Thoughts on Romans 2

Today's reading: Judges 19; Romans 2

There are a lot of "Christians" in the world today that way too closely resemble the Jews Paul is writing about in Romans 2.

In Romans 2 Paul is addressing the self-righteous Jew who thought that because they were Jewish, and therefore had the Law, they were innately better than than others. Paul's point, to summarize it crudely, is that God is more interested in the person who follows His law than He is in the person who has received His law. Many Jews of Paul's day thought that because Israel was God's chosen people, they were inherently good with God and they looked down on others who were not part of this group. But the question ultimately is not what group you associate yourself with, it's where your heart is before the Lord.

And this is what I see a lot of "Christians" seemingly getting wrong today as well. I talked about this a couple days ago in Judges 17, but there is a very common perception that what God wants from us is being a generally good person and probably going to church. So on the one hand, you get many people who, like these Jews, think they are good with God without a real basis for that assumption. On the other hand though, you get a lot of people in the Christian church looking down on and judging those outside of it.

What does God want from us? Faith in Jesus. We don't have to become sinless to turn to Christ, and we don't have to clean up our act for God to initiate with us. God initiates with us, we respond in faith, and from there, by His Holy Spirit, He begins to work in our hearts to change and transform us more into His image.

And yet, when I was in college, there were always preachers on campus railing at people for drinking, cussing, and sex outside of marriage (only one of which is for sure a sin biblically speaking...). Or you see Christians all the time condemning people for things like homosexuality. But should we really expect a non-Christian to live like a Christian? Should we expect someone who doesn't have the Holy Spirit to agree with and live by the same morality that we as active and professing Christians so often fail to live up to ourselves? Why would we rail at someone who maybe doesn't even believe in God about all the ways they are not living up to God's standards, rather than loving them the way Jesus did? Jesus didn't call sin righteousness, but He also didn't let people's sin stop him from showing them God's love and calling them to respond to His grace.

We, as Christians, are not called to judge those who don't know the Lord, we are called to love them and share with them the grace that has been made available to them in Jesus. God forbid we become nothing more than modern day Pharisees, basking in our own self-righteousness, while the world around us perishes without knowing their left hand from their right!