I preached this message on February 22, 2026, the First Sunday in Lent, Year A.
When you think about it, Satanism, the worship of Satan, is an oxymoron. I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. “That’s a weird way to start a sermon, preacher!” Yep, guilty as charged. But seriously, why would anyone want to put their “faith” in Satan when all the evidence points his core nature? He’s pure evil. He’s deceptive. He hates those who worship God. I would dare say he’s more interested in getting you to not worship and serve God than he is having people worship him. But he can ignore those people, because they’re already solidly in his camp.
John says this about the devil when he confronts the Pharisees in the Temple in John 8:
44 You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. 45 Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me! 46 Can any of you prove me guilty of sin? If I am telling the truth, why don’t you believe me? [1]*
Adam and Eve had a first-hand encounter with Satan in the very beginning. He lied about what eating the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil could do for them. Yes, after eating the apple, they did experience the shame of their nakedness, so at least that much of what Satan said was true, but it was a half-truth at best. The lie that Satan told Eve was “You will be like God.” That was a lie in so many ways, and here’s why:
God is not just omniscient, knowing all that can be known, but he is omnipotent and omnipresent as well. Adam and Eve, relatively speaking, only got a fraction of the knowledge that God had about such things and NONE of the power or presence that God had. Their shame at disobeying caused them to fear the presence of God when God had designed Eden and the world for them to live in his presence. They lost power, because at that point, death became a necessity for survival. An animal would have to die to clothe them. Blood sacrifices became necessary for temporary atonement. And God’s son would have to die to redeem them forever from the curse.
Satan won that first round with God’s precious new creation, but out of that came the first prophecy of Satan’s defeat at the hands and feet of God’s son. It’s no wonder, then, that he thought he could try and pull that off when God’s one and only son came on the scene. If he could get Jesus to stumble, the world would be his, or so he thought.
In the garden, Eve had become convinced somehow that the forbidden fruit “was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom.” It shouldn’t surprise us that Satan used those same three categories to tempt Jesus in the desert as in our Gospel passage this morning. “I know you’re hungry for some food, Jesus. Go ahead and turn these stones into bread.” But Jesus knew, unlike Adam and Eve, that there was more to God than producing a little supernatural “manna” to satisfy what must have been an intense human experience of hunger. “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.”
Satan tried to trick him by twisting a promise of God into a perversion of wisdom. “Come on Jesus. You know God will catch you if you jump off the top of the Temple here! Imagine the scene when the crowd watches the angels swoop you up at the last second! You’ll be a superhero!” But Jesus knows it is foolish to put God to the test like that, and rebuked Satan with that fact in no uncertain terms.
Satan had one more chance. He took Jesus to a high mountain where he had a “pleasing sight” awaiting him—”all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor.” But once again, Jesus knew the price was too high to go along with Satan’s schemes, and he knew none of them would bring about what God had promised him when he fulfilled his mission. “You know the commandment, Satan. I will have no other gods before me. He was there to “worship the Lord God and serve him only.” The liar failed at trying to fool the one in whom there was no lie and only truth.
And that was the beginning of the end for Satan. Jesus won that battle, but Satan didn’t give up that easily. He had to switch his focus to others, and most of you know who that would be: someone from his inner circle. The signs would be there early on that something wasn’t quite right with Judas. Even Peter gets some of the blame, but that, it seems, may have been more to his impetuous nature at times, and Jesus had other plans for him anyway.
The power of death was defeated at the cross. I’m sure that was something that Satan actually felt. Jesus had even told Peter that the gates of hell could not withstand the coming of God’s kingdom, and I think for a while anyway, as the church began to coalesce after Pentecost, God and Jesus kept Satan at bay to give the fledgling believers a head start at getting the gospel out.
I want to turn now to Romans 5:12–19, the other New Testament passage in the Lectionary readings today, to look at the results, if you will, of Jesus’s victory over death and how he, as the New Adam, broke the curse brought on by the First Adam, who through passivity allowed his wife to give in to the serpent and joined her in her disobedience. Romans 5 has a powerful message about how you and I can be strengthened in our own faith walk because of what Jesus accomplished on the cross and in his resurrection from the dead.
Hear what Paul has to say:
12 Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned—
13 To be sure, sin was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not charged against anyone’s account where there is no law. 14 Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a pattern of the one to come.
15 But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many! 16 Nor can the gift of God be compared with the result of one man’s sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. 17 For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!
18 Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people. 19 For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.[2]
Even though Paul says plainly in 1 Timothy 2:14 that it was Eve who was deceived and sinned first (sorry, ladies, I’m just the messenger here), Paul considers the blame for “original sin” to be squarely on Adam’s shoulders. Adam had one command, and he (and Eve) blew it. But because it was a single command and the Law had not come yet, God could not permanently charge Adam with a violation of his law. Instead, they were expelled from the garden because they could not be trusted. That doesn’t mean they weren’t loved, though. God would declare even as he announced their punishment that the seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent.
Paul demonstrates that Jesus fulfilled the role that Adam never could. Adam’s disobedience or lack of faithfulness brought sin into the world, but Jesus’s one act of faithful obedience, submitting to crucifixion, is the only act that could defeat the power of sin once for all and bring righteousness to all who would follow him. It took one sin by Adam to mess up things for everybody, but one faithfully obedient savior to restore us to God in his righteousness.
Romans says that Jesus Christ is our righteousness. He earned that designation by fulfilling the whole Law of God. But God still needed that once-for-all blood sacrifice that would make the animal and grain sacrifices of the Old Testament completely obsolete. Jesus was the only one who could be that spotless lamb. But it wasn’t just because of his 100% obedience to the law. The crucifixion had one more element that made it absolutely effective and impossible for the devil to challenge or destroy: It was love, pure and simple.
“For God so loved the world.” Only a perfect man with a fully divine nature who showed us beyond a shadow of doubt how he and his Father loved us in person and face to face could make that sacrifice. The bulls and goats and birds that were sacrificed under the Old Covenant could not ever love us the way Jesus did and does, which is why his sacrifice stands not only above the old sacrificial system, but above every other religion as well. Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, was a real person, but he never loved anything about the world that should have mattered to him. He just tried to obtain a state of nothingness, a very selfish goal that no one else, by definition, could help him achieve. There’s no personal connection there and no promise of any help from the supernatural realm. Jesus’s sacrifice was by far the most superior of any that could have happened on this world God created with love, and the only one that can guarantee us eternal life in God’s glorious new kingdom.
As believers, then, know that you are “in Christ” in every sense of the concept. We are baptized “into Christ,” which means we are baptized into his death. So we share in his death so we can be free of the requirements of the law, beneficiaries of grace, and servants of righteousness. As you go forth in the world from here, declare God’s word unashamedly to those who need to hear the hope of his good news. Amen.
[1]The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. *I didn’t say it in my message, but I sure thought about adding: “The Pharisees must have had Jesus Derangement Syndrome.”
NOTE: Video link will be added when it is available.
I presented this message at StoneBridge Christian Church in Omaha, Nebraska, on February 4, 2026, to kick off the church-wide small group study on Paul’s letter to the Romans. In the first part of the message, I address the connection between faithfulness and righteousness in 1:5 and 1:17. In the last half of the message, I cover the high points of the other sections of the two chapters. There is a 7-second lacuna at about 9:18 where I had to cut out the audio from a Bible Project video on Romans that we showed during the service due to copyright laws. The bold text in the message represents the supporting slides on the screens.
Good evening, Church! The Lord be with you!
I trust you all have been enjoying Mark’s and Josh’s messages to this point. It is a huge undertaking in this day and age to take one chapter at a time through a book like Romans, but then that’s the answer to the age-old question, right? How do you eat the elephant in the room? One bite at a time.
If you’ve been in one of our First Step classes, or, if you’ve been here as long as I have, a 101 class, you know that StoneBridge is affiliated with a brotherhood called The Restoration Movement or Stone-Campbell Movement. You were probably also told that we have our “catchphrases” like “No creed but Christ; no book but the Bible” or “Where the Bible speaks, we speak; where the Bible is silent, there is freedom.”
It’s important and beneficial, then, to do something like this every so often to make sure we’re aligned as a congregation on both how we understand our relationship with God and what we expect from the church and each other in the congregation and especially in our small groups.
Paul’s epistles in the New Testament historically were arranged from longest to shortest, which is why Romans stands at the head of the Pauline epistles. But Romans is also the most complete “systematic” theology we have in the New Testament, covering all the key concepts of salvation and walking faithfully with Jesus, our Righteousness. The contextual clues in Romans 15:23–32 place the time of writing somewhere around AD 56 or 57, which coincides with the historical record in the first few verses of Acts 20. Paul was in or near Corinth at the time waiting to return to Jerusalem.
The situation in Rome at that time is probably pretty fluid. The Jews had been kicked out of Rome twice in the 40 years prior to Paul’s writing the letter: By Tiberius in AD 19 and by Claudius in AD 49. Under Claudius, then, the church in Rome was primarily Gentile. But some speculate after Claudius’s death in AD 54, the Jewish Christians may have started to return to Rome, only to find the church somewhat different than when they had left.
Paul’s letter may serve a couple purposes, then. The first, as evident in 1:5, is to affirm that his mission is to call the Gentiles into what he calls “The Obedience of Faithfulness.” But it seems also that he needs to remind the Jewish Christians who have returned to Rome what is their own relationship with their law in Christ and what responsibilities they have as God’s original “chosen people.” The Gentile Christians wouldn’t have been ignorant about the Jewish background of Christianity, but they may have forgotten some important details in their absence.
Paul talks about the law quite a bit in Romans, but he does so in a way that engages both Jews and Gentiles. While the law is important and reverenced by the Jews, Paul argues that it cannot ultimately be the thing that saves them. He points out that sometimes the Gentiles get it right even though they don’t have that connection to the law the Jews do. What matters is what is in their hearts, and that’s how he grabs the attention of both groups.
Paul also realizes the importance of evangelizing the largest city in the Roman Empire as well. Population estimates vary, but it was likely somewhere around 500,000 people, give or take a 100,000 or so. The only time Paul uses the word “church” (ἐκκλησία ekklēsia; perhaps a better translation would be “congregation”) in Romans is in chapter 16, where greets those who seem to be leaders in house churches in Rome. They certainly didn’t have any church buildings yet, although some Jewish Christians may have still been able to meet in synagogues. In a city that size, it may not have been feasible to try and gather all the Christ-followers in one place, either, even if only a couple times a year.
In keeping with the theme of “Pave the Way,” I want us to look at the “Romans Road” from two perspectives so we can get a fuller idea of the two main themes in Romans: the first is Righteousness and the second is the thematic statement at the beginning and end of Romans, Obedience of Faithfulness.
Now even though we have two perspectives of the Romans Road here, we’re not going to be looking at two separate roads. We’ll be looking at two parts of the same road. You can’t have one without the other. “Righteousness,” as I’m going to describe it here, is the foundation or substructure of the road. It’s the rebar, the expansion joints, the paved-smooth layer of compacted earth that ensures there will be no surprises or sinkholes after the road is complete. The foundation for any road, just like the foundation for any building, must be perfectly aligned and perfectly measured.
If you’ve ever seen the never-ending construction on I-80 across Nebraska, you’ve probably seen the perfectly placed dowel bars and tie bars they lay down before they start pouring the concrete. Those ensure that the road structure holds together under all the stresses placed on it. That is what righteousness is times infinity. Righteousness isn’t just about being “right with God”; it is absolute, uncorrupted perfection in the eyes of God. That is the foundation we need as Christ followers to have the assurance that we’re walking on the right road with all the support we need from our Father in heaven and to support our fellowship with one another here on earth.
The main part of the road, the part we see and walk on, is paved on this foundation of righteousness by Jesus’s faithfulness. Just like there’s more to righteousness than being right with God, there is more to faithfulness than just saying you believe in Jesus. I’ll break that out here shortly.
Now here’s the beauty of the foundation aspect of righteousness. That foundation has already been lain and the road has been paved and maintained in perfect condition for 2,000 years now. It is a straight and narrow path that goes straight from where each of us is now to the main entrance of the heavenly city. All we have to do is walk on it, in Jesus. People like Mark and Josh and your campus pastors are all primarily concerned with the part of that road that goes straight to heaven’s gate. But the reality is, when you’re “in Christ,” you have that foundation of righteousness wherever you find yourself—at work, on vacation, in your home, etc.
That is the important background information you need to know about Romans and some of the key words in this epistle. We’ve got a short Bible Project video here we want to play for you before we focus on chapters 1 and 2.
In Romans 1:5, Paul makes an interesting statement about the “obedience of faithfulness” in his greeting. I want us to read my translation of the first five verses of Romans 1 together here, because Paul has a lot of “supporting facts” that will come up as we discuss both righteousness and the obedience of faithfulness.
Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God—2 the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures 3 regarding his Son, who was a descendant of David according to his human ancestry, 4 and who through the Spirit of holiness was appointed the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord 5 through him we received grace and apostleship to call all the Gentiles to the obedience of faithfulness for his name’s sake.[1]
Paul will close his letter to the Romans with that very same phrase. Again, let’s read the final verses of Romans together in context so we can hear it for ourselves.
25 Now to him who is able to establish you in accordance with my gospel, the message I proclaim about Jesus Christ, in keeping with the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past, 26 but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God, so that all the Gentiles might come to the obedience of faithfulness—27 to the only wise God be glory forever through Jesus Christ! Amen.[2]
Now many translations have tried to get creative with this phrase “obedience of faithfulness,” but the truth is it’s only two words in the original Greek. The New Living Translation, which Mark typically uses in his sermons, has “believe and obey.” While that captures the meanings of the two words, it doesn’t capture the unity of the phrase in the original language. The way it’s written in the Greek text implies the two words refer to the same thing. When Paul says, “obedience of faithfulness,” he is really saying that “obedience” is “faithfulness,” and “faithfulness” is “obedience” (e.g., see McKnight p. 32). The other implication of this is that “faith” is not just an intellectual assent to a fact. “Faith” always implies that some action is involved, as we’ll see.
Before we commence on this journey, I do need to make you aware of a couple of synonyms for these terms. Depending on the version of the Bible you read, and sometimes even within the same version, you may see the adjective “righteous” translated as “justified” and the verb “make righteous” as “justify.” Those words all come from the same root word. The Greek word for the noun “faith” also means “faithfulness” or “belief.” The verb “have faith in” may be translated as “believe” or “trust.” My goal is to be consistent with how I speak about these terms when they occur.
Let’s start with the theme verse in Romans 1:5. The concept of “the Obedience of Faithfulness” permeates Paul’s letter to the Romans, so it’s crucial to understand what it refers to. It’s also strongly bound to the concept of righteousness. We see that at the end of the first section in Romans 1, Romans 1:17. In the NIV, it reads like this:
17 For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”[3]
In the New Living Translation, we regularly use in Sunday service, it sounds a bit different:
17 This Good News tells us how God makes us right in his sight. This is accomplished from start to finish by faith. As the Scriptures say, “It is through faith that a righteous person has life.”[4]
This is a rather difficult verse to translate because of some technical grammatical issues that scholars debate. It’s also tricky because so much meaning is packed into the phrase “the righteousness of God,” it’s hard to capture the nuances of that in a straightforward translation. I won’t go into the grammatical issue here tonight, but I do want to deal with the part of the verse that is translated “from first to last” or “from start to finish” and establish the meaning of “righteous/righteousness” here. This is important to spend a few minutes on, because once you understand what’s going on, a lot of other things fall into place and make sense in Romans.
First, I want to talk about what “righteousness” means here, especially “the righteousness of God.” For years, many assumed that this phrase refers to the righteousness that God imparts to us when we believe. But about 35 years ago, several scholars argued for a different understanding of that concept, and I’ve been following, studying, and writing about that concept for almost that whole time. The concept they argued for, and that has taken hold in many circles, was that “the righteousness of God” was an inherent character quality of God that is unique to him, a quality that is active, that “is being revealed” in the gospel.
Who or what is the gospel that’s being revealed about, then? It’s about Jesus, of course. The “righteousness of God” then isn’t an object to be given. It is embodied in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is “the righteousness of God.”Jesus Christ is “The righteous one [who] will live by faithfulness.” That last bit is a quote from Habakkuk 2:4, where the Hebrew adds a pronoun: “The righteous one will live by his faithfulness.”
Let that sink in for a minute. Look back at vs. 16: the gospel is “the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who has faith.” Again, isn’t the “good news” of the Gospel that Jesus’s death on the cross and shed blood is what makes our salvation possible? This also helps flesh out the “first to last”/“start to finish” translation. A word-for-word rendering of verse 17 is “the righteousness of God in the gospel is being revealed from faithfulness into faithfulness.” How does that apply to Jesus?
Remember what I said a couple paragraphs back: God’s righteousness, like God’s word, is living and active. When it says “from faithfulness,” this refers to Jesus living out the righteousness of God by perfectly obeying the law of God while he’s living on earth. He’s the only one who can do that. Romans 10:4 says: “Christ is the culmination of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who has faith.” That means Christ fulfilled every requirement of the law, something no one to that time had ever done. Because Jesus fulfilled every requirement of the law, he is the only one who can be called “righteous.” And because Jesus is the righteous one, if we are “in Christ,” we share in that righteousness as well.
Because the phrase is “from faithfulness into faithfulness,” we must find out what is the “into” part. Well, Josh Dotzler said that when he preached on Romans 2: Jesus Christ lived a perfect life, and his reward was death on the cross. Christ’s faithfulness to the law resulted in his being faithful to death on the cross. Sound familiar? That’s because Paul makes that same statement in Philippians 2:8: “And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross.” There’s that word “obedient” from Romans 1:5. “Obedience of faithfulness” refers to the crucifixion of Jesus! So it makes sense that Paul would want to lead the Gentiles into an understanding of the significance of Christ’s death on the cross and his resulting resurrection from the dead.
Okay, everybody take a deep breath for a moment. Breathe in. Breathe out. That was kind of intense, so let me bring it down a notch. I want to come back to our current them of “Pave the Way” for Mark’s sermon series. I went through all that because it’s important to understand this: “Righteousness” is the foundation for the road we walk on. What I just said about Jesus being the righteous one doesn’t take away from the fact that because we are in Christ, we “have faith” or “act faithfully” as well. We’ll get to that in chapters 4 through 8, and especially in 8 when Paul talks about the role of the Holy Spirit in our walk of faithfulness. I would encourage you to read the section on “Honor” on pp. 40–42 in Scot McKnight’s Romans book that you should have received, because he unpacks so much more meaning and application from Romans 1:16–17, more than I can get into here tonight.
Here’s a quick summary then, and we’ll move on to other topics in chapters 1 & 2. Righteousness is something that only Jesus possesses because of his faithfulness to the law of God, but we still share in that because we’re “in Christ” and we have the Holy Spirit as our internal guide. It is typically more accurate to speak of “faithfulness” than just “faith” when we encounter that concept, especially in chapters 1–4. We need to use some discernment, however, to determine if the word is referring to the faithfulness or work of Jesus Christ or to our own faithful walk in Christ. This will influence how you understand these concepts throughout the rest of the epistle. God knows we will mess up from time to time. If we’re in Christ, though, his righteousness covers us. So don’t mistake what I’m saying here that we must be perfect 100% of the time or we’ll lose that standing. That doesn’t happen when we strive for faithfulness.
Now, some notes on what we skipped over to talk about the theme of 1:5 and its relationship to 1:17. In 1:2–4, we see that Paul, right off the bat, emphasizes both the humanity of Jesus and his divine nature. We often forget about the human side of Jesus. He never sinned, of course, but he did experience the full range of human emotions. But why did Jesus have to come in the flesh? Why couldn’t God have just made an updated list of the Ten Commandments and sent it through another prophet? Well the answer is quite simple, and it’s not some fancy theological mumbo jumbo.
By sending his son, who had all the fulness of the deity dwelling in him according to Colossians, God got a first-hand report of just what the human condition was like. God did know in a certain sense, but because God is spirit and we’re not, he couldn’t really express his love to us. That’s what Jesus did, both in his life and in his death: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son….” And why did Jesus have to die on the cross for our sins? The blood of bulls and goats in the sacrificial system could never really deal with sin. Those sacrifices were only an appeasement to God. They couldn’t make us righteous. They never came back to life. And those animals didn’t, and couldn’t, love us like Jesus could. Only the sacrifice of one in human flesh who had attained the fullness of God’s righteousness could love us enough to be both a sacrifice AND our source of hope (and righteousness) in his resurrection. That’s the importance of Jesus’s humanity.
A quick note on verse 6: I think Paul must be speaking to the Jews who have returned to Rome after getting kicked out when he says “you also are among those Gentiles.” The reason I think this is because he addresses the Jews and their relationship with the law in chapter 2.
After the greeting, in verse 8, we see Paul’s praise for the Romans that their faithfulness, that is, the way in which they are living out their faith in Christ, is being reported all over the world. That’s a common sentiment in many of his letters. He probably didn’t know too many Roman Christians personally. We know from Acts 18 that Paul had met Priscilla and Aquila (the first two mentioned in Romans 16) in Corinth and had probably learned much about the Roman church from them since they had just been expelled from Rome. I think it’s a safe guess to say that the list of house churches in Romans 16 probably came from Priscilla and Aquila. “Be sure you mention these folks when you write to the house churches there, Paul. Wouldn’t want to leave anybody out!” He learned enough to know he wanted, no, needed to go to Rome and encourage them all.
We can look at verses 8–13 here as a sort of model for what our small groups should look like. Praying for one another; sharing the gospel with one another; and encouraging one another to faithfulness. Small groups aren’t just a good idea; they’re a biblical concept that makes the experience of “church” more personal.
Jumping over to verses 18ff, we have a parallel statement on a different aspect of God’s being and activity in the world. “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness.”[5] God’s wrath, unlike God’s righteousness, is not bound up in one individual, though. God’s wrath is being revealed in real time. The verb form there implies the action is continuous and has not ceased.
The descriptions of unfaithfulness, idolatry, and contempt for the created order are pretty grim, perhaps even bordering on blasphemy of the Holy Spirit (see Romans 2:24), the “unforgiveable sin” in the gospels. This “wrath” likely encompasses both the physical and spiritual damage to an individual who’s progressed to that point. The physical damage in some cases may be beyond repair, (at least by human hands), but I think Romans 2 indicates there may be a possibility of spiritual redemption even for those whom God has already given over to separation from himself. Let’s turn there next and land this plane for the evening.
In Romans 2, we have two things going on. From a high level, Paul begins a series of “arguments” or persuasive speeches demonstrating how God is righteous in his judgments and that walking faithfully in Jesus is the only way to new life, but also warns of hypocrisy for those who think they have no reason to be rebuked. Then he starts to address the Jews, formally and cordially.
Paul emphasizes in the first part of chapter 2, as he’s continuing on from where he started in Romans 1:18, that you don’t need the law to know if you’re doing something bad. If you don’t live under the law and do something bad, you’ll still experience judgment. If you live under the law and you’re a Jew at least or a Jew who’s converted to Christianity, you understand what the law is and how it can be applied to you, if you’re not in Christ. But fortunately for those who are in Christ, they’ve already had the assurance we saw in Chapter 1: Christ became the righteousness of God so we wouldn’t have to experience the judgment and wrath of God.
But he also emphasizes that since we (Jews and Gentiles) have broken the law in some way, we must be careful of the judgments we make of others who are enslaved to sin. He reminds his readers in 2:4 that some of them have already received God’s kindness that led them to repentance, and they should be paying that forward to those who still need to hear the message of repentance and forgiveness in Jesus. Instead, they’re “storing up wrath” for themselves in the final judgment by showing contempt for God’s kindness because they (Jews and Gentiles both) are too stubborn to admit they’re wrong. What is the ultimate source of stubbornness? Persistent selfishness.
To counter this persistent selfishness, Paul exhorts his readers to persistent faithfulness in verses 7–10. In other words, instead of focusing on how bad others are, they need to focus on the good things that lead to eternal life, glory, honor, and peace. Let God take care of the judgment.
In verses 12–16, Paul shifts to talking about that final day of judgment. Just because the Jews are God’s chosen people and have “heard” the law all their lives doesn’t mean they are automatically declared righteous in the end. It’s not a matter of hearing only; it’s a matter of following through on what you’ve heard. The OT background here is Deuteronomy. Over and over again in Deuteronomy Moses exhorts the Israelites to “Be careful to heed the word of the Lord.” That “carefulness,” or to use a modern buzz word, “mindfulness,” carries over into the NT. We shouldn’t be sloppy about our faith. Think before you act or post (I’m speaking to myself when I say that!). What matters is that what you hear about the law or the gospel in your ears and process through your brain makes it to your heart and to your hands and feet. Then you will have assurance in the day of judgment.
Paul addresses the Jews specifically in the last half of chapter 2. He essentially repeats the warnings of the first part of chapter two, but for good measure and to tweak their consciences a bit, he throws in some conspicuous references to the Ten Commandments and how they might not be following them. The good that’s required by the law doesn’t go away because we’re in Christ. One way to look at the “thou shalt nots” of the Ten Commandments is to flip them into positive actions. “Don’t commit adultery” becomes “set boundaries for your marriage,” “love your wife as Christ loved the church,” “pay attention to when she does something different with her hair,” etc.
Paul ends chapter two with a discussion of circumcision. This was an initiation rite into the Jewish community from birth. Although many non-Jews practice circumcision today, it’s not much of a religious rite; it’s ostensibly done for health reasons. But as followers of Christ, we do have our own initiation rite: immersion, commonly known as baptism. I believe that Paul is setting up his readers for his discussion of baptism in chapter 6 here. We can’t rely on our baptism to get us into heaven if we’re not going to live like we’ve undergone that transformative event! What Paul says about circumcision in vv. 25–29 can be applied to baptism. If we’re only baptized outwardly but our hearts and our minds haven’t been “baptized,” then it’s of no value.
I’m going to tease chapter 6 here: As I’ve studied the book of Romans over the past 30 years, my understanding of the argument Paul is making in chapters 2–11 had broadened immensely. I have come to see that the first five chapters of Romans are building up to what is our “obedience of faithfulness”: our baptism. When we are baptized into Christ, Paul says, we are baptized into his death. Just as Christ was raised from the dead, so too does our coming out of the water affirm that we have newness of life. Think about the implication there. If Christ is “The Righteous One [who] lives by faithfulness,” then being in Christ means we share in that righteousness. That’s why righteousness is much more than being “right with God.” It’s about a whole new way of living life. If we remain faithful to living in the righteousness of Christ, then as Romans 2:13 says, we’ll be declared righteous when we stand before our maker. That is our prayer for all of you.
Let’s pray,
Thank you for allowing me to share with you. Go forth in the peace and strength of God.
Sunday Morning Greek Blog 