Lesson 6b
Romans 2:17-29 · Mike Doyle · Apr 22, 2018
Romans (2018-21), No. 14
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/49261994679

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

So I was thinking, because Courtney called me and said, well, listen, can you pick up for me, because I'm in Southern Colorado drilling a well. So I thought, OK, just to bring us up to speed. So right now, in the sequence of things of what we're doing, what's the purpose of the verses in the end of one through two? in the beginning of three. What are we doing here? What are we trying to find out? Or what is Paul trying to teach us?

You have been paying attention? It's not about the letter of the law, right? I mean, the Jewish guy, he's got everything and he says you've got nothing. If you just... Basically, we've got three groups of people, right? Who are the three groups? No, no, we're not even there yet. The three groups of people we've been talking about in Romans 1 and 2, who are those three groups? The common sinner, the person who doesn't know anything about anything, who just begins to live and live by whatever he or she feels or thinks or whatever. Is that person guilty before God? Right?

We've concluded they are. Then the second group of people, this group in the first group, they've got a little morality, right? So they come up with their own set of morals and doctrine that they want to live by. And so they have a code or a set of rules by which they live by. And what Paul is trying to show here is that, okay, They're without excuse before God because in essence what God says to them, I'll judge you based on your rules. You won't win. You have to do it based on my rules. So we've got two groups of people.

Now we move into the third, which is the really religious guys. And up until this point in history, the most religious people on the planet were who? The Jewish nation. And why were they so religious? And where'd they get the law? They got it from God. So they are the one group of people that, as we're going to find out, really do have an advantage. Right? They do have an advantage, because God dealt with them.

You know, by the way, if I get into one of these coffin jags, plug your ears, it sounds awful. What Paul is doing, he's very carefully going down through Judaism and he's showing why they're going to be guilty and without excuse before God also. Because, quickly in your mind, do you remember the criteria in which God is going to judge everybody? It was the end of the last chapter, and Courtney started with it this week.

Do you remember what they were? There were six of them, and now we're working on the seventh. The first one was that God will judge man according to truth. So, who's the truth? The Lord Jesus said, I'm the truth. So God will judge every man according to the truth because God is right about everything. He's righteous and He is not going to have somebody come before Him to be judged who somehow missed the bus.

They know. They're without excuse. The second is that He will judge you based according to accumulated guilt. So it's interesting, I don't think people who don't know Christ or don't understand grasp this idea that over their life they're building up a case against themselves. You know, they're adding to the stack, adding to the stack, adding to the stack. So he judges based on that. Third thing is, he judges based on their works.

Now, he says, Back in verse 6, we'll render to each person according to his deeds. I'm getting nervous about this time, aren't you? Then he says, God says, I'm not a respecter of persons. It doesn't matter to me who you are or who you think you are. I'm going to judge everybody the same. Everybody the same. There's no partiality with God.

Then he says that he's going to judge people based on their performance, not necessarily what they knew, but how they functioned. And that's one of the things that where we are with the Jews now, is we're talking about performance rather than knowledge, because did they have knowledge? Yeah, they did better than anybody did. God gave them knowledge. What's the sixth one? According to reality, not a professed religion. That's right. Reality. What's real? What isn't real? And we, because of the society we live in, we think that, well, I'm going to get before God and we're going to have a discussion about this.

There isn't going to be any discussion. You know? You don't get it. This isn't a debate and you don't have a rebuttal. The last thing is that he's going to judge them according to what? That's what we're talking about today, and have been. What is he judging them on the last principle, the seventh principle? Oh, I think I switched those up on you, I'm sorry. What's that? I think I switched those up on you, because I think the one I said was the seventh.

According to reality, not religious. But the point being here is pretty simple that God gave the Jews a religion and we could call it a religion. Religion as a derivative of that is a Latin word that means regulation. So they have Judaism and they are with more revelation comes more responsibility, right? So they've got a tough road to hoe. I think they do. How did they do with it? They actually didn't do what God wanted them to do. So what happens to the Jew? Well, let me ask it this way. How does the Jew react to what he knows?

We live in a neighborhood of, used to be more, but now still quite a bit, of Hasidic Jews. that wear the black unis and the fedoras. Yesterday it's snowing and raining and they're all walking up to the synagogue and outwardly they look pretty pious. But we've been around them long enough now to realize that, gee, what Paul's talking about here in Romans is exactly true of them.

So the point being is that Paul challenges them by saying to them, well, you do, or you say, or you believe this, that, and the other thing. Do you not do the same thing? That would be quite a challenge, don't you think? So we had worked our way down to question seven, which said, would verse 22 and 23 be intimidating to us if we didn't take serious our profession of faith? And so what I did And I had some other notes I can't find, but this will work. I find it interesting within Christianity, and I find it especially interesting in environments where believers are, I don't want to use the word better trained, but more knowledgeable about the scriptures than say the group next to them who operate more on emotion and feeling rather than on what the Word of God says.

So, if I take Romans 2.22 and 23 and take out the word Jew and insert the word Christian, what does that look like?

Let's see if you guys are going to feel guilty by the time I get there. Newell says many professional evangelists especially have caused a stench. Don't you love that word? By their reaching after men's pocketbooks. That's sooner than what I want to do. Hold on a minute. That's good enough. I didn't want to do it. I want to do it this way. I wanted to do it. I want to do it at 17 through 29. Okay. Romans 2, 17.

I'm going to substitute the word Christian. If you bear the name of a Christian, and you rest having the gospel and the glories of God, and you know His will, you approve of the things that are excellent being instructed out of the gospel, and are confident that you yourself are a guide to the blind, Having in the gospel that form of knowledge and the truth, then here comes the question. Thou who glories in the gospel through your own disobedience to the gospel, do you dishonor God? Do you? Answer, yeah, I do. The name of God is blaspheme. The preaching of the gospel is called in the world, Newell says, a learned profession.

So, not to scold us, but I think sometimes, it's been my experience because I was one of those guys that met the Lord at 35 and I was introduced to these growth truths right away. Just so happened the guys that I knew were learning them, and I met some other men that knew about them, so I was exposed to them right away.

One of the things I noticed, pretty quickly, that most Christians understand the gospel and salvation. They've got that down pretty good. And they're pretty humble about it, you know, and they'd like to see other people come to Christ. But then you add a little knowledge to them, like identification truths, that we were crucified with Christ, buried and resurrected. positional truth, all these wonderful positions that we enjoy as believers. What I began to notice is that people got arrogant about that. They really did. The very first time I met Bob Eccle, I went to a Bible study at his house. And there were some people there that kind of were just learning these truths. And as Bob was teaching, if anybody in that Bible study made a misstatement.

These people were on him like a snake for not being able to articulate or not articulating it the way they thought it should be. And I thought, this is stupid. That's not the gospel message. That's not the message of Christ. The information was fine, but the delivery wasn't too cool. The method wasn't very good.

And it turned out that over time they just made people angry. Well, I must admit I did the same thing for quite some time. I ended up up in Bob Eccles' Bible study for a lot of years and ended up not going because every time I went I made people mad. Because I was one of those people who were challenging everybody about how they were saying, you better be using the right words there. Is that the way we should function? How should we function?

Let's say, and it fits perfect with the Jews, with the Jewish religion. They did what human nature has a tendency to do, that knowledge puffs up, right? So now I know more than you do. I'm the expert and you have to listen to me and I can tell you. The worst thing in Christianity is somebody who knows something and has got one of these fingers. We recognize by looking at these verses that it certainly was a problem with the Jews and their attitude because they still have that attitude, don't they?

The Hasidics do. It's amazing the set of rules they have. Out of all of the people that live in my neighborhood, I think there were 30 some families that were Hasidics. There was only one that we really liked and that was the guy across the street who was the The number two rabbi over there, for some reason, he and his whole family were just terrific people.

They never looked down their nose at you. He was over all the time helping us. Wanting me to help him do stuff he couldn't do. Like on the Sabbath, there's a lot of stuff. But because of his demeanor, we became friends with that family. And they were really a neat family. But for the most part they're very standoffish and look down their nose at you.

They think they've got the answer to everything and you don't. Do we ever act like that? Sure we do. Sure we do. Why do you think we do that? Because we're right. That's the right answer. We might be right. I think sometimes it's because we want people...

I mean, dying outside of Christ is like a deadly thing. Physically dying. Yeah, physically dying outside of Christ is a horrible thing. You have to believe in it before you go. So I think there's... Maybe a little bit of an urgency on our part to go, honestly, Jesus is not an option. You really need him. So there may be some loving pleading going on at times.

Notice in these verses I just read that the Jews were to be a guide to the blind. Rather than being a guide to the blind, what attitude did they adopt? They were separatists, you know? They weren't a guide to the blind. Why do you think God gave them all the oracles? So they would be the vehicle through which they got spread around the earth. What did they do with them?

They built a wall up around them and said, you know, you've got to know the secret handshake and you've got to become a Jew and get circumcised and do all this other stuff and then we'll tell you what the Gee, that principle doesn't hold true today, does it?

That's everywhere. We've got the secret and you've got to, you know. When in fact the idea is, always has been, that the glory of God is to be manifested to the world through the nation of Israel. And instead of it being manifested, they dishonored the name of God.

Do we do that? We do sometimes. We do sometimes. The name of God is blasphemed because of our own preaching of the gospel or because of a little bit of maybe arrogance on our part because we do know some things? Do you find that the increased knowledge gives you a sense of I got it or a sense of awe about what it is, the grace that is presented there. Do I have to answer all my own questions today?

I think so. I think so. I know we, and I've always had this tendency, if I hear something as terrific like the gospel message when I first was saved I remember the guy I was saved in a guy's office downtown two guys were and one of the guys I walked out of the office and I was on 17th and Stout Street and I was so excited about being a Christian I was hugging this guy and he was saying get away from me well you know I mean you you you see the grace and you get And so I made a career over the next year or two about telling the right thing to the wrong people. I mean, I had people say, don't ever come back to my house. They'd invite me for dinner, and by the time we got halfway through the salad, they were mad at me. Because I was giving them the gospel. And so, you know, you learn, I think, from that.

One, question six says, should a Jew admit that he is guiltier than the Gentile before God? Should he admit that? No. What do you think? Is anyone guiltier than another? Think about it. Should a Jew admit that he's guiltier? Think about what he knows now. Because of the advantage that he has, Is she in a worse position before God? What do you think? Well, I think your answer is yes. But I feel like they're still just the same human as we are. Yeah, the fire is just as hot, right? Yeah.

But I think the point here, if you parallel with the gospel message that we know, have you ever been convicted that you oversold it? Or that you did it wrong, or that you tried to shove it down somebody's throat, and you weren't leading them in love, you were pinning them to the floor. When my friend told me he was going to kill me with my Bible, I was getting the hint. I think though the Gospel is offensive.

Yeah. It just is by the nature of it, isn't it? Yeah. So, what's the answer there? It's a pretty simple answer. There are several things that come to mind. There's sins, there's the sin nature. Sin nature is equally, guilt as related to the sin nature is equal to all men. The sins of men are different and can be greater or lesser but they still come from the sin nature. the wrath or the judgment of the sin nature is the same for all who do not have a new nature. But there are deeds, there are works, and those do have weights and relationships to God, but not in terms of condemnation. I don't know how that works out. the Jews had the law, and so they're held to a higher standard because of their knowledge. We also talked about teachers in relationship to Christianity, and how they're held to a higher standard.

We do not all enter heaven, but there's the judgmency of Christ, where we lose. We don't necessarily, you know, not enter heaven, but we lose opportunities, right? So just the same as an athlete doesn't get awarded a first or second place. They got to compete, they still got to be there. Just as Christians before the Lord, they will suffer loss, it's not a lack of presence with Him.

Does that make sense? But there are deeds, and it says that there are standards there. Teachers for us, and for the unbelieving world, Jews had The oracles, as you said, they had the knowledge, they had everything they needed to trust the Lord, but they used it. Yeah, I think about, like you're talking about the beam of judgment, it's a place of rewards. Every believer will get rewarded there.

It's not a place for sin to be discussed. Why not? Because it's already been taken care of. Sin's handled. So we're not talking about sins anymore. We're talking about rewards and the deeds that we're talking about. It's what Christ was able to do through His Spirit through us, we get rewarded for. What we did out of ourselves goes to this fire, right? It's going to get burned up. I will suffer loss, right? Yeah. But if you focus on the deeds, where are you looking? That's really good because I'm building to that point.

We all have within us, because we're believers, we have a, as J.B. Stoney talks about, we have a taste for the things of God. It comes with a life. And with that life comes a heart for others. We want others to understand the wonderfulness of the Lord Jesus and what he did and salvation and for believers spiritual growth and all of those kinds of things. The problem is we don't know how to do it.

Even the Apostle Paul went through how many years of training before God turned him loose on the world? He did three years in Arabia and who knows five or six seven years maybe in Tarsus but he was working there, but he was learning that whole time. And you can see in his epistles, he learned through his whole life. He never stopped learning. He never stopped learning how to do things, too. He never stopped. So it's one thing to know the truth. It's another thing to know how and when to give it to somebody else.

But that's what we're here to do. We're here as servants of the Lord to proclaim the gospel and of the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ. That's the number one job every one of us have above every other thing we do. I don't care what it is. We have to be trained, not trained necessarily, but we have to learn how to do that. Tools that go into that.

You learn over time that the very Word of God, those words have power in themselves. And if you use those rather than your opinion, usually they have a better effect on the people you're talking to than what you're trying to say. Do you understand what I'm saying? So it takes years to get to that point where you will settle down just on the words and trust what God has said because those words drew you and those words cause you to grow. So why use your opinion as opposed to the words of God?

You should use them. And I think that's where the responsibility comes in. That's where the loss of rewards are going to be. How much did you use God's Word for whatever God has called you to do? And how much was your opinion? I think your opinion is what gets stoked in the fire.

And we are servants. Does everybody agree that we are servants of the Lord? And if we're servants of the Lord, What are we here to do? Proclaim the gospel of the glory of Christ. That's a lot. That's a lot. So it can be proclaimed with words. It can be more emphatically proclaimed by the way we live. By the way the Spirit of God conducts the life of the Lord Jesus through us. Because people are going to ask, what's that hope that's in you? You know, and it isn't because you're carrying a sign around that says, I have hope.

It's not that. It's because it's visible. It's visible. And like Donna says, where's your focus? Your focus is on Christ himself. I've just been thinking about this. These first two chapters of Romans are all about, I mean, Paul's establishing the necessity of the gospel. Right. So, this is all about guilt. There's no one who doesn't fall under the guilt factor here. You all need to believe. There's no privilege, there's no moral, there's no barbarian. And this whole chapter is about that.

You've been relating that to us as Christians, and how we judge, and how we look down our finger at others. There's also this flip side to things of saying, you do your thing, I'll do mine. I'm not saying that that's the topic of Romans chapter 2, but it's equally a problem for us as believers. It's the flip side of this judgmental thing.

I'm not going to judge anybody. Everybody can do their own thing. So the scripture establishes a right and a wrong, and then there's the judgmental side of appropriating that right to other people, and then there's the side where I don't want to ever tell anybody that they're wrong. You can do what you want. You can see the way you want. It's this idea of, you've got your truth and I've got mine. It's the postmodern concept, right? Sure.

And so that has just as much impacted Christianity as the judgmental side of things here. But what's interesting is that Paul and the book of Romans doesn't allow for either of those two ways of thinking. Because God is a God of truth, and there will be judgment. And so, on the one hand, I don't want to ever tell anybody that stuff.

I mean, let's be honest. Who wants to tell somebody? It's scary. If you want to be rejected, hey, let's go. Yeah. Right? I mean, who wants to be on that side of the conversation? That's a very uncomfortable place to be. Sure. So, I'll swing the pen to the other side, and I'll just judge them and tell them, and I don't care if you hate me. So, there's a middle ground, and that middle ground is grace, right? You know what I think the middle ground is? I think the middle ground is that as we grow, we are more and more dependent on the Spirit of God, and we recognize that God is sovereign, that nothing's loose, none of the screws got unloosened, nothing's tilting, and if we trust Him and walk with Him, the opportunity that He has fitted us for will be there, and we can trust Him as we go.

Yes, right. And sometimes he has you being like your own. This time I feel in New York, like I'm my own little ship. I've got no other Christians around me. That's right. And I'm not here to tell you about it, because I don't want you to look at me like I have three heads. But I'm just going to, like you say, walk with the Lord and have my own little beacon of light. But it's weird. It is weird. And like you said, this is a walking with the Spirit.

We're not creating those things. No. And that's what judgment does. You know, when we start getting prideful, or when we start getting, you know, when we start to hide, or we start to pride, you know? Both of those two things are not trusting the Lord with those relationships with people. That's right.

But I just wanted to bring out the flip side, because some of us may not feel like we're very judgmental. Some of us may feel like we're extremely accommodating. And I feel like I'm going, I'm swung between those two extremes. I think we all do. Yeah. I really do. We had a guy call us up Friday. Yes, Friday.

This is a guy. These are two old business partners of mine, and both of them have become Christians over their life. One of them only the last four or five years, and the one in the last four or five years is a lawyer, so you know what he's like. He's a single guy, he's 70 years old, and God has worked on this guy. He and this other friend of mine have been angry at each other for quite some time.

He calls me Friday and he says, he said, well, how's it going? I said, I'm doing good. He said, I just want you to know I called so-and-so and asked him to forgive me. I mean, you've got to know this guy. He's as tough as they come. Excuse me. But Don and I, we were walking around the house like this for an hour because I'm thinking, gee, the Lord did all this without me. It was so cool, you know, for this man to call this other man and just say, hey, forgive me. And the other guy went, okay.

But you could just see the grace of God affecting this guy. And, you know, there was no sense in which we could say, oh, we can take credit for any of that. Well, and didn't you say, too, that the Spirit was just on him? He said, yeah, I've been thinking about him, and you can tell he's cooking. And the Lord was just talking to me all morning. I had to call him.

Imagine one lawyer calling another business partner and asking for forgiveness, and he's sincere about it. I think he shocked this other guy so much he didn't know what to say. So I think we learn, we grow, and we learn how to do things. Sometimes I wonder why God lets us screw it up so often, because we do leave a lot of dead bodies in our wake. I remember little things you learn in your lessons.

One time we were at a Tuesday Bible study years and years ago out at Betty Sundine's place and Miles was there. It was his wedding anniversary. He and Cornelia may be married for 50 years or something. So somebody brings a cake in, right? So one of the guys who thought he'd asked Miles a wise question said, Well, Miles, what is your secret over all of these years? You know what his answer was?

I've learned what not to do. Isn't that cool? Great answer. I've learned what not to do. I think our spiritual growth is that way. We learn what not to do. You know, the one thing when I was with Kent on my friend Clint on Saturday and talking to his wife yesterday. People who don't know Christ are very confused. Clint kept saying, I don't like that angry God you believe in.

He is a hateful, he murders And if people could only know that there were purposes for everything that God did, but the gospel is believing If you believe the gospel, you'll be in heaven. That's the simple truth of it. It's very confusing for people because they're thinking there's all these rules and then Paul says, we're not out of the law. I mean, it's real confusing. But the beautiful gospel is just so overwhelmingly wonderful. We're not condemned. I mean, it's just... You see what I'm saying?

Like, Clint's worried about this angry God, and I'm saying, well, those things are true. Whatever he did, he did. And it's the same God that you're going to believe in when you leave. But I just want people who don't believe to know the gospel is simple and beautiful, and God loves them. Yeah. I'm going to finish this in the next five minutes, you ready? So question eight you can do on your own.

Isaiah 52.5 and Ezekiel 36.20-23 just talk about the impression the Jews made on foreign lords and countries that captivated them that they profaned the name of Jehovah among the heathen and they're responsible for that. And so in those two verses you'll see what their lifestyle meant to other people who observed them. And that's a problem.

So eight, nine, can external circumstances override man's character and ways and judgment? The point I'm asking is the Jews were big on circumcision, right? Like we're big on baptism. So can religious form contradict immoral behavior? I say no. No, it can't. He makes a statement that if you were a Jew, if you're not a Jew and you're living like a Jew, would not God judge you better than if you were a Jew and you weren't living like one? The point is external circumstances can't override God's character in ways and judgment.

You see that? So I come out of a denomination where these things called sacraments are really important. I must tell you, I took probably, let's see, if you don't become a priest, I think you do five of them. Then when you die, you get the sixth one. I did them all under false pretenses. I really did.

One of the things you have to do, like when you're a kid, you go to confession, and then you go to communion, right? So at first, I don't know, first or second grade, you have to go to confession, so you make up the stuff. You make up the sins, because you don't understand. But then when you get to be a teenager, it's really tough to make it from confession Saturday to Mass on Sunday. without sinning. It's really hard. Anyway, so none of those rituals really work. That's not the issue about walking with the Lord. It has nothing to do with sacramental things like circumcision or like baptism or like any other thing like that. So ten, circumcision is the key ritual to a Jew.

Where in man Where in man should circumcision take place and when did it happen to the believer? It's the circumcision of the heart. If I were to use a synonym for circumcision, what synonym would I use? How about the word identification? circumcision removed skin off of a man and separated him from that fleshly material, right?

On the cross, a man is co-crucified with Christ. What happens to him? The spiritual circumcision of the heart takes place and he is separated from the flesh. You see that? So the circumcision of the heart is really an interesting understanding for every believer to know that they have been, by the work of the Holy Spirit, separated from the source of their sin. The forerunner to that was physical circumcision, but it was just a symbol that really talked about something else that was coming that would really matter, which was being crucified with Christ. To actually be separated through spiritual death from your old sin nature is circumcision of the heart. That's what it is.

So why do you think God went through the trouble to announce these seven great principles of judgment? Why do you think He did it? Because He wants you to know. He wants you awake. You talk about your friends that are mad at God or whatever their attitude is or whatever anybody's attitude is. God wants us to know what His game plan is and how He's going to do things. And it doesn't matter whether you accept him or not in terms of changing the reality of him, because God's always right.

And he's loving, but he's also righteous. His son had to die first before he could demonstrate his love towards us. He couldn't not do this and go ahead with this. So he has taken into consideration all the follies of men, all of them, and he has resolved them and now he offers grace.

But you can't try to say, well, my opinion is, what is that verse, every mouth will be stopped before God and everyone will know. Let's close. That's the second bell, right? Father, we thank you for this time. We thank you for all the grace that you have us under. We thank you for the grace of your Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and we pray in his precious name. Amen.