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| > Sermon Archive > Sermons by Author > Dr. Wes Bredenhof > Prepare to face the God who judges with no partiality | Previous Next Print |
| Order Of Worship (Liturgy) All songs are from the CanRC/FRCA Book of Praise Psalm 89:1-3 Psalm 19:3 (after the Law of God) Psalm 62:1,7 Hymn 73:1,4,5 Psalm 84:5,6 Scripture readings: Deuteronomy 10:12-22; Romans 2:1-5 Text: Romans 2:6-11 |
Beloved congregation of Christ,
London is estimated to have just under a million CCTV cameras. When you’re there, almost everywhere you go, a camera is watching you, recording your actions. Many times you won’t notice them because they’re well-hidden. But look carefully and you’ll see that you’re almost always being watched.
Now imagine if that was true for everyone everywhere all the time. And at the end of the world, the footage of your life gets played back in a courtroom. The one behind the bench will judge everything you have done through the course of your life. The footage would include not only the things other people saw and heard you do, but also the things you thought no one else knew about – the secret things. How would you feel about that?
If you’ve lived a good life, you’ve got nothing to worry about. If you’ve kept God’s commandments, loving him and loving your neighbour all the time, it’s all going to be good. You’ll get through that courtroom, no problem. God will judge you fairly and give you what you deserve – eternal life in his presence.
The message of our passage this morning is that we all better be ready to face that Judge. In the end, we will all stand before him. In the end, the books will be opened and our deeds will be exposed. What will be the outcome for you? If you want a positive outcome, you have to be ready. So I preach to you God’s Word from Romans 2:6-11 and I’ve summarized the sermon with this theme: Prepare to face the God who judges with no partiality.
We’ll consider how he judges:
1. Those who persistently do good
2. Those who selfishly pursue evil
As always, context is crucial when it comes to understanding our passage. We have to remember that this passage doesn’t occur in isolation, but as part of a broader argument. Romans is set up like our Heidelberg Catechism – in fact, our Catechism’s structure was based on Romans. So it’s guilt-grace-gratitude. Or sin-salvation-service. Or debt-deliverance-devotion. You can slice it up different ways. For our purposes, we’re in that first section, making the case for human guilt, sin, and debt. Making that case is meant to drive us towards the gospel, towards the good news of what God has done for sinners in Jesus Christ.
So, as we dig into these verses, we have to remember what Paul already said back in chapter 1, verse 16: the gospel “is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.” The gospel – and nothing else – is that power. And we have to also remember what he’ll say later in chapter 3, verse 28, “For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.” What he writes here in chapter 2 cannot contradict that. Instead, it’s meant to lead to that. Let’s see how.
Verse 5 spoke of the “day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.” Our passage expands on that day of judgment. According to verse 6, God will render an appropriate judgment to every one based on what they have done. Verse 11 corresponds to this with its reminder that “God shows no partiality” in his judgment. When Paul says that, he’s hearkening back to what the Old Testament said about God. For example, in our reading from Deuteronomy 10, Moses reminded the people of Israel that “the great, the mighty, and the awesome God,” is not partial and takes no bribe. He doesn’t look at your ethnicity, gender, or social status when he judges. God doesn’t play favourites – when he judges he applies the same standard to one and all.
What that standard is will be worked out further in what follows here in chapter 2. It’s the law of God. That law is captured especially in the Ten Commandments. The moral law of God is grounded in the character of God. What God requires in his law demonstrates to us what God himself is like. That means the law is absolute and unchanging, just like God is absolute and unchanging. It is the firm standard by which God will judge with no partiality.
If according to this standard, you have persistently done what is good, seeking the approval of God, he will give you eternal life. That’s in verse 7. It doesn’t matter who you are, what your ethnicity is, he will judge you to be worthy of life forever in his presence if you’ve done what it says in verse 7. Similarly, verse 10 says that those who do good, will receive “glory and honor and peace” from God. Again, who you are doesn’t matter, all that matters is what you’ve done. If you’ve done good, God will surely take notice at the final judgment, he will approve, and you will be blessed. You will be admitted to his presence where you can live with him forever in happiness.
One of the key elements here is in verse 7. It speaks about “patience in well-doing.” That’s a legitimate translation, but here the NIV more accurately gives the sense. The NIV of verse 7 speaks of those who “by persistence in doing good, seek glory, honor and immortality.” Persistence. That’s the key to unlocking a judgment in your favour. You have to continually do what is good according to God’s holy standard, his moral law. It has to be without any interruption. If you are persistently doing good, then he will grant you eternal life in the final judgment.
What is echoed here is the first covenant made with Adam in the Garden of Eden. We sometimes call that the covenant of works. Others prefer to call it the covenant of creation. Whatever we choose to call it, God promised life to Adam on the condition of complete and persistent obedience. If Adam would obey God by not eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he would be able to live in the Garden of Eden and enjoy fellowship with God forever.
This principle of the covenant of works comes back in the New Testament in the teaching of Jesus. In Luke 10, a lawyer asked Jesus what he could do to inherit eternal life. Christ asked him about the requirements of the law. He repeated the requirements to love God with all your being and to love your neighbour as yourself. Christ then echoed the covenant of works: “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.” If you want eternal life, all you have to do is love God perfectly and love your neighbour perfectly. That’s it. If you can do that, you’ve got it made. If you can do that, you don’t even need Jesus. You don’t need God’s grace in him. You can climb your way up to God on your own steam.
Now if you think you can do that, I’ve got some ocean front property in Alice Springs [or Arizona] to sell you. The reality is that the covenant of works was broken by Adam. He fell into sin and he plunged the rest of us into sin too. The power of sin is so great that there’s no possibility any of us will ever be able to fulfill the obligation of the covenant of works. Not a single human being will be given eternal life according to the principle found in verses 7 and 10. If you think of it in mathematical terms, the number of people in the set of those who will earn eternal life through persistent well-doing, the number of people in that set is exactly zero.
Again, this is all part of Paul’s way of arguing towards our need for Jesus Christ, our need for the gospel. We’re working towards that quote from Psalm 14 in chapter 3, verse 10, “None is righteous, no, not one…” No Jews, no Greeks, no one is righteous, no one will be righteous by their own deeds at God’s judgment. This is why we need Jesus Christ. He fulfilled the terms of the covenant of works, so we can be in a covenant of grace.
Christ is the only one who was persistent in doing good. Everyone who believes in him is united to him, and through that union with Christ, God gives to us eternal life. Through Christ and our union with him, we are granted glory, honour, and peace, regardless of our ethnicity or anything else about us. We can only be blessed with life forever in God’s presence through what Christ did in our place. He lived the perfectly obedient life persistently, loving God and his neighbour, and he also paid our penalty on the cross. Everything we need for eternal life is found in Christ and only in him. So don’t try to earn it yourself, instead rest, rest in what Christ has done for you. That is how you prepare to face the God who judges with no partiality. You prepare by entrusting yourself to Jesus alone.
If you don’t prepare like that, then what we find in verses 8 and 9 will be the case. Here the Holy Spirit warns those who are self-seeking – you could also say “selfish” or “self-centered.” They have “self” on the throne of their lives instead of God. Because that’s true, they don’t obey the truth of God’s moral law. In fact, they regard God’s standards as false and worthless.
Instead, it says in verse 8 that they “obey unrighteousness.” That’s a peculiar expression. Again the sense is what we find in the NIV: “following evil.” Rather than following the righteousness given in God’s moral law, they choose to follow everything contrary to God’s law.
At the last judgment, these deeds will be publicly exposed and there will be dire consequences. Paul piles on the terms to drive that home. There’ll be wrath, fury, tribulation, and distress. All these terms are intended to convey the truth of what the Bible elsewhere calls hell.
Hell is the place where God’s impartial judgment on sinners is carried out. It is a place of eternal, conscious torment of body and soul. It’s not a metaphor or some other figure of speech, but a horrifying reality.
There are some Christians who argue that there is no such place as hell. They hold to a view known as annihilationism. Instead of going to hell, people who remained in their sins and didn’t turn to Christ will be annihilated. To be annihilated means that you simply cease to exist. That’s their punishment, they go out of existence. This idea is most commonly associated with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but the Seventh Day Adventists hold to it too. Annihilationism was also taught by the well-known Anglican theologian John Stott.
Annihilationism is contrary to what Scripture teaches here in Romans 2 and elsewhere. If we just limit ourselves to here in Romans 2, it speaks of God’s “wrath and fury.” That wrath and fury is experienced by the sinner as “tribulation and distress,” not as annihilation. Not ceasing to exist, but wishing that you didn’t exist because you’re in that much agony of body and soul. And it’s eternal. It’s eternal because when you sin against God, you sin against infinite majesty. Sin committed against infinite majesty doesn’t warrant annihilation, but infinite, unending punishment of body and soul. That’s what you find in hell.
This is what God will render to each sinner who does not have Jesus Christ as their Saviour. It doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter what your ethnic background may be. Without partiality, God will judge all sinners who are without Christ in exactly the same way. They will all receive his just judgment in hell.
It’s important to remember the difference between those who are ultimately given eternal life and those who are given eternal death in hell. Both were sinners in this world. Both were deserving of God’s eternal condemnation. But those who are given eternal life had Jesus Christ as their Saviour. He is what makes all the difference.
That’s not just something to be taken as an abstract truth. That needs to be taken into your heart and life. If you are depending on your own deeds, no matter how good you think they are, they will never be good enough. You will never be good enough to earn eternal life from God. You need Jesus Christ. We all do. Nothing can substitute for what God offers us in him. He is the only way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through him.
What’s true for us is true for others too. What Paul writes here in Romans 2 is universally applicable – God shows no partiality. Whether you believe what’s written here to be the truth or not, that makes no difference. This is the objective reality. Everyone is going to bump up against it. Refusing to believe it is like refusing to believe that gravity is real. You might go up on a high building and dangle yourself over the edge and claim that gravity isn’t real or dangerous to you in that situation, but you’d be deluding yourself. It’s the same with God’s judgment at the end and what results from it with everyone who doesn’t believe in Christ.
Realizing this highlights again the urgency of the gospel. Those who don’t know Christ in a saving way, need to repent and believe if they’re going to avoid the horrific wrath to come. If you know people who aren’t Christians, pray for them. Plead for them that they would hear the gospel, whether from you or from someone else. Ask God to work in their heart with the Holy Spirit so they would be born again and come to faith in Jesus Christ. Without him, there is no hope for eternal life for anyone, Jew or Greek or Australian [or Canadian/American, etc.] or anyone.
Loved ones, I trust you see by now that our passage isn’t giving anyone a viable alternative to the gospel. There’s no good news here for anyone. There are two ways described here. Apart from Christ, one is impossible and the other is inevitable. Earning salvation for yourself through the terms of the covenant of works is impossible. Judgment leading to hell is inevitable. The only way out of this bad news is through the righteousness of God in Jesus Christ. Prepare to face God by clinging only to the hope we have in Jesus. If you’re in Christ by faith, then truly that last day of judgment when the books are opened will not be a day of fear or anxiety for you. You will be secure and confident in Christ and what he did. He’s the only way to a positive outcome on that day. AMEN.
PRAYER
O righteous God in heaven,
With your Word we confess you to be a just Judge who shows no partiality. We are sinners who violate your law constantly, even as your children in Christ. Father, we know that we have no righteousness of our own by which we could hope to earn eternal life. We cling to Christ and what he did for us in his perfect life of obedience and in his death on the cross. Please continue to look upon us as we are in him, also at the final judgment. We pray for those we know and love who are selfishly pursuing evil without Jesus as their Saviour. Please work through us and others to bring the gospel to them. We pray that you would work in their hearts with your Holy Spirit that they too would know the hope of the gospel.
* As a matter of courtesy please advise Dr. Wes Bredenhof, if you plan to use this sermon in a worship service. Thank-you.
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