Third Presbyterian Sunday Morning Bible Study - March 14, 2021

Below is the Bible Study written by Jim Rudiger for his Sunday School Class which meets at Third Presbyterian Church, Norfolk, Virginia. It's based on Romans 1:28 - 2:16.

Who laid down the law in your home when you were growing up?  For me that is an easy answer - my Grandmother.  Grandmamma was a tiny little women, about eighty pounds and inches short of five foot.  But she ruled our home with an iron fist.  She was the Attorney General, Supreme Court and Judge Judy all rolled up in one.  Uncles, aunts, my brother, Jack, and I knew that this little Carolina farm girl didn’t take any prisoners.   A lot of our studies from Romans is about God writing his laws on our hearts.  Grandmamma was very clear in what her laws were and for Jack and I, they weren’t written on our hearts as much as they were etched on our legs with willow switches.  Grandmamma’s laws were very simple - do what she said when she said to do it and no back talk.  Some of the laws were picky.    We weren’t allowed to go across Hampton Boulevard to gawk at the freaks in the carnival set up in the vacant lot between 27th Street and 35th Street without her OK.  Also, and this was a big rule, we weren’t allowed to use Aunt Jenny’s black satin dresses for Batman capes without her permission. I'll tell you how Aunt Jenny's dress inspired Grandmamma's to create a law for it in just a minute.  And above all, no talking during the “Grand Ol’ Opry” radio show.  

Now, while there were punishments for breaking one of her laws, there were also rewards for being good little boys.  There were home made fig preserve sandwiches, there was letting us bring Puff our cat into the house, that is if there wasn’t a baby in the house.  Grandmamma was convinced that cats sucked the breath out of babies.  And the best reward was being told that we didn’t have wear knickers to school the next day.

You know, Jack and I didn’t spend much time wondering if Grandmamma’s laws were fair or just.  Just seeing her breaking off another willow switch put everything in perfect perspective.  I did one time rebel against her authoritarian rule and expressed my displeasure with one of her narrow minded judgments.  It was the time that I convinced Jack that Aunt Jenny’s dress/cape had magical powers, powers that would deny even sharp pointed darts from penetrating Jack's Batman cape.  Jack draped the cape over his arm and raised it in defense as I let fly with a dart.  Unfortunately, Aunt Jenny’s dress/cape seemed to have run out magic at just that time and the cape was pinned to Jack’s arm with my dart.  If Jack had taken it like a man and not started yelling his head off, Grandmamma would have never known.  But she came running into the living room in response to Jack’s sissy crying and removed the offending dart.  As she soothed cry baby Jack’s tender feeling, she glared at me knowing that when the last tear coursed down his dirty little cheeks, she would be out the back door choosing a sturdy willow branch.  

After the switching, I secretly wrote on the coal scuttle with chalk, “I hate Grandmother”.  I didn’t even use the more familiar “Grandmamma”.  I knew that when she banked the coals that night, she would see my message and feeling so bad that her actions had driven me to such an extreme point of unhappiness, she would rush up the steps to my bedroom and beg for my forgiveness.  

I laid there in the bed chuckling at how quickly I had formulated the revenge.  She would rush up the stairs and burst in my room, tears flooding her eyes as she begged for forgiveness.  After a suitable time given for this begging, I would grant her my forgiveness and she would have learned a valuable lesson about respecting the legs of little boys.

Well, that night I crawled into bed and listened for the rattle of the grate.  There it was.  Grandmamma was shaking the grate and getting the scuttle ready to received the evening’s ashes.  Now, she has noticed the message and adjusted her glasses to see what was written.  My plan was working perfectly.  Any minute now I would hear her coming up the stairs.  I waited and waited, but, there were no foot steps on the stairs.  Oh, no.  Maybe when she saw my message she was so distraught, so filled with remorse that she was overwhelmed with guilt and was weeping in the darkness of the living room.  Then it started.  The longer I laid there, the more guilty I felt.  Finally, I got out bed and went downstairs.  Grandmamma had let down her bun and was brushing her hair.  She acted as if nothing had happened.  The guilt got so over powering that I ran to her and begged for HER forgiveness.  She just hugged me and said that it was all right and to go back to bed and not to worry.  "And, bother way", she whispered with a smile,"I have decided that you don't have to wear knickers to school tomorrow.

In today’s study, Paul says that God has rules too.  Breaking those rules will bring punishment, but playing by the rules will bring rewards.  Last week, we learned about how everybody falls short of the ideal.  The end of Chapter 1 wasn’t covered last week, but, in it Paul describes the culture of the of the society of unbelievers, the heathens.

Romans 1:28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done.  29 They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice.  Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents 31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 

Paul sure doesn’t paint a pretty picture of how unbelievers acted.  What were some of the things they were guilty of? Wicked.  Evil.  Greed.  Depravity.  Envy.  Murder.  Strife.  Deceit.  Malice.  Gossips.  Slanderers.  God-haters.  Insolent.  Arrogant.  Boastful.  Invent ways of doing evil.  Disobedient to parents.  Senseless.  Heartless.  Ruthless.  And this is only on HBO.  How many of these things apply to our times?  It’s kind of disheartening to think that the bad guys in Romans 1 are still around.

Now as you remember, this letter was written to a home church in Rome that included Jews who followed Jesus’ teaching as well as Gentiles who had just accepted Jesus as their personal Savior.  I’m sure that as the Jews who were in the house heard how Paul describe the heathens, they must have nodded their head in agreement. They were thinking that the Gentiles in their church had a lot to answer for.  And that brings us up to today’s study.

Romans 2:1 Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are when you judge others; for in passing judgement on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing  the very same things.  2 You say, "We know that God's judgement on those who do such things is in accordance with truth."  3 Do you imagine , whoever you are, that when you judge those who do such things and yet do them yourself, you will escape the judgement of God?  4 Or do you despise the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience?  5 But by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath, when God's righteous judgement will be revealed.  6 For he will repay according to each one's deeds: 7 to those who by patiently doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; 8 while for those who are self-seeking and who obey not the truth but wickedness, there will be wrath and fury.  9 There will be anguish and desires for everyone who does, the Jew first and also the Greek, 10 but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek.  11 For God shows no partiality.

Paul has just finishing painting a pretty grim picture of the unbelievers.  It was a world under the condemnation of God.  There is no doubt about it.  And listing their sins, we can see that God is justified in his condemnation.  I mean, who wouldn’t be?  The Jews were pretty cocky at this point.  They were in full agreement with Paul’s description of heathens which to them meant all Gentiles.  They must have strutted around, chest out, tut tutting those who weren’t the chosen people like they were.  You see, the Jews never for a moment dreamed that they were under a similar condemnation from God.  God might judge heathens, but He was the special protector of the Jews.  Paul is trying to drill it into the Jew’s head that they are just as big a sinner as the unsaved Gentiles were.  In fact when the Jews are condemning the Gentiles for how they act, they are really condemning themselves because they have acted in the same way.  The Jews, though, had a pass.  Go pass “Go” and collect $200.00."  And what was that pass?  It was the race card.  Because they were racially Jews, they were exempt from judgement.  Paul breaks the bad news to them.  Being racially a Jew won’t spare them from judgement.  They will surely be judged, not on their racial heritage, but on the kind of life that they lived.

Jews always considered that they had a special relationship with God.  They proudly proclaimed that, “God loves Israel of all of the nations of the earth.”  They also said, “God will judge Gentiles with one measure and Jews with another.”  They had been taught this since they were old enough to understand.  If you believe you have a special relationship with somebody important, doesn’t it make you think that you can get by with breaking the rules a little bit?  Not all of the rules need to apply to you.  Martha Stewart felt this way and she went to jail.  Just look at the people who serve on the President’s cabinet for a few years and then capitalize on the relationship to become CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

In Paul's day, it had gotten to the point that Jews felt that since they were descended from Abraham who had a special deal with God, they would share in the eternal kingdom regardless of all their sinning, disobedience or unbelieving.  God was in their pocket.  Oh sure, God may slap their wrist but this would be nothing compared to how he dealt with the Gentiles.  The bottom line was that the Jews believed that everyone was destined for judgement except the Jew.  It wouldn’t be any innate goodness or even profound sorrow for their acts that would make them immune from the wrath of God.  It was simply the fact that they were -  JEWS!

To drive the point home to the Jews, Paul reminds the Jews of four things:

He told them bluntly that they were trading on the goodness of God.  In the fourth verse Paul asks, “Do you despise the riches of God’s kindness and forbearance and patience?” Kindness, forbearance and patience?  How does Paul apply these three things to the Jew’s attitude?  The kindness used here was that attribute that leads to a loving gentleness.  It was the way Jesus dealt with the woman who anointed his feet with oil or the adulterous woman at the well.   This loving gentleness shown by Jesus in these two situations is the way God dealt with Jews.  Paul is saying, “Listen, you Jews, you’re just trying to take advantage of the great kindness God has shown you.”  

Now forbearance has it’s roots in the word truce.  What is a truce?  It’s the cessation of hostility, but a cessation with limits.  There are strings attached.  Lay down your arms.  Don’t advance your troops.  A truce offers a chance to resolve the conflict.  But that chance will never come into being unless the opportunity is grasped.  Paul is saying that the Jews think that they have outfoxed God because God hasn’t punished them.  God’s forbearance is a truce to allow them to grasp the opportunity to turn their lives around.  To repent.  But God’s forbearance has it’s limits.  It isn’t a carte blanche to continue sinning.  It is an opportunity to get their life together.  

Finally, Paul tells the Jews that they are taking advantage of God’s patience.  What is patience?  A wise man once wrote that patience was that characteristic of the man who has it within his ability and power to get revenge against someone, but deliberately decides not to use it.  Someone insults you or hurts you, what is the first thing that comes into most people’s mind?  Pay back time.  Making the guy pay for hurting or insulting you.  What if you are the guy's boss?  You have the chance to really make this guy’s life miserable.  Patience is when is the face of hurts and insults and in the face of the opportunity to make the guy pay for what he did, you forgive and move on.  That is patient mercy and that is what God has done for the Jews.  The cold hard fact was that the Jews felt that since God had not punished them even when they knew that they deserved it, he couldn’t punish them - he just didn’t have the will to make them pay.  Paul is reminding them that they owe their very life to God’s patience.

People who study these things say that most of us feel that we have immunity against tragedy.  It can’t happen to us.  Bad things happen to other people.  That is why trying to appeal to young people about the necessity of fixing social security is a lost cause.  Because they don’t think they will ever grow old.  When I was young, I thought being old meant wearing reading glasses and hair graying at the temple - not graying laying on the floor.  After all, I had seen hundreds of movies and that is the way Mr. Chips got old or Judge Hardy looked at the end of the picture.  The Jews even openly bragged that they had immunity from tragedy, from the judgement of God.  They were trading on the mercy of God and it is our misfortune that many people today also trade on God’s mercy.

For the Jews, God’s mercy was an invitation to sin not a chance to repent.  There are people today who are confident that they will end up in heaven because they sincerely believe that regardless of what they have done, how many sins they have racked up, that God will forgive them.  That’s God’s job - to forgive.  Look at it this way.  Suppose a son or daughter does something that breaks your heart.  In love you forgive them and the thing they did will never be brought up again.  The son or daughter can react in either of two ways.  He can go out and do the same thing again trading on the fact that if your forgave once, you will forgive him over and over again for the same thing.  Or he can be so grateful that your love for him led you to forgive him, that he will spend the rest of his life proving that he was worthy of your forgiveness.  The most shameful thing in the world is to use mercy and forgiveness as an excuse to sin some more.  You see the point here is that the mercy of God, the love of God, is not meant to make us feel that we can sin and get away with it.  It is meant to so break our hearts in love that we will never look for ways to sin again.  This was a lesson that Paul had to teach the Jews.

Paul shoots down the Jew’s favorite defense that they are God’s favorite people so they have it made.  Paul tells them that God doesn’t have a favorite nation clause.  God may pick certain nations to do a special task or for a special responsibility, but there are no nations picked for special privilege or special consideration.  Everything in the Jewish religion was centered around the concept that they had a special position of privilege and favor in the eyes of God.  Before we are too harsh on these Jews, maybe we better make sure that we haven’t let that feeling of special privilege creep into our culture.  Millions of Christians are dying in Africa but it is none of our business because it isn’t happening here.  Children starving with flies swarming filling their eyes and open sores cause us to turn our eyes from the TV but that is happening a half a world away.  Just be thankful that we are immune to such tragedy.  In the end, Paul says that God will settle his account with each man according to his actions.  For Paul, faith that doesn’t push people into action is hollow and a travesty.  Really, isn’t the only way that we can see someone’s faith is in his work?  We can talk the talk.  But the rubber meets that road when we walk the walk.  You see, we can’t comfortably say we have faith and leave it at that.  Our faith has to be the spring board for what we do in this world.  And there a lot waiting to be done in this world.  It is by our actions that we are accepted or condemned.

Romans 2:12 All who have sinned apart from the law will  also perish apart from the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law.  13 For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous  in God's sight, but doers of the law who will be justified.  14 When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves.  15 They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse  or perhaps excuse them  16 on the day when according to my gospel, God, through Jesus Christ, will judge the secret thoughts of all.

Paul has spent the last verses raking the Jews over the coals and now it gets to be the Gentile’s turn.  Can’t you just see Paul pacing his small room.  He is on a roll now.  His secretary, Tertius, is sitting at the desk writing as fast as he can as Paul paces up and down developing his next argument.  The words are coming so fast, Tertius has to scribble faster to keep up.  The single candle whose flickering flame distorts the words already written serves to heighten his anxiety.  

Paul has dealt with the Jew’s notion that they had special privileges and favor with God.  While they weren’t the best servants of God, they did have one thing that nobody else had.  The had the law that had been given to them by God.  They knew what God expected.  It sure was easy for the Gentiles to say, “Give me a break.  I wasn’t lucky enough to know the law.  The Jews had the law so they should have known better, but I was ignorant of the law so I shouldn’t be judged about something that I didn’t know.”  Paul answered this argument with one of the most important things we can get out of today’s study.

How many times in your Christian life have you wondered or heard discussed the question of what about those people who have never had the Bible or been exposed to the Gospel?  What happens to them?  It is Paul’s position that a man will be judged by what he had the opportunity to know.  If a man was Jew and knew the law then he will be judged as somebody who knew the law.  If he did not know the law, he will be judged as somebody who didn’t know the law.  We have a fair God.  But that doesn’t really answer our questions about those remote people living in the jungles.  I still want to know what happens to the people who never heard of the Bible or lived before Christ was even on earth a or people who lived deep in the rain forest and never spoke to missionaries.  What happens to them?  Paul’s answer is that a man will be judged by his acceptance and desire to fulfill the highest for him to know.  If he has been true to the highest that he knew, then God won’t expect any more than that of him.  Wait a minute.  I still don’t understand.

Paul goes on to say that even those who did not know the Law had an unwritten law in their hearts.  In other words, God puts in everyman's heart what is right and what is wrong.  The big words for this is the instinctive knowledge of right and wrong.  Sometimes this is called natural law.  We instinctively know that it is wrong to kill.  It is wrong to take something that belongs to another.  It is Paul’s argument that in the very nature of man there is planted an inherent and instinctive knowledge of what a man ought to do.

To Paul the world was divided into three kinds of people.  First were those who had the written law - the Jews - given to them directly from God.  Then there are those who have heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  The third bunch are those without the written word or the Gospel.  Even with this handicap, these people have a God-implanted, instinctive knowledge of right and wrong in their hearts.  So, you see, none of these kinds of people can claim an exemption from the judgement of God.  In the end everybody will be judged according to what he knew or had the chance to know.

Rules and laws.  Grandmamma and willow switches.  Maybe my best understanding of this instinctive law that God writes in our hearts was that night eighty years ago when a little boy who had no idea about the law of the Bible or justification through Christ’s sacrifice realized that he had done wrong and then took action to right that wrong.  And as a reward for doing the right thing, a little boy wasn’t humiliated the next day by having to wear knickers to school.

Payer: Father, fill our hearts with such gratitude for your kindness and mercy toward us that, in true humility, we will bow before you and serve others.  In Jesus name we pray.  Amen