The unrighteousness of moralists
All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. 13 For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous.
14 (Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, 15 since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.)
16 This will take place on the day when God will judge men’s secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares.
It may be helpful to take a look at the structure of the five verses quoted above. The NIV translators have done us a service by putting verses 14 and 15 into parentheses. They are thereby indicating that these two verses form a separate thought, an aside Paul adds to answer an objection he anticipates may arise.
If for the moment we leave verses 14 and 15 aside, it will be evident that the thought expressed in verse 16 hooks up directly with verses 12 and 13. Those two verses told us about God’s negative verdict against sinners, a verdict that “will take place on the day when God will judge men’s secrets through Jesus Christ, as my [Paul’s] gospel declares.”
What God will be judging on judgment day are “men’s secrets.” That is just another way of saying that God’s verdict will be determined by what people’s motives were, by what moved them to do the actions and activities that marked their lives. We can’t see people’s motives. To us they’re secret, unless by chance people make them evident to us by what they say or do.
There is, of course, a close connection between what people feel in their hearts and what they do with their hands, as Paul points out when he says, “All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous.”
There’s a great difference between hearing the law and obeying it. Perhaps an illustration can help to clarify this. You may be totally convinced of the value of limiting highway speeds to 55 miles per hour. It reduces wear and tear on your vehicle; it saves gasoline and lives. You agree with the law; you “hear” what it says. But if you’ve been driving 70 miles per hour in a 55 zone, and a highway patrol officer pulls you over to the side of the road, all your agreeing with the law isn’t going to prevent you from receiving a ticket. The officer has seen your performance, your lack of obedience to the law.
So too before God. It’s not “those who hear the law” but “those who obey the law” who will be declared righteous.
And the same principle, the same standard of judgment, applies also to declaring people unrighteous. “All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law.”
Note that in both cases, Paul is talking about people who have sinned and as such are now subject to punishment. The difference (or rather, apparent difference) is that one group sinned “apart from the law” while the others sinned “under the law.”
Paul is dividing them into two groups because of the different circumstances surrounding the two groups—one of them Jewish; the other, gentile. The Jews had the benefit of God’s revealed law, notably in the Mosaic Law given to them through Moses on Mount Sinai. The Gentiles were “apart from the law” in the sense that they didn’t have that specific set of God-given regulations.
But the Gentiles still sinned and therefore are subject to God’s wrath and punishment. Paul is expecting an objection at this point: How can it be fair for God to punish the Gentiles if they didn’t have the benefit of the law’s guidance?
Paul now addresses this complaint in the two-verse aside (verses 14,15) we called attention to earlier. Paul points out that although the Gentiles didn’t have the Mosaic regulations, they were not without “law,” information about God’s holy and unchangeable will.
“By nature” pagans do things required by God’s law. Guided by the natural knowledge of God written in their hearts, they know and decide that it is wrong to kill, to steal, to dishonor authority, and the like. This does not mean that they know the whole will of God; to the extent that they have a natural impulse to do things in a moral way, “they are a law for themselves.”
A related way in which Gentiles show that they have “the requirements of the law . . . written on their hearts” is the activity of conscience. Conscience operates on the innate feeling that there are certain natural rules of conduct to be followed, certain things that should be done and others that should not be done. When a person’s conscience judges that his actions are in conformity with the rules, then he is inclined to defend himself.
On the other hand, there are times when the person knows he’s going against the law written in his heart. He’s doing what he knows he shouldn’t be doing. Then there comes a voice from within him that rightly accuses him and convicts him of sin. Such a person may have sinned “apart from [God’s written, revealed] law,” but he is still guilty before God, because he has consciously and intentionally defied God and rebelled against the natural knowledge of God’s law, as reinforced by conscience. As he has sinned “apart from the law,” so he will “perish apart from the law.”
God is serious about having his will done and having his law kept. Relative goodness will not do.
Recall that this section has been addressed to the moralist, the person who feels that because he isn’t as bad as the coarse gentile sinners, he is acceptable to God. Paul makes it unmistakably clear that such a moralist, either Jew or Gentile, has been disobedient to God and deserves eternal punishment. The moralist has no righteousness upon which he can stand before God and therefore is just as bad off as the flagrant sinners he looks down on.