The Inexcusable Judge

Therefore you are inexcusable, O man, whosoever you are that judges, for wherein you judge another, you condemn yourself; for you that judge do the same things... do you despise the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leads to repentance? But after the hardness and impenitent heart you store up unto yourself wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God; who will render to every man according to his deeds.

The one quickest to condemn the world's sin proves, in his very judgment, that the same sin lives in his own heart.

Paul's Aim: The Glory of the Gospel

Paul's purpose in opening this letter to the church at Rome is to exalt the glories of the gospel of God. As we saw in Romans 1:15, he was ready and willing to preach that gospel in Rome, just as he had already done in Galatia, Macedonia, Greece, and Asia Minor. Wherever Paul went, he went not as a traveling tentmaker or a sightseer admiring the great temples of Corinth or Ephesus. His whole aim was to proclaim the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ.

He declared in verse 16 that he was not ashamed of the gospel, because he knew it alone is the very power of God unto salvation to everyone that believes. The gospel is the only way of salvation. Peter preached the same in Acts 4:12: "There is no other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved." Jesus said it of Himself in John 14: "I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father but by Me."

The word "gospel," from the Greek euangelion, means good news, glad tidings of good things. It is the same word used in the Greek Old Testament for the messengers who carried word to the captive Jews in Babylon: "You can go free, you're set free." It was good news.

The Black Backdrop of Our Lostness

But for the good news to become exceedingly glorious, it must be presented against the black backdrop of the lostness of humanity. The good news only becomes clear as good news when we recognize how bad the bad news is. That is what these chapters in Romans set before us. Paul quotes the Old Testament in Romans 3:10: "There is none righteous, no, not one. There is none that understands; there is no one that seeks after God... there is no one that does good, no, not one." And he sums it all in Romans 3:23: "All have sinned and come short of the glory of God."

This is God's appraisal, the indictment of the Judge of all things upon His fallen creation. Yet we, as fallen human beings, have a hard time believing it. We think, "There has to be some good in us. We can't possibly be 100% unprofitable." Our fallen nature has an incredibly hard time accepting the reality of our fallenness; we simply don't like to admit we are as lost as we truly are. Like a man who insists he is never lost and always knows which way is north, we don't like to confess our spiritual lostness.

The Conscience and Self-Justification

We also have an amazing propensity for self-justification. God has hardwired into us a recognition of His moral law—a moral compass, the conscience. Anytime our God-given conscience conflicts with our sinfully-inclined thoughts or actions, we attempt to adjust things so the pain of conviction, the cognitive dissonance, goes away. When we do this repeatedly, refusing to listen to the conscience and walking the other way, we can sear or callous it until we no longer have sensitivity to the moral law God imprinted on us.

Paul describes this in Ephesians 4:17-19, where unbelievers walk in the vanity of their mind, "having their understanding darkened... who being past feeling have given themselves over to sinful actions." And in 1 Timothy 4:2 he speaks of those "having their conscience seared as with a hot iron."

The western ethos of our day presupposes that man is essentially and inherently good, becoming bad only because of harsh circumstances and his environment. But that is not what Scripture reveals. As Jesus teaches in Mark 7, defilement does not come from what goes into a man, but from what comes out of him, out of the heart.

Three Cross-Sections of Humanity

In chapters 1, 2, and 3, Paul zeroes in on three groups within humanity. In Romans 1:18-32 he addresses the hedonist—the one who lives for pleasure, according to no law or governance, finding meaning in whatever makes him feel good. This humanistic philosophy is rife in our culture today, just as it was 2,000 years ago in Rome. In chapter 2 he turns to the moralist, and next week we will look at the religionist, the self-righteous.

Romans reveals the desperate condition of humanity: God's wrath is ready to be revealed from heaven against all ungodliness (1:18). Humanity has wholesale rejected God's glory and exchanged it for the pitiful substitutes of idolatry. Because God has programmed us to worship, when we refuse to glorify Him and be thankful (1:21), we will inevitably worship something. The chief end of man is the glory of God; we are instruments of worship by design. When we refuse to worship Him, we default to idolatry, and idolatry always reduces to immorality.

Three times in chapter 1 we read that "God gave them over." When man says, "I refuse to glorify You as God," God responds, "I will not intervene." He will not force Himself upon us. In not intervening, He gives us up to spoil, and the result is always immorality—homosexuality, unrighteousness, fornication, covetousness, envy, murder, deceit, hatred of God, pride, arrogant boasting. These actions are sinful because they do not accord with the righteous character of God. God is the standard of what is right and pure and true; anything incongruent with His character is sin.

The Wages of Sin Is Death

Romans 1:32 gives the conclusion for the hedonist: "who, knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death." Why? Because "the wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23). This is substantiated elsewhere. In Galatians 5:19-21, Paul lists the works of the flesh—adultery, idolatry, hatred, wrath, envy, murders, drunkenness—and concludes, "they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God." In 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 he again lists the unrighteous who "shall not inherit the kingdom of God."

The intriguing thing is that we in our fallen nature actually like lists like that—especially people sitting in church. When we read such a list, it is likely we find nothing in it that we are doing right now. As moralists who live by a certain moral ethic, we say, "Well, I don't murder, commit adultery, or steal. I don't do any of those things." A list like that puffs us up. We are incredibly quick to identify sin in others, but we have a diminished capacity for seeing it in ourselves, and so we justify our sinful nature.

Even when a point of such a list convicts us, our self-exalting morality covers over that gritty conviction with a pearly white self-righteousness. We mumble over the parts we don't like and think, "What a lost and gross world we live in. Don't those vile people know God's judgment is coming?" Lists make moralists feel safe and secure from God's judgment. Indeed, "list" is part of the word "mora-list."

That Every Mouth May Be Stopped

So Paul shifts from chapter 1 to chapter 2, from the hedonist whose sin is openly evident to the moralist sitting safe in a little room thinking, "Everything's good here. No judgment, no wrath." His aim, stated in Romans 3:19, is "that every mouth may be stopped, and that all the world may become guilty before God." There are three groups—the hedonist, the moralist, and the religionist who boasts in the Law and descent from Abraham—and Paul means to stop all of their mouths and make them all guilty before God.

Why? Because for the glory of the gospel to shine, it must have the backdrop of universal guilt. Paul does not even begin to speak of justification, sanctification, and glorification until Romans 4. In chapters 1, 2, and 3 he is building the case that everyone is guilty before God.

You Are Inexcusable

"Therefore, you are inexcusable, O man, whosoever you are that judges; for wherein you judge another, you condemn yourself; for you that judge do the same things" (Romans 2:1). Paul was an expert in logic—a lawyer, a doctor of the law trained as a Pharisee. Having just listed all these terrible deeds and declared their judgment, he knows some readers will say, "They deserve to be damned to hell." So Paul turns to address them directly.

He uses the exact same Greek word here that he used in Romans 1:20, where the hedonist who refuses to worship God and turns to idols is "without excuse," because the invisible things of God are clearly seen in creation. Now the moralist is likewise "inexcusable." The Greek word krino, "to judge," here means to condemn someone to hell—to say, "Because of how you live, you are damned." Paul gives three reasons why the one who casts such judgment stands in an indefensible position.

First, their judgment proves the reality of a judicial morality. When you judge someone, declaring what they do is wrong, you prove the existence of a moral law and a moral lawgiver. If there is no God, there is no moral lawgiver; if no lawgiver, no moral law; if no moral law, you can never tell anyone they "shouldn't" do anything, for everything is relative. But when we judge another, we prove there is a standard of right and wrong.

Second, their judgment brings self-condemnation. "When you judge another, you condemn yourself." James 2:10 tells us that if you transgress God's law in one point, you are guilty of all. So if you say, "I've never killed or committed adultery," but you have told even a tiny white lie, you are guilty of the same transgression as the adulterer. Bear the weight of that.

Sin Is of the Heart

It is striking how often, when you ask someone why they think they'll go to heaven, they answer, "I've never killed anybody" and "I've never committed adultery." Jesus addresses those very sins in the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 5:21-22 He says that whoever is angry with his brother without cause is in danger of judgment, and whoever says "Thou fool!" is in danger of hell fire. To wish someone were hit by a bus while saying, "I'd never physically touch them," is malice—it is murder.

In Matthew 5:27-28 He says that whoever looks upon a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her in his heart. Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees—who had only an external righteousness—you will in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven. God deals with the heart. All sinful behavior is simply the overflow of a sinful heart.

Jesus proves this in Mark 7:20-23: "That which comes out of a man is that which defiles him... For out of the heart of men come forth evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit... All these evils come from within." So when Paul says, "You do the same things," he means that even if the hedonist's deeds are not manifest in your life, they are still resident in your heart, because sin is of the heart.

God's Righteous Judgment

"But we are sure that the judgment of God is according to truth against them that commit such things" (Romans 2:2). Humanity is unfit to condemn others to eternal punishment because of our own inherent sinfulness, but God is the right and true Judge. We can be sure of this, first, because of His character: He is just, righteous, and true.

In Genesis 19, before God poured out wrath upon Sodom and Gomorrah, He met with Abraham, who interceded for the cities. Suppose there are fifty righteous, then forty-five, thirty, twenty, ten—at one point Abraham asks, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" It is an awesome question. If there is One who will judge every human being, that One had best be righteous in His judgment.

We live in a nation with one of the greatest judicial systems, yet even with a jury of peers hearing testimony and evidence, the guilty are sometimes freed and the innocent sometimes condemned. We naturally filter divine judgment through that human understanding. But Isaiah 11:1-4 tells us how the Messiah judges: "He shall not judge after the sight of His eyes, nor reprove after the hearing of His ears, but with righteousness shall He judge." God never has a reasonable doubt; there is never a "the glove doesn't fit, so you must acquit" moment with Him.

Why? Because, as Jeremiah 17:10 and 1 Chronicles 28:9 reveal, the Lord searches the hearts and understands all the imaginations of our thoughts. God knows every lustful, vengeful, and covetous thought you have ever had. What no one else can see, as you sit in judgment crying, "Look at that adulterer, they should die!"—you condemn yourself, because you are guilty of the same.

Despising the Riches of His Goodness

"And thinkest thou this, O man, that judges them which do such things, and doest the same, that thou shalt escape the judgment of God?" (Romans 2:3). Do you think that because you don't outwardly practice those things—though they are resident in your heart—you will escape? "Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance?" (2:4).

The moralist often sits in self-righteous judgment because he misreads the grace of God. He looks at the world's sinfulness and the bad things that befall sinners and concludes, "Clearly I'm doing okay, because God hasn't judged me yet." But we must not mistake God's patience, longsuffering, and rich kindness for His approval. The longsuffering of God is for a purpose. 2 Peter 3:9 says, "The Lord is not slack concerning his promise... but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance." His common grace makes a way for repentance—for the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night (2 Peter 3:10).

Storing Up Wrath

"But after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up unto thyself wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God; who will render to every man according to his deeds" (Romans 2:5-6). Though the moralist does not do the deeds of the hedonist, he is still worthy of the same judgment, because in the face of God's rich mercy he has stubbornly refused to repent. Part of why he refuses is that his own established moral reality convinces him he doesn't need to: "Those bad people need to repent, but I'm good."

With seven billion people on earth, you can always find someone worse than you—if you must, you can reach all the way back and say, "Well, I'm better than Hitler." But Hitler is not the standard of righteousness; God is. His perfect standard is the measure. Because of their hardness and failure to repent, the moralist stores up the same wrath that will be poured out on the hedonist, for God renders to every man according to his deeds. As Galatians 6:7-8 warns, "Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."

Jew First, and Also the Gentile

"To them who by patient continuance in well doing seek for glory and honour and immortality, eternal life: but unto them that are contentious, and do not obey the truth... indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Gentile... for there is no respect of persons with God" (Romans 2:7-11). If we sow to the flesh, we reap corruption and judgment; if we sow to the Spirit, planting the things of God into our lives, we reap everlasting life.

The moralist protests, "But I am doing good, unlike those bad people." The problem is the heart. If you have not received a new heart through the new birth, your good works flow from a wicked heart, and all such righteousness is as filthy rags before God.

"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" (2:12). Verses 13-15 explain that not the hearers of the law but the doers are justified; and the Gentiles, who do not have the written law, "show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness." Even if you have never read the Bible or learned the Ten Commandments, you have the implanted conscience, and the heavens declare the glory of God. So we are all without excuse—hedonist and moralist, Jew and Gentile—because God is not a respecter of persons.

Verse 16 brings it home: "In the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel." It is not ultimately about the actions; the actions are merely proof of the secret, inward heart problem.

The Religionist Awaits

So the hedonists are done for, and the moralists are toast. "But," says the religionist, "I have kept the Law. I have Abraham as my father. I have descended of a royal line. Therefore I will be justified." Really? We will address that next week.

Closing Prayer

Father, I thank You that You are the One who leads us. Your word says the steps of a righteous man are ordered of the Lord, so we want to be following You. We thank You that we are not functioning in our own power or our own righteousness, but have been clothed in Your righteousness, and You direct us. Lord, I pray that You would direct us as a body, that You would direct us to see great ministry produced from this fellowship. Direct us, we pray, in Jesus' name. Amen.