All Have Sinned

All the "seeds" verses are integrated.  If you understand God's standard, it is easy to understand the verses that reveal that "all have sinned."  Romans 3:23 says, "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."  The "glory of God" is the "standards" of God's perfection, the righteousness of God in all His ways and His kindness in all His deeds.  Every person has fallen short of compliance with the standard of God's nature.

Perhaps an illustration that will help us understand this verse is this.  If we were to stand on the seashore and I were to ask you to pick up a rock and throw it, you might throw it farther than me, or I might throw a stone farther than you.  But, if our target were to throw a stone all the way to Hawaii, we both would "fall short" of that standard.  Similarly, God's standard of perfection is so unattainable by those who are living with a sin nature that we are simply unable to live up to it.  We all fall short of God's perfection, either by our commission of bad deeds, or by our omission of good deeds.  We all fall short of God's righteousness.

Isaiah 53:6 further explains that we have all sinned.  Isaiah 53:6 says, "All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; but the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him."  All of us have in our minds that our own way is right.  But, left to ourselves, we all choose to go astray from God's ways and choose our own ways, the ways of our sin nature.  The result is iniquity, the failure to live up to God's ways for our lives.  Praise God that He has caused the iniquity of all of us to fall on Jesus, who walked in God's ways perfectly and gave Himself up as a perfect sacrifice for our sins. 

In a sense, it is like we all had a cancer, the cancer of sin and iniquity.  But, it is as though God took all the cancer out of us and put it into Christ.  Then when Christ died, the cancer died with Him.  It is in that way that He offers us new life, that He has taken all that was killing us into Himself and offered new life to us.

The next in the series of memory verses addresses the penalty for our sins.