Bible Commentaries

Judgment

Romans 2:5-6

I. Belief in a Judgment is part of our faith in the sanity of the universe. Judgment is not an arbitrary enactment but an inevitable process: the sequel and corollary of our sense of responsibility. If goodness and right are anything more than words, there is Judgment to come out of all that is done on earth. Daniel Webster, the American, when asked what was the greatest thought that ever occupied his mind, replied, "My personal accountability to God". And I know of nothing so essential to the definition of a man as that sense of responsibility. Eliminate that, and man is not So delicate are the tablets of our soul, which we call memory, that nothing howsoever slight can ever be razed from them. Nothing dies from out the memory. When God says, " Romans 2:7

I. The grandeur of the Quest. "Seek for glory and honour and incorruption." What thrilling words these are when taken with their great meanings! Some would eliminate them from the vocabulary, and shut us up to more modest language. But take these words, properly understood, out of the vocabulary, and what will be the effect on character? The noblest character, the strongest and most beautiful life are impossible without the large ideas and hopes expressed in these terms. Take these great words out of the vocabulary, and what will be the effect on experience? Can the spirit within us live without them? "No," says the secularist: "the spirit of man will not be content without these words: but glory, honour, and incorruption are found within the worldly life". Axe they? "Glory"—have we that? Glory means solidity, reality, durability, and certainly we know nothing of these in the temporal sphere. "Honour"—have we that? When the soul is denied, we become like the beasts which perish, and the honours of life's short day are golden shoes, purple saddles, jingling bells. "Immortality"—have we that? Yes: fame. Fame! a death"s-head crowned with a fading wreath. The fact Romans 2:13

"Preach to these men as one may," thundered Savonarola to the Florentines, "they have got into the habit of listening well and yet acting ill. This habit has become a second nature, and they contrive to listen without obeying. And it is as hard to change this course of things as to change the course of the waters. Thou hast made a habit of always hearing the command? Then do justice, do justice Else thou wilt become like a rook on the steeple, that, at the first stroke of the church bell, takes flight and is scared, but afterwards, growing accustomed to the sound, perches quietly on the bell, however loudly it be rung."

Reference.—II:13.—P. McAdam Muir, Modern Substitutes for Christianity, p33.

Romans 2:14

The text of Butler's two sermons on "The Natural Supremacy of Conscience".

References.—II:14.—Bishop Butler, Human Nature and other Sermons, p28. Expositor (6th Series), vol. v. p429; ibid. vol. x. p176. II:14 , 15.—Ibid. vol. vi. p267; ibid. vol. xi. p201.

Romans 2:15

As Jowett, in his introduction to the Gorgias, observes, "Men are not in the habit of dwelling upon the dark side of their own lives; they do not easily see themselves as others see them. They are very kind and very blind to their own faults; the rhetoric of self-love is always pleading with them on their own behalf. Adopting a similar figure of speech, Socrates would have them use rhetoric, not in defence but in accusation of themselves....

"Under the figure there lurks a real thought, which, expressed in another form, admits of an easy application to ourselves. For do not we too accuse as well as excuse ourselves?... In religious diaries a sort of drama is often enacted by the consciences of men "accusing or else excusing them". For all our life long we are talking with ourselves."

References.—II:15.—N. D. Hillis, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvii. p328. Archbishop Magee, Sermons at St. Saviour's, Bath, p146.

Romans 2:16

In a much-criticised passage in his Enigmas of Life, Mr. Rathbone Greg attempts to describe one of the retributive pangs falling to the sinful soul, which belong to the nature of the future world, namely, "the severance from all those we love who on earth have trod the narrower and better path". "What," he asks, "can be more certain, because what more in the essential nature of things, than that the great revelation of the Last Day (or that which must attend and be involved in the mere entrance into the spiritual state) will effect a severance of souls—an instantaneous gulf of demarcation between the pure and the impure, the just and the unjust, the merciful and the cruel—immeasurably more deep, essential, and impassable, than any which time or distance or search or antipathy could effect on earth? Here we never see into each other's souls; characters the most opposite and incompatible dwell together upon earth, and may love each other much, unsuspicious of the utter want of fundamental harmony between them.... But when the great curtain of ignorance and deception shall be withdrawn—"when the secrets of all hearts shall be made known"—when the piercing light of the spiritual world shall at once and for ever disperse those clouds which have hidden what we really are from those who have loved us and almost from ourselves, when the trusting confidence of friendship shall discover what a serpent has been nourished in its bosom, when the yearning mother shall perceive on what a guilty wretch all her boundless and priceless tenderness has been lavished, when the wife shall at length see the husband whom she cherished through long years of self-denying and believing love revealed in his true colours, a wholly alien creature; what a sudden, convulsive, inevitable, because natural separation will then take place! One flash of light has done it all. The merciful delusions which held friends together upon earth are dispersed, and the laws of the mind must take their course and divide the evil from the good."

References.—II:16.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxi. No1849. Expositor (4th Series), vol. ii. p260; ibid. (6th Series), vol. ix. p91. II:17-25.—Ibid. (5th Series), vol. v. p325.

Romans 2:21

Perhaps some of the most terrible irony of the human lot is this of a deep truth coming to be uttered by lips that have no right to it.

—George Eliot.

Charles Lamb, writing of his cousin Romans 2:21

The world smiles when we complain of Russian aggression. The Asiatic subjects of the Queen of England are two hundred millions. The Asiatic subjects of Russia are forty millions. The right on both sides is the right of conquest.

—Froude's Beaconsfield, p244.

Seneca's fame as a moralist and philosopher was due, perhaps, in the first instance to his position about the Court, and to his enormous wealth. A little merit passes for a great deal when it is framed in gold, and once established it would retain its reputation, from the natural liking of men for virtuous cant Those lectures to Lucilius on the beauty of poverty from the greatest money-lender and usurer in the empire! Lucilius is to practise voluntary hardships, is to live at intervals on beggars" fare, and sleep on beggars" pallets, that he may sympathise in the sufferings of mortality and be independent of outward things. If Seneca meant all this, why did he squeeze five millions of our money out of the provinces with loans and contracts?

—From Froude's Essay on The Norway Fjords.

Reference.—II:21-23.—Expositor (4th Series), vol. vii. p420.

Romans 2:24

This I well remember, that though I could myself sin with the greatest Delight and Ease, and also take pleasure in the vileness of my companions; yet, even then, if I have at any time seen wicked things by those who professed goodness, it would make my spirit tremble. As once, above the rest, when I was in the height of my Vanity, yet hearing one to swear that was reckoned for a religious Romans 2:28-29

On the occasion of his momentous visit to Ulverstone and Swarthmore, George Fox describes his visit to the local church, where ultimately he was moved to speak. "The word of the Lord to them was, He is not a Jew that is one outwardly, but he is a Jew that is one inwardly, whose praise is not of man but of God." The text, which may be termed one of the Quakers" texts in the New Testament, was often upon Fox's lips.