Let me begin by
asking you a question: What happens to those who never hear the Word of
God? What happens to those who never see
a Bible, hear it preached, or have any contact whatsoever with the Christian
message? What happens to those tribesmen
who still today live in far off jungles, shut off from the rest of the world,
never hearing about the one true God?
I imagine you’ve asked that
question before. Many Christians
have. How will God deal with these who
never believed in His Son, never repented, but also never had an
opportunity? How can He count their sins
against them? How will He treat them? This post will seek to answer that
question as well as others.
The Context and Argument
Read Romans 2:12-16. Paul has just made a
statement in verse 11. That statement is
that God shows no partiality. God does
not play favorites when it comes to His judgment. He is absolutely fair and renders to each
person what the law requires. In verses
6-10 Paul argues that God will not judge Jews any differently than
Gentiles. The Jews will be judged first, but they will not be judged differently. All will be judged according to their
works. Unbelievers will have their
sinful deeds lifted up as evidence against them. Christians will have their evil deeds covered
by the blood of Christ, but the good deeds which God’s grace worked in them
will stand as evidence of their union with Christ and they will receive heaven. There will be no respecting of nationality or
ethnicity or family tree. God will be
impartial in His judgment.
But there is an
objection. How can Paul say that God is
impartial when God has chosen to give His law to some people and not to others? Here is an objection that Paul may very well
have had to answer time and again as he preached in city after city. How can he call God’s judgment impartial when
for centuries the Jews have had the law revealing to them what is good and what
was evil while the rest of the world did not?
The rest of the world received no Scriptures from God, not law book, no
tablets with commandments etched upon them.
How is it fair for God to condemn people for breaking commandments they
didn’t know existed? How can God hold
them accountable for actions they did not know were wrong? God chose not to give these peoples His law;
how dare He judge them for not keeping it?
Paul’s answer to that
objection is that not only will God judge all people according to their works,
but He will also judge them according to the law that they possessed. Those who had the most privilege and were
given the greatest revelation of God’s law will be held accountable for all that
they received. Those who received less
of God’s law will be held accountable for what they received. God will be fair.
How Verses 12-16 Make the
Argument
Now, let me show you how each
of these verses (12-16) contribute to this argument. Then I will bring out its implications for
us.
Look with me at the first half
of verse 12: “For all who have sinned without the law will also perish without the
law.” Who is being described
here? Look at the verse again. Who is being described? It is those who did not have the law. The law here is the Law of Moses, the first
five books of the Bible, the commands of God given in Genesis through
Deuteronomy that reveal how a righteous person should live. The people described in the first half of verse
12 are the vast majority of people who lived on the earth in the days of the
Old Testament and many who have lived on the earth up to this day. These are non-Jewish people, Gentiles, who
have never received the Law of Moses, never heard it, and never had access to it.
What does Paul say about
them? First, he says they are sinners. How is that possible? To sin is to break a law. How can people who don’t have the law sin? They must
have some kind of law for their sin to be sin.
Paul does not tell us yet what kind of law they have (he will in a
minute), but only tells us that they do not have the law, that is, the Law of Moses.
Nevertheless they are sinners.
Second, he tells us that they
will perish. These Gentile sinners,
these who have never had the Law of Moses, will perish for their sin. For them, like everyone else, the wages of
sin will be death.
Third, Paul tells us that they
will perish without the law. In other words, on the Day of Judgment, it
will not be the Law of Moses that condemns them. They will perish, but it will not be because of
the Law they never had. The implication
is that there is a law that they did
have, a law that they did break, and
it is that law which will condemn them.
Now, look with me at the
second half of verse 12: “All who have sinned under the law will be
judged by the law.” This is easier
to understand. The people described in
this part of the verse are those who do have the Law of Moses, have broken it,
and therefore will be held accountable to it on the Day of Judgment. This is us.
Every one of us in this room has access to a Bible with the Law revealed
to us not just in Genesis-Deuteronomy but in Genesis – Revelation. We have had the privilege of having God’s
commands revealed to us in black and white on the pages of His Word. Yet all of us have all broken these commands. Apart from Jesus, these commands will stand
against us on the Day of Judgment.
So, to summarize verse 12,
there are two groups of people that Paul put before us. There are those who did not have the Law of
Moses who nevertheless are sinners and will perish, but not because of that Law. Then there are those who did have the Law of
Moses and have broken it and will be condemned by it.
Look now at verse 13: “For it
is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of
the law who will be justified.” Who
are we talking about here? We are talking about a third group of people, a
people who will not perish on the Day of Judgment, but be saved. Paul is speaking here of those that are
justified – that is, counted righteous – before God.
Who will these people
be? Will they be the ones who had the Law
of Moses and heard it? No. After all, there are many who have had the Law
of Moses and have heard it yet remain rebellious sinners against God. No, it is those who do the Law of Moses who will be righteous in God’s eyes. Remember the verses before this? Paul has in mind here the kind of person
described in verses 7 and 10. He has in
mind a person who by grace through faith in Jesus has been changed, and is now
being enabled and moved by the Spirit of God to keep God’s commands and to
fulfill the Law of Moses. These people,
those who by grace keep the law (not perfectly, but the best they can as they
depend on Jesus’ power), these are the ones who will go to heaven. This is a call to us, to make sure we heed the words of the book fo James: “Be doers of the word and not hearers only,
deceiving yourselves.” It is the
doers who reveal by their actions that they belong to God and will be with Him
forever.
So now we have three kinds of
people before us: 1) Those who have
never had Moses’ Law yet are still sinners and will perish. 2) Those who do have the Law of Moses and
will perish because they have failed to keep it. 3) Those who have been saved by grace and reveal
that they have been saved by keeping the Law of Moses.
Now, verse 14 is about that
first group, those who have never had the Law of Moses. Look with me at verse 14: “For when Gentiles, who not have the law, by
nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they
do not have the law.”
When people who do not have the
Law of Moses do what the Law of Moses requires, they show something about
themselves. Namely, they show that they
have some inward concept of God’s law.
When people who have never heard of Yahweh or Jesus and never seen or
read a Bible honor their parents, or do not tell a lie, or do not murder,
because they sense that there is something right or wrong involved in those
actions, they are a law to themselves. They
do not have the external Law written on scroll or paper, but they do have an
inward law, a law in themselves. And of
course, though they at times keep this inner law and do what they know is
right, all people have at other times broken that inner law and done what they
deep down know to be wrong.
So you see, we are getting
now an answer to our earlier question:
What law do people sin against if they do not have the Law of
Moses? Paul is arguing that people
naturally have a law in themselves, an innate sense of right and wrong.
He says more in verse 15: “They show that the work of the law is
written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their
conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them.”
There are three important
truths taught in this verse. First, Paul
says that these Gentiles, pagans without the Law of Moses, show that the work
of the law is written on their hearts.
That phrase ‘work of the law’ is a difficult one; it is not found
anywhere else in the New Testament.
Think about this with me: ‘The work of the law is written on their
hearts.’ This isn’t ‘work’ as a
verb. This is ‘work’ as a noun. You do work and the result is your work. Well the law works and the result is its
work. What is the work, the product, the
result of the law in our lives? My best
guess is this: the work of the law is the knowledge of right and wrong. This is what the law does. It informs us of right and wrong. That is the issue here: how can God judge people who have not known
right or wrong? The objection is that it
is law that gives people this
knowledge. How can people without God’s
law have that knowledge of right and wrong?
Answer: these Gentiles who do not have the Law of Moses nevertheless
have an inner-law, and its result in their lives is an innate knowledge of
right and wrong.
This knowledge of right and
wrong, this work of the law, is written on their hearts. Let me ask you this: Who do you think wrote
this onto the hearts of men? Isn’t there
only one possible answer? God. God and God alone has the power to write
something onto the hearts of all people.
It is God alone who created us in His image and knits us together in our
mother’s womb. God gave the Jews a law,
the Law of Moses, and they will be held accountable to that. We have that law as well, and the full
expression and application of it as it comes to fulfillment in Christ and the
New Testament. We will be held
accountable to what we have written in these pages of our Bibles. Yet even if we did not have these, the
fundamental laws of God are written into the fabric of our beings and we will
be held accountable to those laws.
The second thing to see in
verse 15 is that the human conscience bears witness to this. Have you ever felt guilty before? Even people who have never seen or heard the
laws of God in the Bible feel guilty.
Yet what is guilt but your own conscience judging you, telling you that
you have done something wrong. How can
your conscience judge you unless it knows that something is right or
wrong? Every time a human conscience,
whether it is functioning well or not, causes someone to feel guilty, it bears
witness to this truth that there is an inward law.
The last thing to see in
verse 15 is that our thoughts bear witness to this inner law as well. What happens when our consciences makes us
feel guilty? What thoughts go through
our mind? Do we say, “Oh, silly
conscience. There is no such thing as
right and wrong. You have no reason to
make me feel guilty. There is no such thing as guilt since there is no such
thing as doing wrong.” Is that they way
you think? Some people might try and
pretend they think that way, but no one really does. No, when our consciences make us feel guilty,
our thoughts go in either one of two directions: either our thoughts begin
accusing us or they begin excusing us. If
our thoughts are accusing us, they are saying, “You deserve to feel
guilty. What you did was shameful. What were you thinking? Look at the harm you’ve done!” Those thoughts show that we know right from
wrong and have an inner-law. Or, if our
thoughts try and come up with excuses, saying, “You shouldn’t feel guilty. You had no choice. Other people do worse things. How bad could it really be?” the very fact
that your thoughts are trying to come up with excuses reveal that you know that
there is a law, a standard of right and wrong by which you will be judged. People who do not believe in right and wrong
and consequences and judgment do not need excuses. Yet no such people really exist. So you see, whichever way our thoughts run,
whether they accuse us or excuse us, they stand as yet another witness to this
inner-law that God has written onto our hearts.
How C. S. Lewis Taught
This
We can now summarize the main
argument: there is an inner law, written by God on the hearts of all people,
which all people have knowingly broken and by which they will be judged on the
Day of Judgment. We’ve seen how Paul
teaches this. I would now like to let
you hear how C. S. Lewis taught this. Lewis
certainly was not an apostle or a divinely-inspired writer, but there is no
doubt that God has used his book Mere
Christianity to bless His Church in mighty ways. Many of you have heard of Chuck Colson, a
popular preacher, founder of the Prison Fellowship ministry, a man who turned
himself in for his crimes in the Watergate Scandal and served time in
prison. A friend gave Colson a copy of Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis and it
was as he read that book that the gospel was made clear to him and he believed
and was saved.
Lewis has done a fantastic
job of explaining Paul’s message here in this section of Romans 2, so just sit
back and listen as I read:
“Every one has heard people
quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny
and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we
can learn something very important from listening to the kinds of things they
say. They say things like this: ‘How’d
you like it if anyone did the same to you?’ – ‘That’s my seat, I was there
first’ – ‘Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm’ – ‘Why should you shove
in first?’ – ‘Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine’ – ‘Come
on, you promised.’ People say things
like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as
well as grown-ups.
Now what interest me about
all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the
other man’s behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of
behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man…nearly always…tries to make
out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or
that if it does there is some special excuse.
He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the
person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite
different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up
which lets him off keeping his promise.
It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of
Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like
to call it, about which they really agreed.
And they have. If they had not,
they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the
word. Quarrelling means trying to show
that the other man is in the wrong. And
there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of
agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be sense in
saying that footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement
about the rules of football.
Now this Law or Rule about
Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature…This law was called the Law
of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not
need to be taught it. They did not mean,
of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not
know it, just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for
a tune. But taking the race as a whole
they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every
one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said
about the war[1] were
nonsense. What was the sense in saying
the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at
bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised? If they had had no notion of what we mean by
right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could not more
have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.”
So you hear Lewis’
point. Even just looking around at how
people relate to each other everyday gives clear evidence that deep down there
is an agreement among people about certain things being right and certain
things being wrong. This is the Law of
Nature, the law written on the hearts of man by God. This is the law that all people have broken
and by which they will be judged justly on the law day.
Close
This teaching is under heavy
attack in our day. Here are just some of
the objections people raise: 1) Isn’t it true that when we look at different
cultures and societies who haven’t been influenced by Christianity or Judaism,
they often have very different moral codes?
How can you say that God has written this law on the hearts of all men
when all these different societies seem to disagree on what is right and what
is wrong? 2) How can you be sure that
our inner sense of right and wrong is not a human invention, something that we
learn from our parents and our culture?
How can you be sure that naturally we have no sense of right and wrong
and we only gain that sense by the way we are raised? Maybe God had nothing to do with this at all,
but rather, our parents are the ones most responsible for writing these laws
into our lives. 3) Isn’t it more likely
that our inner sense of right and wrong is a result of evolution? Isn’t it more likely that human beings have
evolved, and during our evolutionary history we learned to have negative
feelings toward actions that would harm our species and positive feeling toward
actions that would help our species? In
other words, how do you that there is not a scientific explanation for our
inner sense of right and wrong?
Each of these objections is
raised against the Bible’s teaching concerning natural law. Each is important and deserving of our
time. In our next post, we will address each
and everyone of them.
There is also a question that
needs to be addressed, namely, how is this writing of the law on the hearts of
all people different from what God says is true of Christians? Speaking of His people in Jeremiah 31:33, God
says, “But this is the covenant that I
will make with the house of Israel
We will address that question in our next post as well. Let me close
by bringing us back to the issue with which we started this sermon: What
happens to those who never hear the Word of God? What happens to those who never see a Bible, hear
it preached, or have any contact whatsoever with the Christian message? What happens to those tribesmen who still
today live in far off jungles, shut off from the rest of the world, never
hearing about the one true God?
The answer, as we have seen,
is they do have a law. God has put
within them a sense of right and wrong.
They have all broken that law.
They will be held accountable on the Day of Judgment and they will
perish eternally in hell. Dear friends,
this is why the Great Commission is so important! This is why Paul was passionate to get the
gospel to as many places where it had not yet been preached as quickly as
possible! If never hearing the Word of
God meant that those people would not perish, the best thing we could do would
be to keep people from hearing God’s Word.
That is not how it works. All people are sinners, all people are under
God’s just condemnation, and all are in desperate need of the Lord Jesus
Christ. God has entrusted His gospel to
His people and said, “Go!”
People are perishing; are we going? This is why it is of such important that we
devote substantial time, money, resources, energy, and prayer to the task of
reaching those who have never heard the name of Christ. As long as there is no missionary among them,
no Bible in their language, no evangelical church reaching out to them, these
people have no access to hope!
From Greenland's
icy mountains,
From India's coral strand,
Where Afric's sunny fountains
Roll down their golden sand,
From many an ancient river,
From many a palmy plain,
They call us to deliver
Their land from error's chain.
What though the spicy breezes
Blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle,
Though every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile!
In vain with lavish kindness
The gifts of God are strewn;
The heathen in his blindness
Bows down to wood and stone.
Can we, whose souls are lighted
With wisdom from on high,
Can we to men benighted
The lamp of life deny?
Salvation! O salvation!
The joyful sound proclaim,
Till each remotest nation
Has learnt Messiah's name.
Waft, waft, ye winds, his story,
And you, ye waters, roll,
Till, like a sea of glory,
It spreads from pole to pole;
Till o'er our ransomed nature,
The Lamb for sinners slain,
Redeemer, King, Creator,
In bliss returns to reign.
From India's coral strand,
Where Afric's sunny fountains
Roll down their golden sand,
From many an ancient river,
From many a palmy plain,
They call us to deliver
Their land from error's chain.
What though the spicy breezes
Blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle,
Though every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile!
In vain with lavish kindness
The gifts of God are strewn;
The heathen in his blindness
Bows down to wood and stone.
Can we, whose souls are lighted
With wisdom from on high,
Can we to men benighted
The lamp of life deny?
Salvation! O salvation!
The joyful sound proclaim,
Till each remotest nation
Has learnt Messiah's name.
Waft, waft, ye winds, his story,
And you, ye waters, roll,
Till, like a sea of glory,
It spreads from pole to pole;
Till o'er our ransomed nature,
The Lamb for sinners slain,
Redeemer, King, Creator,
In bliss returns to reign.
(Reginald Heber, 1819)
Could it be that God is moving the heart of
someone reading this to go to the unreached with the gospel? Friends, we are never happy to see members
leave our churches, but if we had members being sent out to
Southeast Asia, to Latin America, to the Middle East, to Russia or China, how
could we not rejoice? There is more than a
billion people with little or no access to the gospel. Will you go?
Dear friends, if you are not
willing to go, it ought to be because you are confident that you are where God
would have you. Yet even you have a
role. Those who are not goers must be
senders. We must be those who work in
the offices and the schools and the hospitals and the factories to earn the
money that will not only support our families but support our brothers and
sisters in Christ taking the gospel to the world. We work so that they can go. Are you giving? Sending also means supporting those on the
field with prayer and with words of encouragement via letters, care packages,
emails, and the like.
Paul was a goer. He longed for the church in Rome
‘For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ But how are they to call on him in whom they
have not believed? And how are they to
believe in him of whom they have never heard?
And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are
sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful
are the feet of those who preach the good news!’
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