Judgement of God
Romans 2:1-5
Judgement of God Part 02
Therefore you are inexcusable, O man, whoever you are who judge, for in whatever you judge another you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things. 2 But we know that the judgment of God is according to truth against those who practice such things. 3 And do you think this, O man, you who judge those practicing such things, and doing the same, that you will escape the judgment of God? 4 Or do you despise the riches of His goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance? 5 But in accordance with your hardness and your impenitent heart you are treasuring up for yourself wrath in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God,
Romans 2:1-16 are a single section and gives us the principles on which God judges men.
Romans 1:18-32, that God’s wrath is revealed in judgment, and that God has revealed His wrath in judgment against the sinful pagan world because the sinful pagan world is guilty of rejecting His revelation and then of descending into idolatry and horrifying vice. Men abandon God and God abandons men to the consequence of their own sin, and thus the wrath of God is at work. A very important question that is unanswered.
What about the good people? The people who are not murderers, liars, thieves, fornicators, adulterers, and homosexuals.
Where do they fit? Many moral people, basically outwardly good people, would probably agree with Paul’s condemnation of the godless pagan world in chapter 1.
Romans 2:1-16 we can derive 6 principles of God’ judgement. 1. Knowledge, 2. Truth, 3. Guilt, 4. Deeds,
5. Impartiality, and
6. Motive. Bible tells us that God will judge all men through Jesus Christ. That is the divine plan.
Acts 17:31, because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead.” Someday God will judge all men through Jesus Christ. Christ is the agent of judgment.
John 5:22, For the Father judges no one, but has committed all judgment to the Son,
John 5:27, and has given Him authority to execute judgment also, because He is the Son of Man.
John 12:48, He who rejects Me, and does not receive My words, has that which judges him—the word that I have spoken will judge him in the last day. Bible clearly portrays that someday men will be judged by God through the agency of the Lord Jesus Christ. Men are aware not only through the Scripture but through their conscience and through what they can see around them that God judges evil.
3. Guilt.
God judges’ men based on guilt. V 4-5, Or do you despise the riches of His goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance? 5 But in accordance with your hardness and your impenitent heart you are treasuring up for yourself wrath in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God, God affirms that the moral man is guilty of sin and can in no way escape judgment.
Verse 4 says God has been good to all in the world. God has been good to you, and His goodness and His forbearance and His long suffering had as its goal to lead you to repentance. God has been leading men to repentance, but men have been going to judgment instead. Men are piling up a pile of guilt that is going to come back on them in judgment.
The terrible crime of all against God is to reject what God has done! Man is guilty of rejecting,
- God’s goodness,
- abusing God’s mercy,
- ignoring God’s grace,
- spurning God’s love, and
- mocking His kindness.
Whenever we sin, we show contempt for God’s goodness.
Hosea 11:1, “When Israel was a child, I loved him, And out of Egypt I called My son.
Hosea 11:4, I drew them with gentle cords, With bands of love, And I was to them as those who take the yoke from their neck. I stooped and fed them.
Hosea 11:7-8, My people are bent on backsliding from Me. Though they call to the Most High, None at all exalt Him. 8 “How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I set you like Zeboiim? My heart churns within Me; My sympathy is stirred.
God with love, tenderness, graciousness, kindness, and mercy reaching out to draw Israel and they were just sliding away from Him. V 4, Or do you despise the riches of His goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance?
The word “despise” is a very strong word. It means grossly underestimate the value or significance of something. It is making light of the riches of the goodness of God to the worst sins. The worst sin is mercy despised.
They failed to really evaluate the true worth of the riches of God’s goodness. They did not know how valuable it was, and men still do not know. Everyone who are alive in the world today has experienced the goodness of God. Experiences it every breath they take!
Now because of the covid we know how much oxygen a person consumes a day. About 7 to 8 litres per minute. About 11,000 litres of oxygen. About 4.1 million litres in a year.
- The Lord makes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
- The Lord gives them food to eat.
- The Lord raises the Sun every morning.
- The Lord gives water to refresh the thirst.
- The Lord gives them food to fill their hungry stomach.
- The Lord gives them green grass and beautiful mountains.
- God has demonstrated His goodness.
We God’s goodness, which refers to the benefits which God gives. We God’s forbearance, which refers to the judgment He does not give. We have God’s long suffering, which refers to the duration of both. The Hebrew term would say He is slow to anger and abundant mercy.
It is the riches of those things. Not just the shallow but the fullest. God is just good, and He pours out His goodness and He withholds His judgment, and He does it for a long time.
Psalm 52:1, Why do you boast in evil, O mighty man? The goodness of God endures continually.
Psalm 119:68, You are good, and do good; Teach me Your statutes.
Psalm 33:5, He loves righteousness and justice; The earth is full of the goodness of the Lord.
Psalm 145:9, The Lord is good to all, And His tender mercies are over all His works.
Psalm 107:8, Oh, that men would give thanks to the Lord for His goodness, And for His wonderful works to the children of men!
Most people do not see God as being good. Most people wonder how God can be so bad to let certain things happen.
How can God allow that? The goodness of God is nowhere more clearly seen than that when man commits a sin, he does not fall over dead on the spot. God had every reason at the fall to wipe out humans. He has the same reason every single time you or I ever commit one sin, and it is only His goodness and His forbearance and His long suffering that lets us take another breath. It is mercy rejoicing against judgment!
God was especially good to Israel. He is, after all, the God of patience. He was good to the pagans. In Noah’s time God waited 120 years for them to repent. He was so patient with the nations. The time of their ignorance, He overlooked.
He was so patient with Israel and with Judah, He waited for centuries before He took them into the Babylonian captivity. God is wonderfully patient with us today. We look around the world today and people are sinning at a rapid rate. The divine law of our God is trampled underfoot.
God Himself is openly despised, His name is blasphemed, and it is amazing that He does not strike dead the people that do that. When you hear someone blaspheme the name of God and then take another breath, that is the goodness of God.
Why doesn’t He cut them down? Why doesn’t He cut me down and you down when we sin as He did Ananias and Sapphira? Why doesn’t He cause the earth to open and swallow us like Dathan and Abiram?
How can God let that go that on? Why does not the righteous wrath of heaven consume them? The only answer,
Romans 9:22-23, What if God, wanting to show His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, 23 and that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which He had prepared beforehand for glory, If you have ever thought for one moment that God is unjust, you simply reveal how easy it is to learn to abuse the goodness of God. V 4, The goodness of God is designed to lead men to repentance.
It is designed to cause them to turn from sin to Him. It is designed to cause men who are filled with evil to long for God and God’s goodness. It is designed to make them thankful that He did not slay them and turn to Him in gratitude.
If you realize what you deserve every day you live, every breath you take, you will thank God that He did not strike you down. God’s goodness and God’s patience calls us to repentance, to thankful grateful hearts, and yet we so often fail to do that.
What does repentance mean? To turn from sin toward God. To turn away from what we are doing to Him.
We our sin and we see what we deserve, and we know we should die, and when He does not take our life, but He lets us live, we should turn in utter gratitude to Him. But men do not do that. They despise God’s goodness, and guilty of the same thing that is characteristic of an unregenerate but religious person.
The Jews believed they were exempt from the judgment of God, and many people believe that. Most people in our world do not believe God’s going to judge them! They just load up on God’s goodness, God’s providence, they take in all the pleasure of life, all the love, children, parents, friends, the beauty, the pleasure and all the delicacies of life that God gives, and they just take it all in, and it’s all mercy that they don’t die.
But they never think about that, and that is why it is such an incredible sin to be unthankful. When Paul in Romans chapter 1, condemns the Gentiles for failing to glorify God and neither were they thankful. We go right into a sin because we are so used to mercy that we figure well get it again. So, the Jews, like the rest, assumed mercy and went on sinning. They assumed God’s grace and went on sinning.
They assumed God’s kindness and goodness and patience and long suffering and went right on sinning, and they just stomped all over God’s goodness. But goodness despised leads to the end of goodness and ultimate judgment.
V 5, But in accordance with your hardness and your impenitent heart you are treasuring up for yourself wrath in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God, The kind of people who are like this are people who do not see God’s nature as loving, good, and kind. They just see their own nature as deserving.
In contemporary evangelical Christianity that is built around self. People talk about self-image, self- esteem, self-worth, and self-value. It is nothing but humanistic worldliness. They twisted it from a God-centred perspective to a man-centred. Salvation in Christianity is all seen from the viewpoint of what can it do for me?
Sin is always seen as to how it affects man, not how it affects God. The only reason you even breathe one breath is because God is merciful, and if you forget that and tread on that mercy, such ingratitude is so severe.
People see God as unjust. Something comes into your life, your husband dies, your wife dies, your kids are injured, somebody you know gets a disease, your thought is, “God, that’s not fair.”
How can You do that, God? That is your rotten old sin principle operating.
How can I be without a job? How can I have all these kinds of problems?
Why me? This is not fair. You tend to question God’s love and you tend to question God’s actions. God is so merciful and so kind and yet men despise that very kindness. When something goes wrong in their life, they begin to accuse God of being unfair or unjust.
How incredible.
How can people question God’s goodness?
Answer
By seeing history from the wrong perspective. We are in the New Testament. We are experiencing God’s goodness. We are experiencing God’s grace, God’s mercy, and then we go back to the Old Testament we read about all these amazing things that God does.
He turns Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt because she looked backwards. You say, “The poor lady, the whole place is burning up, it’s so hard to resist to turn and have one look. It is not a mortal sin, she just went out of existence.
It seems so arbitrary why that? What kind of a God does this cruel and whimsical kind of punishment? Abraham, asked by God to go up and burn up his son in a sacrifice. God sends a bunch of snakes in to bite all the Israelites.
God caused the ground to open and swallow those men. God sends forth fire from His prophet Elijah and it burned up a hundred people, and they are just soldiers going about their business and they are gone. Some people were mocking Elisha, a bunch of little kids, calling him names, and a bear came out and ripped up 40 of them.
You say, what kind of a God is this?
Why all those little kids? Little kids are bound to sort of make fun of people now and then. Yet, other people like David whose lives are a mess and Solomon whose got more wives than you could count, and he just goes along through life, and Lot’s wife goes.
What kind of a God is this? The Bible says God hardens Pharaoh’s heart and then kills his firstborn for having a hard heart. What about when He called for the extermination of every Canaanite, kill every man, every woman?
Does not make sense. It is not the same God. I mean it cannot be the same God. It’s impossible.
Illustrations
2 Samuel 6. The Ark of the Covenant is being brought back to the children of Israel. Ark has been in the country of the Philistines for many months, and now they are going to get the Ark of the Covenant back. What a great time it is.
They are bringing back that which represents the presence of God in their midst. Whenever the Ark of the Covenant was moved the Kohathites had to move it, and they were a part of the Levitical order. But the Kohathites were trained from their youth to transport the Ark. They knew how to do it. They were trained to do it. God had told them never is anyone ever to touch it. There were big rings on the side. They had poles to run through those rings. They would carry it with the poles, never touch the Ark.
2 Samuel 6:3, So they set the ark of God on a new cart, and brought it out of the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill; and Uzzah and Ahio, the sons of Abinadab, drove the new cart.
God did not want His Ark on a cart. This was human. This was disobedient to the instruction. They are popping along on the cart and everybody is happy, and they are playing instruments.
2 Samuel 6:6-7, And when they came to Nachon’s threshing floor, Uzzah put out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen stumbled. 7 Then the anger of the Lord was aroused against Uzzah, and God struck him there for his error; and he died there by the ark of God. Uzzah, he was a Kohathite, he oversaw this, he just put his hand out to steady the Ark. He did not want it to be defiled by hitting the ground, but what he did not know was that the ground was not defiled, humans was. Nothing wrong with the ground. Dirt never fell, man did.
So, when he touched the Ark, he was dead on the spot. Poor fellow! He does not go out and commit adultery, He does not have 800 wives, He is out of existence. But it was a careless and arrogant sin, which came about because he was not obedient to the Word of God.
Leviticus chapter 10. Aaron had two sons. He was so proud of those two boys, Nadab and Abihu. Any father would be! They were going to be priests. What a great thing. They were going to be priests, and guess what day this was, Leviticus 10, this was their ordination.
His two boys were ordained to the priesthood, first day, and they went in there and they took the censer that the priest used and they put fire in and they put incense in. They offered strange fire before the Lord which He commanded them not. They messed around.
They were so excited about being a priest that they just took some liberty, and they went in there and did a thing that was not what they were supposed to do. There went out fire from the Lord and devoured them. They died before the Lord.
Can you imagine Aaron? God, these are just young boys, I mean they were so excited about what they were doing, and this was their ordination, and they are dead. You burned them up. No warning! You could have told them, “boys, we know you are new at the ministry, but you are going to have to get rid of that kind of flippancy and do it right,” but they are gone.
There are so many people in Israel who are evil, and they are alive.
Have you ever asked yourself about the flood?
How could God drown the whole world? Does that seem like cruel and unusual punishment to you? Later when we study the Old Testament further, we will find that there are nearly 35 sins for which God prescribed the death penalty.
The death penalty for hitting your parents, even cursing them. Murder, kidnapping, sodomy, fooling around with magic, violating the Sabbath, blasphemy, desecration, child sacrifice, contact with spirits, unlawful divorce, false prophecy, raping an engaged woman, and it goes on to about 35, and they required capital punishment.
People say God is just too severe. If we at the Old Testament with the New Testament in view, we are going to get confused because we live in an aura of the goodness, mercy, and grace of God. If you go back from that perspective, you are going to get all confused in the Old Testament. The problem is we feel that God is unjust because we are comparing His justice with His mercy, not His mercy with His law.
We must go back to creation. You cannot look at the Old Testament from the New Testament, you must look at the Old Testament from the creation. God said to Adam, “The day you eat of the fruit of the tree you shall surely die.” When God created, He said, you sin, you die.
The New Testament reiterates the wages of sin is death. (Romans 6:23) The soul that sins it shall die. (Ezekiel18:20) You eat, you die. In creation, all sin was a capital offense. Any sin, God had a right to kill.
Now, think of it this way
God made man freely. Created man of His own choice freely. He made man to glorify Him. He made man to radiate His image. He made man to manifest His person. But man rebelled. If God freely made man and God freely gave man his life and the conditions to continue that life, and man chose to violate that, then God had every right in the world to take that life back.
After all, He gave it freely. Whenever we sin, we are striking a blow at God’s sovereign character. We are misrepresenting His image and His intention for us. We are insulting God and does not He who freely gave life have the right to freely take it back if He gave the conditions and we violated them?
Is that unfair? No!
God gave the conditions, that would be just. He has every right to take back the life He gave when that life violates His conditions. Adam and Eve ate.
Did they die? No! They did not die.
Did they get justice? No.
What did they get? Mercy. The moment that Adam and Eve sinned, God’s mercy was activated and the plan of the cross. Because as soon as God was merciful to sinners, somebody had to take His justice. The cross became a fixed reality.
So originally, every sin required death. Is it unjust by God’s law to take the life of the rebel to whom God has been so good? No. But God did not exercise His justice. God was merciful to Adam and Eve. By the time you come to the Mosaic law, you only have around 35 capital offenses. That is not cruel and unusual punishment, that is an amazing reduction in the severity of God’s judgment.
Because originally, it was any sin and now it is just only around 35 of them. God is so merciful but by the time He gets to the Mosaic era. He has reduced it to 35. Even in the case of those 35, there were times when God did not enact His justice. There were times when the people of Israel did all those things and God spared their lives. He was merciful.
Wherever there was adultery in a marriage, there was supposed to be death, but because they were so adulterous all the time, God permitted them to divorce as a gracious, merciful alternative. They were to die for idolatry, but how many times did God forgive that idolatry?
How many times was He merciful?
They were to die when they were committing fornication, but how many times did God show His patience? They were to die when they murdered, but how many times did God seem to overlook it? He was so patient, so patient. This is the point.
If you compare the Old Testament with the original created standard, the Old Testament is full of mercy. But we are so used to mercy, grace, accustomed to getting away with our sin not being punished we abuse it. Whenever God does do what is just, we think He is unjust.
That is how confused we are, and that is how we despise the goodness of God. When God knocks down in death Ananias and Sapphira, we say, “how can God be so cruel?” when the fact is, how could anybody else in that congregation stay alive? They were all sinners.
We so tread on God’s mercy, and we are so used to abusing God’s grace, that we are offended if God is not merciful, and that is the truth. He chooses times not to be merciful.
Why does God punish now and then? Because it is so bad now and we tread so much on His mercy and abuse His grace so badly. Now if God did not give us those frequent examples of His justice, imagine how much more we would tread on His mercy without any fear of repercussion.
The reason that God from time to time takes a life and comes down in severe judgment is because periodically throughout the flow of redemptive history, He must illustrate what should happen to bring us back to our senses because we are so accustomed to His mercy.
If we did not have examples of the consequence of sin, we would go on blissfully trading without a thought on His mercy.
1 Corinthians 10:8, Nor let us commit sexual immorality, as some of them did, and in one day twenty- three thousand fell;
God took the life of 23,000 of them.
Why?
1 Corinthians 10:11-12, Now all these things happened to them as examples, and they were written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the ages have come. 12 Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.
So why are there throughout the Old Testament and even into the New, why are there those illustrations of God’s instantaneous wrath? They are examples and God does those to show us what should happen to all of us and to build in our hearts attitudes of thanksgiving.
Conclusion
Every day I live I should say, “Thank You, God, thank You for being so merciful and overlooking the sin today that should have caused my death and eternal judgment.” We would never tolerate the insubordination that God tolerates. We tread on His mercy even with these examples.
Luke 13. They tell Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. Now, some Galileans came down apparently to the temple and they were Jews, and they came into the temple to offer their sacrifices. There they were doing their religious activity, and Pilate moved into the temple and slaughtered them so that the blood pouring out of their bodies was mingled with the blood of their sacrifices. Right in the time they were worshiping their God, he slaughtered them right on the altar.
The people are crowding around Jesus, and they are not asking about Pilate’s cruelty! They are asking about God’s justice, and they are saying, “What about those Galileans and Pilate, that pagan, that desecrated person comes in and slaughters them during their sacrifice. How can God allow that?”
What they are saying is, “Were they super wicked? Were they wicked than everybody else?
Where was God?
Luke 13:2-5, And Jesus answered and said to them, “Do you suppose that these Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans, because they suffered such things? 3 I tell you, no; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish. 4 Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse sinners than all other men who dwelt in Jerusalem? 5 I tell you, no; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish.”
They were examples. They got justice as an illustration of what all the rest of them were going to get if they did not repent. They were not worse than anybody else. They were chosen examples that God elected to use as illustrations.
If you refuse to be led to repentance by His goodness, if you will not come to thank Him and to come to Christ, then your hard and unconverted heart is just piling up wrath. You may be surviving now but in the day of wrath when the fullness of wrath is revealed in the righteous judgment of God at the great white throne, it is going to break loose on you.
The ones who are not repenting are piling up a storehouse of sin and judgment, laid up little by little. The writer of Hebrews calls, in chapter 3 and in chapter 4 three times, harden not your hearts! Do not become cold and indifferent because all you are doing is storing up unto yourself.
You are responsible, you are doing it to yourself. You can tread on mercy now and you will receive fury in the future. Or you can see mercy for what it is and be grateful and come in a repentant heart to God and turn to Christ.