9 tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Gentile; 10 but glory, honour, and peace, to every man that worketh good, to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile: 11 for there is no respect of persons with God.
12 For as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law: and as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law; 13 (for not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified. 14 For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: 15 which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;) 16 in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel.
Romans 2:9-16
Let’s just bow in prayer. Dear Heavenly Fathers, we come before you this morning.
Lord, I pray that you would help us to understand. Contrary to what false teaching is coming into the church today, your death on the cross was for all men to pay the penalty for all men’s sin, if we but receive the gift of salvation that is found in Jesus Christ our Lord.
You are not a respecter of persons. But Lord, you desire that none would perish and that none would go to hell. But that all would receive your Son’s gift of salvation and the forgiveness of their sins.
But Lord, help us understand. This is a gift that must be received. And Lord, if we are unwilling to receive it, whether we be Jew or Gentile, the consequences are grave.
And Lord, help us to understand that there are many in the world today that literally are the walking dead. They have refused to come to the cross of Christ and await their day of judgment and eternal damnation. Lord, help us to have a heart to share the gospel message and to pray that your word would go forth and that men would be redeemed.
Speak to us through your word this morning we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen. One of the sad things that has happened in the church today is oftentimes we forget to understand what the Bible is all about.
And we begin to preach a word that becomes a soft gospel. A gospel that kind of winks at sin. A gospel that oftentimes wants to be like Rob Bell, a youth minister, who has abandoned the true gospel completely and says, well, God is going to save everybody in the end.
Unfortunately, my Bible does not say that. The Bible says that every man must choose. We have a hymn in our hymn book.
It doesn’t have a real cool melody, but the words are tremendous. It says, to once to every man and nation comes the choice which must be made. A choice to follow Jesus or a choice to deny Him.
And the choice has real consequences. It has eternal consequences. Many men today that want to deny the gospel of Christ, want to try and create means and ways by which they can live eternally apart from what God has said in His word.
When we’ve been going through the books of Daniel and Elijah, I made a passing reference to a group of people that are referred to as technocrats. They want to take over the world. And many of these people that are technocrats, they believe the technology and their great ability to develop devices and various means of extending life and preserving life will enable them at one point in time to live eternally.
Some men have believed that man will come up with a solution. One of the best baseball players that ever played the game was a man by the name of Ted Williams. Ted Williams fell into this lie.
Ted Williams, when he died, had his head removed and placed in an area where it was freeze-dried for the day when man would come to develop the technology and they could take his brain and give him eternal life. Unfortunately, Ted Williams’ head wasn’t who Ted Williams was. Ted Williams had a soul and a spirit just like you and I and every person that has ever been created in the image of God has had a soul and a spirit.
And part of physical death is the ripping apart of the soul and the spirit from the body. And only God will one day put that back together when it says that there should be a resurrection from the dead. Unfortunately for Ted Williams, he didn’t believe in Jesus Christ.
He thought technology was his savior. And one day, Ted Williams will be raised from the dead just like every other person that’s ever lived. But Ted Williams will be raised to the second resurrection, the resurrection of judgment and eternal death.
So unless Ted Williams, before he died, confessed his sin and accepted Jesus as his savior, that’s the eternal life he faces. I want you to understand that you’ve got a whole group of people today that are really convincing and trying to convince the whole world just trust in us. I don’t know if you listen to the news where there’s one of these men who would call himself a technocrat.
He’s got it all devised. He says that what he’s going to do is he is going to put devices in his brain that will tie him to the cloud. Those of you who don’t know what the cloud is, the cloud is the great storage centers of all our data.
The cloud is right north of Fargo. They’re building part of the cloud. And that he’s going to have computer chips put into his brain that will enable it when he dies that all of his thoughts will go into the cloud.
And what they’re not seeing is that the brain is part of our physical body. It’s not who we are. Remember Dave Hunter, a number of years ago, what he said when someone asked him about that, he said the brain is one of the best computers that’s ever been devised, but all it is, it’s like a machine.
And you are the one that’s driving the machine. Your soul, your spirit is the one that is giving instructions to your brain. That’s why it is so distressing when you see so many young people and so many old people that allow other spirits besides their own to drive their brain.
You take drugs. You do alcohol, which is a drug. What are you doing? You’re giving your mind, your brain, over to the control of another entity.
The scriptures tell us that that entity is really driven by Satan, a demonic entity. There are people today that get involved in the occult and they want to identify with demons because they think that they can gain so much more wisdom. Because they go to a seance and they supposedly talk to people that are dead.
They find out information that no one but them would know. And I want to tell you, the Bible tells us, God tells us we’re not to go there. He says we’re not to be involved in necromancy, speaking to the dead.
We’re not to be involved in opening up our minds to the influence of the demonic. That’s where much of our culture today is going. Is it drugs, alcohol, the demonic? And what does it say about the last days? It says that sorcery would increase.
You find that in the book of Revelation. What is sorcery? The word for sorcery in the original language is pharmakia, drugs. Drugs that can control the mind.
But what does God have to say about this? Well, it’s interesting in Romans. The Apostle Paul presented us back in Romans chapter 1, the theme of this book. And in Romans chapter 1, 16 and 17, if you remember those verses, it says, For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation, to every one that believeth, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.
For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, the just shall live by faith. That’s the theme of this book. Paul spent the rest of chapter 1 showing us how man has gone on this vortex of rebellion against God and sin, and how it is taking us far from God, not closer to God.
The things and illustrations I opened up the sermon with this morning, all are examples of means by which people think they’re going closer to God, but they’re really being driven further from Him because they’re rebelling against the truth. And they’re rebelling against the gospel. Paul tells us in chapter 2, verse 9, The tribulation and anguish, every soul of man that doeth evil, of the Jew first, and also the Gentile.
He’s referring back to the things that would control you as we looked at those two weeks ago, and I gave identification and definition to many of the rebellious things that men become involved with when they turn their back on God and go into this total state of rebellion. And he says, that’ll be what controls you, and that’ll be what takes you to the direction of where your final judgment will be, and that will result in the resurrection that you experience. But then he says something else.
There’s a second group of people. And he says, the second group of people, but glory, honor, and peace to every man that worketh good, to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile. Now, we’ve just got done stating that there’s no way that man can keep the law.
We studied that last week. We looked at the moralist, the one who thinks he can keep the law, the one who establishes rules and regulations, the one who says, if I just do X, Y, and Z, the outcome will automatically be the equation that I want it to be, and that I will have eternal life because I did this, this, this, and this. And his trust and faith is not in the finished work of Christ, but it’s in his own ability to keep the law.
So what is Paul speaking of here? Is he speaking of those who can keep the law, that they’ll be able… Well, the Bible says that that’s true, that if you could never violate the law, if you never broke a commandment, if you never rebelled against the character of God once in your life, you would gain eternal salvation. The problem is, there’s no man that’s ever lived except Jesus Christ who was able to do that. And the only reason that Jesus could do it is that He was God that came in the flesh.
He possessed the divine character of God because He was God. And He did not violate His own character. But every man that’s ever lived has violated the character of God at one point in their life, and you’ve rebelled.
So that brings the question that you often hear when you go out to witness to people who are walking in rebellion to God, who don’t want to believe in God, who don’t want to believe in the finished work of Christ, who don’t want to believe in salvation. And one of the things they’ll often say, they’ll give you examples, and they’ll try to come up with the most obscure example that they can, and say that that’s everything. And one of the things they’ll often say is, well, what about the heathen in Africa that never had a Bible, that never could hear a radio, that never heard the gospel? What about them? Why? Paul told us about them in chapter 1. He said every man, every woman, every child can observe the work of God all around them and stands without excuse.
So how are they saved? The Bible says that there’s only one way to come to God, and that’s through Jesus Christ. Jesus Himself said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh to the Father but by me.
Is there a separate means of another gospel for those people? I want to tell you no. But I want to tell you if you’re serious about finding God, God will bring someone into your life that will show you who He is and how you’re saved. A number of years ago, Roberta and I got this DVD, and it was put out by a missionary organization, and it was talking about one of the mission fields that they had.
And they had a mission field to a very backward third world country, and I forget exactly which country it was in, but I believe it was one of the far eastern island countries. And they had heard about this group of people that had been totally isolated, and God laid it on their hearts to take the gospel to them. I believe it was three or four couples that decided they were going to take the gospel to these people.
When they got there, you know what the response of the people was? We’ve been waiting for you. We know there is a God. We want to know who He is.
How would you go to a group of people who had never read a Bible, never heard a Bible, never really been taught by anybody about biblical truth, but yet God has revealed to them through all that’s around them that there is a God. He’s revealed to them through the conscience they have in their heart there is a God. And they’ve been waiting for Him.
Well, most of us would run to the back table and pull out one of those tracks, and give them a track, and say, I hope you read English, or maybe I can transfer this into your own language somehow. You know what this group of people did, these missionaries? They did something that was totally unorthodox. They began in the Bible, in the book of Genesis.
And they began to show them from Genesis chapter 1, and they taught through the whole Bible. They taught them that God was the Creator, that before anything existed, before the world existed, God was there. They taught them that Jesus had created the world.
And they began to go through the books of the Bible. All of a sudden, they get into the nation of Israel, they’re teaching them about that, how God was working through Israel. He brought the law, He brought the sacrificial system, which was pointing to this coming Messiah.
And all of a sudden, one day, one of them said, I need to get saved. They would have probably done like many of us would have done, and said, well, we’ll get there, we’ll get there, we’ll eventually get to that part. No, they went and they talked to him, and they talked to him about, yes, you need to get saved.
He was brought into conviction because he saw, they were talking about having to sacrifice these animals to pay the penalty for their sin. And he said, I sin! The things that you talked about in Genesis, the law, I do those things! I need to get saved. People were getting saved out of order.
I remember a number of years ago, we were meeting downtown at the Mission Front, and I was bringing a message, and I just started my message. I don’t even remember what I was preaching on. But I just started the message, and all of a sudden there was this street person that came in, and they stood up and said, I need to get saved, what do I got to do? I’m going, well, it’s not that part of the service yet.
It’s not time for the altar call. But you know what we did? We stopped our service, and the men went back and talked to this gentleman, and prayed with this gentleman, and shared the gospel with this gentleman, because that was the moment he needed to hear. And the women were praying for us.
You know, sometimes we put things in programs, and we put things in things, and we don’t realize God is working in people’s hearts. And the Bible tells us that there’s not going to be anybody that’s going to be able to stand before the Lord and say, I’ve got an excuse, I’ve got a reason why I shouldn’t be sent to hell, because I rejected you. He’s saying, no, there’s no man.
Well, if that’s true, then God is working through people’s hearts right now out there, that you think are so in rebellion against God, that He’d never want to hear the gospel. Have you ever met anybody like that? I met a man one time, and he fit the first group of people here really well. He could swear with the best of them.
He could drink with the best of them. As a matter of fact, he was running a business, and he was doing work for us, and one day he went to a bar with one of his workers. And the guy had the audacity to ask him, when am I going to get my paycheck? He rolled off and hit him in the jaw and broke his jaw.
That’s the temper he had. That was the character he had. And I’m going, he’s beyond help.
It was about ten years later. I was called with my job by him. And he said, I’m building a church over in Gwendolyn.
I’d like to talk to you about windows and doors. He came over to my office, and this guy who always had a giant chip on his shoulder, who always was ready to go and fly off the handle, who had a mouth that every other word that came out was perverse, was gentle and quiet. He went through doors and went through windows, went through what he was looking for, and at the end I said, can I ask you a question? Did you accept the Lord as your Savior? He said, yes.
If God can save him, if God can save Manasseh, who led the whole nation of Judah and Israel, the whole nation of Israel, and led them all into rebellion, and yet at the end of his life, he cried out to God for forgiveness, and God forgave him, because it’s not based upon our works, it’s based upon our relationship with Jesus, and our trust and faith that he can redeem us. And that’s what God is saying here, and that’s what Paul is telling us. And he says here, for as many as have sinned without the law, shall also perish without the law.
He’s saying, when they come to you and say, well, what about the African native that’s never heard the gospel, that’s never seen a Christian movie, that’s never read the Bible, that’s never heard a missionary, what about them? It says, if they don’t have the law, they’ll perish without the law, because they’ve still got evidence all around them that reveals God as their character. And the biggest evidence is within them. I’ll give you another example.
I shared with you before, Jim Elliott and the missionaries went with him down to South America to minister to those Indians that had never heard the gospel. They were much like the tribe that this other troop ministered to, except they weren’t open to hear the gospel. And so what they’d been doing is they’d been dropping trinkets, and they’d been flying over, and they’d been putting things down to try and show them that they were coming in peace.
They landed their airplane, they got out, the Indians came, and they killed them. Jim Elliott’s wife, Elizabeth, and another one of the missionary’s wives that had been killed, went to those same Indians with the gospel. Just about the whole tribe got saved.
But you know what one of them told Elizabeth Elliott? When we killed your husband and the other men, I said we’ve done something very, very bad. We’ve done something very, very bad. Why would he say that? God placed on his heart the law.
They had killed somebody that had no right to die. They had murdered, and he knew in his heart what he’d done. And when she came and forgave him, and the other missionary’s wife came and forgave them, they saw the love of Jesus.
And what they’d done that was very, very bad, Jesus covered with his blood. Some of those people became pastors and took the gospel to other people. So Paul tells us if they don’t have the law, they’ll perish without the law.
And then he also says, that as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law. That’s very, very disturbing as well, because if you look at right now, there are many people in the world, and we can go to the Jewish people, and we say, well, the Jewish people have had more of the law than anybody because the law was given to them, the prophets were given to them, the promises were given to them, they were to take it to the whole world, and yet today, the majority of Jewish people still are in unbelief.
You have more people coming to Christ that are Jews than have ever come before, but there’s still a lot that aren’t. And you can go to Israel today, and you will see some that are trying to do what Paul talked about that we looked at last week. They try to keep the law.
They’re called the ultra-orthodox and the orthodox, and they do everything. They read the law, and they take it literally, and they try to keep it literally, but they’ve got a problem. They don’t have a temple.
They don’t have a sacrificial system. They don’t want to ever teach on Isaiah chapter 53. They don’t want to teach on Zechariah.
They don’t want to teach some of the Psalms they don’t want to teach on because they talk about the Messiah that’s coming, and you can’t ignore the fact that it was Jesus. I was just listening to a young man the other day that had the opportunity to talk to some orthodox Jews. They may have been ultra-orthodox, actually.
And as he was talking to them, he shared with them a scripture that’s forbidden for them. You know what that scripture is? It’s Isaiah chapter 53. They are forbidden to teach on it.
They are forbidden to read it. They’re forbidden to look at it. Why? Because it points to the man.
They refer to Jesus as the man. This young man said, I just want to ask you some questions. I want to ask you, and I’m going to read a portion from your scriptures, from the prophet Isaiah, and I want you to tell me who you think this is talking about.
And he read Isaiah 53, what we quoted during our celebration of the Lord’s Supper at the end, where I said, By His stripes you shall be healed. He is bruised for our iniquity. Who is Isaiah talking about? Some of them came under conviction because it’s the first time they’d really ever listened to what it said.
And they said it sure sounds like Jesus. They were going to hell with the law as their schoolmaster, but they didn’t hear what the law was pointing them to, Jesus. So it’s not having the law, and it’s not having the law that determines if you’ll be saved, but it’s what you see that God is trying to help you see, and that is Jesus Christ.
For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these having not the law, are a law unto themselves. And I said last week, what is the purpose of the law? The law is the schoolmaster. The law points us to Christ.
Our conscience points us to Christ. God has given us a moral barometer. Remember, every person alive, I always say two things, but it’s really three things.
Every person alive has three things in common. One, every person alive in the world today, every person that’s ever been alive in the world today, they could be dead now, but every person alive in the world has three things in common. Number one, every person that is a person was born.
They came into the world with physical life. They came into the world with a body, a mind, a spirit, a soul. The second thing, every person has been created by God and given the image of God implanted on their life.
And the third thing is every person will die physically. Now, it’s between birth and death with what we do with this, what we’ve been created in the image of, we’ve been created in God’s image, what are we going to do with the image that God created us in? That determines what happens after death. If we want to deny the fact that God is who He says He is and that we were created in His image, then we’re going to be like those who, whether they have the law or don’t have the law, it doesn’t matter because they’re denying what it all points to, and that is you and I are created in His image and we’re created in His image.
We’re a moral being and moral beings have choices and we’ve made wrong choices, eternally wrong choices. Yet God gives us a means by which we can be delivered from those wrong choices and it’s what we do with the knowledge that He reveals to us. I just want to share with you a couple of other things.
If you were in Iran today, you’re living in a Muslim country. Bibles are against the law to possess a Bible. You can be thrown in prison or worse yet, killed for possessing a Bible.
How are you going to come to know Jesus? In the West, we have all kinds of opportunities. We have Bibles, we have Christian productions, we have Christian literature, although some of the Christian literature and some of the Christian productions is going down, not preaching the gospel. That’s another story and another message.
But anyway, you’re in Iran, what do you do? You can go and you can look on Amazon Books, Muslims who became Christians, their story. We’ve got about four of those testimony books at home about women who came to know Christ. Some of them were in very, very devout Muslim homes.
When they became Christians, their lives were on the line. But how did most of them become Christians? Most of them cried out to God and said, God, if you are who you say you are, show me. And they meant it sincerely.
It wasn’t like Herod, when Jesus was brought before Herod, and Herod goes, oh goody, goody, now I can see some of these miracles that Jesus is going to perform. But he had no desire to accept Jesus as the true Savior and Redeemer of man’s sin. He had no desire to see Jesus as really the King of the Jews, who came through the line of David to be the Messiah.
He had no desire, he just wanted a pony and dog show. Jesus didn’t do anything. And Herod’s sitting there going, do it, do it, do it, come on, do it, do it.
Jesus is just standing there. So he sends him back to Pilate. God’s not going to reveal Himself to that type of a person.
They say, okay, God, if you’re God, I want to see some snazzy things happen. These people are crying out to God and saying, God, if you’re really God, show me, because I need to know you. And guess what God shows them? He does it in ways that we would say are not proper for today’s Christians.
Sometimes He’ll do it in visions and dreams. Sometimes He will bring other Christians into their life that should never have been brought into their life. Have you ever had anybody that you’ve just known in your heart, I’m supposed to share something with that person.
I am really supposed to share something with that person. I’ve shared this with a lot of you that weren’t here when I shared it before, but I’ll share it. I took my wife down to Rochester to Mayo Clinic.
She had an eye issue. So we went down to see the doctor. We’re sitting in the waiting room.
This guy comes out who’s sitting next to me. I can just tell he’s agitated. He’s just really, really agitated.
Her doctor came out and talked to this guy. And they knew each other. They were acquaintances and friends.
This guy that was really agitated is a doctor. Her doctor said to him, I am so sorry about your diagnosis. He’d just been diagnosed with ALS.
Those of you who know what ALS is, it’s a death sentence. He’s really agitated. I went over, and so God’s going, you need to talk to this guy.
You need to talk to this guy. I’m going, but I don’t know him. I’m at Mayo Clinic.
I’m in a waiting room. So I went over and I started talking to him, just talking. And I started sharing a little bit.
He asked what I did. I told him, well, I got two jobs. One is I pastor a small church.
And he said, can we go over here? We went and went behind a pillar. He said, I need to talk to you. What do I got to do to be saved? You know, I shared with him things that day, and I gave him my name and my number.
And I said, I can call you if you’d like. And he said, please. I called him for about two years before he died.
One of the biggest things he’s struggling with was the sin that he had in his life and could God forgive it. And I said, God can forgive anything. If God can forgive Manasseh, God can forgive you.
But you have to believe. You have to trust. Do you have anybody like that in your life? Maybe it’s a family member.
Maybe it’s a neighbor. God’s been convicting you. You really need to talk to them.
You don’t know what tomorrow holds for any of us. Paul’s saying, you can be religious. You can be under the law.
You can be going to church every Sunday and not be a Christian. You can be the biggest pagan there is in the world as far as your belief system, but both of you are in the same position. If you don’t accept Jesus, you are going to be condemned and judged not by what other people say about you, but by your own words, your own actions, and your own lives.
And Paul tells us, For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified. For when the Gentiles which have not the law do the law by nature of the things contained in the law, these having not the law are the law unto themselves. When they begin to see a need for salvation in Jesus, when they begin to cry out to God for Jesus and they don’t have the law, and those that have the law, it all points to Jesus.
And Paul closes this particular paragraph, For when the Gentiles which have not the law do by the law the things contained in the law, that is, understand that they are a sinner, and these having not the law are a law unto themselves, God conviction by their own conscience, which show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another. In the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to what? My gospel. What’s the day of judgment going to be? There’ll be those with the names written in the Lamb book of life and those that are being judged by their deeds and works.
Which book are you written in? And I want you to see it says the Lamb’s book of life. He was the Lamb, the sacrifice, like John the Baptist said, Behold the Lamb of God that comes to take away the sins of the world. Jesus will be the judge, but Jesus is also the Redeemer.
We need to understand the importance of what this book is about. This book is here to reveal to us that every man needs gospel. This book is here to show us God is not a respecter of persons.
He doesn’t look at socioeconomic status. He doesn’t look at racial status. He doesn’t look at sexual status.
He doesn’t look at any of that. He looks at men’s hearts. Because every man, woman, and child was created in His image.
And what are you going to do with that image between birth and death? And how are you going to use that image to bring glory to God or disgrace His name? And will you use that image to allow your image that you were created in to be led to the cross of Christ so that that image can be made whole and you can be redeemed to what God fully intended you to be, His child. Let’s just close in prayer. Father, I pray that you just help us to understand Your Word this morning.
Help us to understand it’s not what we know, but it’s what we respond to what You revealed to us. And Lord, help us to understand You, who are not a respecter of persons, don’t expect every man, woman, and child to be a theologian graduating from seminary. But You do expect us to respond to Your Spirit leading us and guiding us to the truth.
Speak to us and help us to be used by You. This we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.