Romans 2:1-29

Romans 2

The Practical Outcome of Judaism.

I. The first thing on which St. Paul lays anxious stress in this passage is this: The judgment of God according to men's works is just, inevitable, and impartial. It is a judgment according to works which the Jew ought, on theory, to challenge. For he seeks to be saved by a "law" that is, by a thing to be done. If he is to be justified at all, it must be through the coincidence of his life with that rule of living which God gave to his nation and on which he plumes himself. Every one knows, even without any special help from revelation, that the judgment of God against the evil-doer is according to truth; and His judgment is inescapable and universal.

II. So far St. Paul has merely been laying down an abstract theory of the Divine impartiality in retribution. He has not yet spoken of the Hebrew law. He does not at first name Jew or Gentile. He addresses his antagonist simply as a man who presumes to judge others for sins of which he himself is no less guilty. At this point, however, he begins to regard his reader as a Jew, separated from the unclean and ignorant heathen by his privileged standing under the Mosaic law; only, instead of recognising the difference which this creates as telling in the Jew's favour, he unexpectedly turns it against him. It gives him nothing but a fatal pre-eminence in guilt and judgment. It is a miserable delusion to fancy that the privilege of hearing God tell us our duty lifts us above responsibility in doing it, or sets us beyond the reach of judgment for not doing it. Nay, it only confers on us, if we sin, a shameful pre-eminence in sinfulness, and when we are judged a fatal priority of condemnation.

III. All through the present discussion St. Paul has taken it for granted that the essence of criminality lies in unfaithfulness to known duty. On the same principle he now turns that very knowledge of the law on which his Jewish countrymen relied into a weapon against them: "Wherein thou judgest another thou condemnest thyself."

J. Oswald Dykes, The Gospel according to St. Paul,p. 38.

Reference: 2 Expositor,1st series, vol. iii., p. 151.