God's Wrath against SIN not US

SIN not sins Explained by the Apostle Paul

We can read the Gospels from year to year and not understand what sin is unless we have Paul to explain it to us. In the Gospels, it is easy to think of sinning as cheating taxpayers, adultery, stealing, abandoning one's sheep, withholding money from God, being critical, and various other discrete acts which can be defined as "sins".  We read that Jesus eats with sinners, and we assume that this means people who have been condemned by society for their specific sinful actions. When the Lord says "I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners" (Matthew 9:13), we naturally assume that he divides up the world into two categories that way, so we do the same. It comes as a surprise to us therefore, in Romans 3, when we hear Paul say,

All human beings, both Jews and Gentiles, are under the power of SIN ..... None is righteous, no, not one .... There is no distinction ..... All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God .....

"Under the power of Sin." That is the clue. Sin (with a capital letter) is not the same thing as sins. Sins are individual misdeeds that you can tot up at the end of the day, or that God will add up at the end of your life. You can make a list of sins and then congratulate yourself because you haven't committed very many of them. If we think of Sin in this way we will never understand what the Son of God came to do.

Sin is not the sum total of a bunch of individual transgressions. Sin is the fundamental condition of man, the disease that we have all got, "a deep interior dislocation in the very centre of human personality." The human race is enmeshed in the consequences of a vast primordial catastrophe, as John Cardinal Newman put it. The world has been thrown blatantly off course by an alien power hostile to God, and paradoxically, each of us is responsible for his own part in the resulting mess. According to Paul, Sin is both "and enslaving power" external to man, and "man's own culpable act" for which each human being singly and all human beings collectively deserve the judgement of God. This is true whether we know it or not, whether we feel it or not. Paul does not begin his discussion of Sin with subjective feelings of guilt, which his hearers may or may not have; he begins with our objective situation before God as fallen creatures in bondage to a Power far greater then we are. The tragedies and follies and depredations that we see all around us in our world are signs that "the Wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of human beings" (Romans 1:18).

So, to recap what we've said, the prologue to Paul's story (and it is a story, even though it might not look like one) is his declaration of God's mighty acts of redemption: "I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation" (Romans 1:16). Only when he has made this clear does he embark upon his long passage about the Wrath of God against Sin, which goes on for two chapters and a half in the course of this passage he is counting on us to understand that God's wrath is against Sin not against us.

Quoted from Fleming Rutledge's book, "Not Ashamed of the Gospel"