False Hopes Exposed and Eliminated (Rom. 2:12-16)

As we continue to work our way through the epistle of Paul to the Romans, we come to this section of the letter in which he, as it were, is indicting the world before the judgment seat of God.  He is doing this because he wants us to see our need for the gospel.  In this text the apostle exposes two false hopes as the vain and vacuous things that they are.  By false hope, I mean a hope that a person has that they are okay with God when they are not.  Paul mentions two false hopes here.  The first is confidence in religious knowledge and the second is the confidence in religious ignorance.  Some people think that the religious knowledge that they have is proof enough that they are on the narrow way to life.  On the other hand, there are other people who hide behind their ignorance about religious things, and think that what they don’t know can’t hurt them.  The sad thing is that those who entertain such hopes aren’t going to give the gospel a second thought.  But the apostle exposes both these ideas as false and wrong.

Here is what he does.  He has been saying in the previous verses that both Jew and Gentile are exposed to the wrath of God because of sin.  He then summarizes this argument in verse 12: “For as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law: and as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law.”  Those who are “without law” are the Gentiles and those who are “in the law” or “under the law” are Jews.  Gentiles “shall … perish” and Jews “shall be judged.”  God is no respecter of persons (11); all stand exposed to God’s judgment.

Now the apostle has been arguing that God’s judgment is just (2).  He has been arguing that God will judge those who sin against what they know.  We are liable to judgment because we know something is wrong and yet we do it anyway.  That has been the apostle’s argument up to this point.  In what sense then do these verses advance his argument?  They advance his argument by showing on what basis of justice God will judge Jew and Gentile. 

To see this, I want you to observe the structure of the text.  Note that in the KJV, verses 13-15 are in a parenthesis.  I think this is correct.  Verse 16, in other words, is picking up the thought from verse 12.  The Gentiles will perish and the Jews will be judged, verse 12, and this will happen (the perishing and the judging) “in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel” (16).

Then in verses 13-15, Paul is explaining on what basis God can bring judgment upon Gentile and Jew.  He brings it upon the Jews because though they hear the law, they do not keep it (13).  And God brings it upon the Gentiles because though they do not have the written law like the Jews, they do have a moral consciousness that testifies to the work of God’s law and is witnessed to by the conscience.  In each case, both are sinning against something that they know, whether it is God’s law written in the Law of Moses, or whether it is God’s law testified to by conscience.  They are still both without excuse.

Now as we look at these verses together, I want us to see how these two persistent false hopes perish in these verses.  I call them persistent false hopes because they appear again and again, not only in past history but probably even in our own experience.  And I want us to see why the apostle is so interested in torpedoing these false hopes.  Some people might argue that hope is hope and if it makes someone happy, leave them alone!  Why pull the rug out from under someone?  Isn’t that cruel?  Why make them feel unhappy and guilty?  Well, we shall see that the purpose is not to make people unhappy; quite the opposite, in fact.  False hopes are false precisely because they will collapse under us at the very moment when we need the support.  What we need are not false hopes but real ones.  But false hopes have to die in order for us to see the reality and relevance of true hope.  So here are my points: why these hopes are false, and then why they must die.

Why these hopes are false.

I mentioned at the beginning that the false hopes Paul addresses here are confidence in religious knowledge and confidence in religious ignorance.  The Jews were among those who prided themselves on their religious knowledge. These are the ones the apostle is speaking to when he writes, “For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified” (13).  The Jews had the law.  Though most didn’t have a copy of the Torah at home, they would go to the synagogue every Sabbath and hear it read.  Hence, Paul addresses them as “the hearers of the law.”  And they thought that by having the privilege of hearing and learning the law, that was evidence enough that they were in good graces with God.

Now the ancient Israelite was not the only one who dealt with this problem.  If you have grown up in a Christian home, you have to be careful that it’s not your problem.  We can deceive ourselves into thinking we’re just fine because we have some Biblical knowledge.  We can mistake knowledge for evidence of spiritual health.  But it’s not.  This reminds me of some students I had in the past when I taught at the university.  There would be a student who failed a class and failed it miserably.  They would then have to retake the class.  But the problem I often encountered was that sometimes they wouldn’t take the class they were retaking seriously enough.  They needed to really grapple with the material and think about it and wrestle with it and do the homework and listen attentively in class and ask questions.  But more often than not, these students, having already heard the material once, assumed that they didn’t need to hear it again!  In fact, they were the ones who needed to pay the most attention to it, and yet so many times they were the ones who ended up not taking it seriously at all.  And they inevitably ended up failing all over again.  You see, hearing is not understanding.  And hearing God’s word doesn’t mean you’ve really understood it, or that it has been a blessing to your soul.  There are probably many people who have heard thousands of sermons and assume that solely on the basis of that fact that they are spiritually okay.  But that’s not necessarily the case!

And so Paul goes on to say that it’s not the hearers but “the doers of the law” who “shall be justified.”  It’s not a matter of having the law; it’s a matter of doing it, of obeying it.  And this is just where they failed.  

Now there are many who think that Paul is actually arguing that a person can be justified, forgiven, and saved by works.  So when Paul says the doers of the law will be justified, he imagines that there will be people who are justified by keeping God’s law.  Some who are more careful will say that the apostle is talking about future justification at the final judgment when God will vindicate his people on the evidence of their works.  The problem with that interpretation is that it’s just not the way Paul understands the reality of justification in any of his epistles.  This is the first use of the verb “to justify” in Romans and we must not imagine that he has introduced one of the most important concepts of this epistle in a completely different way than he will use it later.  Justification is God’s declaration that one is righteous.  Here, Paul is saying it’s not the hearing of the law that will ensure that declaration; it’s the doing of the law that will ensure it.

But Paul’s great argument, as we shall see, is that we are justified by faith in Christ without the works of the law.  The entire argument of the apostle from 1:18 to 3:20 is to make that an inescapable conclusion for his readers.  We remind you of where he’s heading: “Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin” (3:20).  And then a few verses later: “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law” (3:28).  So he can’t possibly be saying here that anyone can be justified by keeping the law.

What then is Paul doing here?  He is simply reminding his readers of the terms of the law.  There were people in his audience who put their hope that they were accepted by God on the basis of their having the law of God.  But Paul is saying, in effect, “Look, if you want to put your hope in the possession of God’s law, you have to abide by its terms.  And the terms that the law of God demands are full and perfect obedience.  If you want life by the law, you must obey it.”  

Now some might argue that Paul is not saying that full obedience is demanded here, but only keeping the law of God by faith.  But that is not what the apostle says, is it?  The doers of the law are justified.  Who are they?  They are the ones who keep the law from A to Z, from beginning to end, from the moment they are born to the moment they die.  It doesn’t matter if you keep most of the law; you must keep all of it if you want to be justified by it.  This is why Paul will say this to the Galatians: “For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse: for it is written, Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them. But that no man is justified by the law in the sight of God, it is evident: for, The just shall live by faith. And the law is not of faith: but, The man that doeth them shall live in them” (Gal. 3:10-12).  You have to continue in all things which are written in the law, or you are under a curse.  It’s the man who does the commandments of the law – all of them – who lives.

Or consider what the apostle James says: “For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all. For he that said, Do not commit adultery, said also, Do not kill. Now if thou commit no adultery, yet if thou kill, thou art become a transgressor of the law” (Jam. 2:10-11).  At the end of the day, it’s not finally a matter of how many laws you have kept.  The problem is who you are sinning against when you do sin.  To beak one law is to sin against God.  And because God is a Being of infinite glory, sin against God is a crime of infinite proportions.  One sin is all it takes to get there.  So you see, doing the law is not just about being better than most.  If you want to be justified by the law, you have to keep all of it all the time.

How many people can say that they have done that?  You might be able to pick a selection of God’s commandments and say, with the rich young ruler, “All these have I kept from my youth up,” but there is always going to be something that you haven’t done.  All of us are law-breakers.  All of us!  “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23).  So those who put their hope in religious upbringing, religious knowledge, or even religious observance as the basis of their relationship with God are banking that on a false hope.  Only doers of the law are justified and none of us are doers.

The second false hope is the hope, ironically, that people put in religious ignorance.  In other words, there are some people who think that what they don’t know can’t hurt them.  Of course that’s a dangerous philosophy of life, but it is especially foolish when it comes to the matter of our relationship with God.  There are some people who think that religion is really not that important at all, that all you need to do is to live up the light you have and do the best you can do.  Now I’m not about to say you shouldn’t do that; of course all of us should live that way.  But to rest your hopes on that for salvation and life is folly.

However, some people will come to verses like this and say that is precisely what the apostle Paul is saying here!  They will argue that the apostle is talking in verses 14-15 about pagans who are saved.  They argue that the evidence that they are saved is that they have God’s law written on their hearts.  So, they would say, a person doesn’t have to have the Bible, they don’t have to know Christ, they just need to live up to the light they have.

Now that is a wrong interpretation of these verses.  It’s wrong on the face of it because the fact of the matter is that no one apart from the grace of God in Christ lives up to the light that they have.  But it’s also false as a matter of interpretation.  This is another instance where a text has been taken out of context and twisted into meaning something entirely alien to the apostle’s intention.  We need to remember that the context of verses 13-15 is verses 12 and 16.  In other words, the context here is judgment, the judgment of God, the final judgment of God.  The context is not how people are saved but how and why people are condemned.  Paul is explaining in verses 13-15 why those who sin in the law will be judged and why those who sin without the law will perish.  Verse 13 explains verse 12b: why the Jew, the one who sins in the law, will be condemned.  Then verses 14-15 explain 12a: they are an explanation why the Gentiles who sin but didn’t have the written law will nevertheless perish.  The context is judgment, and an explanation of why God can judge both Jew and Gentile.  This is not at all about saved people or how people get saved.

What then does the apostle mean when he talks about “the work of the law written in their hearts”?  Now people will point to the New Covenant promise in Jeremiah 31 and Hebrews 8 and say here is definitive proof that Paul is talking about saved people.  For one of the key New Covenant promises is that God will write his law in the hearts of his people: “But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jer. 31:33).  

Well, Paul is not talking about that here.  The New Covenant promise, though using similar language, is not talking about the same thing.  The New Covenant is God’s promise in Christ to save his people and to regenerate them.  But that is not what Paul is describing.  He’s not talking about salvation but nature: “For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another” (Rom. 2:14-15).  Now we’ve already come across this word “nature” in Romans, and it was in Romans 1:26 when the apostle is describing sins which were “against nature,” that is, against the order God established in creation.  So when Paul says that the Gentiles do these things by nature, he is talking about something that is true of mankind in virtue of their creation; that is, by virtue of being human.

All men are made in God’s image, saved or not, pagan or Jew or Christian, and as such they are moral beings.  They have the work of God’s law written in their hearts, not in virtue of the new birth, but in virtue of nature and of the creation order.  Every nation and every culture has some sense of right and wrong.  There are things which are universally condemned in every age and culture – which, by the way, is a very strong indication that the secular viewpoint which says that there is no objective right or wrong is badly flawed.  Of course guys like the atheist Richard Dawkins will say that this is an artifact of evolution, and that evolution has tricked us into thinking there is right and wrong.  But that’s not a satisfying explanation either, for evolution is supposed to be about the survival of the fittest, and when that philosophy is put into practice you don’t get morality, you get Nazism!

So Paul is describing nature in terms of the creation order, not the new nature in terms of the salvation Christ brings.  But his argument is this: God can condemn such people who sin (12) because, even though they don’t have the Bible, they still know certain things are wrong, they have this moral consciousness, which Paul refers to as the work of the law written in their hearts (14-15).  

And their conscience speaks to this as well.  The conscience is that moral faculty we possess that judges us when we do bad and commends us when we do what is right.  By the way, it’s important to say that the conscience is not perfect and can go astray.  Sometimes the conscience needs to be educated.  But we should never go against our conscience.  We should never do something we think is wrong or fail to do something we think is right.  As Paul will say later, whatever is not of faith is sin (14:23).

Paul’s point in all of this is that knowing the true religion in itself won’t save you.  And not having the true religion is no excuse either.  Both Jew and Gentile stand condemned before God.  Let’s beware that we don’t seek false consolation either in religious knowledge or in religious ignorance.  God is not without witness; his law is not without witness, and those who sin against it (and that’s all of us) will be brought to account on the day of judgment unless something is done about our sin.

Why these false hopes must die

Now I want to come back to this question: why is Paul doing this?  Why is he, as it were, parading people before the judgment seat of God to be arraigned and condemned?  Why not leave people in blissful ignorance if they’re happy in that state?  Well, we need to have false hopes dashed because they act like walls that keep us from seeing our true hope which is Christ.  They keep us from seeing our need of him and from seeing his sufficiency to bring us to God.   

I think our Lord’s words to the church in Laodicea illustrate what I’m trying to get at here.  Christ told the church at Laodicea, these people who said, “I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing” – that what false hopes do to people – “and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked.”  Well, when false hopes are stripped away, that’s when we see our wretchedness and our misery and our poverty and our blindness and our nakedness before God.  What is the cure for it all?  Christ!  As he goes on to tell the church: “I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear; and anoint thine eyes with eyesalve, that thou mayest see” (Rev. 3:17-18).

This is what Paul is trying to do.  He is trying to get his audience to see that they are wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked.  But his purpose is not to leave them there.  Romans 2 is a stop on the way to Romans 3-5, when the apostle will unpack the gospel and its implications.  And what is the gospel, essentially?  It is Christ telling us that he can give us what we don’t have.  He can bring us to God.  He can cleanse us from our sins.  He is an all-sufficient Savior.  

So do you see yourself as spiritually impoverished?  False hopes make you think you’re rich when you don’t have a penny to your name before God.  I don’t think it was an accident that our Lord began the Beatitudes, and indeed, the entire Sermon on the Mount, by declaring, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 5:3).  Sin impoverishes us because sin strips us of fellowship with God.  God told the rebellious nation of Israel, “your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear” (Isa. 59:2).  What does it matter if I rule over the nations and have all the gold and silver in the world if there is a chasm between my soul and God?  The question of our Lord ought to make us think: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Mk. 8:36-37).  We have lost our souls when we are alienated from God.  In the parable of the rich fool, who pulled down his barns to build bigger barns, our Lord ends the story by contrasting the man’s temporal wealth with the tragedy of his spiritual poverty: “But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?  So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God” (Lk. 12:20-21). Have we spent our lives laying us treasure for ourselves when our souls are impoverished and bankrupt before God?

But, my friends, Christ gives us the true riches: “I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich.”  He makes us rich by bringing us to God, so that all things now work for our good, so that God who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all will with him freely give us all things (Rom. 8:28, 32).  He makes us rich by uniting us to himself and giving us all spiritual blessings in heavenly places (Eph. 1:3).  

He is our treasure because he did what we cannot do.  We cannot be justified through law keeping.   But Jesus kept the law perfectly.  He never disobeyed a single commandment.  His entire life was one of obedience.  And then he offered himself without spot to God.  The sacrifices of the OT law had to be spotless; there could be no blemish.  Even so, there was no moral blemish on Christ when he went to the cross, he who knew no sin.  He died, not because he deserved it, but because we deserved.  He died in the place of sinners.  He substituted himself in our place and bore the punishment we deserve.  He takes away our guilt and our condemnation and he brings us to God, not now as our Judge but as our Father.  He gives us hope; indeed, he is our hope (1 Tim. 1:1).

Do you see yourself to be naked before God?  Are we trying to wear the rags of our self-righteousness in his presence?  Don’t you see that the only one who can cover us is God?  We can try our figs leaves, but we need Jesus to die for us so we can be clothed in his righteousness. In Christ we can say with the people of God, “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my soul shall be joyful in my God; for he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments, and as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels” (Isa. 61:10).  The Lord Jesus Christ our Savior gives us “white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear.”

Do you know that your natural state is blindness?  I don’t mean of course physical blindness but spiritual blindness. How the so-called wise men of the world think they see!  But through their wisdom they know not God (1 Cor. 1:18).  It is precisely because men have rejected the authority of Scripture and have substituted autonomous human reason in its place that we live in a world that can no longer even define what a woman is, let alone tell us how to get right with God!  Our spiritual and moral blindness means that we cannot see and that the only way we can see is if Christ grants us sight.  We are dependent completely upon him.  It is as much a miracle for a man to see truth – by that, I mean not only to intellectually perceive it but also to see and feel its reality and relevance to us – as it was for God to call the light out of darkness on the first day of Creation.  As Paul puts it to the Corinthians: “But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost: In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them. For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus' sake.  For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:3-6).

But Jesus give us sight.  He takes blind eyes and makes them see.  He counsels us to come to him to “anoint thine eyes with eyesalve, that thou mayest see.”  

My friends, it is wonderful when God gives us sight to see two things: to see the misery of our condition in sin, and to see the sufficiency of Christ to save us from that sin.  The first requires the dashing of hopes.  The second the substitution of true and living and lasting hope in Christ.  There is no other hope like him!  As the apostle Peter put it, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you” (1 Pet. 1:3-4).  Living hope!  How does it come? It comes only through the abundant mercy of God through Jesus Christ.  

So this is what the good apostle is doing.  I hope by the work of the Spirit of God in your heart, your eyes see your own unworthiness before God, but also the worthiness of Christ for you.  Let your false hopes die and find true hope in Jesus Christ.  And I am so thankful that he doesn’t say, “Hey, you need to clean yourself up first.”  He says, “Come to me in your nakedness, in your poverty, in your blindness, and let me clothe you, enrich you, and make you see.”  May you do so today and find rest and hope in him!

And if you have come to know Christ as your Savior and Lord, I want to remind you that the doors of the church are open.  To follow Christ means to join him in baptism, and it means following him with his church.  Come and welcome, all who love Jesus and want to follow him!