I gotta have my orange juice.

Jesu, Juva

Reprobate

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I wrote previously:

Earlier, when Paul says that “none is righteous” (Rom. 3:10), he is obviously using it in a different sense. He is quoting Psalm 14, where David applies this statement to “the fool,” to “evildoers” and to the “children of man,” but takes comfort because “God is with the generation of the righteous” (i.e., the children of God). It is possible that Paul is applying Psalm 14 in a new direction, to all people everywhere. But there are better passages he could have used if he had wanted to make that point (e.g., Ps. 51:5). It seems more likely to me that he is saying something more subtle. Paul is not saying that no one anywhere is righteous; rather, he is making the provocative application of Psalm 14 to the Jews. They have ceased to be God’s righteous people and have become boastful evildoers, enemies of Jesus and his church.

Augustine agrees:

When, therefore, we look for the city of God in these seventy-two nations, we cannot affirm that while they had but one lip, that is, one language, the human race had departed from the worship of the true God, and that genuine godliness had survived only in those generations which descend from Shem through Arphaxad and reach to Abraham; but from the time when they proudly built a tower to heaven, a symbol of godless exaltation, the city or society of the wicked becomes apparent. Whether it was only disguised before, or non-existent; whether both cities remained after the flood, — the godly in the two sons of Noah who were blessed, and in their posterity, and the ungodly in the cursed son and his descendants, from whom sprang that mighty hunter against the Lord, — is not easily determined. For possibly — and certainly this is more credible — there were despisers of God among the descendants of the two sons, even before Babylon was founded; and worshippers of God among the descendants of Ham. Certainly neither race was ever obliterated from earth. For in both the Psalms in which it is said, They are all gone aside, they are altogether become filthy; there is none that does good, no, not one, we read further, Have all the workers of iniquity no knowledge? Who eat up my people as they eat bread, and call not upon the Lord. There was then a people of God even at that time. And therefore the words, There is none that does good, no, not one, were said of the sons of men, not of the sons of God. For it had been previously said, God looked down from heaven upon the sons of men, to see if any understood and sought after God; and then follow the words which demonstrate that all the sons of men, that is, all who belong to the city which lives according to man, not according to God, are reprobate.

—Augustine, City of God, Book XVI

Written by Scott Moonen

August 22, 2026 at 10:02 am

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