paul quotes the Psalms, introducing them with “as it is written,” and in verse 23, which we read in Chapter 2, he says the same in his own words: “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” The word for fall short is hystereo ὑστερέω hoos-ter-eh'-o, to be behind, to lag, to come up short. Every human being stands there, and that is why justification has to be a gift, received by grace through faith, as Chapter 1 set out.

So far, Paul’s words and this book agree completely. But that chapter of Romans does not end at verse 23. It ends here:

Romans 3:31 Do we then nullify the nomos(law) through faith? May it never be! On the contrary, we uphold the nomos(law).

The chapter that says no one is righteous and all have sinned closes by saying that faith does not nullify the Torah but upholds it. Paul did not think that “There is no righteous one” and “we uphold the nomos(law)” were at war. He set them in the same chapter, a few lines apart.

Faithful Is Not the Same as Flawless

An everyday picture helps here.

Think of a man who has been married for forty years. Over those years he has forgotten an anniversary, spoken a sharp word he regretted, come home late without calling, and apologized more times than he can count. Is he a faithful husband? Everyone who knows him would say so without a pause. Faithful does not mean that he never failed. It means that the whole direction of his life has been toward his wife. A different man, one who has moved in with another woman, would not be called faithful, however many anniversaries he remembered.

Scripture uses the word righteous in the same way. It does not mean flawless. It is a word for a life that walks in what God commanded, and Scripture says plainly that there were people who lived that way.

“It Shall Be Righteousness for Us”

The first witness is Moses himself.

Deuteronomy 6:25 And it shall be righteousness for us, if we keep to do all this commandment (mitzvah מִצוָה mits-vaw') before the LORD our God, as He commanded us (tzivvah צָוָה tsaw-vaw').

These are the words of Moses, not of some later teacher. If keeping the commandment were simply impossible, this sentence would be a cruel joke, yet Moses gives it as a promise.

Scripture also records people who lived it. We met Zacharias and Elizabeth in Chapter 1, but Luke 1:6 is worth reading again with this question in mind.

They were human beings, and they were not sinless. Yet Luke says that they “were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and dikaioma δικαίωμα dik-ah'-yo-mah(ordinances) of the Lord.” Their righteousness was not a feeling but a walk, and Luke calls it blameless.

Romans 3:10 and Luke 1:6, then, do not cancel each other. “There is no righteous one” stands in a chapter whose point is that “by works of nomos(law) no sarx σάρξ sarx(flesh) will be justified before Him” (Romans 3:20). “They were both righteous before God” describes how a husband and wife walked. The first concerns how a person is justified, and the second concerns how two people lived. Paul was not correcting Luke, and Luke was not correcting Paul.

Daniel: Sinner, Righteous, Trusting

All of this can be seen in a single man, Daniel.

Daniel confessed his sin, and not merely the sin of others in the abstract, but his own:

Daniel 9:20 And while I was still speaking and praying and confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel, and casting down my supplication before the LORD my God for the holy mountain of my God,

A few verses earlier he had prayed, “we have sinned and have done iniquity, we have done wickedly and have rebelled” (Daniel 9:5), and he did not count himself outside that “we.”

Now hear what God said about this same man:

Ezekiel 14:14 and though these three men were in its midst — Noah, Daniel, and Job — they, by their righteousness, would deliver their soul (nephesh נֶפֶשׁ neh'-fesh), declares the Lord GOD.

God sets Daniel beside Noah and Job and says that they would deliver their soul “by their righteousness.” The man who confessed his sin is the man God calls righteous.

Scripture also tells exactly how Daniel was delivered from the lions:

Daniel 6:24 Then the king was exceedingly glad over him, and commanded to bring Daniel up out of the den. So Daniel was brought up out of the den, and no manner of hurt was found on him, because he had trusted in his God.

(YLV Daniel 6:24, Masoretic verse order)

No harm was found on Daniel “because he had trusted in his God.” Daniel himself said that God “sent His angel” (YLV Daniel 6:23, Masoretic verse order), and the book of Hebrews counts among the people of faith those who “stopped the mouths of lions”:

Hebrews 11:33 who through faith conquered kingdoms, worked dikaiosyne δικαιοσύνη dik-ah-yos-oo'-nay(righteousness), obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions,

Through faith they “worked dikaiosyne(righteousness)” and “stopped the mouths of lions.” In that sentence faith and righteousness are not opposites. Righteousness is what faith worked.

Daniel, then, stands before us as all three at once: a confessing sinner, a man God called righteous, and a man saved because he trusted in his God. If our theology says that one of these must cancel the others, our theology is narrower than the Bible.

Back to the Question

Does having the Torah mean that people do not sin? No, and no one says that it does.

Is everyone righteous? No. All have sinned and fall short, and no one is declared righteous before God except by His grace.

As for “There is no righteous one, not even one,” it is true, and the same chapter ends by saying that faith upholds the Torah. The same Bible also says that Zacharias and Elizabeth were righteous, walking blamelessly in all the commandments, and that Daniel was righteous and was delivered because he trusted. Righteousness in the walk is not the enemy of grace. It is what the people of faith in Scripture actually lived.

One verse in Galatians, however, seems to shut the door on all of this. Paul says that those who are of the works of the law are under a curse, and if that means what many think it means, everything in this chapter is a mistake. That verse must be read whole, both halves of it.