THE GOSPEL OF GOD
Meditations in the Letter to the Romans
GUILT OF THE RELIGIOUS
Romans 2:17-24
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THE Apostle is proceeding further in his purpose to show that all are guilty before God and need the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Unless we know our guilt there will be no sense of need. Without a sense of need the Gospel will be meaningless and without relevance. Without the Gospel we are lost. This is the reason why Paul gives time to prove all are guilty before God.

The Jews were those who desperately needed to understand the reality of personal guilt. Perhaps the devout Jew most of all. The Jew was very religious, and if devout was meticulous in all duties and ceremonies of their religion. It was very hard for the Jews to accept that they were guilty before God and needed the grace of God for their acceptance with God. They felt they had earned God's approval and blessing by their religious and moral living. The same is true for all who are religious, and so what Paul says to the Jew is applicable to the religious person. The Jew was the religious person of the Old Testament Church. Within the outward visible church of the present there are many devout religious people who are in the same condition as the Jew. They can't see their guilt before God and their need of grace because they are blinded by their religious devotion which to them deserves the approval of God and reward from God.

The first thing Paul exposes in the religious person is that they rely on the law. This is where their failing begins. The Jew, the religious person of the Old Testament church, rested upon the fact that they had been given the law of God and the fact that they kept the law meticulously. The Jews studied the law of God handed down through Moses, and expounded it. Over the years this had resulted in quantities of explanations and interpretations which laid down what keeping the law involved and what was failing to do so. When all these rules and regulations had been observed or observed well, if not perfectly, then the Jew felt that he or she merited the favour of God as a right. They felt their keeping of the law, as they saw it, deserved, as a right, the favour of God. Together with this was their condemnation of all who failed to keep the law as they did.

Then followed a sense of pride at their achievements and a looking down on others who failed to come up to their standard. Paul speaks of the Jews bragging about their relationship with God.

This syndrome is typical of the religious person, and it is the same today as it was amongst the Jews of the New Testament period. The trouble is that all this law keeping is mainly outward, and does not touch the heart. Also there grows up a religious culture, as was the case amongst the religious Jew, which with all its meticulous moral and religious living, in fact fails to observe the law of God in heart and truth, but is observing a perversion of it that has grown up through all the study and interpretation that has gone on. The Spirit of Christ is missing. Further a sense of pride at moral and spiritual achievement blinds to the true Spirit of Christ, and causes religious people to believe that God is favourable towards them and that they are on a different level to others. This brings the sense of pride that looks down on others as being less than they are.

Paul describes the characteristic of the religious Jew. He or she felt themselves able to teach others. They felt they knew the right way to live and what God approved, and they were not slow to press this knowledge on others. In this they presented themselves as superior to others, and further they were always ready to correct and criticise and judge others.

It is a failing of religious people that they are so ready to be putting people right and so ready to judge and criticise. They conduct themselves in this 'instruction' with sublime lack of understanding of the harm and hurt they cause to others. They also fail to see that their understanding is limited and so their judgement and correction must be flawed. They are also blind to their own failings.

Further they are unable to appreciate their own lack of understanding. Once a person achieves a state of feeling they know and have arrived, they shut the door to further instruction for themselves, and so they are deaf to appreciating where they go wrong, or appreciating the harm they may be doing to the cause of Christ.

PAUL, having described the religious Jew, goes on to expose their guilt and sin. The fact is that they did not teach themselves. They did not really apply the law in its purity and truth to themselves. If they had done so they would have seen their own failing and sin. This blindness is illustrated in a true story which I heard. A young curate, talented in preaching, took it upon himself to preach a sermon against the sin and failing of one particular person in the congregation of the church where he ministered. He felt afterwards that he had been unwise and gone too far, and feared to meet this particular person he had preached against. However the meeting eventually was inevitable. As this curate saw this person approach him he waited in trepidation. The person came forward with praise for the sermon that the curate had preached to show her where she needed to correct her life, saying 'it was just what some other particular person in the congregation needed'. Plainly this person could not see his or her own failings but felt quite able to see and correct the failings of others.

Paul challenges the religious Jew with the fact that they sinned like everyone else. They were guilty before God just like everyone else, even though they were meticulous in their moral and religious observances.

Paul's challenge firstly addresses the general truth that when we criticise another person and judge them for some wrong, we are hypocrites because we are sinners too. We may not fail in the particular sin we are judging in another, but we sin in many other ways. So we have no right to condemn and look down on others.

Paul challenges them even more deeply. These Jews, and the religious person of today, only apply the law outwardly and not to the heart. They feel that outward conformity is sufficient. Jesus. however, in the sermon on the mount shows that we can sin as much in the mind and heart as in actual acts. We may not commit physical adultery, but none of us can say that we have never committed adultery in our hearts and in the way we have thought and desired. Further we may never have actually stolen any physical thing, yet we have spoken about people in such a way that we have stolen their good name. We have not given full measure in our work, so that we have stolen from our employer. The ways we steal are almost endless. Then we can say we have never killed anyone, yet Jesus pointed out that hate and dislike and despising people were in the nature of murder, even though it is murder in the heart and not in physical fact.

The truth is that we all fail, and even if our outward behaviour may be exemplary we are still sinners in thought and heart. Further religious people are prone to some sins more than others, particularly the sin of pride, vain glory and hypocrisy. These sins often do more harm and hurt than those considered far more serious.

Paul ends his exposure of the religious Jew by saying that they dishonour God. He says that God's name is blasphemed amongst the Gentiles because of them. This is very strong language. Can it be substantiated? It can!

The religious Jew claimed to belong to God and to be in God's favour. Their claim was that their lives and living represented the sort of life and living God required and that with which God was pleased. In other words these religious Jews were claiming that if people wanted to know God then they must look at them, and if they wanted to know God's favour then they must live and behave like them. They blasphemed God amongst the Gentiles because such testimony was wrong and told lies about God and the way to know God's love and favour. The Jews did not mean to blaspheme God but that is the outcome of the false view of God and his ways that they had. This was not the fault of the revelation God had given to them in the Old Testament, but was the fault of their corruption of that revelation which had grown up through the corruption of their hearts and minds.

We have this illustrated very vividly in the story Jesus told in the Gospels of the Pharisee and the Publican praying in the temple. The Pharisee's prayer of self praise described the way the religious Jew thought, and the self-righteousness of their attitude before God. He really thought God was pleased with him. He felt he was a cut above other human beings, and he despised people like the Publican or Tax Collector who was praying in a corner. The Pharisee was so sure of his excellence before God that he prayed out loud and in full view of everybody, and he wanted everybody to know how excellent and good he was. The view of God he was portraying was not only false, it was unattractive. Gentiles looking on either felt that they could not hope to please God or be in God's favour, or they found the Pharisees portrayal of God so offensive that they did not want to have anything to do with a god like that.

The religious church person today is very similar, and their lives and attitudes, their criticism of others, and their judgmental stance has the same effect. God is blasphemed to those outside the church. They find the god they see portrayed in the lives of these people unattractive and repulsive, and they don't want to have anything to do with such a god. Far from giving a true testimony to God, these religious people are corrupting the true testimony to God. These religious people may in fact speak the truth and preach the Gospel truly, but their lives deny that Gospel, and turn people away from Jesus. They may say that Jesus loves you, but by their lives they portray Jesus as most unloving. They may preach that there is forgiveness in Jesus, but by the duties and judgements they press upon people, they deny that forgiveness altogether.

Like the Jew this is not the intention of these religious people, but this is the effect of their lives and attitudes. With their mouths they may preach that we are saved and forgiven and justified by God's free unmerited favour, and on the grounds of Christ's work for us, yet by their judgement and condemnation the practically testify is that salvation is by works, and that unless we come up to the standard they have set as God's standard, people can't be saved or call themselves Christian.

The effect of all this is that people are turned away from God. They come looking for God, wanting to know him, ready to live for him, but are turned away in despair or disgust. The truth is that these religious people, however they may understand the Gospel in their minds, have not understood it in their hearts or believed it or experienced it. The truth is that they are like Simon the Pharisee who criticised the woman who came and anointed Jesus’ feet. Jesus said he had not been forgiven because he had no real love for Jesus. Simon the Pharisee reveals the state of such religious people. They have never seen how much they fall short of the glory of God. Simon confessed that he sinned, but like Pharisees he felt his sin was very little and such that God hardly cared about. It was felt that it was a very small matter for God to cancel such little sin. Thus they had little sense of God's love, mercy and grace. Their dependence was on their moral excellence and religious standing. Rather than feel a sense of God's love and mercy, they felt that God owed them favour, and almost that God was rather privileged to know them. Such an attitude meant that Simon had very little sense of God's love for him and he in turn loved God very little.

The woman who anointed Jesus with expensive perfume had been forgiven much and she loved Jesus deeply for his love for her. Here is true Christianity. When a person is like this there is little tendency to be critical of others. We do not feel we have any right to be critical or to judge. It is not a matter of acknowledging what is right or wrong, but a matter of our attitude to other people. Because we have been forgiven much by God, whatever other people are like, we feel we dare not judge them, but instead love them as Christ has loved us. This is not condoning sin, but it is being Christ-like.

In a very real sense the religious person is in a much more dangerous condition than one who professes no religion or at least very little. They do not feel their need. They do not understand how much they have fallen short of God's glory. They are blind to the fact that what they think is true religion is really a travesty of the real thing. They feel no real need of God's grace, and so they receive no grace. They are locked in a condition which locks them out of the Kingdom of Heaven. Paul's plain speaking is his yearning love for them so that their understanding might be opened and they may be humbled, repent and turn to Christ as their only hope and salvation.