Romans 2:11,12

“ For there is no respect of persons with God. For all those who have sinned without law shall also perish without law: and all those who have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law. ”

The principle stated in Romans 2:11 is one of those most frequently asserted in the Old Testament; comp. Deu 10:17; 1 Samuel 16:7; 2 Chronicles 19:7; Job 34:19. Accordingly, no Jew could dispute it.

The phrase πρόσωπον λαμβάνειν, literally: to accept the countenance, to pay regard to the external appearance, belongs exclusively to Hellenistic Greek (in the LXX.); it is a pure Hebraism; it forcibly expresses the opposite idea to that of just judgment, which takes account only of the moral worth of persons and acts. With God signifies, in that luminous sphere whence only just sentences emanate. But is not the fact of the law being given to some, and refused to others, incompatible with this divine impartiality? No, answers Romans 2:12; for if the Gentile perishes, he will not perish for not having possessed the law, for no judgment will cause him to be sifted by the Decalogue and the Mosaic ordinances; and if the Jew should sin, the law will not exempt him from punishment, for the code will be the very standard which judgment will apply to all his acts. Thus the want of the law no more destroys the one than its possession saves the other. The aorist ἥμαρτον, sinned, transports us to the point of time when the result of human life appears as a completed fact, the hour of judgment. The καί, also (“will also perish without law”), brings out the congruity between the mode of the sin and that of the perdition. In the second proposition, this also is not repeated, for it is a matter of course, that where there is a law men should be judged by it. The absence of the article in Greek before the word law, makes this word a categorical term, “A mode of living over which a law presides;” as applied: the Mosaic law. Διὰ νόμου, by law, that is to say, by the application of a positive code (the Mosaic code). We must beware of regarding the difference between the two verbs: ἀπολοῦνται, shall perish, and κριθήσονται, shall be judged, as accidental (Meyer). The very thing the apostle wishes is by this antithesis to emphasize the idea that the Jews alone shall be, strictly speaking, subjected to a judgment, a detailed inquiry, such as arises from applying the particular articles of a code. The Gentiles shall perish simply in consequence of their moral corruption; as, for example, ruin overtakes the soul of the vicious, the drunken, or the impure, under the deleterious action of their vice. The rigorous application of the principle of divine impartiality thus brings the apostle to this strange conclusion: the Jews, far from being exempted from judgment by their possession of the law, shall, on the contrary, be the only people judged (in the strict sense of the word). It was the antipodes of their claim, and we here see how the pitiless logic of the apostle brings things to such a point, that not only is the thesis of his adversary refuted, but its opposite is demonstrated to be the only true one.

Thus all who shall be found in the day of judgment to have sinned shall perish, each in his providential place, a result which establishes the divine impartiality.

It is evident that in the two propositions of this verse there is the idea understood: unless the amnesty offered by the gospel has been accepted, and has produced its proper fruits, the fruits of holiness (in which case the word ἥμαρτον, sinned, would cease to be the summing up and last word of the earthly life).

And why cannot the possession of the law preserve the Jews from condemnation, as they imagine? The explanation is given in Romans 2:13, and the demonstration in Romans 2:14-16.