Romans, especially chapters 1-8, is the most systematic presentation of God's good news in the New Testament. All Christians should know this material thoroughly and be able to share and explain it to others.
Although the gospel is God's good news, it begins with His bad news — humanity deserves God's judgment.
Paul declared that the immoral pagans are justly under God's judgment because they suppress their knowledge of the true God to worship false gods, and because their lives are filled with overt rebellion against God (see Romans 1:29-32). Those people are in trouble with God!
You might be wondering, "But what about the people who believe in the God of the Bible, who go to church to worship Him, who are upstanding, law-abiding citizens, and who are deeply offended by the pagans? Are you saying that they are also under God's judgment"
The chances are pretty good that you describe yourself this way, or that you know many who do. A study conducted in the 1990’s showed that 82% of adult Americans believe in an afterlife that includes both heaven and hell, but only 4% of those people believe that they will go to hell. Since only 35% of American adults claim to have received the gospel, this means just under half of all American adults believe they do not deserve God's judgment.
If you are one of these people, you are not going to like Romans 2 – because Paul is specifically addressing you in this chapter. Notice the switch from "they" in Romans 1:32 to "you" Romans in 2:1. This is God's bad news, part #2. The "good" people are also in trouble with God, they are also headed for God's judgment. They are "without excuse" just as much as the pagans are "without excuse" (see Romans 1:20). Paul is going to systematically expose and refute every illegitimate exemption clause we use. And he is an expert at doing this, since he lived the first 30+ years of his life as the quintessential "good" person.
This is the most common and deep-seated form of denial. Our standard of reference for most things, including morality, is how we compare ourselves to other people. And in many human affairs, horizontal comparison is appropriate.
We often grade exams on a curve, taking the range of scores and apportioning the grades among them rather than grading everyone against 100%. On a hard test, 54% may be considered a "good" score.
When we speak of human moral behavior, we instinctively think in a similar way. There is a legitimate sense in which we speak of "good" people, like people who argue with their spouse or cheat a little on their taxes, versus "bad" people, who murder their spouses or cheat the government out of hundreds of thousands of dollars of income tax. On this basis, most of us can say "I am a good person compared to them."
But it is a fatal error to assume that God's judges according to the same standard. Read Romans 2:1-3. Paul says God's judgment is "based on truth”. This means that God judges us, not according to how we compare to "bad" people, but according to how we compare to who He really is. And since God is perfectly righteous, He evaluates us based on whether we live up to His standard. God does not grade on the curve; His passing grade is 100%!
In Mark’s Gospel, someone asked Jesus about how good he had to be to inherit eternal life and Jesuse immediately clarified the meaning of "good" in this context (see Mark 10:17-18). When it comes to earning entrance into God's kingdom, the standard for "good" is God Himself.
This is why Paul insists that when you judge the "bad" person as worthy of God's judgment, you seal your own fate. The issue is not whether you break God's law less than other people, but whether you break it at all. If you agree that God should judge sin, and you sin, then you agree that God should judge you.
Look at the list of things that deserve God's judgment in Romans 1:29-31:
It can be tempting to think that God’s way of judging is not fair. Some people just seem more sinful than we are, right? Why can God not operate within our own standards of good and bad?
This form of denial was really deep-seated among Paul's Jewish countrymen. They mistakenly believed that because they were born into God's chosen people, they were automatically exempt from God's judgment. The rabbis even taught that all Israelites have a portion in the age to come and that Abraham held the authority to turn Israelites away if they had been sent there by mistake. Paul describes this mentality in Romans 2:17-20.
Although this is more common in cultures that emphasize inherited privilege, you still see this form of denial to some extent in our culture, through family lines of ministers, people born into the church, and other forms of religious entitlement.
Paul says that when it comes to earning God's acceptance, He does not show favoritism based on family lineage or cultural-based rights. The issue is not what kind of religious lineage you have, but whether you have fully obeyed God's law. Read Romans 2:6-13.
It is a violation of Romans 2:1-3 to read these verses in a comparative sense. Paul is speaking in an absolute sense. If you fully obey God's law, which no one can do, you will earn eternal life regardless of your religious lineage. But if you "do evil" or "sin", which everyone does, you deserve God's wrath regardless of your religious lineage.
This does not mean there were no advantages to being born into the chosen people (see Romans 3:2). God gave the Bible through them, and He gave the Messiah through them. But He did not give them any inherited immunity from His judgment. In fact, they get judged "first" because they know His standard more clearly than those who never had the 10 Commandments.
Some people think they will avoid God's judgment because they have "a good public record." It is possible to live your whole life without committing overt, public sins — like murder, adultery, or tax fraud.
But it is a fatal mistake to believe that a good public record means you deserve exemption from God's judgment. This is because God will judge not only our overt, public acts. He will also judge our secrets (see Philippians 2:16). He knows our secrets because He is omniscient; He must judge our secrets because He is just. So it is not whether people can find dirt on the outside; it is whether God finds dirt on the inside. What does this "secret dirt" include?
How would you feel if you had to appear before God and suddenly, all of your secrets are made known before Him?
Jewish males in Paul's day depended heavily on receiving the rite of circumcision. To even suggest that their circumcision gave them no immunity from God's judgment was likely to result in a fight. In the same way, many church people put incredible confidence in observing divinely ordained rituals like baptism, church attendance, and communion.
But Paul denies this (see Philippians 2:25-27). He is not against circumcision, or the other rituals practiced during that time, he originated them; but he is against false confidence in ritual observance. What matters is not whether you observe divinely ordained rituals, but whether you obey God's law. Ritual observance provides no immunity from God's judgment. This is contrary to the Old Testament, and it turns God into someone who can be fooled by people who simply do the actions without the right heart to go along with it.
"Are you saying that all the times I have gone to church, when I could have stayed in bed, and worshiped God through the liturgy and gone to confession and taken communion, when I could have spent time on my own hobbies and interests, do not matter in God’s eyes?" If you are talking about earning God's acceptance, God says they count for nothing.
Then why did God give them in the first place? Paul gives a hint of this in Philippians 2:28-29. His point is that they are outward pictures of an inward spiritual reality that God gives you when you come to Him with the right heart attitude.
Circumcision was a picture of the radical heart surgery God would provide through the Holy Spirit so we will want to obey God. Baptism is a picture of how God washes away our guilt once and for all through Christ's death for our sins. Communion is a picture of how God makes His grace available to us through Christ as often as we need it.
What a tragic perversion to rely on ritual observance to earn God's acceptance! This is like a criminal showing off a clemency document as a graduation diploma.
You can see from these last two verses why Paul wrote this painful chapter. Not to humiliate you or drive you to despair of having God's acceptance. But to humble you and drive you to despair of earning God's acceptance. Paul is like a doctor trying to break through the denial of his patient by exposing the seriousness of his condition — not to enjoy his distress, but so he will submit to the cure he is offering free of charge.
Are you ready to take your place before God with the "bad" people (see Philippians 3:9a)? Are you ready to admit that you are just like "them" in the most important way of all — that you have broken God's law countless times in thought, word and deed — and that you deserve not His acceptance but His judgment? If you are not willing to admit this, you are saying "I do not need God's charity — I am good enough." But if you are willing to admit it, you can receive God's complete exemption (see John 5:24).
Are you willing to risk offending your "good" family members and friends so they can see their need for grace? This is not religious judgmentalism; it is an act of love.
