God’s Judgment is According to Opportunity: 2:12-16

Recap and Background

Hello and welcome to Episode 6, as we continue the amazing story of Paul explaining the gospel to us in these first four chapters of the book of Romans. If you have followed the episodes so far, you will have seen that Paul is building his argument step by step, explaining each step in detail. The key verse that is the starting point for what Paul is explaining, is

Romans 1:16:

“For I’m not ashamed of the gospel’ says Paul, ‘because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew then to the Gentile.”

He goes on to explain, “For in the Gospel the righteousness of God is revealed - a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”’

This is the stunning revelation of the gospel. God is going to put people in a right relationship with him, as they believe in Christ and what he has done for them. This is what Paul was trying to preach all over the Roman world. In the recent episodes, we noticed that Paul’s main argument, has been to try and explain why this gospel is necessary because if you don’t believe you need to be saved, what is the point of Christianity? What is the point of Jesus dying on the cross? What is the point of God sending his Son to the earth? Paul has been explaining the depth of the power of sin to control human behaviour and separate us from God. As he has been following through his argument, he started by talking about humanity in general, what he calls the Gentiles, all the peoples of the earth except the Jews. He explained that, although they hadn’t had any direct revelation from God, God had spoken to all the people of the earth through two means. One was the wonderful creation in the natural world which acts like a signpost, showing that there must be a God with great power who has created everything. The second thing, that we have all had to guide us towards God, is our conscience, our moral sense inside us.

In this episode, we are going to look at the idea of conscience in much more detail, because Paul develops it in the text that we are studying. The question in the last few episodes, has been why do people not respond to creation and to conscience within, fully? Why do we still keep ourselves separate from God? Why is there a sense in which we are always independent of God? There is something inside us, which Paul calls the power of sin, a spiritual force that controls us, which always causes us to turn away from God. Let me explain this by a simple analogy.

Imagine that you are driving along a road in a taxi. You are in the passenger seat at the front and the driver is next to you. In front of you is the open road. You can see two kilometres ahead of you, with no cars in sight on this side of the road. You are going straight. There are two lanes because it is a big road between cities. The driver then says to you, “You don’t mind if I just take my hands off the steering wheel for a couple of minutes? I feel like a rest.” How would you feel? What would happen if he actually did it? Many of you will be drivers like me. I tried this the other day in my car. It didn’t take long for a small deviation to start as I went slightly to the left, or slightly to the right. If you are the driver, you have to intervene quickly and get your hands back on the steering wheel, otherwise your car is going to crash into the side of the road. That is like us as humans. There is something inside us that causes us to go to deviate away from God’s will. A small amount of deviation leads to serious consequences further down the line.

God’s Judgement

‘All whose sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. For it’s not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous.’

Romans 2:12-13, NIV

Paul introduces the idea of judgment according to opportunity. God is the judge. Paul used the word ‘to perish’. That is a reference to what happens to us after death, if we are separated from God at the time that we die. Jesus uses similar language in the famous statement in John 3:16, ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they’ve not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.” This is one of many references in the New Testament to the fact that after death comes judgment, and the risk of being separated from God permanently, forever. A terrifying prospect. That is why the gospel is urgent. Paul says that we are judged according to opportunity. God doesn’t judge us according to things that we couldn’t know, he judges us according to the things that we do know.

Every person has two things that they do know. They know that there is a creation – there is a natural world out there. They also know there is a moral conscience inside them. Those are the two things that guide us, but we don’t follow that guidance. The Jews had an extra revelation which Paul calls, ‘the law’, the Law of Moses, and all the revelation that God gave to the Jews in the Old Testament.

A distinction is being made here between humanity in general, and the Jews in particular. The Jews have the Law of Moses but the Gentiles didn’t have it. When Paul was writing to the Romans, many of them had no contact with Judaism. They didn’t know anything about the Old Testament. They were just ordinary people, Roman citizens living in Rome who had their own pagan religions, their own idols in their houses and their own religious way of life with all sorts of traditions and myths.

What exactly is meant by the Law of Moses? In the time when the Jews as a nation were gathered together in the Old Testament and had just escaped from many years of slavery in Egypt, God revealed himself to them in a dramatic and powerful way when Moses was their leader. They were camped at that point in a desert area near a place called Mount Sinai. God revealed himself in tremendous power to Moses. Moses went up the mountain and God revealed all sorts of things to him and gave him particularly the Ten Commandments. Paul is stating here that the Jews had the Ten Commandments, but the Gentiles did not have the Ten Commandments revealed to them. They have got their conscience and creation but they haven’t had the Ten Commandments which were specifically given to the Jews. They are recorded in Exodus 20 and then later on, in Deuteronomy 5. These are the Ten Commandments.

‘You shall have no other gods before me.’

‘You shall not make any image…’

‘You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God…’

‘Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy…’

‘Honour your father and mother…’

‘Do not murder.’

‘Do not commit adultery.’

‘Do not steal.’

‘Do not give false testimony...’

‘Do not covet your neighbour’s house and his other possessions.’

They were not given to the Gentiles formally. Some of them had not heard of those commands. But they were given to the Jewish people - and not only the Ten Commandments, but more than 600 commandments that are recorded in the Old Testament books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. A whole worship system was given to them, law courts and family laws, and it was all based around the Ten Commandments. This is what the Jews were given that the Gentiles were not given. Paul’s point here is that we will only be judged according to the information and the revelation of God that we have been given.

Conscience

‘Indeed when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.’

Romans 2:14-15, NIV

Even if some of Paul’s readers and hearers in this letter had never heard of the Ten Commandments, and that was definitely the case, they still had a moral voice inside them. So, what is conscience? An inner sense of right and wrong which helps us to make moral decisions. This inner sense of right and wrong, Paul says, is something given to every human being. It is not just created by your parents, your school, your society, your village, your culture, or your country.Those things influence us but we have a basic sense of right and wrong which is deeper than any one of those things. That is why when people talk to each other in any society we are always quick to saying: ‘That was the right thing to do,’ ‘He did that wrong,’ ‘She shouldn’t have done that’. Do you notice that everybody talks in those terms all the time? The assumption behind that is that there is a moral standard. Those assumptions are very similar to the Ten Commandments. The voice inside tells us something very similar to what the Ten Commandments tell us. Paul believes that God has given to each one of us, that inner sense of right and wrong.

That has been given to you as an individual and responsibility comes with it. Sometimes, through terrible things that might happen to us, or through people who lead us astray, or through some awful circumstances in life, our sense of right and wrong gets out of order. Sometimes we suppress the voice that says we should be doing a certain thing in a particular situation but that inner voice is still there. Sometimes society tells us to do something, or not to do something particular, which is only based on that particular society and it is not based on our conscience. You and I know that we wrestle with a sense of knowing what we ought to do all the time, and Paul is saying that is a God-given thing going on inside you, whether you are a believer or not.

A man came to me about 20 years ago. He had been married about 20 years. He told me he needed to talk to me. He had a family. He took me out for a walk, and he said, “I am faced with a very big decision. There is a woman at work and I am very drawn to her. We are just about to start a relationship. Should I do it? You are the only person I am going to talk to about this. I am going to make a decision in the next week or two.” I asked him, “What do you think is the right thing to do?” He already knew the answer to that question. That was his conscience speaking from within. But what was he going to do? He thought and he wrestled and he was troubled. He went away from that conversation saying, “I will not go ahead with that relationship.” And he didn’t go ahead with it, and he is still married to the same person today as a result of listening to that inner voice. Sometimes, we don’t listen to it, and then we get into a situation where we feel guilty and uneasy with ourselves. This can be God’s voice to us as well because this is often the basis upon which people make a decision to follow Jesus Christ. There is a feeling that there is something wrong inside them, a feeling of genuine guilt for things that they have done in the past.

Conscience is important. Paul says in these verses, that the Gentiles sometimes follow their conscience, but sometimes they don’t. Their conscience sometimes defends them and sometimes accuses them. That is the human experience. Sometimes we do the right thing, and sometimes we don’t and we tend to know the difference. We live with the uncertainty that sometimes we make wrong decisions. The reason it happens, is because God puts this moral sense within us deliberately, to help us to live well in society and to show us that we need salvation.

Accountability to God

‘This will take place on the day when God judges people’s secrets through Jesus Christ, as my Gospel declares.’

Romans 2:16, NIV

All the way through the New Testament, including in Paul’s teaching, there is a strong emphasis on mankind’s accountability to God and the certainty that we will stand before him after death and be judged for how we conducted our lives. Paul refers to it briefly here. It is important to understand how serious and significant this reality is. The best way I can illustrate it is to describe the scene of final judgment as given to us in the book of Revelation. This is what Paul is thinking about here.

Revelation 20: 11-15,

John is having a vision of the eternal world and the future and he sees this:

“Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it.’ (The white throne represents authority and judgment) ‘The earth and the heavens fled from his presence, and there was no place for them. And I saw the dead great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. The sea gave up the dead that were in it, death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what they had done. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.”

There are two sets of books. The books in this vision represent the account of people’s lives. God has the amazing ability to know everything about you and everything about me and every human who ever lived. He is all powerful and all-knowing. There is nothing hidden from him. In the judgment, we see the image here of your life written in a book. How would you feel if somebody gave you a book and said, ‘Here is your life, I know everything about it. I have written it all up and here is a copy and I am going to give it to other people?’ That is what happens on the day of Judgment - it becomes public.

That is what Paul has described in Romans 2. Sometimes people obeyed their conscience, sometimes they didn’t. Good and bad mixed together. But Paul’s gospel is based on the fundamental belief that, even if the good is more than the bad in an individual life, it is never enough to bring salvation. We can’t earn salvation. We can’t wipe out the bad things that are written down in that book and will one day be revealed in eternal judgment. The only answer is the gospel where God wipes out our sins, not in the future, but now. As you believe, you receive, according to Paul in Romans 1: 16-17, ‘the righteousness of God’. You are put in the right relationship. Everything is forgiven; salvation has come; you are living a new life, you are a different person. In Revelation 20 this is represented by the idea of the book of life. In God’s book of life all you need to have written there is not what you have done but your name. It doesn’t say all the good things you have done in the book of life, it just says, this person has been saved by Christ, through believing in him. That is Paul’s gospel. Paul explains that whatever category of human you are, whatever revelation you have received about God, whether it is from creation, from conscience, from the Law of Moses in the Old Testament and all the revelation given to the Jews - you as an individual, will never have responded perfectly to the revelation you have been given, whatever it is. You will never have responded perfectly to your conscience. You will have never worked out fully what it means to see this beautiful creation around us. You will never, if you are a Jew, have obeyed all the laws in the Law of Moses. Therefore you are still under the power of sin, whoever you are, and in need of the gospel of salvation.

Reflections

The final judgment is real. There is only one answer. ‘No one comes to the Father’, says Jesus, ‘except through me’. Paul understood that so clearly and he was willing to give up his life and all his energy to preach the gospel. He says in Romans 1: 16 he is not ‘ashamed of the gospel’. He has put it in the public sphere because he wants people to respond and be saved. We can thank God that he judges us according to opportunity. He will never judge us by things we didn’t know or couldn’t know but we will always fall short on the things that we do know. We can’t be saved by following religious rules and regulations, by trying to be moral and good; we can only be saved by the power of Christ.

The final reflection is that this leads us to an interesting question. When we are believers, as many of us listening to this will be, how do we live our lives once we have been saved? Do we need another moral code book to live our lives? This is going to be the topic of our second series, because once Paul has finished talking about the gospel and its power, which he will do by the end of chapter four, he will introduce us to the two key factors that help us to live the Christian life, and the overwhelmingly most important factor is the power of the Holy Spirit living within us. He has hardly mentioned the Holy Spirit up to this point but then in Series 2 the Holy Spirit becomes a major theme. The second thing he will introduce is the teaching of the New Testament.

But we are jumping ahead. Let us learn our lessons from this fascinating short passage in Paul’s argument. He presses on from here In the next episode, he is going to look at it from the point of view of the Jews. This episode has been focused from the point of view of the Gentiles. What possibilities do the Gentiles have to find God? They have conscience, they have creation. What did the Jews have? They have the law. He is going to talk more about how the Jews responded to the law that God had given them, and their many failures in doing so.