(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.

(Genesis 1:26-27, Jeremiah 2:9-13; Romans 1:16-32)

In addressing this passage from Romans, we should probably begin by clearing the decks: this passage is not about homosexual activity. It addresses homosexual activity, but that’s neither the focus of the passage nor its purpose. The focus is Paul’s explanation of how and why this world is broken; homosexual sex is just a symptom.

What we need to see, if indeed Romans is a theological retelling of salvation history, is that what we have beginning in verse 18 is the Creation and the Fall. That’s why Paul draws so intentionally on the language of Genesis. He’s laying out the universal disaster of human sin in order to make it clear that salvation comes through Christ alone. For him, the relationship between Jews and Gentiles in the church is a major concern, especially as it seems to have become a problem in Rome, and so his key point to this is that Jews and Gentiles stand on equal footing before God. Thus in verse 16 he declares that the gospel is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” There is a distinction, but no separation.

And thus Paul says in verse 18 that the wrath of God is revealed—it’s shown to be active, it’s seen in operation, unfolding in human history—against all human ungodliness and unrighteousness. This isn’t just Gentiles, or even uniquely true of the Gentiles, as he’ll make clear in chapters 2-3. No one is innocent; all are guilty.

Now, when we think about sin, we tend to think about sins—we focus on particular acts, and argue about how bad they are, and maybe try to get something taken off the list. Paul goes below the surface to the root of our sin: idolatry, the choice to worship something other than God. Even for those who don’t have the Scriptures, there is enough reason to acknowledge and worship God just in this world that he has made; we do not fail to worship God out of ignorance. When the sinful heart comes up against the truth of God’s existence and his character—and the idea that such a God would have the right to expect things of us and to make demands of us—it suppresses that truth. The root impulse of sin is the desire to be the sole rulers of our own lives, and thus to acknowledge no god that we haven’t chosen for ourselves, on our own terms. All the people and goals and desires that mean more to us than God are expressions of the central desire of our sinful nature: to be first in our own lives, to bow to no authority but our own.

There’s an old saying that the man who represents himself has a fool for a lawyer; it’s also said that he has a fool for a client, and both things are true. How much more, then, is he a fool who has himself for a god? As we’ve seen, if we turn away from the one who spoke the world into being, we become spiritually deaf; if we reject the one who said, “Let there be light,” and there was light, we are blinded by the darkness of our hearts; if we refuse to accept the one who is Truth and is the source of all wisdom, there is nothing left for us but lies and folly. And against the terrors of the world, there is left no defense, and no option but to worship them in hopes of somehow appeasing them.

If we alienate ourselves from the one who made us, we cannot know who we are; if we must be gods to ourselves, we cannot be truly human to ourselves, and thus we cannot truly know what it means to be human. In this, I think, is one of the subtlest forms of idolatry, and one which is increasingly coming out into the open and taking center stage in our culture: the idolatry of identity. We worship the right to decide for ourselves who we are, to determine for ourselves what defines us. Anything connected to that becomes an inalienable right, because it’s part of who we are; no question or challenge is allowed.

That, of course, is why Romans 1 is so controversial in Western culture. I lived five years in Canada; if I chose to preach on this passage there, I could be accused of a hate crime and put on trial by one of their Human Rights Commissions, so-called. Why? For being “anti-gay,” or whatever terminology they might use. For attacking people for their “sexual identity.” There’s the key word: identity. The desire is definitive.

This isn’t just about sex, though; we see it all over the place. Our culture likes to redefine sins as diseases—thus, for instance, a disobedient child who throws a temper tantrum anytime he’s told “no” isn’t a kid who needs to be disciplined so he learns to grow up, he has ODD (oppositional defiant disorder). He’s not a sinner, he’s just sick. This is a trick we use to avoid admitting that we’re sinful, but it does more than that—it gives us an identity in our sin. This approach teaches us to name ourselves by our besetting sins, and allow them to define us. Which, honestly, is pretty twisted.

Beyond that, think of how we tell people who we are. We identify ourselves by our work—I am a pastor—or by our relationships—I am Sara’s husband, I am Lydia’s father (and Rebekah’s, and Bronwyn’s, and Iain’s). We identify ourselves by our country—I am an American—and our political party. We identify ourselves by our gender, and many of us identify ourselves by our heritage, including that aspect which we wrongly call “race.” We identify ourselves by where we went to school—IU or Purdue? All these “I am” statements are statements of identity—they are all examples of us defining ourselves outside of who we are in Christ. That doesn’t mean all of them are therefore idolatrous, as if it were somehow morally different for me to say “I am a pastor” versus “I pastor a church”; but they often are.

I’ve certainly known men and women who found their primary identity in being married—or in being single, whether they considered that positive or negative. I’ve known more than a few people who truly defined themselves by their political party. I’ve seen folks who were so concerned about what it meant to be a man or a woman that they considered that to be the primary fact about themselves. And yes, there are those who think that who they want to sleep with is absolutely essential to their inmost being.

Now, obviously, some of these are more central to who we are than others. We are created male and female by God, and so this is a fundamental part of who we are, far more profound than whether you voted for Nixon in ’72 or Kerry in ’04. Regardless, if we belong to Christ, that is our primary identity; that is what defines us above all other things. Everything else—even that we are male and female, which is a reality God created before the Fall, when we were still perfect—everything else is secondary. If we find our identity first in any of these things rather than in Christ, that is idolatry.

Anything that we think is essential to who we are (and thus to our well-being) is something we will defend against anyone and anything that seems to threaten it—even God. If I find my identity in being a pastor, my ministry won’t be the ministry of Christ, it will be all about me. If your idea of what it means to be a man or a woman—because that’s really where the identity issue lies, in our interpretation of that fact—if that is most important to you, everything else will be distorted or denied to fit that. And, yes, to anyone who believes their sexual desires are who they are, any suggestion that those desires might not be in accordance with the will of God is going to feel like a rejection of them as people and a vicious attack on their very souls.

Even so, if we’re going to preach the gospel clearly to our culture, we have to begin where Paul begins, here and in Acts: by exposing, naming, and confronting its idols. We have to help people see that what they take for freedom is really slavery, and that they aren’t really who they think they are—they were created to be more, in Jesus Christ.

(Habakkuk 2:1-4; Romans 1:1-17)

This will be an interesting sermon series for me—something of a voyage of discovery. This past January, up at Calvin, I heard N. T. Wright talk about baptism in the light of Romans 6, and he argued that Romans 6-8 is a theological retelling of the story of the Exodus. Which made a lot of sense to me, and got me thinking that maybe he didn’t go far enough with his idea; maybe all of Romans, or at least much of it, is a theological retelling of the whole story of Israel—and thus of our story as the people of God.

It’s an attractive idea, I think, both because it helps make sense of some things in the structure of the book and because it addresses the biggest question I’ve always had about Romans: why was it written? Why did Paul just decide one day to sit down and write a theology textbook to a church he’d never visited? If it isn’t just a theology textbook, if there’s a deeper purpose to it, then that makes more sense to me. The only way to work out this idea and see how true it might be is actually to go through and write the sermons and see how it works.

If I’m right, then the purpose of Romans is not just to tell us what the church should believe, but to give us an overarching vision of what the church ought to be—what we ought to be on about as the people of God, what life as a follower of Christ should look like, and what the ministry of Christ ought to be about. We saw this Christmas that a key idea in Matthew’s gospel is that the life of Christ recapitulates the history of Israel; in Romans, I think, we have Paul doing by his teaching what Jesus did by his life and his example. The life of Christ is the model for the life of the people of God, because we his people have been given his life; Romans unpacks that for us and helps us to understand it. Paul wants us to understand what it means for us to live in and by the life of Christ and the power of his Holy Spirit as his redeemed people.

We see this in Paul’s introduction, which we read this morning. His description of himself normally takes up just a line or two in his letters; here it’s six verses long and basically a thumbnail sketch of his mission and message. His thanksgiving for them is briefer than usual, because this is a church he doesn’t know—it quickly shifts into a statement of his desire to visit them, culminating in the declaration, “I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome.”

And here’s the interesting thing: we see the theme of this letter in verses 16-17—and yeah, there’s a lot there, and we’re not going to unpack it all this morning—but these two verses are grammatically subordinate to verse 15. 15 is the main sentence, 16-17 function as a causal clause. We know this sort of thing—it’s like when I tell my wife, “I’m going to the store because we’re out of milk.” She doesn’t need me to tell her we’re out of milk, she already knows that; what she needs to know is that I’m taking the car keys. I tell her “we’re out of milk” so that she knows why.

It’s the same deal here. This has given some scholars heartburn—how can this be the main point of the letter if it isn’t even the main point of the sentence?—but I think it’s really quite important. He says this, he lays out the heart of his message, for a specific reason: to explain why he’s eager to preach the gospel to them. This is why he preaches, this is why he ministers, this is what his ministry is all about. Paul is in it for the gospel, driven by the gospel, inspired by the gospel, powered by the gospel, guided by the gospel—and nothing else. This is what he does, and all he does, and he wants the same thing to be true of them as the church.

This is the vision, nothing more and nothing less. Notice, I’m not saying it’s Paul’s vision. It is, in a sense; we can talk about this as Paul’s vision for the church, or my vision for the church, in the sense of being captured by this vision. But it isn’t his vision in the sense that it began with him or belongs to him. If it were, it would be merely a human vision, and no merely human vision can build the church. As Andrew Purves of Pittsburgh Seminary says, no human ministry can redeem anyone; only the ministry of Christ is redemptive. Human vision may build a large, successful organization—it often does—but it won’t be the church, because it will only be a human organization. What we need is the vision of Christ for the church, which shines through Paul here.

The vision is that the church should be people of the gospel, all about the gospel, first, last, and always. We should be a people who recognize our absolute dependence on Jesus Christ—that we are not in the least righteous by our own power, but only through faith in him; that we depend completely on his righteousness, for our own attempts are worth nothing. We are called to be a people of grace, who humbly acknowledge before God and each other our need for grace—that we sin, that we fail, that we fall short, that we let others down, inevitably—we cannot be satisfactory people in our own strength.

We will always fall short of even what we consider “reasonable” expectations, because we are limited, fallible, and still struggling with our sin; we need grace, and so we need to show grace to others. We need to tell each other and to tell the world that the good news of Jesus isn’t “Work harder,” though to be sure we all have things on which we need to keep working; rather, the good news is that we are saved by the grace of God through faith in Jesus Christ, and he is sufficient for us. He has redeemed us by his power, and he is transforming us by his power, making us righteous according to his will. We need to give him our best, not because it means we’ll get the result we want—we might not—but simply because it’s our best and it’s what God asks of us. The rest is up to him.

The key is, the power of salvation isn’t ours, it’s God’s, and his power and his righteousness are far beyond anything we can manage; this is why Paul declares, “I am not ashamed of the gospel.” We usually read this as an individual statement, and it is; Paul is an evangelist because he understands that only in the gospel is the power of God for salvation that brings true life. Indeed, this is the only motivation for evangelism that really bears fruit for the long term, if we are captured by the glory and goodness of Jesus Christ and our salvation in him—if we are full to overflowing with his love, and with gratitude for all he has done for us, then we will tell others naturally, every chance we get, the same way that those who are in love are always talking about their beloved. That’s what fills their hearts and their thoughts, and so that’s what fills their speech as well. In the same way, if we would be effective in telling others about Jesus, we must begin by looking to him ourselves and delighting in his presence.

That said, what Paul is saying here is about more than just our individual witness, it’s also about how we live together as the church. It’s about putting the gospel front and center in everything we do and refusing to be about anything else. We lose sight of this because the church has become organizationalized. It’s become all about the organization, thinking like an organization—and an organization exists first and foremost to keep itself in existence, and then if it can, to get bigger, so as to give itself more resources to stay in existence. The church in this country has a bad habit of thinking and evaluating itself in those terms, and so it becomes all about the numbers and how you attract people; and you do that through programs and worship style and stuff you can advertise.

Now, it’s not that there’s anything wrong with programs, and certainly everyone has a style, but there are a couple bad assumptions here. The first is that the church is supposed to be successful on organizational terms, which means strength in numbers; the second is that we have to be the ones to make that happen, and we have to use the same techniques the world does. When we get into that mindset, we end up ashamed of the gospel, because the gospel doesn’t fit the marketing paradigm; we put the stuff front and center that goes over well with the test audience. Paul is calling us to something different: to fix our eyes firmly on Jesus, to proclaim the gospel in every way we can find to do it—which is where our programs come in, to give us different ways and opportunities to proclaim the gospel—and let God worry about the rest.