Romanos 3:11

There is none that understandeth, There is none that seeketh after God.

Paul here charged the Jew in an area where he might have supposed himself to be invulnerable; for, of all the sins the Jew considered himself above, it was spiritual ignorance due to a failure to seek God; and yet, right here it was in their own Bible. They neither understood nor sought after God. True, they knew many things; but they had never understood that their entire system was temporary, typical, and comparable to the scaffolding of a building, and due to be torn down when the great antitype was revealed. They had somehow missed the overriding fact that Judaism was not designed to be God's permanent order of things. Their greatest specific error was doubtless their failure to understand the dual nature of the Messiah, the great Immanuel (God with us, or God in flesh) who would take away human sin (Matthew 22:41-45). They indeed knew what the Old Testament said of Messiah, but they split the prophecies into two categories, supposing that there would be two Messiahs, one of them the suffering priestly Messiah, and the other the glorious kingly Messiah; and it was that tragic error of not understanding that all of the Old Testament prophecies spoke of one Messiah, that blinded their eyes to the identity of the Christ when he came. But that was the fatal error that resulted in utter blindness, in a religious sense, of Israel's leaders. Christ exclaimed, concerning this, "Ye fools, and blind" (Matthew 23:17,19), going so far as to say, "Woe unto ye lawyers! for ye took away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered" (Luke 11:52). They had so cluttered the word of God with their traditions and interpretations that they had even lost the key of knowledge, which was hopelessly buried beneath the rubbish mountain of trivia regarding tithing of mint, anise, and cumin, and a thousand other things. Thus the great sin here charged, and scripturally supported against Israel, was their reprehensible ignorance of God's word.

There is none that seeketh after God ... What a paradox was this, that the chosen nation who had received the revelation of God and who had studied it so meticulously, were, in all that study, not seeking God at all, due to the lack of any proper motive, and having forgotten the warning of Hosea, "Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord" (Hosea 6:3). Knowing what the scripture says is one thing; following on to know the Lord is another. Since the Jews were not seeking after God, what was the point of all their study? Christ himself pinpointed the trouble: it was this, that they desired the praise of men rather than the praise of God (John 12:43). Christ said,

Ye are they that justify yourselves in the sight of men; but God knoweth your hearts: for that which is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God (Luke 16:15).

Moreover, they did not seek to glorify God, but only to glorify one another (John 5:44).