The thematic statement in 1:16–17 parallels the statements in 3:21–29. God’s righteousness ‘is revealed’ (1:17) and ‘has been disclosed’ (3:21), and God has acted to bring salvation to all who believe in Christ (1:16; 3:22). These two passages wrap around 1:18 – 3:20, which presents the incriminating evidence of humanity’s multiple ways of dishonouring God. Paul indicts the Gentile first (1:18–32) and then the Jew (2:1 – 3:20).
The gospel recounts what Jesus did as the Son of God and chronicles what rebellious humanity did to him (Acts 13:26–39). Preaching the gospel, then, cannot avoid unmasking human unrighteousness that rampages through the world and passes itself off as wisdom. In 1:18 – 3:20, Paul levels the ground by showing that all humans are in a vice-laden, doom-laden situation that cannot avoid God’s wrath. Both Gentiles and Jews are without excuse (1:20; 2:1). This registry of universal defiance of God prepares for Paul’s disclosure of God’s solution to this human wickedness (3:21–31). Those who have faith in Christ are freely justified and live no longer in the shadow of God’s wrath that would blot them out, but under God’s grace that redeems them in Christ (3:24).
The opening salvo in Paul’s indictment of humanity reveals how pagans have triggered God’s wrath through their idolatry. From a Jewish perspective, the Gentiles’ sinful rebellion is taken as a given. ‘Gentile’ and ‘sinner’ are almost synonymous (Gal. 2:15). Paul does not specifically identify the culprits as Gentiles. His division of humanity into Jew and Greek (1:16) and the resonance of his accusations with traditional Jewish censure of Gentile immorality, however, make it most likely that Gentile sinners are Paul’s first target.1 Hebrew tradition assumes that idolatry – worshipping what is not God, venerating the creation rather than the Creator – is the vice that leads to all vices:
For the worship of idols not to be named
is the beginning and cause and end of every evil.
(Wis. 14:27)
Idolatry is the breeding ground for perverse religious distortions about God, moral depravity and social chaos. Since Israel also lapsed into idolatry in its history, Paul can easily apply to Gentiles the invectives in Scripture levelled against Israel for rejecting the glory of God and provoking God’s wrath in handing them over to their stubborn hearts and moral corruption (Pss 81:12; 106:20; Jer. 2:11; Ezek. 8:12; cf. Acts 7:42). Humans have opposed the truth that God made available to them. The emphasis in 1:18–32, however, is not on the human condition but on God’s wrathful reaction to human unrighteousness (Schnabel, I, p. 205). God’s wrath is provoked by the deliberate despising and perversion of the truth about God that God has made accessible to all (Wis. 13:1–9).
18. God’s righteousness entails both grace and judgment (cf. 11:22), and God’s wrath is the judgment side of this righteousness as God’s punitive reaction to the evil that manifests itself as impiety towards God and in humans degrading themselves and others. Paul never uses the verb ‘to be angry’ (orgizein) with ‘God’ as its subject. God’s wrath is not the same as the fits of temper so characteristic of the irascible Greek gods who arbitrarily and petulantly punish the ill-starred objects of their fury.2 Zeus (Jupiter), for example, whose vengeance is visualized by the thunderbolt, was easily roused to anger by petty insults, as were all the gods of Greek mythology. They were known for capriciously inflicting torments on humans.3 God’s wrath differs in that it is directed against wicked actions. The two nouns ungodliness and wickedness express the same reality in red letters. All ungodliness and wickedness includes both Jewish and Gentile ungodliness and wickedness, but Paul starts with what is easiest to verify from a Jewish perspective: the stereotypical sins of Gentiles that occasion God’s retribution.
Since God’s wrath is revealed from heaven, it has inescapable cosmic consequences. The use of the present tense is revealed means that it operates within history to punish human corruption and perversions. It is also future in that it will culminate on ‘the day of wrath’ when God, who has the power to destroy both body and soul in hell (Matt. 10:28; Luke 12:5), will judge and mete out the final punishment (2:5, 16).
19–20. Humanity can infer the invisible God’s existence from the created universe (Acts 14:17) because, as Paul asserts, God purposefully has made plain his existence (cf. Job 12:7–9; Ps. 19:1). The implication is that humans can see the fingerprints of the Creator’s majesty and matchless power from the grandeur of creation even without direct revelation. Such evidence does not provide a saving knowledge of God, however. Reason and observations from nature may reveal that God exists, but they lead only to a fuzzy and incoherent understanding of God’s essence. Paul understands that persons can fully see God only in Christ, who is ‘the image of the invisible God’ through whom ‘all things in heaven and on earth were created’ (Col. 1:15–16). He asserts, however, that God’s eternal power and divine nature are knowable to anyone from mere glances at creation because God has willed it and has given humans the capacity to make sense of them. Paul has no interest in unpacking how God is disclosed in creation. Instead, he makes the case that humans wilfully disregard what they know of God from creation.4 To be sure, they may gawk in wonder at creation, but they refuse to glorify, obey and give thanks to the Creator. They substitute the glory of God for something they have fabricated and deified, and they bow down to their own artifices.
Calvin’s statement that the human mind is ‘a perpetual factory of idols’ is apropos. He asserts,
Man’s mind, full as it is of pride and boldness, dares to imagine a god according to its own capacity; as it sluggishly plods, indeed is overwhelmed with the crassest ignorance, it conceives an unreality and an empty appearance as God.5
By fashioning idols and concocting divine myths to prop them up, humans concede that a greater power exists beyond themselves. They prefer, however, the counterfeit gods of their own devising that might smile upon their delusions that they are the centre of the universe. The problem, then, is not their lack of knowledge of God, but their failure to acknowledge God (Edwards, p. 47). Humans wilfully reject God’s claim on their lives and twist what they know of God into beggarly falsehoods. Paul will contend also that ‘the righteousness of God has been disclosed [made plain], and is attested by the law and the prophets’ (3:21) and that his ‘gospel’ (16:25) ‘is now disclosed [made plain], and through the prophetic writings is made known to all the Gentiles, according to the command of the eternal God, to bring about the obedience of faith’ (16:26). The rejection of the righteousness of God that is made evident in the gospel also provokes God’s wrath.
21–22. The awareness of God, however embryonic it might be, has not led to honouring or giving thanks to God. Paul focuses on this refusal to return thanks and to give glory to God and the predisposition to turn up their noses at God’s wisdom and benevolence as humanity’s deeply rooted sin. As Jesus was unhappy about the healed but ungrateful lepers (Luke 17:11–19), God is unhappy with humans’ lack of appreciation for the manifold blessings in creation. Ingratitude causes them to tumble further into the darkness. Gundry notes, ‘Such thanksgiving would have kept them from deifying themselves and those other creatures in the form of ridiculous images.’ 6 It would also have kept them from exalting their own empty wisdom and helped them to recognize that ‘the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God’ (1 Cor. 3:19). Because they are self-confident in their idolatry and wise in their own eyes (cf. 1 Cor. 1:21), their concepts of God and their philosophies are not simply partial, they are utterly wrong from beginning to end.
When humans mutiny against the known Lord of creation, dark shadows drape their minds, giving rise to unbridled wickedness. In the verses that follow Paul gives three examples of offences that precipitate God handing the wrongdoers over to their sins, with its ravaging consequences. Exchanging the glory of the immortal God for idols (1:23) results in God delivering them to impurity and the degradation of their bodies (1:24). Exchanging the truth of God for a lie (1:25) results in God delivering them to sexual perversions (1:26–27). Refusing to acknowledge God in their moral decision-making results in God delivering them to a vice-prone mind and ensuing social bedlam (1:28–31).
23. The verb exchanged (allassō/metallassō) is repeated three times (1:23, 25, 26) and designates ‘perversions of the God-given possibilities of life’ (Schnabel, I, p. 200, author’s translation). People prefer idols that nurture their hearts’ cravings instead of the true, living God who confutes them as leading to utter futility. The plethora of idols in Paul’s world, where people paid homage to all manner of false gods and godlings, fetishes, charms, superstitions and ideologies, illustrates his point. They traded the immortal God for counterfeit images of mortal beings, including fowls of the air, grass-eating, cud-chewing bovines, and crawling reptiles. Ironically, humans created in the image of God worship images of creatures over which God intended them to have dominion (Gen. 1:26). The Romans believed in many spirits that presided over various but limited spheres of activity and had ‘no existence apart from that operation’.7 Worshippers would utilize a kind of organizational flow chart for the various gods to discern which ones had charge of what they desired to get, and then venerate them to get it. Harrington observes,
The Greeks and Romans had no commitment to a particular belief system or even to any particular one of the gods. Multiple shrines could be attended by the same individual. Even the mystery cults allowed continuing devotion to one or another of the other cults . . . it was common belief that many powers existed in the world.8
Refashioning God into a pantheon of deities may have seemed to give them more control over the divine, but they created a hellish host of powers that only enslaved them (cf. Gal. 4:8).
Idolatry seems to be endemic to the human species, but it was pandemic among the Greeks (cf. Acts 17:16). Those familiar with Scripture, replete with its scorn for idolatry (cf. Ps. 106:20; Isa. 44:9–20), would know that Paul’s imagery draws on Jewish history that was also riddled with idolatrous phases (Deut. 4:16–20; 2 Kgs 17:15; Ps. 106:20; Jer. 2:5, 11; Wis. 13:1). They would also know that God does not tolerate idolatry and punishes it severely (cf. Exod. 32:31–35).
24. God does not sit passively by, frowning on sin. The phrase God gave them up (or ‘delivered them over’) is repeated three times to describe God’s reaction. The meaning of this verb in this context lends itself to three interpretations. (1) God leaves them to themselves and allows the toxic repercussions of their sin to cause them to self-destruct, in effect, ‘to stew in [their] own juice’ (Fitzmyer, p. 272). (2) God does not restrain the evil consequences of their actions but abandons them to their fate: ‘God is simply letting happen what their own choices have set in motion’ (Johnson, p. 35). If one chooses chaos for one’s life, God allows it to work itself out. (3) In a deliberate act of judgment, God delivers people over to be punished (cf. Acts 7:42; 1 Tim. 1:20).9 God hands them over to passions that are never satiated, and they dishonour their bodies with their shameful, self-degrading conduct. All three interpretations bear elements of the truth and need not be mutually exclusive. The multiple uses of the verb in the LXX for God handing Israel over to the hands of their enemies to punish them for their transgressions (paradidōmi; cf. Lev. 26:25; Judg. 2:14; 2 Chr. 6:36; Ps. 105:40–41 [LXX]; Mic. 6:16), as well as punishing the wicked nations (Isa. 34:2), argue for this last meaning as primary.
The genitive articular infinitive to the degrading of their bodies among themselves may convey either purpose (‘in order that’) or result (‘with the result that’), or, more likely, it clarifies the nature of the ‘impurity’ or ‘uncleanness’ as sexual.10 They become consumed with lustful passion (cf. 1 Thess. 4:5) that knows no restraint. In worshipping the unlimited indulgence of sexual desires, they become like that which they worship, hollow replicas of what God intended humans to be.
25. Paul restates what he says in 1:23 for emphasis. Revering the creature rather than the Creator makes something that is finite something that is absolute. Paul, by contrast, can hardly mention the Creator without breaking into doxology (cf. Ps. 106:48). Doxology affirms that we rely solely on God, who determines what we must hope for, what we must fear and how we must live. Barrett comments,
The immediate result of this rebellion was a state of corruption in which men were no longer capable of distinguishing between themselves and God, and accordingly fell into idolatry, behind which, in all its forms, lies in the last resort the idolization of the self.
(Barrett, p. 37)
26. God’s reaction, handing them over to degrading passions, is not capricious but a righteous judgment. The phrase ‘for indeed’ (te gar) before their women is often left out of English translations, but it introduces what Paul considers to be appalling examples of degrading passions and concrete evidence that a culture that worships idols ruptures the created order. He is not specific about what females are doing. The parallel with what males are doing, having sexual relations with other males (‘and in the same way’, 1:27), suggests that females engage in a similar reversal of natural sexual roles. In both verses, Paul uses the nouns ‘females’ (thēleiai) and ‘males’ (arsenes) rather than ‘women’ and ‘men’, which is a deliberate allusion to the creation account in Genesis 1:27, ‘male and female he created them’. Natural intercourse is assumed to be intercourse between a male and a female, and unnatural intercourse is between female and female or male and male. Natural refers to what Paul considers to be visibly obvious from human anatomy: that males and females were created with differentiated sexual organs that complement one another to make procreation possible. Unnatural or ‘contrary to nature’ (ESV) refers to using the sexual organs in ways that conflict with ‘the anatomical and procreative complementarity of male and female’.11
Paul’s use of the verbs exchanged and ‘giving up’ in 1:27 assumes that they chose same-sex partners of their own volition. He regards this same-sex object choice as another manifestation of human idolatry and a perversion of God’s intention evident in the created order. He reflects the Jewish tradition that viewed homosexual practices as a clear example of the shameful consequences of suppressing God’s truth.12
27. While heterosexual relationships can also be marred by shameless acts, those sins are denounced elsewhere in Paul’s letters. Here, he zeroes in on the way male same-sex object choice ‘runs counter to the way God has designed human sexuality’.13 Paul’s reference to nature, natural intercourse, does not refer to an individual’s nature but to God’s established order of creation. Same-sex intercourse is ‘in essence a misuse of God’s creation, whatever the personal inclinations of an individual’.14 Paul does not limit the shameless same-sex acts of males only to certain categories of actions, such as pederasty, male prostitution, homosexual promiscuity, heterosexuals performing same-sex acts or the exploitative abuse of slaves. He applies the term to all male same-sex acts. His point is that perverting the relationship humans are to have with God leads to the perversions of God’s intention for human sexual relationships.15
The phrase translated ‘received in themselves the due penalty for their error’ (NIV) interprets the verb ‘what was necessary’ (edei) in the Greek. This penalty is grounded in God’s judgment as the warranted punishment for the sin. One pays an unexpectedly high price for rebelling against God’s truth. Paul does not believe that humans have an inalienable right to express their sexuality in any way they choose. Their lusts so darken their minds that they are easily seduced into imagining that perversions of the created order are normal and therefore acceptable.
Paul does not specify what they received in their own persons. It could refer to sexually transmitted diseases, increased femininity in men (cf. Philo, Spec. 3.37), increased mannishness in women, and/or the degradation of the soul that results from committing indecent acts.
28. Paul employs a play on words, which I translate, ‘They did not see fit [edokimasan] to have God in their knowledge so God gave them up to an unfit [adokimon] mind’ (cf. Barrett, p. 39). The verb see fit is used, for example, for testing coins to see if they ring true or are fake, and for testing persons to see whether they are qualified for an office or not. Mind represents ‘the sum total of the whole mental and moral state of being’ (BDAG, p. 689). Paul says that God was the object of human scrutiny and received a thumbs down. Humans fool themselves, however, if they think that they dispose of God when they try to depose God from the divine throne. The result is an unfit (or debased) mind that is so corrupted it can no longer think straight. Because it cannot think straight, it does not properly direct thanks to God (1:21). Because it is not appreciative of God’s lordship over creation, its capacity for moral discernment is nil, so that it is rebellious, easily hoodwinked, and prone to causal illusions that block it from being corrected.
29–31. Same-sex acts are the most obvious perversions of the created order that incite God’s punishing wrath, but they are not the only sins. God’s wrath flames forth against ‘all ungodliness and wickedness’ (1:18). The inevitable price of trying to have one’s way with God is spiritual poverty and social chaos. The broken relationship with God leads to the breakdown of morals and the break-up of society. Paul catalogues examples of the latter in this list of twenty-one vices. Bence summarizes, ‘Paul indicates that the unrighteous eventually lose their moral bearings (senseless), their integrity (faithless), their capacity for love (heartless), and their ability to respond to those in need (ruthless)’ (Bence, p. 41). In a letter directed to believers in Rome, the vices of being insolent, haughty, boastful, heartless and ruthless particularly apply to the imperialistic sins of a Roman Empire that deifies itself by deifying its emperors. The indictment, however, applies to all nations. Schlatter concludes, ‘The revelation of the divine wrath is evident in a religion that feeds on lies, in a body that is profaned, and in a community in which hatred and war are native’ (Schlatter, p. 45).
32. Paul delivers the summary judgment and implicates those who encourage and promote wrongdoing. They know God’s decree and admit that those who violate it deserve death. This concession acknowledges that God’s wrath is not unjust and that their condemnation is merited. When they applaud or sympathize with those who commit these sins, they are complicit in building a society brimming with vice. Cranfield comments that ‘those who condone and applaud the vicious actions of others are actually making a deliberate contribution to the setting up of public opinion favourable to vice, and so to the corruption of an indefinite number of other people’ (Cranfield, I, p. 135). Paul’s conclusion means, ‘The insistence upon the “package deal” by which one must approve another’s lifestyle else he is guilty of rejecting the other person will not stand up.’16
Paul’s discussion of the wrath of God is not a vestige from the Old Testament that has regrettably slipped into the New Testament that predominantly portrays God as a God of love and grace (cf. 1 John 4:16). Käsemann recognizes that ‘God has always exercised his claim to dominion over creation by meeting the disobedient with retribution’ (Käsemann, p. 35). God may be kind and forbearing (2:4), but if God were indifferent to evil, God would condone it and would not be righteous. The wrath of God is the inevitable reaction to human rebellion against God and God’s purpose in creation. It is ‘not God’s attitude toward us but the effect which God’s holiness has upon those who are against him’ (Brunner, p. 167). Humanity’s ‘No’ to God is answered by God’s ‘No’ to them. The gospel reveals both God’s righteousness and ‘the abysmally deep sinfulness of the world’, which, as Paul presents it, is a manifestation of God’s wrath that ‘points forward to the full manifestation at the end’.17 Idolatry exposes a ruptured relationship with God, who will not be mocked. Sexual sins expose the fractured relationships humans have with others that bring their own deadly repercussions.
Paul does not portray God’s wrath as smiting sinners with extraordinary natural events such as pestilence, violent tempests and blazing fires. As a kind of hidden judge (Harrisville, p. 37), God does what seems to be nothing. Sinners are not captive to an impersonal law of the universe, ‘an inevitable process of cause and effect in a moral universe’, as Dodd contends (p. 23). Nor is ‘the principle of retribution built into the structure of God’s ordered universe’, as Caird asserts.18 Paul’s view accords with that of the Old Testament that the source of wrath is not ‘an obscure or indeterminate power, but the personal will of Yahweh with which it is necessary to come to terms’.19
Cause and effect coalesce so that the degrading passions, the debased mind and being filled with every kind of wickedness are the punishment (Käsemann, pp. 38, 47). Moral perversion is the result of God’s wrath, not simply the reason for it. Dabourne writes, ‘God gives the sinners up to what they have made of themselves.’ 20 They are punished by the very sins they sin, creating a vicious cycle. This principle is found throughout Jewish literature. Chasing after false idols makes them false in all that they do (2 Kgs 17:15). Worshipping what is worthless makes them worthless (Jer. 2:5). People reap whatever they sow (Gal. 6:7).21 They also become like the gods they worship. By worshipping the images of beasts, their morals become beastly. Later in Romans, Paul identifies ‘Sin’ as a power. Paul’s picture of the effects of God’s wrath when humans seek to break free from God shows them handed over to a power that claps them in the irons of bondage that they cannot break by their own strength.
This understanding of God’s wrath corrects a common misunderstanding that sin is something to be dreaded only if it is detected. There is no getting away with sin. It is like a cancer that destroys. With cancer, the deadly thing is not its detection but the disease running its course. The problems come when the disease goes undiscovered, and even when it is diagnosed it may be too late. If the rebellion that suppresses God’s truth and exchanges it for monstrous lies marches on unchecked, ruination ensues in this life and damnation in the next.
God’s wrath is ultimately redemptive in intention. Being under God’s wrath is not intended to be an unending condition. It is provisional. The translation ‘God gave them up’ (1:24, 26, 28) may wrongly imply that God writes them off. The better translation is ‘God gave them over’ (NIV). While God may ‘hate all evildoers’ (Ps. 5:5), God does not intend to abandon them for ever. Instead, God allows sinners to go their own way in the hope that their subsequent wretchedness will cause them to snap out of it before it is too late and there is no turning back. Delivering them over to their sin is ‘a deliberate act of judgement and mercy on the part of the God who smites in order to heal (Isa 19.22) . . . throughout the time of their God-forsakenness God is still concerned with them and dealing with them’ (Cranfield, I, p. 121).
Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son who made his own choices and wound up in a pigsty provides an example. The son ‘came to himself’, arose and, filled with contrition, returned to his father, who received him with open arms (Luke 15:12–24). God must work in this way, allowing persons to hit rock bottom in the hope that they will come to themselves and repent, because God gave human beings free will. They are not machines. When an engine does not work, it can be fixed, even if it means putting in a whole new set of parts. Human evil, covetousness and malice cannot be so easily fixed. When humans are already deeply mired in the muck of their own making, like Christian, the central character in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, who sinks under the weight of his sins and sense of guilt into a cavernous bog, the Slough of Despond, they cannot escape by pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. The statement attributed to Martin Luther is true: ‘Sin is a knot which only God can untie.’ Redemption from sin that leads to knowing and worshipping God as the Father of the Son through the Spirit will be costly.
The perpetrators of the acts Paul lists ‘deserve to die’ (1:32) and cannot inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6:9–10), but this verdict is not final while they still live. God bears with patience the objects of his wrath (9:22) and has provided a solution through Christ to humanity’s insolvent condition. Believers are ‘justified by his blood’ and will ‘be saved through him from the wrath of God’ (5:9). They may have been guilty of these things, but ‘you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God’ (1 Cor. 6:11; cf. Rom 3:24).
Paul has said that the wrath of God is poured out on ‘all ungodliness and wickedness’ (1:18). He then sketched the sins of the Gentiles who deliberately reject the revelation of God they have received. He now draws a bead on the Jews in 2:1–29. They also are entrapped by sin’s merciless power, and, despite their posturing as God’s unassailable elect, they will be subject to God’s impartial scrutiny at the judgment. Paul intends to destroy the props that enable Jews to imagine that they could be reckoned righteous before God ‘on any basis other than that offered in the gospel: the righteousness of God made accessible through faith’ (Byrne, p. 79). They too are guilty of ungodliness (11:26) and wickedness (2:8; 3:5) and therefore also evoke God’s wrath. Paul’s argument in 2:1–29 headlines two basic principles: God judges all humanity ‘in accordance with truth’ (2:2), and God will disregard everyone’s ancestry and judge each according to his or her obedience to the law – the written law or the law written on their hearts (2:12).
Paul adopts a diatribe style in this section.22 He brusquely answers and exposes mistaken presuppositions and conclusions framed as the questions of the fictional dialogue partner. He also poses his own counter-questions. The purpose is ‘to expose error so that the auditor can more clearly see the truth’.23 The indefinite ‘whoever you are’ (2:1) means that the dialogue partner could be anyone who believes he or she is morally superior to those involved in the decadence described in 1:18–32: a Gentile moral teacher, a Jew, or even a Jewish Christian. The majority opinion that Paul directs his censure against ‘Jewish despisers of Gentile (im)morality’ is correct (Ziesler, p. 81).24 Paul initially cloaks his dialogue partner’s identity simply as one who judges others, but in 2:17 the partner is clearly identified as a Jew. The following list of allusions to Jewish texts and themes throughout verses 1–29 indicates that this person is a representative of Israel who believes himself to be an advantaged member of the elect people of God.
(1) The preceding indictment of idolatry and debauchery in 1:19–32 reflects the typical Hellenistic Jewish polemic against Gentile sins (though the term ‘Gentiles’ never appears). What follows in 2:1–11 challenges the Jewish sense of moral superiority and privilege that assumes God will condemn the Gentiles for their sins but will give his chosen people a special indulgence. Wisdom 12:22 gives voice to this attitude:
So while chastening us you scourge our enemies ten thousand times more,
so that, when we judge, we may meditate upon your goodness,
and when we are judged, we may expect mercy.
(2) Paul utilizes the tradition of the ‘day of wrath’ in the Old Testament (e.g. Zeph. 1:15; cf. 1 Thess. 1:10). Such a reference would be a mystery to a pagan dialogue partner (cf. Acts 17:30–34; 24:25). The idea of ‘storing up wrath for yourself’ (2:5; cf. Deut. 32:34–35) is akin to its opposite of laying up treasures in heaven (Matt. 6:19–20; Tob. 4:9–10; 2 Esd. 6:5; 7:77).
(3) The citation of Psalm 62:12 (61:13, LXX) in 2:6 confirms that Paul chides a Jew who acknowledges that God will repay persons according to what they have done and therefore is impartial.
(4) Other themes that recur throughout Jewish literature emerge: the danger of and punishment for a ‘hard heart’ (‘stubbornness’, Deut. 9:27); the riches of God’s kindness, forbearance and patience; the conviction that they expire on the day of wrath when it will be too late to repent. In Romans, ‘riches’ (9:23; 11:12, 33), ‘kindness’ (11:22), ‘patience’ (9:22) and ‘forbearance’ (3:25) are all connected to God’s dealings with Israel (Schnabel, I, p. 265).25
(5) The presumption that Israel enjoys a privileged status in the judgment is reflected in Wisdom 15:1–3:
But you, our God, are kind and true,
patient, and ruling all things in mercy.
For even if we sin we are yours, knowing your power;
but we will not sin, because we know that you acknowledge us as yours.
For to know you is complete righteousness,
and to know your power is the root of immortality.
Paul’s primary purpose in this section is ‘to prove that the Jews are guilty before God, for they have transgressed the revelation they have received, just as the Gentiles have rejected the revelation they have received (1:18–32)’.26 Jews have been ‘entrusted with the oracles of God’ (3:2), but they have turned away from this special revelation God has given them that points to Jesus as their Messiah (Luke 24:25–27, 44; 2 Cor. 3:14–15).
Paul’s rhetorical strategy may be likened to that in Amos 1 – 2 in which the prophet castigates Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, the Ammonites and Moab for their multiple transgressions (Amos 1:3 – 2:3) and suddenly pivots to attack the sins of Judah and Israel (Amos 2:4, 6).27 A Jewish audience likely would utter ‘Amens’ all the way through 1:18–32, but Paul is not through. He next impeaches the Jews in four stages:
(1) The special position of the Jews in relation to God does not confer on them the right to sit in judgment on the rest of humankind (2:1–11). God alone sets the criteria for the judgment and gets to say who is and who is not acceptable.
(2) Election implies partiality, and Paul’s point is that God will be impartial. Jews may not presume that because of their election they will receive preferential treatment and will be unscathed by God’s retribution against sinners in the final judgment. The law’s criterion for vindication by God’s judgment is not the possession or knowledge of the written law but obedience to its commands. Obedience decides one’s eternal destiny. Those who obey the law that is only written on their hearts will shame those who know but disobey the written law (2:12–16).
(3) Knowing the law, teaching it to others and taking pride in it are all useless if one violates its commands (2:17–24).
(4) Physical circumcision, the ground of Jewish confidence as the seal of the covenant, is meaningless unless it also signifies a cleansed heart (2:25–29). This indictment of Jews prepares for the gospel’s accusation against all humanity (3:20).28
1. Therefore (dio) has its typical inferential force and continues the thought – but what thought? If Paul is no longer talking about the Gentiles but about Jews when he switches to the second-person singular, the ‘therefore’ refers to 1:18, ‘the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness’. The Jews’ ungodliness and wickedness is also under indictment. God’s wrath is poured out on three categories of persons: those ‘who practice the vices listed in the preceding section’; those ‘who approve of what they do’ (1:32b); and ‘those who disapprove, in the sense that they sit in judgement upon the previous two classes (2:1, 3)’ (Byrne, p. 83). It falls on everyone.
Whoever you are translates ‘O man’ found in the Greek in 2:1, 3 (cf. 9:20). Paul may seem to attack the general human proclivity to pass judgment on others’ sins while paying no regard to one’s own. Jewett contends that he targets the arrogant, pretentious ‘bigot’ to overturn all group exceptionalism of whatever stripe (Jewett, p. 14). ‘O man’ underscores that the one addressed is a mere human being, not God who is the one and only transcendent judge. Dunn notes, ‘The contrast between human and divine judgement becomes a key theme in the remainder of the indictment (2:1–3, 12, 16, 27; 3:4, 6–8)’ (Dunn, I, pp. 79–80). While his reproaches may apply to anyone who smugly judges others, Paul specifically has in mind the Jew who judges Gentiles. His sin is not that he condemns Gentiles but that he does the very same things, which in the context can only refer to the sins itemized in 1:19–32. Since God condemns those who practise such things (1:32), the accusations in 1:18–32 establish a common ground. Both Gentiles and Jews are ‘without excuse’ (1:20; 2:1).29
This censurer of others is also ‘without excuse’ (CSB) or ‘without defence’. His judgment of others turns back on himself (cf. Matt. 7:1–5). He pronounces his verdict on others that ricochets back and condemns him as well. He may not commit exactly the same sins, but he is no less wicked and is without excuse. His religious pride is a type of idolatry that blinds him to his own wickedness.
2. Paul declares what is self-evident to Jews: God is a righteous judge who makes true judgments (Pss 96:13; 98:9; Jer. 11:20; Acts 17:31; Rev. 16:7; 19:2).30 In accordance with truth asserts that God’s judgment is objective and impartial. The dialogue partner’s crucial mistake is not that he dares to mount the judge’s throne or to gloat haughtily over God’s condemnation of others. Instead, he fails to recognize that he is also guilty of sins that incite God’s wrath and fury. He possesses the truth in the law (2:20) but does not obey it (2:8). He knows the truth about God’s judgments, but he does not repent. He compares himself favourably with Gentile sinners and deceives himself into believing that he is exempt from God’s condemnation because God will judge him by a different standard.
3. The rhetorical question Do you imagine . . . that . . . you will escape the judgement of God? goes unanswered. Paul assumes the answer is obvious: no-one who does the same things he condemns others for doing will escape God’s judgment. The question implies that the dialogue partner imagines that he will escape. Paul’s aim is to establish Israel’s sinfulness and explode the myth that Israel’s status at the judgment is impregnable. Dunn cites a parallel statement in the Psalms of Solomon: ‘And those who do lawlessness shall not escape the judgement of the Lord’ (15:8) (Dunn, I, p. 81). The author of the psalm continues by asserting that Jews are the righteous who bear God’s mark of salvation and live by God’s mercy while the sinners have the mark of destruction and will perish for all time. This notion also appears in the Wisdom of Solomon 11:9–10, which praises Wisdom for disciplining the wilderness generation with mercy and testing them as a father does in giving a warning. By contrast, the ungodly ‘were tormented when judged in wrath’ and ‘examined . . . as a stern king does in condemnation’. Election by God does not automatically free the Jews from the potential of eternal punishment. When brought before the bar of the all-knowing judge, they will not be exonerated because of a favoured-nation clause in the covenant. God’s impartiality results in universal condemnation according to the standards laid out in the law.
4. The fictional dialogue partner is sadly mistaken if he thinks God deals out only retribution to Gentiles and only kindness to Jews. Generous kindness refers to a divine characteristic of God in dealing with sinners (Mic. 7:18; Wis. 11:23; 12:19, 22), but Paul also connects it to God’s ‘severity’: God will cut off those in Israel who disobey (11:22). Forbearance relates to God passing over sins (3:25). God has held back in punishing sinners, but Paul ties God’s patience to enduring ‘the objects of wrath that are made for destruction’ to show the riches of his glory for the ‘objects of mercy’ who are ‘not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles’ (9:22–24). Misconstruing God’s present kindness as approval that assures of divine clemency at the final judgment is a fatal error. God is forbearing and patient only to provide time for repentance (2 Pet. 3:9). The opportunity to repent expires at the last judgment (2 Bar. 85:1–2).31 Pious Jews of Paul’s day would agree, as evidenced by Sirach 5:4–7:
Do not say, ‘I sinned, yet what has happened to me?’
for the Lord is slow to anger.
Do not be so confident of forgiveness
that you add sin to sin.
Do not say, ‘His mercy is great,
he will forgive the multitude of my sins’,
for both mercy and wrath are with him,
and his anger will rest on sinners.
Do not delay to turn back to the Lord,
and do not postpone it from day to day;
for suddenly the wrath of the Lord will come upon you,
and at the time of punishment you will perish.32
What Jews might not acknowledge is that God is kind, forbearing and patient to allow time for Gentiles also to repent (cf. Acts 17:30–31). Repentance, however, is a gift of God (Acts 5:31), and Paul will argue that God is impartial not only in judgment but also in bestowing gifts.
5. Paul controverts theological assumptions like those found in 2 Maccabees 6:12–16. The author seeks to explain the calamities that have befallen Israel:
In the case of the other nations the Lord waits patiently to punish them until they have reached the full measure of their sins; but he does not deal in this way with us, in order that he should not take vengeance on us afterwards when our sins have reached their height.
The author regards it as ‘a sign of great kindness not to let the impious alone for long, but to punish them immediately’, and it means that God ‘never withdraws his mercy from us’ and ‘does not forsake his own people’.33 Deuteronomy 32:34–35 contains the reassurance that Israel’s enemies will meet with God’s retribution:
Is not this laid up in store with me,
sealed up in my treasuries?
Vengeance is mine, and recompense,
for the time when their foot shall slip;
because the day of their calamity is at hand,
their doom comes swiftly.
A promise that, by contrast, God will have compassion and vindicate the people follows (Deut. 32:36). Paul insists instead that his dialogue partner, like Israel’s enemies, is amassing a warehouse full of sins that will be avenged on the day of wrath (cf. 1 Thess. 2:14–16). Paul debunks the idea that the world will be divided ‘into virtuous Jews and wicked pagans’ (Ziesler, p. 85).
A theme Paul develops later forms the theological basis for his assertions in this unit. It is that the law has failed to solve the problem of a hard and impenitent heart,34 and human volition fails to bring about the required obedience. The law may be spiritual, but humans are ‘of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin’ (7:14). Therefore, they can never perfectly fulfil the law. The law is impotent to create obedience but quite potent in pronouncing judgment on disobedience. Zealous pursuit of the law (10:2) cannot be the means to escape God’s wrath. Bullishness for the law ironically has resulted in bull-headed disobedience of God. Jewish disdain for Gentiles has resulted in discrediting God’s audaciousness in choosing Israel to be God’s witness to the world. The human heart’s bent towards sin affects both Jews and Gentiles. It needs a more effective remedy than the law. Humans need a new basis for establishing their righteousness before God.
6. That God will repay according to each one’s deeds pervades Jewish literature.35 Paul’s point, however, is to stress that God rewards and punishes impartially, and one’s race or heritage will not factor into this reckoning. Paul’s remarks on God’s impartiality form a chiasm:
A God will repay according to each one’s works (2:6)
B Those who do good will receive eternal life (2:7)
C Those who do not obey the truth will receive wrath
and fury (2:8)
Cʹ Those who do evil will suffer trouble and distress (2:9)
Bʹ Those who do good will receive glory, honour and peace
(2:10)
Aʹ God is impartial (in judgment) (2:11)
Pate comments that the
contrast in destinies recalls Deuteronomy 27 – 30, especially 30:15–20 and the ‘two ways’ tradition specified there: if Israel obeys the stipulations of the Torah, they will experience the blessing of the covenant, which is life, but if they disregard the Torah, they will experience the curse of the covenant, which is wrath in the form of exile (cf. 30:4–5).
(Pate, p. 43)
Paul’s emphasis on ‘the Jew first and also the Greek’ (2:9–10) expands this tradition to apply also to Gentiles.
7. In verses 7 and 8 Paul spells out two axioms related to God’s judgment according to one’s deeds: doing good will reap an eternal reward (cf. Gal. 6:9); doing evil will reap wrath and fury. The phrase literally translated ‘patience of good work’ refers to persevering in good work, consistent action and not the occasional deed.
Seeking glory and honour has nothing to do with seeking self-exaltation. Paul’s linking of these two words with immortality (aphtharsia, ‘not being subject to decay’) means that he refers to a state of being in the afterlife when God has resurrected mortal human beings. Humans do not innately possess immortality, as the Greek view of the immortality of the soul presupposes. Only God bestows imperishability along with the glory and honour that befits eternal life (1 Cor. 15:51–54). Seeking glory, honour and immortality means doing what pleases God so that one is no longer destined to the corruption of death but is accounted worthy of the resurrection and a place in the age to come (Luke 20:35), namely, eternal life. For believers who are in Christ, it means being conformed to the glorious image of his Son (8:29; 1 Cor. 15:49; Phil. 3:21). But this comment jumps ahead of Paul’s argument.
8. Zephaniah 1:14–18 and 2:2–3 picture the wrath and fury unleashed on the day of the Lord enveloping disobedient Israel, and Paul believes that Israel is gravely disobedient in rejecting Christ (10:21; 11:31). Those who do not obey the truth are no different from those who suppress the truth (1:18). One of the root causes of this disobedience is self-seeking (eritheia), which can be defined as ‘pursuing one’s own importance, guarding and increasing one’s power, and grasping for the gains inspired by this craving’ (Schlatter, p. 53). It has evoked God’s wrath, and the addition of the word fury (thymos) suggests that this wrath is God’s personal and ‘deeply felt’ indignation (Dunn, I, p. 87).
9. For everyone correctly translates ‘for every soul of man’ in the Greek text and refers to every person’s life (Fitzmyer, p. 302). The Jews may be first in privilege, but they also will be first in punishment (Amos 3:2). Greater privileges bring greater accountability. God will administer the judgment according to the principle enunciated by Jesus: ‘From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded’ (Luke 12:48).
10. God will separate the good from the evil in the judgment. The division is not between the Jew and the Greek but between those who have consistently done what is good and those who have done what is evil. Paul’s statement reflects John the Baptist’s warning to those who might be blasé about the wrath to come because of their false confidence in having Abraham as their forefather. They cannot ignore bearing ‘fruits worthy of repentance’ (Luke 3:7–9). At this stage in his argument, Paul is interested only in establishing that if Jews fail to do good works, they are liable to God’s harsh judgment and cannot expect to be grandfathered in based on their long-standing covenant with God and the merits of the patriarchs. Schreiner summarizes, ‘The main reason Paul introduced the issue of repayment according to works is to show the Jews that God is impartial, that there will be no special favoritism for them’ (Schreiner, p. 122).
11. That God shows no partiality reinforces the statement in 2:6 that ‘he will repay according to each one’s deeds’, Jews and Gentiles alike.36 It underpins the basic premise that salvation comes to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek, and wrath comes to everyone who suppresses the truth, Jew or Gentile (1:16–18).
Paul argues that his dialogue partner cannot divorce himself from the morass of evil plaguing the world simply by expressing his indignation over it. At the judgment, one will not be asked, ‘What or whom did you condemn?’ but ‘What did you do?’ The problem in judging others is that the measuring rod humans use to judge others and themselves is fundamentally twisted by the sins listed in 1:30: insolence, haughtiness (arrogance) and boastfulness, which makes their judgments hopelessly biased. Humans ‘unhappily possess an inbred proclivity to mix ignorance of themselves with arrogance toward others’.37 One cannot judge others as if they were the only ones guilty. God did not call Israel to be the moral watchdogs of the world but a light to the Gentiles.
Paul is not merely condemning the judgmentalism of a pretentious and arrogant person.38 He does not call for his dialogue partner to repent of his judgmental attitude or to be more prudent in judging (contrast 14:4, 10–13). He will not stand condemned before God because he turned up his nose at others’ decadence. Paul expects him to concur that such sins are abhorrent and deserving of wrath (Schnabel, I, p. 270). He is condemned instead for committing the same sins. (Schreiner, pp. 115–116). By affirming that God rightly judges sins (2:2), he acknowledges that God rightly judges (Wilckens, I, p. 256). He too will be the object of God’s wrath for his sins.
God administers judgment with impartiality. Many do not mind if God is partial as long as God is partial towards them and not others. In chapter 2, Paul debunks the view that Jews will get off more lightly for their sins because of their inherited covenant relationship with God. He lays the groundwork for describing Israel’s persistent failure to obey God’s word. None can rely on the kindness of God and expect to get a free pass at the judgment. God is also severe (11:22). Since God’s judgment is in accordance with the truth, God does not grade on a curve to absolve those who suppose themselves to be God’s favourites. Since God is righteous, God does not treat sin as lightly as humans often hope. The ones who are outwardly pious are even more susceptible to taking for granted their blessed assurance. But God destroys security based on human categories and human religiosity. While God is patient, the end-time judgment awaits everyone, including those belonging to Israel and to the church. If they know the truth but have not allowed God to change their hearts, they will be condemned for treating God’s bountiful goodness and patience with contempt.
Paul’s statements in 2:7–9 may seem to teach that salvation can be attained by virtue of works. Since this view contradicts his main argument in Romans that salvation comes by faith alone, this inference cannot be his intent. It is important to recognize that ‘for the moment he is considering, not what man can plead, but what God requires. He has yet to show that the works God rewards spring from faith’ (Taylor, p. 27). He spells out ‘a universal principle concerning God’s righteous judgement’ (Hultgren, p. 115). Ziesler summarizes Paul’s point: ‘God requires the practice of righteousness, and not just assent to it’ (Ziesler, pp. 80–81).
One should be careful not to read too much into what Paul says in this unit. Wolter recognizes that Paul presents a fictive situation from the perspective of the Jew who judges. He has yet to present the perspective of the judgment from the Christian vantage point (Wolter, I, pp. 183–184). His point is that God judges all according to their works with no distinction. He does not yet make clear that all fall short. When they are weighed in the balance, their good works will never tip the scale towards righteousness. Justification is unattainable through works.
It is therefore important to interpret these statements in the light of Paul’s entire argument. As Hultgren avers,
He seeks to show that there is no hope of salvation for anyone apart from the redemptive work of God in Christ . . . God’s judgement, Paul says, is fundamentally according to works. On that basis alone, some are found righteous, others guilty – in principle, if not in fact. This entire diatribe concerns judgement apart from Christ, whom Paul mentions only once, and that is at the end of the section (2:16).
(Hultgren, p. 112)
On that basis, any hope of salvation requires absolute obedience. He pulls the rug out from under those in Israel who think they will be justified before God from their fulfilment of the law. This unit provides the rhetorical framework for what follows: ‘The only hope for anyone is the grace of God extended in the redemptive death of Christ. God is impartial, and that is fundamental to understanding both his judgement and his grace’ (Hultgren, p. 113).
This unit expands on the statement that God shows no favouritism and spells out why. Those who have sinned without the law will perish. Those who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law (2:12). What Paul leaves unsaid but assumes is that the law is an exacting taskmaster: ‘Cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the things written in the book of the law’ (Gal. 3:10; cf. Deut. 27:26). He is building up to his conclusion that all have sinned (3:23), and all will be held responsible before God for their sin (3:19). Disobedience leads to death and destruction.
The thought expressed in 2:12 is completed in 2:16:
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 . . . on the day when, according to my gospel, God, through Jesus Christ, will judge the secret thoughts of all.
In between, 2:13–15 parenthetically explains how God can judge Jews and Gentiles on equal terms. In the case of Jews, the law decrees that only the doers of the law are righteous, and merely hearing the law will not lead to their acquittal. Gentiles may be without the written law, but by virtue of instinctively doing what the law commands, they reveal that they experience the tug of the divine will in their lives. The written law condemns the Jews for failing to be doers of the law; the Gentiles’ consciences condemn them for their failure to do what they know is right. The conclusion in 2:16 asserts that, through Christ, God will judge impartially the actions and secret thoughts of all humankind (cf. 14:10, 12).
12. The verb ‘sin’ (hamartanō) and an explicit reference to the Mosaic law appear for the first time in Romans. Paul refers to the law nineteen times in 2:12–19. Being ‘without the law’ (anomōs) appears twice in 2:12 (cf. 7:9). Paul takes for granted a central tenet of Judaism that God favoured Israel over all the nations by giving them the law. An answer to why God gave the law only to such an insignificant nation appears in a widespread rabbinic tradition that explains that God had offered it also to the Gentile nations but they declined, rejecting the commands not to murder, commit adultery or steal. Sipre §343, a later rabbinic commentary on Deuteronomy, cites Micah 5:15 as God’s response to this rebuff:
And in anger and wrath I will execute vengeance
on the nations that did not obey.
Of all the nations, only Israel was willing to accept the yoke of the law.39 This tradition reinforced Israel’s sense of superiority over the nations. Possession of the law, however, does not make for virtue. Paul’s point is that whatever one’s ancestry and privileges, sin evokes God’s wrath and fury and incurs condemnation, anguish and distress (2:9). Human sin therefore creates parity (cf. 3:9). Being without the written (Mosaic) law does not excuse Gentiles when they sin. Possessing the written law does not exempt Jews when they sin.
Snodgrass points out that Paul adopts ‘a Jewish view of judgement, but one that is radicalized and applied to both Jew and Gentile’. He also notes that Judaism did not require one to be perfect for salvation. Jews also believed in mercy: ‘Mercy was viewed as the lot for the righteous (usually the Jews) and judgement according to works was the lot for the evil (usually the Gentiles).’ 40 Paul rejects that distinction to contest a misinterpretation of the significance of Israel’s election. He sets up his position that if God did not justify sinners by faith, none would be saved, since all are sinners. If the criteria for the divine judgment were based solely on their deeds according to the law’s requirements, all humans would fall short. The righteousness that God requires is far more than membership of the covenant community; it is doing what God demands of those within the covenant (Exod. 24:7; Deut. 27:26).41
13. Hearers of the law echoes Deuteronomy 6:4–5, ‘Hear, O Israel’, and alludes to the Jewish custom of hearing the Law and the Prophets read every Sabbath (Acts 13:27; 15:21). What truly matters in God’s sight is obedience to the law, not simply familiarity with it (cf. Matt. 7:21; John 13:17; Jas 1:22). As Ezekiel 18:5–9 makes crystal clear, one must follow God’s statutes to become righteous. The rabbis concurred (m. ʾAbot 1:17). Gentiles also understood the principle of proving ‘your words by your deeds’ (Seneca, Ep. 20.1).
Paul’s statement that the doers of the law will be justified seems to contradict flatly what he says in 3:20a: ‘For “no human being will be justified in his sight” by deeds prescribed by the law’ (literally, ‘by works of law’). What Paul says in 2:13 should not be isolated from his entire argument. In this phase of it, he intends only to undercut any mistaken assumption that possession of the law spares one from God’s judgment. That only doers of the law will be justified states a basic premise of the old dispensation. It should not be taken as Paul’s understanding of the sole criterion in the final judgment that Paul envisions will be through Christ. The old dispensation judged according to the unyielding standard of complete obedience to the law. No-one is able to measure up to that standard. Consequently, no-one will be exonerated. For this reason, Paul elsewhere characterizes the old dispensation, which requires doing the law to receive life (Gal. 3:12; cf. Lev. 18:5), as ‘the ministry of condemnation’ (2 Cor. 3:9). It explains why he says that ‘the law brings wrath’ (Rom. 4:15), since ‘all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the things written in the book of the law”’ (Gal. 3:10; cf. Deut. 27:26). The new dispensation, by contrast, makes divine grace ‘universally available to Jews and Greeks apart from merit’.42
14–15. The majority of versions interpret the Greek word translated ‘by nature’ or instinctively (physei) as modifying the verb ‘do’: When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires (literally, ‘the things of the law’). What the law requires in 2:15 interprets the phrase that reads literally in Greek ‘the work of the law’.43 The implication is that Gentiles carry out God’s commandments without having been instructed by the written law. This statement forestalls any objection that might be inferred from Paul’s assertion in 5:13: ‘sin is not reckoned when there is no law’. One might ask how the Gentiles without the law can be held accountable for their sin if they did not know it was sin. That their deeds correspond with what the written law requires reveals that they are not ignorant of divine law. Paul has already declared that they know God’s decree and that defiance of God’s decree deserves death (1:32).
By saying that Gentiles do what the law requires, Paul does not refer to all Gentiles, nor does he mean to imply that some Gentiles perfectly obey all of God’s law.44 If that were so, why were the Jews the only ones who needed the revealed law? He simply asserts that evidence exists that some Gentiles have experienced the transcendent claim of the divine moral law written on their hearts and live virtuous lives (for example, Cornelius, according to Acts 10:1–2). That they are a law to themselves means that while they might not be able to recite the Ten Commandments, ‘they are capable of a high moral standard that coincides with the teachings set forth by the moral commandments’.45 This assertion explains how some Gentiles live morally principled lives without the written law and how, when they fail to do so, their consciences serve as their accuser.
Conscience is conceived here to be a judge of actions, not a guide that directs actions.46 That their conflicting thoughts accuse or excuse them has no connection to God’s final judgment. The verdict of one’s conscience does not clear one before God. In defending his conduct to the Corinthians, Paul attests that he is unaware of anything against himself, but he is not the final judge. He is ‘not thereby acquitted’ because the Lord will judge his conscience and ‘will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart’ (1 Cor. 4:4–5; cf. Acts 24:16).
16. This verse completes the thought of 2:12 after the parenthetical explanation about the criterion of God’s judgment that levels the playing field. The term day refers to the court where the ultimate judgment takes place. This meaning for ‘day’ is found in 1 Corinthians 4:3, when Paul says, ‘It is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court [‘day’ in Greek].’ As the supreme judge, God is all-knowing and can detect what humans think is safely hidden, their secret deeds and private thoughts. Paul makes the theologically astounding statement that God will carry out this judgment through Jesus Christ who will be the cosmic judge of all.47
According to my gospel does not mean that Paul’s message is his idiosyncratic take on the good news about Christ. It is ‘the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages’ (16:25). In this context, he conveys that his gospel does not eliminate accountability in the judgment, as some have maligned it as doing (3:8). Doing good is not superfluous and now irrelevant,48 but by identifying Jesus Christ as the final judge, Paul introduces another criterion for the judgment that he will develop later. Only those who belong to Christ and have been transformed by his power will withstand his judgment (8:37–39).
The separation at the final judgment will not divide along strictly ethnic lines, but who are these morally principled Gentiles who ‘will condemn you [a Jew] that have the written code and circumcision but break the law’ (2:27)? When Paul uses the term ‘Gentiles’ (ethnē ), he usually has in mind non-Christian Gentiles (2:24; 3:29). Many reasonably conclude that he refers to Christians as those who fulfil the law (Cranfield, I, p. 156; Jewett, p. 213; Kruse, p. 132; Schnabel, I, pp. 295–297; Wright, p. 441). Paul refers to Christians simply as ‘Gentiles’ in 11:13 and 15:9. In my view, however, ‘by nature’ or ‘instinctively’ (2:14) does not allude to the fulfilment of Jeremiah 31:31–32 in the lives of Christians and does not refer to the reborn nature. Believers have the written law (1 Cor. 10:11), and they certainly are not ‘a law to themselves’ but are under ‘the law of Christ’ (1 Cor. 9:21; Gal. 6:2). Believers do not obey ‘by nature’ (‘instinctively’) but do so only through the power of the Spirit (8:4, 14; Gal. 5:22–25). Paul resorts here to the Stoic concept of natural law to make his case that Jews are not the only ones who can know God’s will (Fitzmyer, pp. 310–311). His comments are consistent with Philo’s explicit statements about Abraham, who lived long before the law was given to Moses on Mount Sinai. Citing Genesis 26:5, Philo writes that Moses makes
this crowning saying, ‘this man did the divine law and the commands’. He did them not taught by written words, but unwritten nature gave him the zeal to follow where wholesome and untainted impulse led him . . . Such was the life of the first, the founder of our nation, one who obeyed the law . . . himself a law and an unwritten statute.
(Abr. §275 [Colson, LCL]) 49
Gentiles ‘show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness’ when ‘their conflicting thoughts . . . accuse or perhaps excuse them’ for their actions (2:1). That they struggle within themselves over right and wrong reveals that they have an acquaintance with what is right and wrong.
Paul’s overall rhetorical purpose should be kept in mind before mining these statements for theological doctrine. He mentions the moral Gentiles to puncture Jewish pride that assumes Jews have an advantage over the Gentiles because they possess the law and the Gentiles do not. His goal is not to commend the Gentiles but to show that God will judge both Gentiles and Jews impartially by the same universal standard that the law enjoins. Ziesler is correct: ‘At this stage in the letter Paul is still dealing with the human situation apart from God’s gracious action in Jesus Christ, which he will not reach until 3:21’ (Ziesler, p. 81).
Paul’s validation of moral Gentiles who have the law written on their hearts does not mean that they will be acquitted by passing some moral test. They are not saved by their works any more than Jews are. By highlighting that God’s judgment is based on deeds, not birthright or possession of the law, Paul reinforces his point that God’s judgment on the disobedient in Israel who possess the law is richly deserved. The case of the moral Gentiles forces the question: how will it stand for the Jews who have the written law if they do not do what it requires? The theological point to take away from this passage is that the gospel is ‘the power of God for salvation’ that delivers us from God’s wrath that is directed against our own sin (1:16–18) and not simply aimed at the ‘ungodliness and wickedness’ of others.
Another question arises: ‘How can Paul say that the doers of the law will be justified (2:13) and then affirm that no one will be justified before God on the basis of doing the works of the law (3:20)?’ (Matera, p. 67). The former statement does not nullify the fact that all are guilty of sin and under the power of sin and will not be saved except by faith. Paul will make it clear that no-one can rely on ‘works of the law’ or an imagined innate goodness for salvation. All will appear before God’s tribunal at the final judgment and will be subjected to God’s penetrating probing that exposes the secrets of the heart. Paul warns that possessing God’s special revelation does not give anyone an advantage if one does not heed it. Jesus’ parable of the dialogue between the rich man, consigned to Hades, and Father Abraham underscores the point. Abraham’s final word declares, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead’ (Luke 16:31). For Christians, the bar will be even higher, since in addition to Moses they have the commands of Christ who was raised from the dead, and they know him to be their judge.
Consequently, Christians should understand that at the Judgment Day they will be held accountable for what they have done in the body (2 Cor. 5:10; cf. 1 Cor. 3:12–15; 2 Cor. 11:15; Eph. 6:8–9; Col. 3:24–25). Käsemann comments,
The danger of the pious person is that of isolating God’s gifts from the claim which is given with them, and of forgetting to relate forbearance and patience to the Judge of the last day. Humans always crave security. They seek to obtain it through moralism, worshiping the gods, or trusting the divine goodness. The Lord who is known as Judge, however, does not ensure security, he destroys it.
(Käsemann, p. 55)
Therefore, one cannot avert God’s condemnation by staking claim to ‘the moral high ground’ (Bird, p. 74). Snodgrass avers, ‘“Works righteousness” is excluded, but saving obedience in response to God’s grace is not.’ 50 Christians no longer live under the shadow of being judged by their works. They are justified only by being in Christ (8:10–11). Their salvation comes as a gift and not as a reward for good deeds (Gal. 2:21; Eph. 2:8–9). Those who are in Christ can trust that their salvation is secure, because everything good that Christians do stems from God working in them (Phil. 2:13) as the Holy Spirit brings forth the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:16–25). That security does not mean that they need not work out their ‘salvation with fear and trembling’ (Phil. 2:12)
Paul addresses his Jewish dialogue partner to answer the question: how does God’s impartiality tally with the status of the Jews as God’s chosen people? He shatters any notion that the Jews’ special entitlements provide an escape clause that allows them to skirt God’s judgment. His argument turns on the second half of the principle laid out in 2:12: ‘all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law’. Jews may have the truth contained in the written code of the law, but that advantage does not give them immunity from punishment stipulated by the law. God’s wrath does not fall only on Gentile sinners. If Jews transgress the law, they face the same condemnation.
The term ‘Jew’ in 2:17 and 2:29 brackets this unit as Paul redefines who is truly a Jew. His description of his dialogue partner is like Josephus’s portrayal of the Pharisees as ‘a group of Jews priding itself on its adherence to ancestral custom and claiming to observe the laws of which the Deity approves’ (Ant. 17.41 [Marcus and Wikgren, LCL]; cf. 1QM 10:8b–11). Paul’s attack on this proud Jew resembles Jesus’ assault on the scribes and Pharisees as hypocrites in Matthew 23. In 2:17–24, Paul accentuates the hypocrisy of the Jew who boasts of his reliance on the law that he believes makes him a beacon of light for others but whose manifold transgressions of the law lead Gentiles to disdain rather than to glorify God’s name. In 2:25–29, Paul argues that being a true Jew has nothing to do with bearing the name ‘Jew’, tracing one’s bloodline or having physical markings. Instead, the true Jew is marked by an internal circumcision of the heart in the Spirit that brings obedience to the law. This is the only thing that counts before God. Fleshly circumcision that distinguishes the Jew from the Gentile becomes irrelevant. Paul is leading up to the climax of his argument that all are sinners and enemies of God (3:23). The last stroke is his conclusion that since ‘no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight’ (3:20, NIV; cf. Ps. 143:2), only God can remedy the problem of sin and bring about reconciliation and redemption. God has done so in Jesus Christ.
17. The one addressed proudly designates himself a Jew, as Paul himself does in Galatians 2:15 where he contrasts being a Jew with being a ‘Gentile sinner’. Paul also boasted in his Jewish bona fides in Philippians 3:4–6 as one who was ‘circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews’. He believed that his relationship with God was secure because of a righteousness based on his obedience to the law. Therefore, Paul is not presenting a snide distortion of his opponent. It is Judaism as he experienced it. The series of boasts are not ironic but serve as legitimate grounds for confidence in and gratitude towards God when accompanied by obedience. The problem is that the entitlements Paul lists fill his Jewish dialogue partner with false assurance and a breezy conceit. The if makes his comparison of a Gentile who does what the law requires without having been instructed by the written law (2:14) and a Jew who boasts in the law but dishonours God by breaking it (2:23) a hypothetical situation to clarify his point. The obedient Gentile represents a best-case scenario; the disobedient Jew, a worst-case scenario.
‘Reliance on the law’ had long defined Jewish identity. The psalmist delights that God’s law is in his heart (Ps. 40:8). Often cited is the boast in 2 Baruch 48:22–24:
In you we have put our trust, because, behold, your Law is with us,
and we know that we do not fall as long as we keep your statutes.
We shall always be blessed; at least, we did not mingle with the nations.
For we are all a people of the Name;
we, who have received one Law from the One.
And that Law that is among us will help us,
and that excellent wisdom which is in us will support us.51
The catch is that Israel must do more than rely on the law; they must keep the law’s statutes to be blessed by God and to avoid falling.
To boast in God can be good (1 Cor. 1:31; 2 Cor. 10:17), but it becomes tainted when it turns into a boast about oneself, that is, when one boasts about one’s election by God and unduly assumes that one belongs to the only group that will be vindicated in the judgment because of that special relationship to God. Paul is not merely condemning a puffed-up sense of superiority over others. Instead, he decries boasting that encroaches on God’s sovereignty and impartiality. The references in the immediate context to those who will and will not face God’s righteous judgment in 2:1–5 and the outline of the criteria of God’s judgment in 2:6–16, 25–29 confirm that the boasting Paul has in mind refers to assurance related to God’s final judgment. In 3:27–30 and 4:2, Paul excludes the boasting that assumes that God is only the God of the Jews or that justification is based on the works of the law. He argues that the ‘hope of sharing the glory of God’ is based only on faith (5:2). He reproaches here the presumptuous boast that Jews alone will be saved from God’s wrath.
18. God’s law teaches the difference between righteousness and iniquity, the right and wrong way to live. Through its lens Jews can test and discern what is best among differing things. In practice, however, Paul accuses his interlocutor of acting as if he were oblivious to the distinctions. His point is that while the Jew may be instructed in the law, knowledge is useless without obedience. What one does, not what one knows, reveals one’s true character.
19–20. Knowing God’s law is not simply a privilege to be used for one’s selfish ends but brings with it the obligation to teach others, as Moses did (Deut. 4:5–8). The dialogue partner understands himself to be a guide to the blind and a light to those who are in darkness. That is Israel’s calling. Enlightened by the law, they are to be a light that shines for a world that dwells in darkness (Isa. 42:6–7; 49:6; cf. Wis. 18:4), not simply a light that shines ‘on the face of the Many’, the members of one’s sect. The light is snuffed out when words do not correspond to deeds. One then becomes a blind guide (Matt. 15:14; 23:16, 24). Those without inner light from God (cf. 2 Cor. 4:6) cannot be a guiding light for others. Those who are morally rudderless cannot steer others in the right direction.
21–22. Switching to biting accusatory questions, Paul indicts his dialogue partner for breaching the very law upon which he relies.52 The reproaches disclose why he can accuse this Jew of doing ‘the very same things’ as the Gentile sinners (2:1). The stock list of sins appears in the same order in Philo (Conf. 163), and Seneca logs the identical three sins in an inventory of monstrous acts (Ep. 87.22–24). The conclusion to a listing of sins, which includes adultery and stealing from God’s sanctuary, in Psalms of Solomon 8:8–13 comports well with Paul’s point: ‘There was no sin they left undone in which they did not surpass the gentiles’ (Pss Sol. 8:13 [Wright, OTP II, p. 659]). This Jewish sinner is no better than a Gentile sinner and has no grounds for boasting.
While the first two accusations, stealing and adultery, stem from the Decalogue in reversed order (Exod. 20:14–15; Deut. 5:18–19), it is less clear what the verb translated as rob temples (hierosyleō) denotes. This charge may be literal and relevant to the situation of the Romans. Josephus recounts an incident of a Jew who lived in Rome and professed to instruct men in the wisdom of the laws of Moses. He gathered a group who persuaded a woman convert named Fulvia to send purple and gold to the temple in Jerusalem. Instead of delivering the gifts to the temple, the group absconded with them. When Fulvia’s outraged husband informed Tiberias, the emperor, the ensuing investigation resulted in the order to banish Jews from Rome (Josephus, Ant. 18.81–84). On the other hand, the charge may refer to the hypocrisy of abhorring idols while trafficking in idolatrous paraphernalia from pagan temples. The questions recall Jeremiah’s diatribe:
Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, ‘We are safe!’ – only to go on doing all these abominations?
(Jer. 7:9–10)
The charge of robbing temples is therefore more likely a general reference to sacrilege (cf. Acts 19:37).53
23. Three times Paul accuses his dialogue partner of transgressing the law (2:23, 25, 27). The law was not given so that Jews could flaunt their ascendency over others. Paul contends instead that it was added to identify sin as wilful transgression (Gal. 3:19; cf. Rom. 4:15; 5:14). The law should silence this man’s boasting. His sinful disobedience dishonours God and makes him no better than the pagan Gentile who does not honour God (1:21).
24. Paul caps off his accusations against his Jewish interlocutor with a slightly altered citation from Isaiah 52:5. Isaiah identifies Israel’s lowly estate in exile as emboldening the rulers of the nations to despise God’s name. Schreiner notes that in the context of Isaiah’s theology (Isa. 64 – 66) ‘the people are in exile because of their sin (40:2; 42:24–25; 43:22–28; 50:1)’ (Schreiner, pp. 143). Paul draws on this context and Ezekiel’s emphasis that Israel’s sinfulness has also caused the Gentiles to discredit God’s name. Because Israel has profaned God’s holy name, God must act to sanctify his name. The prophet Ezekiel particularly emphasizes God’s promises to sanctify his name:
I will sanctify my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them; and the nations shall know that I am the LORD, says the Lord GOD, when through you I display my holiness before their eyes.
(Ezek. 36:23; cf. Ezek. 20:41; 28:22, 25; 38:16, 23; 39:27; 2 Bar. 21:25)
25. Paul takes for granted that Jews esteem circumcision as the divinely ordained outward sign of their special covenant relationship with God and of belonging to this holy covenant people. The ‘for’ (gar) is often omitted in translations. It introduces not a new line of thought but ‘strengthening premises’ to substantiate what precedes – that the one who boasts in the law dishonours God by transgressing the law (2:23).54 Circumcision is no longer the outward certification that one belongs to God’s covenant people. It can become instead a sign of hypocrisy when one who is merely circumcised fails to honour the obligations it entails (Exod. 15:26; Lev. 25:18; Deut. 4:40; 6:1–6). If the covenant requirements are disobeyed, then the mark of the covenant is meaningless. Circumcision is no different from uncircumcision, and Jews, like this dialogue partner, become like Gentiles, ‘excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise’ (Eph. 2:12a, NIV). Paul does not go so far as to say that they are ‘without hope and without God in the world’ (Eph. 2:12b, NIV). His assertions in 11:17–32 make it clear that is not true. Paul’s point is this: Jews may believe circumcision set them apart as the people of God, but it is not ‘a certain passport to salvation’ (Barrett, p. 58).
26. Paul’s phrasing of his question in Greek with the negative interrogatory particle (ouch) expects the answer ‘Yes’: if those who are uncircumcised keep the requirements of the law, will not their uncircumcision be regarded as circumcision? Most devout Jews would disagree, but Paul’s use of the passive voice (be regarded, ‘be reckoned’) assumes that God is the subject of the verb. God will regard them so, which means that circumcision of the flesh is irrelevant to God when it comes to eternal life. Paul steadfastly maintains elsewhere, ‘Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing; but obeying the commandments of God is everything’ (1 Cor. 7:19; cf. Gal. 5:6; 6:15).
27. Paul now cites the case of Gentiles who do not receive physical circumcision because they do not have the Mosaic law as their birthright (cf. Gal. 2:16) but who have kept what the law requires. To assume that someone who is uncircumcised keeps the law, Paul must have in mind only the moral commands in the law (cf. 13:8–10). Obedience to the moral law is decisive for being considered spiritually circumcised. Uncircumcised Gentiles who keep the law could be presented at the final assizes as damnatory evidence against Jews who transgress the law.
The written code (literally in Greek ‘the letter’, to gramma) refers to the law that is external, that which is chiselled on stone tablets or written with ink in books (2 Cor. 3:3). It contrasts with what is internal and written by ‘the Spirit of the living God . . . on tablets of human hearts’ (2 Cor. 3:3; cf. Rom. 7:6). The problem with ‘the letter’ as something that is only external is that it has no more power to make someone obey its commands than a traffic stop sign has the power to make a driver come to a complete stop. It simply makes running a stop sign a deliberate transgression. Committing deliberate transgressions places one under a curse: ‘Cursed be anyone who does not uphold the words of this law by observing them’ (Deut. 27:26; Gal. 3:10; cf. 2 Cor. 3:6–7). The letter not only does not solve the problem of sin but can even make it worse by arousing sinful passions (7:5–11). Even if we obey the commands, we do so like maladroit piano students who memorize the piece, hold their hands correctly, play all the right notes, but fail to make music because the main concern is to avoid making a mistake.
28–29. Paul switches from the second-person singular in addressing his dialogue partner to the third person to comment on two representative individuals, the public Jew and the secret Jew. He draws the astounding conclusion that ‘the public Jew with his circumcision is not the true Jew. The secret Jew whose heart is circumcised by the Spirit is the real one.’ 55 Outward displays of piety often serve only to cover up inner corruption. Jesus condemns the scribes and Pharisees who ‘do all their deeds to be seen by others’ by making ‘their phylacteries broad and their fringes long’ (Matt. 23:5). They are like ‘whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth’ (Matt. 23:27). Righteousness is not something that is only external, a surface whitewash, and the true Jew is not someone who is only conspicuously Jewish in following outward customs. That person is simply a Jew according to the flesh (4:1; 9:3; 11:14). The true Jew is identified by an inward disposition that manifests itself in being ‘obedient from the heart’ (6:17). Paul is not yet referring, at least explicitly, to regenerate Gentile Christ-followers and their spiritual circumcision (Phil. 3:3; Col. 2:11) under a new covenant. His sole purpose at this point in his argument is to expose ‘the failures of his contemporaries in order to convince them of their need for that inner renewal that only the Spirit of God can effect’ (Matera, p. 77). Bodily circumcision is no prophylactic against God’s judgment. Praise . . . from God, namely, God’s positive verdict in the judgment (1 Cor. 4:5), results only from a thoroughgoing spiritual makeover that affects one’s behaviour.
Josephus lauds the law of Moses as superior to the laws of all other nations, including the wisest of the Greeks. He claims the law is ‘the most excellent and necessary form of instruction’ (Ag. Ap. 2.175 [Thackeray, LCL]) that regulates the entire life of Jews (Ag. Ap. 2.156) and boasts, ‘So then, learning the laws by heart from our first perception, we have them engraved, as it were, in our hearts, and rare is the one who transgresses them; plea bargaining to escape punishment is impossible’ (Ag. Ap. 2.178 [Thackeray, LCL]). Paul would agree with the last part of this statement but would challenge the assertion that Jews have the laws so engraved on their hearts that they rarely transgress them. He argues that while they may possess the law and have intimate knowledge of it, that privilege has not resulted in the required obedience. Instead, it has fostered only unjustified overconfidence about how they will fare in God’s judgment (cf. Jer. 9:23–26). This is the problem. Their boasting keeps repentance at bay and keeps them from believing in Jesus as Lord. Paul will argue that all are in need of salvation from damnation for failing to keep the law. Judgment is based on what one does irrespective of one’s background. Not every Jew commits the cardinal sins listed, but every Jew is guilty of sin and is liable to God’s condemnation despite the Jews’ advantaged heritage and their circumcision as the seal of their covenant with God. McFadden concludes, ‘The theme of judgement according to works lays a foundation for justification in Romans by developing the context in which justification by faith is to be understood.’ 56
Christians also need to hear Paul’s message of judgment. In a world that is filled with those who talk loudly, Paul argues here that actions are what define us. By radically underscoring the problem of human transgression that will lead to God’s judgment even for God’s chosen people, Paul’s message of justification by grace through faith has greater impact. Owning a Bible and memorizing its contents does not save Christians today any more than possessing and studying the law saved the Jew in Paul’s day. God never asks what one knows about the law or whether one had good intentions to obey it. One cannot glory in an identity that is not shown to be authentic by one’s obedience. Bragging about one’s special standing before God is a sure way to lose it. Eternal life comes only through the grace offered in Jesus Christ.
Receiving God’s grace does not jettison God’s expectation of righteous behaviour. Paul says that while ‘neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything’ (Gal. 5:6), what does count is ‘faith working through love’ (Gal. 5:6), ‘a new creation’ (Gal. 6:15) and ‘obeying the commandments of God’ (1 Cor. 7:19). Heschel declared, ‘I am commanded, therefore I am’,57 but Paul will argue later that God requires more than obedience that answers a command. God could have created robots to mimic obedience to the law. Jesus required obedience that claims a person wholly for God, and Paul also understands that keeping the commandments of God (1 Cor. 7:19) means an obedience to the will of God that is far more radical than fussy observance of an external code.
Paul does not explain how an uncircumcised Gentile might be able to obey the law when his Jewish interlocutor could not. In my interpretation, he does not refer to Gentile Christians becoming spiritual Jews in this passage. He makes a case about Jewish identity. If an uncircumcised Gentile fulfils the intention of the law, even without submitting to Jewish ritual traditions, that person becomes a better representative of what it means to be a Jew than a Jew who does obey these traditions but violates the intention of the law summed up in loving your neighbour as yourself (13:9). At this stage in his argument, Paul aims only at puncturing Jewish pride that assumes the Jews are the only people who interest God and that they alone will be saved because of their birthright and superior heritage. After reading all of Romans, however, Christians understand this text differently and recognize that with the advent of Christ the only Gentile who could possibly meet this benchmark is a Gentile Christ-follower who is justified by faith (3:26) and lives under the promised new covenant (Jer. 31:31–34; Ezek. 36:25–27).
In Deuteronomy 10:16, Moses exhorts Israel to circumcise the foreskin of their own hearts (cf. Jer. 4:4), but in 30:6, he asserts that God will perform this heart circumcision: ‘Moreover, the LORD your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, so that you will love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, in order that you may live’ (cf. Ezek. 11:19–20; 36:26–27; Jub. 1:23; Odes Sol. 11:1–3). Paul will argue later that the Holy Spirit is the renewing force behind this spiritual operation. Paul is yet to make the case that Christians fulfil the law only by being in Christ. It is therefore dangerously mistaken to take this text to mean that one can become righteous by fulfilling the law through one’s own power. Moo comments,
Like John the Baptist (Matt. 3:7–10) and Jesus (cf. Matt. 21:28–32) before him, Paul denies that belonging to the covenant people per se ensures acceptance with God. Neither possession of the law nor circumcision marks a person as truly belonging to God. Only repentance (2:4) and an inner, heartfelt commitment to God (2:28–29) – in a word, faith – ultimately count before the Lord.
(Moo, p. 136)
That Paul’s dialogue partner has convinced himself that he is a guide to others may reflect his lack of self-awareness, like those who ‘may be clever enough to teach many, / and yet be useless to themselves’ (Sir. 37:19). It is Israel’s calling, however, to teach others and to glorify God’s name among the nations. The problem is that their conduct does not draw the nations to God but instead repels them. Those who teach others but do not practise what they teach are condemned across all cultures. Paul expresses his fear of this failure: ‘I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified’ (1 Cor. 9:27). Paul expects that the faith and obedience of Christ-followers will radiate throughout the world (1:8; 16:19).
In this unit, Paul corrects the possible mistaken inference that God’s impartiality in judging both Jew and Gentile means that God has revoked the covenant promises to Israel. Paul does not discount Jewish pre-eminence but asserts that simply possessing the ‘words of God’ does not mean that one will obey them. Being physically circumcised does not ensure that one’s heart has been circumcised – that is, having a pure heart devoted to God. What is decisive is doing God’s will as spelled out in God’s divine utterances.
To make his position clearer, Paul shifts his rhetorical strategy. The questions in this unit do not originate from an imaginary protester. They develop from the internal logic of Paul’s argument in 2:1–29 and clarify major propositions. The questions he asks, then, are not intended to refute outside opponents but to lead believers to a deeper understanding and commitment of their lives to the gospel he preaches.58 He assumes that his audience will concur with both the answers and the reasoning behind them.59 He uses the questions to present a historical or theological fact in his answer. If some were unfaithful (3:3), God remains true (3:4). God’s righteousness does not hinge on the faithfulness of his people. If my unrighteousness highlights God’s faithfulness, which abounds to God’s glory (3:7), is it unfair for God to judge me and inflict wrath on me for being a sinner (3:5, 7)? Absolutely not. God rightfully is the judge of the world.
This unit affirms God’s integrity in keeping promises and in both saving and judging. The answers to the questions raised derive from God’s words (3:2), God’s faithfulness (3:3), God’s truth (3:4, 7), God’s righteousness (3:5), God’s judgment (3:6) and God’s glory (3:7). The questions raised here are taken up again and answered in greater depth in chapter 9: he addresses God’s truthfulness and faithfulness to his promises (3:3–4, 7) in 9:7–13; God’s justice/injustice (3:5) in 9:14–18 (10:2–3); God’s judgment (3:6) in 9:22; and God’s glory (3:7) in 9:23. Paul also takes up the question whether one should sin so that more grace might abound (3:8) in 6:1 and 6:15. There he does more than condemn the slanderous suggestion that his gospel of grace encourages persons to continue to do what is evil to evoke even more grace from God and augment God’s glory as all-merciful. He discusses the power that Christians have through the Spirit to live righteous lives.60 Paul cites Psalm 51:4 in 3:4, but the whole psalm informs Paul’s theological assumptions in the context of his arguments (Jackson W., pp. 70–72). God desires truth in one’s inner self (Ps. 51:6), which accords with what Paul says in 2:28–29. God does not delight in shallow, outward works such as sacrifices and burnt offerings (Ps. 51:16), which accords with what Paul says in 3:20, 27–28; 4:1–6; 9:12, 32; and 11:6. Instead, God requires ‘a broken spirit . . . a broken and contrite heart’ (Ps. 51:17), and then God forgives. God’s forgiveness blots out the guilt of sins yet does not solve the problem. David pleads for God to create a clean heart for him and to renew in him a steadfast spirit (Ps. 51:10). Paul shows how God does this for believers through the Spirit (8:1–13; cf. 2:29).
1–2. The first question reprocesses the Jewish boasts highlighted in 2:17–20 that denote the distinctive advantages Jews have over others. The second question takes up the theme of circumcision raised in 2:25–29. Those who have read Galatians might assume that Paul’s answer to the second question about the benefit of circumcision would receive a resounding ‘Nothing’ (Gal. 5:6; 6:15; cf. 1 Cor. 7:19). He pulls the rug out from under this false supposition by saying that circumcision has much value, in every way. The issue of God’s credibility lies at the root of the two questions. If the Jew has no advantage and circumcision has no value, then either the Scriptures are a false witness or God has reneged on the promises – in particular, the promise made to Abraham in Genesis 17:1–7 that is tied to the requirement of circumcision. God declares it an ‘everlasting covenant’. Paul argues from the basic assumption that God is always faithful (Deut. 7:9; 32:4; Ps. 33:4; Isa. 49:7). Israel’s primacy is not illusory. The Jews’ priority, however, may mislead them to think that God will treat them differently from the rest of the world’s sinners. God’s covenant with Abraham does not include a non-punishment clause. God’s righteousness will not exempt Israel from receiving the same impartial judgment meted out to all sinners (Cranfield, I, pp. 176–177).
Most Jews viewed circumcision as an indispensable mark that signified obedience to God’s commands (Deut. 30:15–20).61 Since one could break the Sabbath to circumcise a boy on the eighth day (m. Šabb. 19:2), Jews regarded circumcision as foremost among the biblical commands. Jubilees calls it an ‘eternal ordinance’:
anyone who is born whose own flesh is not circumcised on the eighth day is not from the sons of the covenant, which the Lord made for Abraham since (he is) from the children of destruction. And therefore there is no sign upon him so that he might belong to the Lord because (he is destined) to be destroyed and to be annihilated from the earth and to be uprooted from the earth because he has broken the covenant of our Lord God.
(Jub. 15:26) 62
Paul, however, has defined circumcision’s value in terms of obedience to the law (2:25). Circumcision turns into a meaningless physical mark if it does not reflect what it is intended to signify, namely, obedience to God in one’s heart and soul. Jews therefore can squander their advantages, and their circumcision can become uncircumcision when they are unfaithful to God.
The Jews are truly privileged because they were entrusted with the oracles of God (cf. Deut. 4:8; Ps. 106:12; 147:19–20), which most likely refers to God’s revelation in Scripture.63 Paul may have in mind particular revelation related to the scriptural promises related to Christ. He comments in 3:21–22 that God’s righteousness has been disclosed apart from the law, is attested by the Law and the Prophets, and comes only through faith in Christ. Since he also declares, ‘For whatever was written in the past was written for our instruction, so that we may have hope through endurance and through the encouragement from the Scriptures’ (15:4, CSB), it is likely that he has in mind the oral utterances of God ‘promised beforehand’ that became ‘the gospel of God’ (1:1–2). Paul emphasizes God’s promises to Abraham in 4:13–14, 16, 20 (cf. 15:8).
The verb entrusted implies that God spoke to Israel for the benefit of others. Paul uses the same verb to state his conviction that God entrusted him with a stewardship of the gospel that God willed to save all peoples by faith so that he would pass it on to others (1 Cor. 9:17; Gal. 2:7; 1 Thess. 2:4; 1 Tim. 1:11). In the same manner, God did not call Israel to be the curator of the divine words to be safely locked up in some holy, tamper-proof museum. Being the trustee of the divine words obligated Israel to be labouring in the world as ‘a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness’ (2:19–20; cf. Isa. 42:6; 49:6; 60:3).
3–4. The beginning of verse 3 is best translated, ‘What if some did not trust [believe]?’ Paul refers to the Jewish refusal to recognize that the promises to Abraham were now being fulfilled in Jesus as the Messiah (10:14–21).64 He later laments that many of his fellow Jewish have rejected Jesus as the Messiah and have stumbled over the stumbling stone because they have sought a righteousness based on works and not on faith (9:31–33; cf. 1 Pet. 2:6–8). By refusing to believe in Jesus they repeat Israel’s past rebellion (cf. 1 Cor. 10:7–10). For Paul, this failure to believe in Christ (11:23) is equivalent to ‘unfaithfulness to the covenant’.65 Using the word some allows for a faithful remnant (11:5), but the refusal by other Jews to believe the gospel places them on the same level as unbelieving Gentiles.
The faithfulness of God implies God’s fidelity to promising salvation for Israel (cf. Num. 23:19; Deut. 7:9; Isa. 49:7). Nehemiah 9:7–8 affirms that God is righteous for fulfilling the promise to Abraham. The rub is that according to Paul’s gospel the fulfilment of the promise to Abraham accords salvation to foreskinned Gentiles who believe in Christ, while excluding Jews who are duly circumcised and faithful to the law but who do not believe in Christ. Paul poses a leading question expecting the answer ‘No’: What if some were unfaithful? Will their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? Paul regards the premise behind the question as unthinkable,66 and it receives an emphatic By no means! God’s faithfulness is bound to God’s character, and Paul considers it axiomatic that God is true, always faithful in keeping promises, and always doing what is right. The unfaithfulness of some Jews will not cause God to renounce the pledge to be faithful to Israel.
Let God be proved true translates a third-person imperative which has no equivalent in English. Like the third-person imperatives we find in the Lord’s Prayer (‘Your kingdom come. Your will be done’, Matt. 6:10), Paul prays for divine action, for God to manifest (once again) God’s fidelity true to the covenant. The prayer alludes to Psalm 116:11 (115:2 LXX) in which the psalmist indicts everyone as a liar while God has remained true despite dealing with a fickle and untrustworthy Israel. The citation from Psalm 51:4 (50:6 LXX), So that you may be justified in your words, / and prevail in your judging, confirms Paul’s line of reasoning. Being true to the covenant also entails that God execute judgment on Israel when their sin warrants it. The words of God do not only record promises and blessings. They also include warnings of God’s judgment, stories of God regularly carrying out that judgment, and the recognition that God was just to do so. In the cited psalm, the contrite David confesses his sin before God (presumably for sexually assailing Bathsheba and orchestrating her husband Uriah’s death) and acknowledges that God was right in severely punishing him for his sin. The full story of David reveals, however, that God remains true to the covenant promises even when God inflicts dire punishment. David proved unfaithful, but God’s judgment on his sin did not rescind God’s truthfulness in making the promises to David that his offspring would reign for ever (2 Sam. 7:13–14; Ps. 89:24–37). God remained faithful in fulfilling the promises made to David (cf. Rom. 1:3).
Paul’s context imagines a court scene at the end of time in which God wins the verdict over Israel. Only at the end of time will it become evident to all that God has triumphed.67 Despite allegations that God has jilted the chosen people, God will stick to the course that has been mapped out to offer salvation to all humans, and God will be proven to have been true, faithful, righteous and merciful even when God judges.
5–6. The phrases what should we say? and I speak in a human way indicate that Paul is not responding to an imagined objector but seeks to reinforce his teaching point that God remains righteous when bringing wrath on the Jews’ wickedness just as God is righteous in bringing wrath on the Gentiles’ wickedness (1:18). All those who are ‘self-seeking and who obey not the truth but wickedness’ will face God’s ‘wrath and fury’ (2:8). Despite their great advantage in being entrusted with ‘the oracles of God’, the Jews have been unfaithful to God (cf. 2 Kgs 17:18–19; Neh. 9:13–30). This is not an anti-Jewish comment since Paul uses the first-person plural pronoun in our injustice (or ‘our unrighteousness’) to express his union with the Jews (cf. 9:3–4). Throughout Israel’s history, God demonstrated his righteousness when he poured out mercy on Israel after they sinned (Neh. 9:31) and when he poured out his wrath after they sinned (Jer. 32:30–33). The suggestion that God might be unjust in inflicting wrath on the Jews therefore receives a ringing ‘No!’ God’s saving power does not suspend God’s judging power. When God inflicts punishment for unrighteousness, it is in harmony with God’s righteousness that also brings salvation to the unrighteous. Scripture affirms that God is the judge of the world (Gen. 18:25) and, as Psalm 51:4 makes clear, also affirms God’s fairness in meting out punishment. Denying God the freedom to condemn the Jews is equivalent to denying God the freedom to be the judge. God’s integrity entails that God will judge all, including Israel, fairly. Since God is even-handed in judging, God is not underhanded in condemning Israel, particularly those Jews who give lip-service to their reliance on the law yet thumb their noses at God by transgressing it. Paul rejects cheap grace for Israel. If God were to waive expressing wrath on the Jews in history, then God would be unfair, inconsistent and unrighteous in judging the world at the end-time assizes.
7. God is the judge of the world, and Paul reduces any objection to this obvious point to an absurdity with his last question: why should God hold him accountable for his sin when it is God’s forgiveness that amplifies God’s glory as a gracious Saviour? Translating it as ‘someone might argue’ (NIV) is most misleading. The I refers to himself since Paul sees himself as a sinner (cf. 1 Cor. 15:9–10) who ‘also’ (kagō; CSB) is being judged by God. He speaks of himself as a representative of all Jews who claim allegiance to the law and mistakenly assume that they deserve a bye in the judgment (Phil. 3:4–6) and that God’s truthfulness and faithfulness to the promises will be manifested when God will bail them out despite their sins. When read in the light of Galatians 2:15, the question contains a deeper bitterness. Jews conventionally differentiated themselves from Gentiles who were sinners. The question asks, ‘Why am I, a Jew, judged as if I were on the same level as a lawless Gentile?’ Implicit in this question is another: ‘How could this about-turn by God in which Jews are liable to the same judgment as unrighteous Gentiles possibly bring glory to God?’ One can see why Paul offers the forewarning in verse 5 that he speaks ‘in a human way’ (kata anthrōpon). This all-too-human viewpoint that assumes special privilege and expects leniency from God that even someone like Paul might entertain must be totally rejected. Jews are in the same position as Gentiles and all humanity when it comes to God’s judgment of sinners.
8. Memories of opponents’ criticism that Paul’s gospel asserts that believers are no longer under any obligation to obey God’s law and that it consequently fosters sin probably trigger this parenthetical outburst. The opponents may be Christian Jews (Acts 15:1, 5; 21:21) or Jews outside the church.68 If the detractors are unbelieving Jews, they falsely reason that if God does not differentiate between Jews and Gentiles, then God has abandoned differentiating between the righteous and the sinner. Any idea that a divine moral order presides over the world goes up in smoke. If those who misrepresent his gospel are Christians, they falsely reason that it serves no purpose to knock oneself out trying to obey God’s law. It is more likely that Paul still has in mind Jewish opponents to the gospel. The question assumes that the greater the human evil, the greater God’s grace must be to forgive it. Displays of such amazing grace blazon God’s glory all the more. God therefore has no right to judge Jews for their faithlessness to the covenant since it only serves to enhance God’s glory. Paul’s strong denunciation of those who make such untenable inferences conveys his conviction that rejecting or distorting his gospel brings divine condemnation.
Paul’s answer to the question anticipates his arguments in chapter 11. He maintains that Israel’s ‘stumbling’ (11:11), ‘defeat’ (11:12), ‘rejection’ of the gospel (11:15), ‘hardening’ (11:25), enmity towards the gospel (11:28) and ‘disobedience’ (11:30) have opened the door for Gentiles to receive ‘salvation’ (11:11), ‘riches’ (11:12) and ‘reconciliation’ (11:15). God’s mercy on sinners has made ‘known the riches of his glory’ (9:23), and Paul concludes the argument in chapters 9–11 with a doxology, ‘To him be the glory for ever’ (11:36). Israel’s persistence in their sinful rebellion against the gospel, however, does not bring greater glory to God. Only their acceptance of it (11:15) will magnify God’s glory when God takes away their sins (11:27) and miraculously grafts them back ‘into their own olive tree’ (11:24).
The issue of God’s righteousness is central to Romans (1:17; 3:21; 9:6; 9:30 – 10:4; 11:29–32). In this unit, Paul grapples with the question as to how God remains righteous after promising to prosper Israel in an everlasting covenant (Gen. 17:1–7) only to condemn them for refusing to believe in Christ. Paul’s fundamental belief that God is right and humans are wrong governs his argument. Gentiles face the wrath of God because they reject the light given in nature. Some Jews face the wrath of God (1 Thess. 2:14–16) because they reject the light given in the ‘oracles of God’ and deny that God’s promises are being fulfilled by Christ’s coming into the world. He argues from passages from the Psalms that humans, in this context applied to the Jews, are unfaithful (3:3), liars (3:4), unrighteous (3:5) and unabashed sinners (3:7). They are neither true to God nor true to their calling. God’s righteousness, however, remains constant, unaffected by human corruption. God is faithful (3:3) and true (3:4) and demonstrates righteousness in judging sin (3:5), not just in showing mercy. God’s wrath on sin is not waived for the Jews because of their special covenantal status. As judge of the world, God judges all sinners alike. God also shows mercy on all sinners alike who believe in Jesus.
Paul addresses the concern that if God’s impartial judgment accepts Gentiles who have faith in Jesus and rejects law-obeying Jews who do not, then the world is no longer governed by the fruit of good deeds.69 Why put oneself out trying to do good deeds?70 Grace does not make sin any less loathsome to God. Paul insists that God does not overlook sin simply to be touted as a kindly benefactor. Penitent sinners, such as David (Ps. 51:4), recognize that God is their judge and that God’s punishment for their sin is fully warranted. Paul adopts the same posture in acknowledging that God also judges him as a sinner. Penitent sinners own up to their state of abject deficiency and also plead for salvation and hope that God will be merciful. The psalmist knows that God also demonstrates his righteousness in pardoning the sin of unrighteous humans (Ps. 143:2, 11).71
The solution to humans’ sin problem, however, is far more complex than God simply cancelling the debt and whitewashing the sin. Paul knows that there can be no forgiveness or salvation outside of trusting in Christ. Consequently, not believing in Jesus, whether one is faithful to the law or not, epitomizes unrighteousness. Jews have an advantage because of their history with God, but they have no advantage when it comes to making a claim on God by virtue of their own merit. They have none, and God will not handicap the final verdict in their favour. This point is important for what follows. If God makes no exception for the Jews, then all humankind must stand condemned before God.
Paul acknowledges the magnitude of the Jews’ privilege. The gospel has not voided the attendant benefits and obligations that come from being God’s chosen people. Instead, they are intensified. Having ‘the oracles of God’, ‘the law and the prophets’, entrusted to them (3:2, 21) gave the Jews an advantage, a preview of God’s intentions in a new covenant. From Paul’s perspective, possessing the ‘oracles of God’ is an advantage only if they are interpreted as signposts pointing to the gospel revealed in Jesus Christ. They also steer Israel to fulfil its vocation in the world. The ‘oracles of God’ are not to be turned into a legal codebook of behaviour that bolsters Jewish boasts and countenances their exclusion of others who fail to measure up to their standards rather than God’s.72 Israel’s superiority, therefore, is based solely on its weighty responsibility to be a light to the world. As Cranfield comments, Israel had an inside track, but those who stood the nearest to the working out of God’s saving purposes were ‘blind, deaf, and uncomprehending’. The reason was that ‘they fundamentally misunderstood their special position when they thought of it as a ground for complacency and all too human glorying’ (Cranfield, I, p. 178). They turned the ‘oracles of God’ into ethnic rituals that cordoned themselves off from others. They bowed their knees before the altar of their imagined ethnic superiority. That attitude will result only in self-exclusion from salvation.
After insisting that God is always reliable and upholds the covenant promises, while the chosen people have been unfaithful, untruthful and unrighteous, Paul corroborates this accusation with the testimony of Scripture. Since the Scriptures are addressed to the Jews (3:19), they should see themselves as the object of these denunciations. The chain of quotes cataloguing a gamut of sins is probably Paul’s own creation.73 They quash any Jewish boast to be morally superior to others. Paul’s aim, however, is to make the case that if Jews are under the power of sin, then all people, both the self-acclaimed righteous and infamous sinners, are also in its unrelenting clutches. Jews and Gentiles are united in this human morass.
The Scripture passages in their original contexts denounced Israel’s enemies and the wicked in Israel. Since Paul believes that Scripture ‘has imprisoned all things under the power of sin, so that what was promised through faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe’ (Gal. 3:22), these passages are examples of Scripture consigning everyone under the power of sin. They obliterate the distinctions between the righteous and the unrighteous. All are without excuse and store up wrath for themselves for ‘the day of wrath, when God’s righteous judgement will be revealed’ (2:5).
Paul sets out the dire situation in which all, both Jews and Gentiles, are mired as a prelude to his discussion of God’s resolution of the problem (3:21–26). God’s solution shines an even harsher light on the severity of the human predicament and makes it fully known. The cross of Christ reveals humanity’s inborn, inveterate and intractable rebellion against God. Only faith in Christ changes one’s life.
9. Paul’s question is normally rendered, ‘Do we have any advantage?’ or Are we any better off?, which takes the verb (proechometha) as a middle voice with an active meaning. Since no lexical examples for this usage have been found, the verb has also been read as a middle voice in which the subject acts in his own interest. The we would refer to Paul, who asks if he is putting forward a pretext or an excuse to defend himself.74 It also could be read as a passive verb: ‘Are we surpassed?’, that is, ‘Have we (Jews) lost our advantage and are we now in a worse position than they (Gentiles)?’ Neither of these readings makes sense from what follows, where Paul asserts that all humans are equally guilty. The usual translation is the best option as Paul picks up his argument from 3:1 and moderates his assertion in 3:2 that Jews have an advantage, ‘much, in every way’. He now says, No, not at all, which might be better translated as ‘not entirely’ (CJB) or ‘not altogether’. The acknowledged Jewish advantages in receiving special revelation do not shield them from the power of sin nor from God’s wrath because of their sins. All are under the law. The Jews are under the Mosaic law; the Gentiles, under the universal moral law (2:15–16). Being under the law means that both Jews and Gentiles are under the power of sin that seizes the commandment, perverts it, blurs the distinction between right and wrong, and generates cravings that violate God’s law (7:8–11) and ensnare them in the web of death.
The noun sin (hamartia) makes its first appearance in Romans. Paul conceives of sin here as something far more fearsome than individual sinful acts. It is a power that takes captive and enslaves every person, Jew and Greek (7:14).
10–12. The first scriptural proof in verse 10 comes from Ecclesiastes 7:20 and states the main theme: ‘Surely there is no one on earth so righteous as to do good without ever sinning’ (cf. Isa. 24:5). For Paul, this indictment would also include David, whom God declares to be ‘a man after my heart, who will carry out all my wishes’ (Acts 13:22; cf. 1 Sam. 13:14). The quotes from Psalm 14:1–3 (Ps. 53:3) in verses 11–12 contain charges similar to those Paul makes against the Gentiles in evoking God’s wrath. While God seeks humans long before humans seek God, humankind failed to respond to God’s overtures and chose to go after their own gods. A darkened mind, useless from its moral depravity, and a complete lack of understanding of one’s proper place in creation (cf. 1:21, 28) are the results of not seeking God. Human relationships deteriorate (cf. 1:29–32). Kindness dies, and with it every shred of goodness. If these accusations are true of Jews and their failure to seek God, then Israel’s reason for being a light to the nations has been extinguished. God will have to rebuild Israel (cf. Acts 15:15–18) to accomplish that calling.
13–17. The citations in these verses from Psalm 5:9; 140:3; 10:7; and Isaiah 59:7–8 (Prov. 1:16) spell out how sin affects everything in a human’s life: throat, lips, mouth and feet. Throats that have become opened graves vividly pictures an inner corruption that manifests itself in speech marked by treachery, malice, blasphemy and hostility. Evil speech – ‘Their throats are opened graves; / they use their tongues to deceive.’ / ‘The venom of vipers is under their lips.’ / ‘Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness’ – results in acts of human cruelty. Such corrosive speech destabilizes peace by further alienating persons from one another as they lurch down deadly paths of destructive horror, shedding blood without hesitation and sowing widespread misery. All human history reflects the repeated breakdown of peaceful accord as individuals and nations are bent on conquering others so that they might be known as conquerors (cf. Rev. 6:2).
18. The last passage cited, from Psalm 36:1, presents the principal reason why humans do not seek God. Fear of God does not refer here to reverential awe. It refers instead to dread of God’s final judgment (cf. 13:3). John Calvin, defending his break from the Catholic Church as leaving false worship for true worship in his discovery of the Scriptures, wrote:
Being exceedingly alarmed at the misery into which I had fallen, and much more at that which threatened me in view of eternal death, I, duty bound, made it my first business to betake myself to your way, condemning my past life, not without groans and tears.75
Calvin came to appreciate that believers need not fear God’s sentence of eternal death.
19. As a promise, the law witnesses to Christ (Luke 24:27, 44), but Paul highlights another function of the law. It provides objective and decisive proof of humankind’s guilt. Jews are under the law (1 Cor. 9:20; Gal. 4:5), but the law will not come to the Jews’ defence as a character witness in God’s judgment. It is their accuser, exposing their unrighteousness and sin (7:7–25), and their jury, imposing the death sentence for their failures to obey. When that sentence is read at the final judgment, every mouth uttering hollow complaints, allegations and excuses will be throttled.
20. Paul sums up his argument with a final quote from Psalm 143:2 indicting all humanity: no human being will be justified in [God’s] sight (cf. Gal. 2:16). Translating it as no human being or ‘no-one’ to refer to human beings in general misses a subtle theological point. Paul altered the psalm’s ‘no one living’ to read ‘all flesh’. Paul chooses the word ‘flesh’ because for him it denotes
man in his weakness and corruptibility, man in his dependency on this world. It is precisely man in his independence from God, choosing to live on his own terms, for himself, man the creature of his appetites, subservient to his mortality, man taking his sense of value from this world, its society and its standards, man, in a word, as ‘flesh’, who can have no hope of acquittal on the day of judgment.
(Dunn, I, p. 159)
Paul may echo Genesis 6:12: ‘And God saw that the earth was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted its ways upon the earth.’ Being ‘in the flesh’ means that all humans are incapable of altering their corrupted state through works of the law.
Paul also adds that ‘all flesh’ will not be justified by ‘works of the law’ (CSB). ‘Works of the law’ (cf. 3:28; Gal. 2:16; 3:2, 5, 10) refers to those ceremonial commands in the Mosaic law that serve as boundary markers dividing Jews from Gentiles, such as the observance of the Sabbath, feast days, food restrictions and circumcision. Observing them means that one lives ‘like a Jew’ and not ‘like a Gentile’ (Gal. 2:14). Adherence to these boundary markers displays the Jews’ exclusive covenant relationship with God, which can feed pride and become tangible grounds for boasting. Dunn originally contended that ‘works of the law’ functioned as a means ‘to retain one’s status as a member of the people of God’, and that Paul regarded them as ‘more superficial, at the level of “the letter” (2:27, 29), an outward mark indicative of ethnic solidarity (2:28), something more limited than “the patient perseverance in good work” (2:7)’ (Dunn, I, pp. 158–159). Dunn has since clarified that he views ‘works of the law’ as referring to ‘what the law requires, the conduct prescribed by the Torah’ that must be performed.76 It is argued that Paul refers to the emphasis placed on laws that distinguished Jews from Gentiles as a way to consolidate their superior status and to exclude Gentiles. Certainly, many Jews feared losing that which made them special in their eyes, and so they magnified the importance of these laws.
This view that ‘works of the law’ applies primarily to boundary markers in the law fails to take into account the full orb of Jewish religion in this era that could affirm that salvation came by grace and also righteousness came by works without trying to harmonize the different conceptions.77 It also garbles Paul’s view of justification by faith.78 Gathercole comments, ‘The problem for the Jew is not their attitude that exploits their privileges, possession of the law and circumcision, but their transgressing the law which makes their circumcision uncircumcision.’ 79 Since Paul says that ‘works of the law’ fail to achieve justification for (literally) ‘all flesh’ (no human being), he does not think that ‘works of the law’ applies only to Jewish boundary markers. It also applies to Gentiles who do not possess the law but instinctively do what the law requires (2:14–17). The problem with ‘works of the law’ is not that they are a distinctively Jewish means of excluding others but that ‘they are “works” that humans under sin’s power (3:9) are unable to produce in adequate measure to secure righteous standing with God’ (Moo, p. 220).
The traditional view that Paul understands ‘works of the law’ to refer to the attempt to establish one’s righteousness by means of doing the works commanded in the Mosaic law remains valid.80 ‘Works of the law’ are not to be limited only to Jewish boundary rituals that separate Jews from Gentiles and oppose the gospel’s universality that transcends the distinction between Jew and Gentile.81 They refer to all the commands in the law, and ‘works’ implies that these commands require obedience. Paul sees the Jews’ primary problem as seeking to establish their own righteousness by striving to do what Moses commanded in the law, and not submitting to God’s righteousness that comes only through Christ (10:3, 5). Ephesians 2:8–10; 2 Timothy 1:8–10; and Titus 3:4–7 explicitly reject the belief that one can be saved by works of righteousness. Even if one does not believe that Paul wrote these letters, the reactions of some first-century Jews to this confidence are evidence that they did hold this view. If one believes that Paul did write these letters, it is evidence that he sought to counter the view that one can earn salvation through works. The prayer of Ezra in 2 Esdras 8:33, ‘For the righteous, who have many works laid up with you, shall receive their reward in consequence of their own deeds’, reflects this view. God rebuffs Ezra’s plea to be ‘merciful to those who have no store of good works’, even though it would declare ‘your righteousness and goodness’ (2 Esd. 8:36–41). God declares instead that ‘a great number’ will perish because ‘they despised the Most High, and were contemptuous of his law, and abandoned his ways’, knowing full well that doing so meant that ‘they must die’ (2 Esd. 8:55–58).
Paul also links the phrase ‘works of the law’ to the law in 3:20. In Galatians 3:10–11, he equates ‘works of the law’ with ‘all the things written in the book of the law’. In Galatians 2:21, he argues, ‘If justification [righteousness] comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing’, which parallels his statement in 2:16: ‘no one will be justified by the works of the law’. The problem is that the law cannot break the power of sin, but sin breaks the power of the law, rendering it incapable of helping humans surmount sin. According to Romans 5:20 and Galatians 3:19, God added the law to make obvious the moral and religious situation of the world by clarifying the nature of sin as a deliberate violation of God’s will. It makes clear that humans not only violate God’s will when they sin, but they do so fully aware that it is a violation of God’s will. With the law, their defiance now becomes conscious and deliberate rebellion against God.
The phrase ‘works of the law’ is equivalent to the use of ‘works’ by itself in 4:2–6 (cf. 9:32). It refers to anything that a person does expecting that it will ‘bring him or her into favor with God’ (Moo, p. 220).82 Paul was convinced that he was blameless when it came to righteousness commended by the law (Phil. 3:6). Sin seizes every opportunity to distort the law (7:7–23) and causes humans, for example, to modify the law’s requirements to make them more attainable and thus create the mirage that one has fulfilled its intentions. In 10:21, Paul cites Isaiah 65:2 to counter any delusion that Israel has dutifully submitted to God. They have consistently been disobedient and contrary. Banking on their obedience to the law to win an acquittal at the final judgment is misguided and will derail the salvation they so zealously pursue (10:1). Sin, the refusal to honour God and the exaltation of oneself, existed before the law. Paul asserts that God did not give the law as a guide on how to attain salvation, nor as a legacy to elevate Jews over Gentiles, but as a divine informer that brings knowledge of one’s sinfulness. The evident inability of Jews to keep the whole law brings Jews down to the same level as Gentiles as sinners before God. The battery of sins in 3:10–18 provides an example of how the law functions in specifying evil deeds. It convicts both Jews and Gentiles. All are without excuse and, when confronted with the incontrovertible evidence of their sins in God’s court of law, they can only remain silent. Attempts to obey the law to set oneself right with God are futile, since the law only heightens an awareness of failure. Worse, the law offers no permanent antidote to sin. The priests must offer the law’s prescribed sacrifices for sin continually, day after day, year after year (Heb. 7:27; 9:6, 25). This repetition was a perpetual reminder that they never completely remove guilt and never cleanse from sin ‘once for all’ (Heb. 10:1–3). The need for atonement persists. Consequently,
God has bypassed the Law altogether in the eschatological manifestation of his righteousness. Nevertheless, the Law retains its capacity to convict man of unrighteousness and, now that its testimony can finally be comprehended through Christ (cf. 2 Cor. 3:14–16), it serves also as a witness to the righteousness of God (Rom 3:21b).83
Paul understands that forgiveness, righteousness and redemption come only through Christ’s atoning sacrifice and through faith in Christ.
It is not provocative for a Jew to say that all have sinned. It is asserted in 2 Esdras 8:35: ‘For in truth there is no one among those who have been born who has not acted wickedly; among those who have existed there is no one who has not done wrong.’ It is provocative, however, for a Jew to imply that obedience to the law is not the way to salvation and that those who follow that path are hopelessly doomed. The reason is that all humankind is under the power of sin. The root problem is not Israel’s misuse of the law that leads to self-righteous boasting about their superiority over others, nor their thinking that they are safe from God’s judgment because of their unique status as God’s chosen people. The problem is that Jews are under the same power of sin and guilty of the same wickedness that galvanizes God’s wrath against the Gentiles. Paul personifies sin as a cosmic power. Sin is not simply an infraction of God’s law but a force that manipulates humans as if they were mere puppets. Persons do not have control over their sin; sin controls them. It corrupts everything they do and think, including their learned meditations and best intentions. Consequently, all attempts to obey the law ultimately fail.
The law has no power to defuse the power of sin. It only raises awareness of human sinfulness. Paul portrays the law as a kind of investigating officer, prosecutor, and judge and jury. It consigns all humankind to death row in the dungeon where sin serves as a cruel jailer. Barrett expresses well the human plight that Paul describes:
As long, therefore, as God’s righteousness is manifested and understood in terms of the law it must spell wrath. The only hope for man is that God should find some other means, beyond law and religion, of manifesting his righteousness.
(Barrett, p. 30)
The law offers no remedy and no reprieve. Only God has the power to enable the great escape from sin’s clutches and eternal death.
Paul’s statement in 3:20, ‘by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified in his sight’ (ASV), modifies what he wrote in 2:13 that only ‘the doers of the law’ will be ‘righteous in God’s sight’. In principle, Paul grants that final vindication may be attained by doing what is good (2:7, 10). While the phrase ‘no flesh’ in Greek essentially means ‘no human being’, the more archaic, literal rendering is a reminder that the problem is that flesh can never do what is good because it weakens the law (8:3) and is hostile to God (8:7).84 The human incapacity to fulfil God’s demands in the law means that no-one can ever achieve a right standing with God based on his or her works. No-one has sufficient resources to give anything to God that could ransom his or her soul (Ps. 49:8; Mark 8:37). Repeated repentance and mournful appeals for God to show mercy do not suffice to receive acquittal before the bar of God’s unyielding justice. Because of sin, humans find themselves in such a hopeless quagmire that it requires God to create some other measure by which they can be justified. Otherwise, all inevitably will be condemned. Therefore, Paul amends the warnings in the Old Testament that keeping the ordinances of God is the way to life and disobeying them is the way to death (Lev. 18:4–5; Deut. 4:1; 5:32–33; 11:8–9; 30:15–20). They may be the way to live life as a Jew, but they are not the way to eternal life.
Consequently, continuing to rely on works of the law to achieve justification before God is not only futile, it reflects a sinful stubbornness to submit to the way that God now provides for humans to become righteous through faith in Christ. ‘Works of the law’ do not simply lead to a dead end; they hurtle one over a cliff of destruction. This theological tenet applies to all forms of human religious expression that tend towards legalism and imply that redemption can be won by one’s own resources and efforts. For example, in Mithraism, a mystery religion particularly popular with Roman soldiers, redemption was viewed as something a man could automatically win when he did certain things, being ritually cleansed, submitting to ordeals and living up to an ethical code. Christians too may think that God will reward them for being virtuous – that is, virtuous as they define it according to human standards. If virtue is set up as the goal to which persons must strive to make themselves worthy of salvation, then they have embarked on a lifelong enterprise of keeping books with God. When persons hold up what they have done for God to admire and applaud, the spiritual ground on which they claim to stand caves in like an unexpected sinkhole.
Paul’s conclusion about the futility of the works of the law to achieve righteousness is based on his conviction that after Jesus’ atoning death and his resurrection we now live in a new eschatological age that has superseded the old Mosaic covenant. The day of the Mosaic covenant has passed, and a new covenant is in force that includes Gentiles and Jews. This radical shift is underscored by Paul’s statement, ‘To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might win those under the law’ (1 Cor. 9:20). Paul, a former Pharisee, zealous for the law (Gal. 1:14), now understands himself to be under a different covenantal arrangement so that his righteousness does not come from the law but from being in Christ (Phil. 3:9).
1. Paul’s arguments have striking parallels with Wis. 11:15; 12:1–11, 24; 13:1 – 14:31.
2. This divine fury is manifest in the opening invocation of Homer’s Iliad 1.1.
3. H. Kleinknecht, ‘ὀργή’, TDNT V, p. 390, notes that the divine wrath (ira deum) that falls on those who despise the gods was well established in Roman cults and myths and their understanding of their history (Livy, History of Rome 2.36.5; 9.29.11; Tacitus, Ann. 14.22). The Old Testament also is filled with manifestations of God’s wrath upon Israel, reflections on its motives and counsel on how to turn it aside.
4. Bornkamm, Early Christian Experience, p. 59.
5. Calvin, Institutes, 1.11.8 (I, p. 108).
6. Gundry, Commentary, p. 575.
7. Ferguson, Religions, p. 68.
8. Harrington, Holiness, p. 24.
9. Johnson, ‘God Gave Them Up’, pp. 126–129.
10. Cf. 2 Cor. 12:21; Gal. 5:19; Eph. 5:3; Col. 3:5.
11. Gagnon, Homosexual Practice, p. 254; cf. Plato, Leg. 636 a–c.
12. Cf. Philo, Spec. 2.50; 3.37; Abr. 26.133–136; Josephus, Ag. Ap. 2.199; 2 En. 10:4; 34:2; Ps.-Phoc. 190–192; Sib. Or. 3:185–187, 595–600; T. Naph. 3:1–5.
13. France, ‘From Romans’, p. 249.
14. Ibid.
15. Jesus alludes to the proverbial unnatural lust of Sodom (cf. 2 Pet. 2:6; Jude 7) in affirming the judgment on them (Gen. 19:1–29), though he uses hyperbole to warn that it will be more tolerable for Sodom on the day of judgment than for those who reject his messengers and the gospel (Matt. 10:14–15; 11:23–24; Luke 10:11–12).
16. Stagg, ‘Plight’, p. 406. Nolland, ‘Romans 1:26–27’, provides a powerful rebuttal to those who would argue that Paul’s statements have no relevance for modern Christian sexual ethics or that Paul condemned different kinds of homosexual practices that differ from what moderns might consider acceptable.
17. G. Stählin, ‘ὀργή’, TDNT V, pp. 441–442.
18. Caird, Paul’s Letters, p. 85.
19. J. Fichtner, ‘ὀργή’, TDNT V, p. 397.
20. Dabourne, Purpose, p. 194.
21. Cf. Wis. 11:15–16: ‘In return for their foolish and wicked thoughts, / which led them astray to worship irrational serpents and worthless animals, / you sent upon them a multitude of irrational creatures to punish them, / so that they might learn that one is punished by the very things by which one sins.’ Cf. also Jub. 4:34; T. Gad 5:10; 1QS 4:11; m. ʾAbot 4:2.
22. The diatribe style imitates the informal conversation between a teacher and his students; cf. Stowers, Diatribe, pp. 85–118. The dialogue partner in the letter may be ‘fictional’, but that does not mean that Paul does not have in view those who held the views he exposes as false.
23. Stowers, Diatribe, p. 177.
24. Wischmeyer, ‘Römer 2.1–24’, pp. 356–376. Neither does Paul defend himself against some Christians in Rome who have slandered his gospel. Nor is he censuring a Gentile Christian who claims to be a Jew. The ones accused are those who were ‘entrusted with the oracles of God’ (3:2), a passage that answers any objections to what he says in 2:1–29.
25. This praise of God’s mercy surfaces frequently in the Psalms (Pss 25:7; 69:16; 86:5; 100:5; 106:1; 109:21; 136:1; 145:8–9).
26. Schreiner, ‘Justification by Works?’, p. 140.
27. Popkes, ‘Zum Aufbau’, p. 499.
28. McFadden, Judgment, p. 153.
29. Ibid., p. 55.
30. The future judgment is ‘according to truth’ (m. ʾAbot 3:16).
31. The conative force of the verb ‘leads’ (agei, present tense) is captured in the translations is meant [intended, supposed] to lead. Versions that translate it as ‘leads you to repentance’ mislead.
32. Cf. also Wis. 12:10.
33. Pss Sol. 7:5–10 expresses the same sentiment: ‘For you are kind, and will not be angry enough to destroy us. While your name lives among us, we shall receive mercy and the gentile will not overcome us. For you are our protection, and we will call to you, and you will hear us. For you will have compassion on the people Israel forever and you will not reject them; And we are under your yoke forever, and (under) the whip of your discipline. You will direct us in the time of your support, showing mercy to the house of Jacob on the day when you promised (it) to them’ (Wright, OTP II, p. 658).
34. A hard and unrepentant heart (cf. 9:18; 11:25) plagued the rebellious wilderness generation (Deut. 9:27; Ps. 95:8).
35. Cf. Job 34:11; Ps. 62:12; Prov. 24:12; Eccl. 12:14; Isa. 3:10–11; Jer. 17:10; Ezek. 33:20; Hos. 12:2; Matt. 7:21; 16:27; John 5:28–29; Jas 1:22–25; Rev. 20:12–13; 22:12; Sir. 16:12. Cf. Yinger, Paul, Judaism, and Judgment, pp. 19–142.
36. Cf. Deut. 10:17–18; 2 Chr. 19:7; Job 34:19; Eph. 6:9; Col. 3:25; 1 Pet. 1:17; Wis. 6:7; Sir. 35:12–16; 2 Bar. 13:8; 44:4; 2 En. 46:3; Jub. 5:16.
37. Davies and Allison, St. Matthew, p. 673.
38. Stowers, Diatribe, p. 177.
39. Cf. also Mekilta Baḥodesh 1 on Exod. 19:2 and Baḥodesh 5 on Exod. 20:2; Sipre Deut. §343; LAB 11:1–2; b. ʿAbod. Zar. 2b–3a.
40. Snodgrass, ‘Justification’, p. 78.
41. Gathercole, ‘Justification’, p. 237.
42. Bassler, ‘Luke and Paul’, p. 551.
43. Paul uses the plural ‘the works of the law’ only in a negative sense as something irrelevant for establishing one’s righteousness (3:20, 28; Gal. 2:16; 3:2, 5, 10). He abbreviates the phrase to ‘by works’ in 4:2 and ‘of the law’ in 4:16.
44. This view accords with the assertion in 2 Esd. 3:36, ‘You may indeed find individuals who have kept your commandments, but nations you will not find.’
45. Donaldson, Paul, pp. 146–147.
46. Seneca illustrates this notion: ‘Therefore, as far as possible, prove yourself guilty, hunt up charges against yourself; play the part, first of accuser, then of judge, last of intercessor. At times be harsh with yourself’ (Ep. 28.10 [Gummere, LCL]).
47. Matt. 25:31–33; John 5:22, 27; Acts 10:42; 17:31; 1 Cor. 4:5; 2 Cor. 5:10; 2 Thess. 1:7–10; 2 Tim. 4:1; Rev. 22:12.
48. Cf. 1 Cor. 3:13–15; 2 Cor. 5:10; 11:15; Gal. 6:7–9; Eph. 6:8–9; Col. 3:24–25.
49. This view is also found in m. Qidd. 4:14: ‘And we find that Abraham our father had performed the whole Law before it was given, for it is written, “Because that Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws”’ (Danby, Mishnah, p. 329).
50. Snodgrass, ‘Justification’, p. 84.
51. Klijn, OTP I, p. 636.
52. Paul raises six questions in 2:21–29 that are followed by nine questions in 3:1–8.
53. Josephus’s use of the term is broad: ‘Let no one blaspheme those gods which other cities esteem such; nor may anyone steal what belongs to strange temples; nor take away the gifts that are dedicated to any God’ (Ant. 4.207 [Thackeray, LCL]).
54. Casson, Textual Signposts, pp. 128–131.
55. Gathercole, Boasting, p. 208.
56. McFadden, Judgment, p. 122.
57. Heschel, Who Is Man?, p. 111.
58. Achtemeier, ‘Romans 3:1–8’, p. 83.
59. Stowers, ‘Paul’s Dialogue’, p. 711, cites Quintilian and Teles as examples of this method of argument.
60. Wright, ‘Romans 2:17 – 3:9’, p. 7.
61. According to a late rabbinic Midrash, when a Roman official asked R. Oshaya why God had not made man as he wanted him, he replied that it was in order that man should perfect himself by the fulfilment of a divine command (Gen. Rab. 11:6).
62. Wintermute, OTP II, p. 87.
63. Doeve, ‘Some Notes’, p. 122.
64. Cosgrove, ‘What If’, p. 105 n. 38, notes that Paul uses the substantive adjective form (apistos) of the verb (apisteō) for ‘unbelievers’ (1 Cor. 6:6; 7:12–15; 10:27; 14:22–24; 2 Cor. 4:4; cf. 6:14–15).
65. Hall, ‘Romans 3.1–8’, pp. 185–186.
66. This and the following questions in this chapter anticipate fuller answers that Paul expounds in chapters 9–11 (cf. 9:14).
67. Williams, ‘Righteousness’, pp. 269–270.
68. The opponents are unlikely to be Roman Christians since Paul phrases his question to expect the answer ‘No!’, expecting his audience to agree with him that such an inference is ridiculous.
69. Bassler, Divine Impartiality, p. 47.
70. Paul addresses the vital importance of ethical behaviour for Christians in chs. 6–8.
71. Cosgrove, ‘What If’, p. 95.
72. Caird, Paul’s Letters, pp. 136–137.
73. Seifrid, ‘Romans’, p. 616.
74. Literally, the Greek verb means ‘to hold something before oneself’.
75. Olin, Reformation Debate, p. 90.
76. Dunn, New Perspective, pp. 23–28.
77. 2 Bar. 51:7 refers to ‘those who are saved because of their works’ (Klijn, OTP I, p. 638). Cf. 1 En. 99:10.
78. For a summary and critique of this ‘new’ perspective(s) on Paul, see Gathercole, Boasting; Seifrid, ‘New Perspective’; and Stuhlmacher, Challenge.
79. Gathercole, ‘Justification’, p. 239.
80. Cf. Deut. 27:26; 28:58; 29:29; 32:46. Seifrid, Justification, pp. 56–57, 71–81, finds a clear emphasis on the importance of works for eventual salvation in Pss Sol. and 1QS. Talbert, pp. 91–99, documents how Palestinian Judaism was far more ‘legalistic’ than the new perspective on Paul allows.
81. 4QMMT is a composite reconstruction of a letter written by the leaders of the Qumran sect to anonymous addressees, portions of which survive in different fragments. The letter outlines interpretations of Mosaic precepts that distinguish what is pure and impure in the administration of the temple cult. It is the only ancient Jewish text that contains the phrase ‘some works of the law’. It appears in a context of warnings for transgressing the author’s interpretation of certain precepts in the law with the promise that it will be ‘reckoned to you as justice [righteousness] when you do what is upright and good before him’ (Martínez, Dead Sea Scrolls, p. 79). The verdict of righteousness proceeds from doing the works of the law. Fitzmyer’s interpretation of the phrase given shortly after the document’s publication remains compelling. It refers to ‘things prescribed or required by the Mosaic law’ (According to Paul, pp. 18–20).
82. McFadden, Judgment, pp. 90–91, notes, ‘Paul uses the word “work” together with its cognates and synonyms to refer to good or evil works throughout the accusation.’ Cf. 1:32 – 2:3, 7–10, 13, 15, 25–26, 27.
83. Williams, ‘Righteousness’, p. 271.
84. Gathercole, ‘Justification’, p. 239.