Romans 3:3

For what if some were without faith? shall their want of faith make of none effect the faithfulness of God? God forbid: yea, let God be found true, but every man a liar; as it is written, That thou mightest be justified in thy words, And mightest prevail when thou comest into judgment.

What if ... is a connective with the previous line of thought, the same expression occurring in Philippians 1:18, where Moffatt translated it, "What does it matter?" Paul was still addressing himself to the task of meeting Jewish objections; and the background fact here was Jewish reluctance to allow their conduct as fair grounds upon which they would be judged. Hodge explained that position thus:

"What if we are unfaithful," says the Jew. "Does that invalidate the faithfulness of God? Has he not promised to be a God to Abraham and his seed? Has he not entered into a solemn covenant to grant his people all the benefits of Messiah's kingdom? This covenant is not suspended on our moral character. If we adhere to the covenant by being circumcised and keeping the law, the fidelity of God is pledged for our salvation. We may therefore be as wicked as you make us out to be; that does not prove that we shall be treated as heathen."[5]

Their want of faith ... refers to the evil conduct of the chosen people due to their unbelief in God, and is not an indictment of their sin of rejecting the Messiah, the latter being a subject Paul had not yet dealt with. Again, from Hodge,

The apostle has not come to the exposition of the gospel; he is still engaged in the preliminary discussion designed to show that the Jews and Gentiles are under sin, and exposed to condemnation.[6]

This verse continues in the main line of Paul's theme in Romans, a demonstration of the righteousness of God, that is, of the righteousness that marks God's character; and, therefore, to the insinuation that God would be unfaithful if he refused (on the basis of human sin) to convey eternal salvation to the Jews, the allegation that such a refusal would make God blameworthy - to all such thoughts, Paul bluntly replied, "God forbid! "Be it not so ..." is the rendition in the English Revised Version (1885) margin, and it means "Certainly not!" It is precisely the faithfulness of God that does deny to wicked men the fulfillment of God's promises to them, which promises were from the first and always, contingent upon human faithfulness. As Macknight pointed out:

To understand this, we must recollect that the performance of the promises to the natural seed of Abraham is, in the original covenant, tacitly made to depend on their faith and obedience (Genesis 18:19); and that it is explicitly made to depend on that condition in the renewal of the covenant (Deuteronomy 28:1-14). Besides, on that occasion, God expressly threatened to expel the natural seed from Canaan, and scatter them among the heathens, if they became unbelieving and disobedient (Leviticus 26:33; Deuteronomy 28:64). The rejection, therefore, and expulsion of the Jews from Canaan, for their unbelief, being a fulfilling of the threatenings of the covenant, established the faithfulness of God instead of destroying it.[7]

Let God be true, but every man a liar ... means "Let it be obvious that God is true, in spite of the fact that every man may prove to be false." God is eternally true and righteous; and, upon those occasions when God judges people guilty of sin and unworthy of his benefits, it is because they are so. It was the major premise underlying the great life of Abraham that God will always do right, regardless of human behavior. "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" was Abraham's great question, addressed to God in prayer, and understood in that context as an affirmation that "Of course, the Judge of all the earth will always do right" (Genesis 18:25). This disposition to justify God under all circumstances, Paul illustrated, as Hodge pointed out,

By the conduct and language of David who acknowledged the justice of God even in his own condemnation, and said, "Against thee only have I sinned; that thou mightest be justified in thy sayings, and overcome when thou art judged."[8]

That thou mightest be justified ... prevail ... when thou art judged ... These two clauses are a quotation from Psalms 51:4; and the circumstance under which David wrote that Psalm reveals the true meaning of these first four verses of chapter 3The fact under consideration was God's intrinsic righteousness; and here, Paul was disposing of the quibble that, merely because God had promised it, and despite human sin, the Jews were entitled to possess eternal life and Messiah's kingdom; he dramatically refuted such a notion by appealing to the example of so distinguished a Jew as David, the man after God's own heart, who, when he sinned, was under God's condemnation. David acknowledged the justice of his own condemnation in order, as he wrote in Psalms 51 (and quoted by Paul), that God might be justified in his words and prevail when he came into judgment. Of course, this means "in order that God might be justified "in the eyes of men," since it is the human view of God's righteousness Paul was discussing. The two clauses of the quotation (Psalms 51:4) form a Hebrew parallel thus:

That thou mightest be justified in thy sayings, And overcome when thou comest into judgment.

The second clause refers to God's coming into judgment (merely in a figure, of course) before the bar of human opinion. God is here presented as appearing before people's minds, as in a form of arraignment, and as receiving approval of all that is highest and best in human intelligence. Lard's perceptive thoughts on this are helpful. He wrote:

God is judged when he is arraigned in human thought, on his dealings with men. When thus arraigned, he must always come off victor. It is not enough that he must gain his cause, he must gain it triumphantly. This is the force of [@nikesis]. He must be shown to be absolutely innocent of every charge. Nor let it be imagined that God is seldom arraigned. He is arraigned in the very charge here considered; and, in countless ways, we, as it were, arraign him every day. We arraign him for creating us capable of sin, for exposing us to temptation, for subjecting us to death for another's sin, for appointing us to a life of hardship, for requiring us to be holy in the midst of great trials, for not revealing to us more of the future - on these counts, and many more, we arraign him. Not that we formally arraign him and accuse him of wrong; but we arraign him in our perplexities, in our discontents - in a word, in the very modes in which we think of him. Not to be wholly reconciled to God is to arraign him.[9]

Let all people, therefore, believe in and trust the absolute righteousness of God through whatever uncertainties, perplexities, disasters, sorrows, and tribulations life may bring. Fortunate indeed are they, like Job of old, who can exclaim in the midst of abounding calamities and throes of misery, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust him" (Job 13:15).

[5] Charles Hodge, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1968), p. 70.

[6] Ibid., p. 71.

[7] James Macknight, Apostolical Epistles (Nashville: Gospel Advocate Company, 1954), p. 61.

[8] Charles Hodge, op. cit., p. 71.

[9] Moses E. Lard, op. cit., p. 103.