Inexcusable Excuse-Makers (Rom. 2:1-4)

 

“Judge not, that ye be not judged” (Mt. 7:1).  I think we could say this has probably surpassed John 3:16 as the most quoted verse in the Bible in our time.  At least, it would give John 3:16 a good running!  We see evidence for this claim whenever a Christian points out the sinfulness of some behavior and a lot of folks throw this verse back at them, as if it is the verse to end all moralistic discussion.  Clearly, they think this verse means that a Christian should never judge anyone for anything, especially things that are approved by society at large.

There are two problems with such an application of this verse.  First of all, in these words, our Lord is not forbidding all moral judgments.  In fact, it’s impossible to do such a thing; you can’t even quote this verse at someone and accuse them of being “judgy” without making a moral judgment.  But even our Lord in the context clearly is not forbidding moral discernment.  In the following verses of the Sermon on the Mount, from which this is quoted, our Lord tells us to have discernment to know when we are interacting with people he describes as dogs and swine (7:6).  In fact, he says that we should, “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits” (15-16).  If that’s not moral discernment, if that’s not rendering a moral judgment, I don’t know what is.  

The context tells us what Jesus is saying.  He is saying that we should not judge others and condemn them openly when we ourselves are doing the same thing.  He is saying that we should fix our problem first.  But here’s the thing: he gives us full allowance that, after we have dealt with the sin in our own life, we can help others to see the sin in theirs.  Here is what he goes on to say: “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye” (3-5).  Ah, there’s the problem! It’s hypocrisy, not judging.

Now ironically that’s another thing people like to judge the church for – hypocrisy.  But unfortunately all too often it is true.  We do need to be careful about this problem of hypocrisy: saying one thing and doing another.  Pretending to be one thing when you are another.  This was the great sin of the Pharisees, the most religious people on the planet at the time: they were condemned as such by our Lord himself: “woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” (23:13).  

And this is what the apostle is aiming at here in the text before us in Romans 2.  Having surveyed the Roman world in all the ugliness of its idolatry and the lifestyle that attended it in chapter 1, he imagines a number of people, both Jew and Gentile I think, that want to say they agree with Paul.  We’ve noted that the Stoic philosophers in Paul’s day condemned as contrary to nature the very behaviors he mentions in the previous chapter.  And certainly also many of Paul’s fellow countrymen would have been bellowing their amens at the apostle’s condemnation of the paganism all around them.

But the apostle is not okay with mere agreement, because he wants all his audience, and that includes you and me, to see that we stand in as much need of deliverance from the wrath of God that is coming on the world for its ungodliness and unrighteousness (1:18) as anyone else.  The apostle is in earnest to make us see that we have sinned and come short of the glory of God (3:23) and that we stand condemned alongside the vilest of men.  We need to be saved, and he wants us to see that.  Thank God, he also wants to show us that we can be saved through Jesus Christ.  But to appreciate that we first need to see that we need to be saved ourselves.

And the apostle knows that everyone is not wallowing in the gutters of life.  There are some who are thinkers, others who are religious, others who are moralistic, who think they have it all together and that they don’t need to be saved.  They don’t know what it means to feel guilty and condemned before God.  They lift their eyes to heaven, and say, “God I thank you that I am not like other men are.”  But the apostle wants them – and us – to see that all is not right.  He wants us to see that even the most moral of individuals is hell bound unless they are rescued from the wrath of God by the righteousness of God in Christ.  He wants us to see that we all need the gospel.  Hence he goes from dealing with inexcusable idol-makers to inexcusable excuse-makers.

So what do moralistic people need to hear?  Are you one of them?  Do you need to hear this?  In these verses, I see the apostle telling such people that they need to do three things.  First, they need to recognize their duplicity.  Second, they need to regard their danger.  Third, they need to reject their deception.

Recognize your duplicity.

The apostle begins this chapter with some very direct speech: “Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things” (1).  Four times in these verses, Paul refers to the individual he is addressing as “the one who judges” – three times in verse 1, and then again in verse 3.  This is a person who goes around judging others for the sin in their lives, and they feel really good about themselves in comparison to them.  Now Paul is talking to anyone who is like this: “whosoever thou art that judgest.”  Whoever you are who thinks that you are better than most people and you don’t need grace or God or religion or salvation or faith in Christ or repentance.  You are doing okay, thank you very much!  

However, what does God’s apostle say to this person?  He says, “Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man”!  Inexcusable: this is the same word we looked at in 1:20 in reference to those who reject the revelation of God’s power and existence from the evidence of the creation.  But now the person Paul is addressing here in chapter 2 is a religious person, or at least a moral person.  Not someone raking muck with the populace: here is someone who is refined in his or her tastes and polished in their behavior.  Intellectuals, perhaps.  But even so, they too are inexcusable!  

How is this?  How can it be?  The apostle tells us that they are inexcusable for at least two reasons.  First of all, they are inexcusable because they know something.  Paul’s opening word, “Therefore,” seems to have confused a lot of commentators.  The question is what is Paul referring back to here?  It’s not entirely clear.  Well, most are agreed that he is referring back to 1:18-32 as a whole, where he is also talking about people who know something.  They know something about God, even though they then suppress that knowledge and turn to idols.  But note how Paul ends the chapter: “Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them” (1:32).  “They which commit such things” is language that is picked up again here in chapter 2, in particular in verses 1 and 3.  They know things and yet they commit acts they know are wrong.  “Therefore you are inexcusable:” you know this is wrong.  It renders you inexcusable.

But that’s not all.  They are not only inexcusable because they know certain things are wrong, which is evidenced by the fact that they stand in judgment on those lifestyles and behaviors, but they also stand condemned because “thou that judgest doest the same things.”  In other words, they are not only inexcusable because they know something, but also because they do something.  The problem is that they are doing the very things they condemn others for.

Now Paul was addressing people in the first century, but surely we can see how relevant these words still are. My friends!  Who among us can say that we are guiltless here!  How many of us stand under the word of God, preached, read, and studied, and say amen to it, and yet go on to do the very things that it condemns!  Especially when no one can see what we are doing or thinking or imagining or desiring.  How easy it is to have the word of God and fail to apply it to our lives!  It is a problem when we hear a sermon or read a convicting passage of Scripture, and our first impulse is to think of someone else when we ought to be thinking of ourselves.  This is a particular danger for preachers, but it is a danger for all of us.  We are first and foremost to apply to the word of God to ourselves.  “Always apply the word of God” (Lloyd-Jones).  Always!  That good advice.  And to do this, we first need to recognize our duplicity: our failure to do this very thing.

Here we are confronted with the terrible subtlety of sin.  You might say that Paul has been dealing with sin in is grossest manifestations in chapter 1.  But here he is dealing with sin in its subtlety.  The problem is that sin in its subtlety is just as dangerous, perhaps even more so, than sin in is grosser manifestations.  No one received more severe condemnation from Christ than the Pharisees.  Not the prostitutes, not the traitors who worked with Rome, but the religious and “good” people!  How fearful are statements of our Lord like this: “Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?” (Mt. 23:33).  They were so religious; they didn’t see that they were running headlong into hell.  But let’s not forget that there are people like that now, too.

And if you think you’re immune to this sort of thing; think again!  David the king, a man after God’s own heart (and by the way, this was not a fallible biographer’s assessment, but God’s own assessment of David, so we can be sure it was true), even this man failed in this respect.  He took another man’s wife, and had the husband murdered on the battlefield, and then went on to cover it all up.  But God sent the prophet Nathan to David who told him a story.  The story was about a rich man who though he had plenty of flocks and herds, seized a poor man’s ewe lamb that he doted over, and without any feeling whatsoever slew it to feed a guest.  When David, even though he was still in the process of hiding his own terrible sins, heard this, he grew indignant: “And David's anger was greatly kindled against the man; and he said to Nathan, As the Lord liveth, the man that hath done this thing shall surely die: And he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity” (2 Sam. 12:5-6).  Little did David know that the story was about himself: “And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man” (7).  

How was it that David could feel such anger at the very thing he had done when he thought it was about someone else?  But we are all guilty of the same sort of thing, aren’t we?  This is how sin works: it blinds us from seeing our own sin when we can simultaneously see it so clearly in others.  It’s the old problem of a man with a two-by-four sticking out of his own eye, trying to get a speck out of his brother’s eye!

My friend, is the Lord saying to you in these words of the apostle, “Thou art the man”?  May he open the eyes of all of us to see and to recognize our duplicity.  But this is not all that we should do.  The next thing is to:

Regard your danger. 

Against the duplicity and hypocrisy of these “self-righteous moralists” (John Stott), Paul contrasts the righteous judgment of God.  He brings us face to face with God and his standard of judgment: “But we are sure that the judgment of God is according to truth against them which commit such things” (Rom. 2:2).  We can so easily become blind to our own sin with the warm and sleep-inducing self-righteousness to which we are all subject, and we need the cold and bracing wind of God’s holiness to confront us and wake us up to it.  This is what Paul does here.  As opposed to our self-deceit and duplicity, by which we condemn sin in others and yet give ourselves a pass, God’s judgment is “according to truth against them which commit such things.”    In fact, we can be sure of it!

I think what Paul means by this is that God will not do what we do: he will not judge one sin in this person and then pass over it in someone else.  Paul is driving at this reality in different ways throughout this passage.  He will say, for example, in verse 11 that “there is no respect of persons with God.”  God is true and righteous in his judgments.  Aaron’s sons are the anointed priests of the Lord, and yet they are struck down without mercy when they sacrilegiously offered strange fire.  Uzzah may have had the best of intentions, but when he touched the Ark of God, which was forbidden, he too was struck down.  This is not just in the OT, for in the NT we see Ananias and his wife Sapphira drop dead when they lied about what they had given to the church.  And though it is true that many of God’s judgments await the final day of judgment, that is no relief, is it?  

Now I know that those who are truly saved will be saved to the end.  I believe in the perseverance and preservation of the saints.  But we should never think for a moment that God will not discipline his people.  He disciplined David severely.  Here is the way the apostle Peter put it to other believers: “if ye call on the Father, who without respect of persons judgeth according to every man's work, pass the time of your sojourning here in fear” (1 Pet. 1:17).  Take the holiness to which God calls you seriously, Peter is saying, because God takes it seriously: “pass the time of your sojourning here in fear.”  No, not in the fear of terror, but one of healthy and serious reverence and respect.

And then what of those who claim to be on good terms with God and yet aren’t?  The Bible speaks of those people, too.  To use Peter’s words again: “And if the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?” (1 Pet. 4:18).  Friends, let us regard the very real and existential danger of God, who will certainly discipline his duplicitous children, and if one will not repent, will cast them from his presence.

And let us remember that when it says that God judges according to the truth, it means the truth as it really is, not just as we present it to the world around us.  Paul speaks of a day when “when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel” (Rom. 2:16).  Secrets!  He knows our hearts better than we do.  He knows our words before we speak them; he knows our thoughts afar off.  Who can understand his errors? David asks.  God does!  Oh, it does us no good to fool the people around us when we shall all stand before the judgment seat of him who judges according to the truth!  O man!  Have regard to your danger!  And then . . .

Reject your deception.

How is it that we can do this?  We’ve been asking that question all along, but I think Paul really does help us see why it is that we so easily deceive ourselves.  Look at what he says in verse 3: “And thinkest thou this, O man, that judgest them which do such things, and doest the same, that thou shalt escape the judgment of God?”  We really do think that we shall escape the judgment of God.  We really do think that God will judge partially when it comes to us, that he will set aside the standard of truth when we stand before his throne.  Why do we think this way?  The answer comes in verse 4: “Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance?”

Now some translations like the ESV, have “presume on” instead of “despise.”  I suppose the word can bear both meanings, but I really do think that “despise” is a better translation here, or something along those lines.  I think the NASB has, “to think lightly of.”  Others, “to have contempt for.”  This is confirmed, I think, when you look at the other passages in which this word is used.  We despise God’s mercy.  Here is why we despise his mercy and think God will pass by our sins without notice: we are living ignorantly of the purpose of God’s mercy and goodness toward us.

Here is what happens, though it ought not to be this way!  Here we are, living in sins that we know are wrong, and yet thinking that God will pass us by.  Why?  Well, because we’ve just had dinner and we have a nice home, and a wonderful family, and we have a well-paying job and a retirement, and we get to go on these exotic vacations.  And nothing is happening to us!  God is good to us!  Isn’t that all the evidence we want to justify going on in our sins?  We dare God to do something about it, not realizing that we have missed the message.  The message in all of God’s acts of kindness to us is not that we should keep on keeping on in our sins but that we should repent!

So there are two things we should know.  First, that God is a God who will judge us according to truth.  And second, that God’s mercy is a continual call to repentance.  You get up in the morning, and it is a call to repent.  You dress yourselves and eat your next meal, and it is a call to repent.  You go to work and come home in the evening, and it is a call to repent.  And on and on.  Why has our world not come crashing in on us when we live in neglect of God Almighty?  It is the same reason the world as a whole hasn’t come to an end: “The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (1 Pet. 3:9).

But please don’t hear this as a call to ignore the gospel and clean yourself up.  That’s not the call to repentance.  Such a thing would only leave us where we are.  Duplicitous people can’t be trusted to change themselves.  In any case, we cannot.  We don’t live up to what we already know.  We are stained by the guilt of past, present, and future sins.  We cannot save ourselves.  That’s not what the call to repentance is.

We cannot and we must not read this passage apart from the larger context of Romans.  This is the way to keep ourselves from misreading this call to repentance.  Paul’s whole point is to drive us to see our need, not for self-improvement, but to Christ!  We must remember and never forget that the heart of the gospel is the good news of the revelation of the righteousness of God from faith to faith (Rom. 1:16-17).  The thing that will save you in the end from your duplicity and deception and from the danger that threatens us in the wrath of God against sin, is not the righteousness of man but the righteousness of God.  If you ask, What is that? I answer, it is the righteousness which we receive from God as a gift of sheer grace and mercy, which we receive through faith in Christ.  We receive it through Christ because it is Jesus Christ alone who is our righteousness before God.  “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor. 5:21).  

You see, God will always judge according to the truth.  But if you belong to Jesus Christ, then your sins have been paid for in his atoning death.  And his obedience is credited to you.  He is our Advocate, our Substitute, our Ransom, our Redeemer, the one who has fully satisfied all the demands of divine justice fully in our stead.  So if you appear before the court of heaven clothed in the righteousness of Christ, God cannot but welcome you: “Payment God cannot twice demand; first at my bleeding Surety’s hand, and then again at mine.”  But if you appear naked, standing on your own two feet, apart from Christ, God will judge you according to truth, and the only sentence that can possibly proceed on that basis is: “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.”  As Matthew Henry put it, those who will not come to Christ to be saved must depart from him to be damned.

My friends, do you not know that the universal call to repentance (Acts 17:30) is a mercy from heaven to you and that it is seeing the mercy of God in Christ that drives us to repentance?  That’s what Paul says ought to happen and does happen when by God’s grace we are sweetly drawn to renounce our sins as we turn to Christ.  Repentance happens when we see the mercy of God for what it is.  It is a call to embrace Jesus Christ in faith and trust as he is freely presented to us in the gospel, as our Lord and Savior.  “Repentance unto life” is, as the Shorter Catechism puts it, “a saving grace, whereby a sinner, out of a true sense of his sin, and apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ, doth, with grief and hatred of his sin, turn from it unto God, with full purpose of, and endeavor after, new obedience.”

So you see, the gospel is not just for the outcasts of society.  It’s for all of us.  Because the fact of the matter is that society really is not a good judge of who should be an outcast and who should not be.  We are all outcasts before God.  We are all in need of the mercy of God in Christ.  Thank God, there is mercy for irreligious outcasts and mercy for religious outcasts.

Jesus is the Great Physician.  He heals the sick and sinners.  He did not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.  Do you see that you are a sinner?  Do you want to be cleansed from the guilt of your sin?  Do you want to be released from the iron grip of sin in your life?  My friend, look to Christ.  He has saved everyone who has come to him in faith.  In fact, when we do come, we will see that he was drawing us all along.  

So let us not just see the ugliness of our sin and hypocrisy.  That’s good as far as it goes.  We need to see it.  But if you stay there, it will only breed one of two things – either self-righteousness for those who think they can change themselves, or despair for those who realize they can’t.  As we see our own sinfulness and ugliness, let us turn from ourselves to see Jesus Christ.  He is altogether lovely. He is the fairest of ten thousand.  He is good and faithful and loving and kind.  He saves all who come to God by him.  “Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them. For such an high priest became us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens; Who needeth not daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifice, first for his own sins, and then for the people's: for this he did once, when he offered up himself” (Heb. 7:25-27).