With Our Own Petard

(Proverbs 24:10-12, Isaiah 52:3-6; Romans 2)

Hamlet, Act III, Scene 4. Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius the usurper king, has ordered Hamlet to England in the company of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; he has given them a sealed letter to convey to the king of England with instructions to have Hamlet killed. Hamlet will later find that letter and rewrite it so that it contains instructions to have Rosencrantz and Guildenstern killed instead. Before his departure, however, he says this to his mother:

I must to England—you know that. . . .

There’s letters sealed and my two schoolfellows—
Whom I will trust as I will adders fanged—
They bear the mandate, they must sweep my way
And marshal me to knavery. Let it work.

He’s using military language here, describing the situation in terms of siege warfare; he doesn’t know what exactly is going on, but he clearly understands that the king intends to use them to make sure Hamlet never makes it back to Denmark.

He continues:

For ’tis the sport to have the enginer
Hoist with his own petard, and’t shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines
And blow them at the moon.

The enginer is the maker of “engines”—which is to say, devices such as bombs; a petard was a type of bomb, a shaped charge used in attacking fortifications. Hamlet knows Rosencrantz and Guildenstern will be armed in some way to destroy him; he intends to outwit them and turn the plan against them, so that they will be “hoist with their own petard”—blown into the air by their own bomb. Not that it’s really their plan, but no matter—they’re serving Claudius in his intrigues, rather than seeing him truly enough to resist him, so they’re guilty too. That the judgment they bear should be turned against them is poetic justice.

You can see where I’m going with this. There’s a similar dynamic here in Romans 2 as Paul turns to address the Jews in the church. In chapter 1 he’s made it clear that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the only path to salvation available to anyone, whether Jew or Gentile, and that all people are under the wrath of God for their ungodliness and unrighteousness; but as he unpacks that, he does so in terms which seem to indict only the Gentiles, because their idolatry and wickedness are obvious to anyone who knows the Scriptures. (Indeed, they were obvious to many in that time who didn’t.)

The danger here is the assumption, which was already becoming common among Jews at that time, that the wrath of God against unrighteousness didn’t apply to them because they were his chosen people. One of the books of the Apocrypha, for instance, the Wisdom of Solomon, has a multi-chapter diatribe about the sin and idolatry of the Gentiles, a lot like Romans 1 only longer; and then comes this: “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.” You get the idea—because we’re God’s chosen people and have his law, even if we sin, it doesn’t really count as sin, and God won’t judge us.

Obviously, Paul can’t let that stand; but by laying out his argument as he does, he turns that attitude back against any Jews who take that approach. They think their special status exempts them from condemnation, but he says, no: it actually holds them to a higher standard. If they have responded to the previous passage with a spirit of judgment, cheering Paul on as he condemns “those bad people out there,” he slams their judgment back in their face, bringing their self-righteous verdict down on their own heads. The bomb they thought was for the Gentiles blows up right beneath their feet.

The principle here is that you’re judged on the basis of what you know; it’s the same idea we see in James 3:1 where he says, “Not many of you should seek to become teachers, for you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.” Paul makes it clear in Romans 1 that the Gentiles are responsible for refusing to believe what they could have known about God from his creation. Here, he points out that while the Gentiles don’t have the written law of God, they do have some sense of his moral law, which influences their behavior—and that they will be judged for doing what they know to be wrong, even without written notice from God to that effect.

And if that’s so, then how much more will the judgment of God fall on those who do have his word, who have been clearly told who God is and what he requires? Having the law of God, hearing the law of God, is only a benefit if you do the law of God. If you don’t, Paul tells them, then you are all the more guilty for having his law, because you know all the more clearly how wrong you are. The idea that knowing God’s law somehow means that you can get away without keeping it is completely backwards.

Let me borrow an illustration here from the preacher and writer Francis Chan—you might have heard this before. Imagine I tell Lydia to go clean her room. (She’s actually quite self-motivated on that, but imagine.) She goes up and closes the door, and an hour or two later she comes back down and says, “Dad, I memorized what you said. You said, ‘Go clean your room.’ I can say it in Greek—Πηγαίνετε καθαρός το δωμάτιό σας. I’m going to e-mail a couple of my friends, and we’re going to get together and study what it would mean for me to clean my room, and what that might look like.” Am I going to be impressed? Is that what I had in mind when I told her to clean her room? No, it isn’t—she hasn’t done what I told her, and that was the whole point.

All well and good then to condemn the Gentiles as envious, quarrelsome, insolent, boastful, prone to gossip, foolish, heartless, and all the rest—but Paul’s Jewish readers are guilty of all those things too, and they shouldn’t be. As a consequence, far from being the witness to God they were supposed to be, they have become one more reason for many Gentiles to reject God. They should not expect to escape judgment for that merely because they’re Jewish. Indeed, Paul says, the only thing that matters is the reality of our hearts—not that we have God’s word, but that his Spirit is at work in our lives training us to do God’s word.

So then, is Paul slamming the Jews because he thinks they could have kept God’s law well enough? No, of course not. Rather, he’s hammering the argument home that to rely on the law for salvation is foolish, because the law cannot make you good enough to be saved—it can only make you more guilty for being bad. He’s driving them to a point where they will realize that their need for something more is every bit as deep and desperate as the Gentiles’ need, to prepare them for the conclusion of chapter 3: that the righteousness of God can only be found through faith in Jesus Christ, even if you’re a law-abiding Jew. Yes, he’s already said that, and yes, he’s writing to a church, so they probably all nodded agreement—but he doesn’t want them just to know this in their heads, he wants them to know it in their guts.

Them—and us. The Jews had grown so used to being God’s chosen people that many of them took him, and their own righteousness, for granted; and that attitude had carried into the church. It was easy for them to focus on the immorality and idolatry of their culture, which was blatant and disgusting, and easy to feel superior as a consequence. When that mindset takes hold, grace becomes something other people need—those people who aren’t up to our standard yet; from there, it’s a short step to demanding they measure up, and grace goes out the window.

It’s a universal temptation for the righteous, to self-righteousness—the delusion that we are righteous in ourselves rather than in Christ, and only by his grace. But as Paul shows us, if we forget that we need God’s grace as badly as anyone, if we let ourselves grow self-righteous and judgmental in spirit, then we will end up hoist with our own petard just as surely as old Wile E., condemned by our own verdict. Judgment begins with the house of God, after all. We just need to keep looking back to Jesus and the gospel of grace, which is the power of God for salvation to all who believe.

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