Meditation for March 7

From The Rev. Peter Munson

Romans 1:28-2:11

 

From Romans 2:

1 "Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.  2 You say, 'We know that God's judgment on those who do such things is in accordance with truth.'  3 Do you imagine, whoever you are, when you judge those who do such things and yet do them yourself, you will escape the judgment of God? 4 Or do you despise the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience?  Do you not realize that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? 5 But by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath, when God's righteous judgment will be revealed.  6 For he will repay according to one's deeds: 7 to those who who by patiently doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; 8 while for those who are self-seeking and who obey not the truth but wickedness, there will be wrath and fury."

 

There Is Judgment

 

I must confess:  I am a person, a Christian, a preacher who is very much into the grace and love of God.  We can't live without God's grace - I'm convinced of it.  Salvation is by God's grace alone.  And when we fully take in how much God loves us, I think it can lead a man or woman to do amazing things for others, in grateful reponse to that amazing love that God showers upon us.

 

Having said that, I am not one of those people who tries to distinguish between "the God of the Old Testament" and "the God of the New Testament".  Perhaps you have heard this somewhere along the way.  The God of the Old Testament is supposedly the God of justice and wrath, a don't-mess-with-me-or-you-will-be-fried kind of God.  The God of the New Testament is supposedly the God of love and grace and kindness and sacrifice and forgiveness.  It is a false distinction.  There is only one God in the Bible, and because God is God, God cannot be so easily pinned down.  The God talked about in the Old Testament - Yahweh - gives Israel endless chances, forgives them over and over again, and His love is revealed in the Exodus, in providing for the Jews in the wilderness, in the giving of the law (The Torah), and in bringing them to the Promised Land (and these are just a few of the examples I could point to).  And as we see in this passage from Paul, and in plenty of things that Jesus said, there are plenty of passages in the New Testament that talk about the justice of God, the judgment of God, and even the wrath of God.  See verse 5 above, for example.  (An aside:  I had a seminary professor from England who said that Americans did not know how to say the word "wrath".  I must say, it sounded much more real, in a way that I felt spurred on to repentance - right there on the spot! - when he talked about "the WRATH of God".)

 

Here's the point.  God is a God of grace and judgment, love and justice, patience and impatience, loving kindness (Hebrew = hesed) or "steadfast love" and WRATH, or what we might call "intense righteous anger".  God is a God who sends his people into exile and brings them out of exile, a God who calls the nation of Israel an adulterer or a whore, and a God who woos them back into a faithful relationship.  God is all of these things.  God is way more complicated and diverse than we are.

 

We don't get to make God in our  image.  Though tempted to do so, it doesn't mean that we are right if we just pick the character trait of God that we like or identify with the most and say, "This is what God is like!"  According to the Bible (Old and New Testament), God is all of these traits and more - always more - because we can never truly define God or say exactly what God is like.  Our words about God are our best efforts, our best approximations of what God is like - nothing more.

 

Back to the judgment issue... according to the Bible - both Old and New Testament - there is going to come a time of judgment, a day of judgment.  According to the New Testament, our Judge will be Jesus.  According to this passage from Romans 2, our actions matter.  There are consequences for what we do.  As I read the Bible, it is still true that none of us is given eternal life or abundant life or any kind of life with God without the grace of God coming into play.  But it is also true that there are consequences for our actions, because there is judgment.  There is judgment, because - among other traits - God is righteous.  Though that might not, at first hearing, sound like good news, I think it is good news.  We want our lives to matter.  Deep down, we want to feel like God is paying attention to what we do and don't do, that our choices make a difference in the world.  The Bible assures us that our lives do matter, and that our choices are important.  And these passages about judgment almost always remind us that we step out of bounds the moment we start playing judge and jury, whenever we act in such a way as to convict and condemn another person, pronouncing our verdict and sentence upon them.  The Bible reminds us that you and I are not the ultimate judge - that God (or Jesus) is the Ultimate Judge.  And that is very good news indeed!  Because the One who is our Judge is also the One who willingly gave his life for us, so that we all might be reconciled to God.  The One who judges us is the One who said from the cross, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."  It is indeed good news that Jesus is our Judge, because, to be honest, if the judge were you or me, we would all have many more reasons to fear Judgment Day.

 

This passage is a good reminder that God is not only a God of grace, but that there is judgment, too.  These verses remind us that our decisions and our actions do have consequences, and matter to God.  This passage reminds us that God's kindness is meant to lead us to repentance (verse 4).  These are all good things for us to reflect on during Lent.