#51. Romans 2:12-13 – Law Brings Greater Judgment (Judgment Series, Part XII)

Part II: The Conduct of Humanity

For there is no partiality with God, for whoever sinned without the law, without law also shall perish, and whoever sinned in law, through law will be judged.

What is Sinning?

This is the very first verse in which “sin,” that oft-used yet enigmatic term, appears in Romans. As this is the first time we see it on our journey here, let’s take a brief moment and expound upon the term itself, as this is essential knowledge for the rest of the letter.

The word “sin” is hamartia in Greek. Its element is, literally, to “MISS.” There are various theological imports that have been embedded into this word over time. Take these ideas – that sin “is” human nature, or “is” lawlessness, or “is” transgression – for the moment, and flush them down your nearest toilet (stat!)

Okay, okay, I know that sounds bad. It sounds rather unreasonable that we should be disregarding theories without proving them – you’re right. My bad. Don’t “flush them down your nearest toilet,” but… clear your head. Close your eyes. Take these broad absolute statements and… file them, in the cabinet of your brain. We will return to these broad presumptions throughout this study, and we will consider them rationally, in more detail. But let us allow the word of God to color our understanding of the way it employs this word first, before presuming these points.

At its core, apart from theological fluff, the term literally means to miss something – a failure in accuracy. We understand this from the word’s most literal use, in Judges 20:16–

The sons of Benjamin were gathered from their cities to Gibeah to march forth to the battle with the sons of Israel… From all these people were seven hundred chosen men hampered in their right hand; every one of these could sling a stone at a hair and not miss.

The word “miss” here is the same word translated sin in both Hebrew and Greek. To miss the mark of those they aimed their sling at would be, literally, to miss them.

We have, with this, a simple analogy for the argument Paul is making concerning sin in Romans 1:18-3:20. It’s rather obvious to most who read Rom. 1:18-3:20 intelligently that the indictment made in the first chapter concerns sin both in act and in fact; from the internal disposition to the actual commitment to “missing” the mark of righteousness (see Paul’s claim: “God’s indignation is being revealed on disrespect and unrighteousness of men…”)

For now, this is all we need – I do not wish to contaminate the jury further than what God has conveyed concerning sin up until this point. Enough is known about the term, from its core meaning identifiable in the word itself and its most practical use, to begin appreciating the contexts in which Paul uses it, and not immediately rewriting some pre-supposed narrative in our own heads.

To Be or Not To Be

It is clear, through this, that to “sin without the law” is to miss the mark of righteousness apart from said law (in Greek, the word nomos, law, is given the prefix “UN,” to say “UN-LAW.”)

In this, Paul can begin answering the question we asked at the end of the previous argument: what of the individual who perished without the law? If they were never tried under law, do they automatically receive a free pass to the glory and honor and incorruption?

The answer is this: they perish.

Does that sound harsh? Well, I’m sorry, but if you’ve been following the study up until this point, this is farthest from unreasonable. Again, this very statement was said, in so many words, when Romans 1:29-32 was considered. It was far easier to digest, then. It was easier to accept it, because it was written in the third person. When you don’t feel yourself being consciously correlated in the group, your judgment is clearer.

Further, when you compare this to religion’s ideas, it becomes clear that God’s statement here is far more reasonable. Zealots would suppose that, once you die an unbeliever (or, at least a little more smartly, on the day of judgment) you go to hell (based off of Pastor Whomever’s claims.) To them, this “hell” is eternal, everlasting, and unchangeable. For most, this includes the idea that you will be eternally burned, since, to them, God is far worse than the villain from Temple of Doom.

When you compare the exact text to the zany alternative, the exact text shines for what it truly is – an appeal to one’s moral and ethical sense in relation to true righteousness, of which we could never hope to attain in our confused, manipulated, and imperfect walks.

This is, of course, only the surface. It is easy for me to compare liver and onions to arsenic, then hold a gun to your head and say, “Eat whichever one you prefer.” Obviously, both would taste terrible, but you can only digest one of them. That doesn’t make what you are digesting much more appealing (liver and onions are rather gross,) and it feels rather… gangster, I suppose, to go, “of more consequence than sparrows are you – now act righteously, or you perish.”

I wish, however, for you to once again disregard our religious training and observe the passage with a view to understand God’s point of view. In order to bestow the ultimate blessing upon all which Paul is burdened to convey, the letter must start here, with a condemnation of all. If we are to be justified before God – that is, considered righteous on all accounts – apart from the faith of Jesus Christ, then we had better get our act together! We must be flawless.

We almost all failed to do this in our formative years. We have all thrown tantrums, been selfish, self-absorbed, and high maintenance through our pride. In our adult years, these habits manifest themselves in more complex – nevertheless unrighteous – ways. It is difficult, of course, to envision a child committing a murder – yet I grew up in a city where there are 400+ murders per year. The child’s pride is often apparent, but harmless. But this same pride, when manifested in adults, brings about the premeditation that results in the loss of life (see almost any rap album today for examples of this.)

What I’m saying is that, whether you wish to count our childhood or not, “adulthood” is not a free pass out of the internal petulance which pervades our souls. This manifests itself in far worse ways, in every avenue of life, from the professional to the social to the immediate. The very fact that we internally battle this sin (and all of us lose this fight on various occasions, with few victories to speak of) is, I firmly believe, empirical evidence to our unrighteousness. It is why utopian ideologies have never worked, it is why families fall apart (both relative and immediate) and it is why the only successful system we have come up with in the last hundred years (the truly “free market” economy) has ended up failing anyway.

Thus… we aren’t flawless (surprise!) From God’s point of view, this is obvious. It didn’t smack Him in the face, He wasn’t shocked by it, and Adam didn’t wound Him apart from His understanding of the ultimate story. His all-powerful nature does not conflict with the fact that unrighteousness and disrespect are still repulsive to Him, and He will always respond with disgust toward it. There is no partiality with God because to be partial would be to accept unrighteousness and disrespect in some manner.

This means that He’s not telling the Greek to act righteously. He never told them “Hey, perform all these laws,” because they would never be able to do it to begin with. If God had put every nation under the law just as He did with the Jew, and carried out the penalties found within, then no one would be alive today. God would have proven Himself righteous, but there would have been no setup for the crucifixion of Christ, and much less could there be any depiction of His heart through it all.

And, since He is not telling the Greek to act righteously, God is then not offering the individual who sinned without law any particular. The one who sinned is just that – a sinner.

The soul that is sinning, it shall die.

Still On the Surface

Indeed, we are still observing the surface level. The gentile will naturally object to this claim from Paul by saying, “But you, the Jew, will say that the Mosaic law is righteous, since to follow it would make you justified. How, then, am I, the gentile, supposed to know the difference between a righteous and unrighteous act? I never had a law to look at and discern righteousness with!”

Such a question will be answered in verse 15 with three different proofs. But before this is answered, the Jew (including the proselyte) must also be considered in the charge. While one who sins without law shall perish, one who sins in the law must also be judged through the law.

Up until this point, the pious Jew will have subconsciously exempted themselves from Paul’s argument. They will have supposed (by adding rabbinical writings such as the Talmud to the law) that they are following the law, and thus already believe themselves justified before God. Of course, this is hogwash, and will be given a fuller consideration from Romans 2:17-3:8, where Paul explicitly turns to the Jew, since implicitly implicating them in the judgment here.

The difference between the Jew and gentile is not God’s standard of righteousness, as His justness does not change. The difference is the law that the Jew is under. The gentile is right to say that the Jew had received a book to discern righteousness with. This will lead to a greater judgment on the Jews’ end, for, on top of knowing the law, they did not fulfill the law.

And what do we know about the law?

For not the listeners of the law are just with God, but the doers of the law shall be justified.

Hmmm. Right; it is not about merely listening to the law, but actually doing the law. It is not enough merely to hear the law, as we so often do. Actually knowing the law will bring about this greater need for correction, for God to right the individual, as opposed to the repentant sinner.

Both the repentant sinner and the ignorant hearer of law will be condemned (for no one has actually done the law except for Jesus Himself.) This is a recurring and critical proposition to be found in these first three chapters, and will be supposed throughout the remainder of Romans as well. Clear examples of this are as follows: we are condemned because we judge while committing the same actions we condemn, and none are exempt from this (Rom. 2:1.) The judgment out of Adam has brought everyone into condemnation (Rom. 5:17.) This one offense has condemned all mankind (Rom. 5:18.) Only in Christ Jesus is one no longer condemned (Rom. 8:1.)

The difference here is not in the verdict, but the actual judgment session to occur at the great white throne. Indeed, you may think that the great white throne deals with man’s individual relations with each other. You may believe that God will finally settle your score with a corrupted government, or finally prove the point concerning your cheating ex-wife, or finally stick it to your sleazy boss. And, while this will occur, it will not be the focus of the judgment scene. The judgment scene, as we have studied, is concerned with this parameter – man’s corrupted relationship with God. We need to be “righted,” literally, and God’s judgments, sourced in love, will accomplish this goal for all. By focusing on this biggest relationship, the other effectual relationships among men will be resolved, for all, through their lamentation and gnashing of teeth (especially from the pious Jew, who believed himself exempt from judgment – Matt. 24:48-51,) will come to realize the collective condemnation of mankind; that their poor dealings among each other are, in truth, only because of their lacking relationship with their Creator.

This piousness reaches its zenith in the church pews today. Most believe that, simply by going to a church, that they are suddenly “right with God.” Others believe that their faith automatically exonerates their actions, or, again, exempts them from any necessary correction on a given matter. Not so; Paul would not be writing this if that were the case. To quote Pastor George Rogers, “There is no salvation in ignorance of either law or gospel.” To simply ignore the reality – that those committing the acts of Rom. 1:29-31 are deserving of death, which we were all too happy to agree with when we were not explicitly called out – is the very ignorance of which Rogers speaks, and further of which Paul speaks, in Rom. 1:18.

Woe to the Christian of today, then! Woe to their refusal to stomach facts as they are! The Jew is the focus in relation to the law, but most churches (and non-denominational groups) today would impose the same law that the Jew failed to uphold onto our shoulders. Thus while the Jew is, indeed, the unfaithful Israel which we see even to this day, we must not ignore that they are representative of the “righteous” today – worst of all the preachers who know that a proper translation is due, and yet enforce their own reasonings to dismiss this fact in favor of misinformation about God.

Will My Loved Ones Be on the New Earth?

I don’t know. That’s not really my place to say, either. I’m no just judge. I have a conscience, sure, which dictates to me which is right and which is wrong, but that conscience has been influenced by modernism and post-modernism alike, to my detriment. I have read the law, but all 613 laws in the Pentateuch are not on standby in my hippocampus. As a man, I must say this.

Only God is a just Judge. Whether your loved ones will be given life eonian – be it their individual situation, or one’s inability to process information properly (my aunt has cerebral palsy, for example, rendering her practically immobile) we may trust now that the One Who is being completely honest with us has also promised to judge justly. Your loved ones are His loved ones, and I would be willing to bet my last quarter that He loves them far more than you or I could even begin to comprehend.

Does that sound like a copout? I don’t mean for it to sound like one; the relationship God is establishing with us here is not one of copouts, but of trust. I point again at Psalm 82, where King David (a man after God’s own heart, remember) implores the celestial realm to grant justice to the destitute and the poor, for they are roving about in darkness and have no light to cling to. Judgment day, as we studied in Romans 2:6-10, is not merely a day of condemnation, but a day of correction and revelation for the entire universe. Will the condemned repentant Ninevite be given life on the new earth? Would God compromise His own just standards with love, or is God just and loving for preserving the condemned until after their second death penalty has been fulfilled?

I do not believe that these are the case. Love does not counteract or contradict justness, but complements it. We are entreated by God to leave the judging to the Just. He has every understanding of our conscience and our lack, demonstrated by His faithful Son descending to this fleshy body. Jesus too notes that the Father’s judging is always just and true (John 5:30, 7:24, 8:16.) It will, I believe, be crystal clear to man that we all deserve death when all of the cards are laid out on the table, all at once, together, at the great white throne (cf. Rom. 2:3.)

Man’s judgments, as we have been learning, are far less fair, and far more brutal, than the judgments of God. In grade school, we have funny examples of this. There’s the classic example of “Now nobody can play with this toy” instead of a righteous verdict being given. And, on a political level, we have far darker examples of this. Innocent men have been subject to the death penalty (see Stephen King’s The Green Mile for a fictional example of this, and many racially-charged lynchings under the faux Jim Crow laws from the 1880s-1964, as well as the present day Palestinian/Israeli conflict for nonfictional examples.) Man’s judgments against mentally deficient individuals is often to hide them from society. They cannot fix them – psychiatry has hardly ever succeeded in this department – but they can hide them.

God will do super-excessively above all that we expect – starting with the evangel which we will read from Rom. 3:21-4:25. God will not hide, but expose and then penalize with a view to correction, as was the case with the first man, Adam. This will be for the ultimate welfare of all. It is assumed that man “perishing,” per Rom. 2:12, automatically means that the dead men will never be saved. Such an assumption is unwarranted, and could only be true apart from Christ’s sacrifice, which, as we read in Rom. 1:16, is to everyone who is believing. It is evident from Paul’s other writings that all will believe (Phil. 2:9-11,) from a God who wills this to be so, even if man must endure judgment day to appreciate it (1 Tim. 2:4, Luke 3:7, John 12:32.)

In other words, the relative destruction of one does not mean their permanent removal from the story. If this were the case, then not only would God and Christ have failed to save them, but they would further lose that individual (a statement hardly becoming of the God Who drops everything for the one missing sheep.)

The salvation of all will be discussed specially in Romans 5:18-19, where it is plainly woven into Paul’s argument for all, post judgment.

The question may further be begged (one which I will ask, but not answer, for I have not studied this yet) – will everyone be spending the same amount of time in the second death penalty? It may be fairly supposed that the repentant sinner will spend very little time in the lake of fire, which is the second death (note that they are dead, as in there is no sensation for torment or torture, for they are not alive – see the study on Romans 1:32 and 5:12 for more details.) This would not be surprising, for God is quite nuanced, from His calculated and measured anger (seven years of indignation and no more,) to His layered glorification which He imposes upon believers (see 1 Cor. 3:8-15,) it would be clear that this One knows better than to judge indiscriminately and standardize judgment. Every individual is unique, and while there are parallels in our strengths and shortcomings, no two situations are exactly the same. If anyone would like to share a studied pursuit of this train of thought with me, I would be more than happy to learn and listen, and digest what you say.

In the meantime, the fact remains, whether you are without law or sin while identifying with law. If sin is found, the sinner must perish. No one is exempt from this, for we are all experiencing destruction presently – the dissolution of our minds, ethically and critically, with the wear and tear of our biodegradable bodies. The fundamental flaw of every individual is that we fail to keep God in recognition (Rom. 1:28,) and this from the underlying disrespect of sin (Rom. 1:18.) The point will be concluded when we reach Romans 3:9-20, at the conclusion of this argument – not one is just; there is not even one. In order to self-justify, one must suppose that God is wrong – thus calling Him a liar, and condemning Him to death on those grounds (Job 11:2, 32:2, 40:8, 1 John 5:10.) Of course, no one will be able to give receipts for these claims at the great white throne, even with the completely fair parameters that God will provide in the following verses – taking us back to the fact of man’s hypocrisy (Rom. 2:1-5.) There is no single individual who has earned, of their own hypothetical volition, a just reward from God.

- GerudoKing