Romans 2:12-16

Romans 2:12

I. What does the Apostle mean when he says that certain persons shall perish without law? Is he aggravating their condemnation, and telling us that they shall have judgment without mercy, be dealt with as lawless outcasts for whom no law was ever intended and whose case no law could ever reach? It would seem as if some persons have thought so, but there could not be a greater mistake. What the Apostle means is, as they have not had the written law to live by, so shall it not appear against them in judgment. They shall be dealt with so that no man may accuse the justice of the Judge. They will not be dealt with according to the rigor of a law which they never knew, and therefore never could obey. There was a code of law under which they lived, written not on tables of stone like the covenant of old, but on the "fleshy tables of the heart" the code of conscience and of reason; and by this law they will be judged, if they have not acted up to the light which they possessed.

II. There is a great day of retribution appointed. It must be, it cannot but be an awful thing to have sinned against the God whom our Scriptures have revealed to us. Jesus Christ will be our Judge. He who was tempted He who in all things was made like unto His brethren the man Christ Jesus, will judge His fellow-man. Then we may draw near with full assurance of faith, trusting to the merits of our Saviour, the mercy of our Judge. "Not simply," writes one of our greatest divines, "because He is a man therefore shall He judge; for then by the same reason every man could judge and none consequently, because no man will be judged if every man were only to judge; but because of the Three Persons which are God, He only is also the Son of man, and therefore, for His affinity with their nature, for His sense of their infirmities, for His appearance to their eyes, most fit to represent the greatest mildness and sweetness of equity in the severity of that just and all-embracing judgment." Let us see, then, that while life remains to us, we repose our confidence wholly on the death of Christ.

Bishop Atley, Penny Pulpit,No. 334, new series.

References: Romans 2:12. Homilist,vol. vii., p. 424.Romans 2:13. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. i., p. 71.Romans 2:13; Romans 2:14. A. Jessopp, Norwich School Sermons,p. 21.Romans 2:13. H. W. Beecher, Sermons,4th series, p. 394.