Just a Thought "23"

Paul set out to prove to the human race that nothing we do and nothing we promise to do will have anything whatsoever to do with our righteous standing before a perfectly righteous God.

When Paul mentions sin, he does so for the purpose of having every individual realize and admit that through out the course of our daily lives, we all miss the mark of God’s perfect rightness.

So it is not a thing we do here or a thing we do there, we never measure up anytime in our human live, we never measure up to who God is, and with God’s righteous character.

We should not think just because God is not judging sin on the world today, that he detests it, he is outraged at it, but the judgment for it has been pasted. Yet, because God is not holding the sins against the human race, that does not make us as righteous as God.

Just because God is not counting our coming short against us, that does not make us as right as he is. God did not take away the sin, he took away the debt of the sinner.

Sin is still here and sin still reaps it’s consequences. Death comes in a myriad of forms, death of a relationship, conscience, there are a lot of ways that sin can bring death.

The circumstances that are occurring in our world today come as a natural result of the sin-cursed world in which we live, not from special judgments from God, they come from choices people make.

God is not trying to get even with people today because of their sins and he is not calling down some special bad thing; some adverse situation in order to teach certain individuals a lesson.

God does not teach through special judgments during the dispensation of grace, he teaches us through his written word today.

Paul did not say the law was written in our hearts, he said the works of the law are written in the hearts of the Gentiles. God knows whether or not a person has placed their faith in what his son accomplished for us, or whether that person is still holding onto the notion that his good works will somehow merit them a position of righteousness in the eyes of God.

God knows the motivation that resides in the human heart that underlies all the works that we call good. It is the changed thinking that comes, as God transforms us by his word. In a day yet future, God is going to cause Israel to walk in his ways, because God is going to write his law into their hearts according to Jeremiah.

God knows whether there is a hidden motivation even to ourselves, hidden by our pride nature to look good before others; to appear knowledgeable before others; to somehow elevate self in relation to others to gain the praise of others, God knows the motivations of the human heart.

Any kind of works at all, even if they appear to be good works in our mind, that are done for the purpose attaining salvation or for the purpose of maintaining salvation, even for the purpose of proving one’s salvation is a slap in the face of God, who had to provide the gift of salvation, because people’s righteousness would be totally incapable of meriting it.

Our good works must be done solely out of appreciation for what God has already accomplished. We need to place our faith in Christ’s faithfulness and that alone. We can thank God for justification, because every one of us from a practical stand point do indeed merit being judged worthy of being on the receiving end of God’s wrath.

When judgment is according to truth, there had better be a way for God to consider us righteous apart from our own production, merit and performance, because none of us can continually and consistently measure up to the perfect standard of a perfectly righteous God.

Paul knew the pride of the human heart would quickly jump to defend it’s self when accused of being unjust and therefore worthy of God’s wrath, he wants us to own up to the fact that in a practical sense we are indeed unrighteous.

How does it make us feel personally when someone points a finger at us and says guilty? Not a very comfortable feeling is it for another person to finger the finger at us and call us guilty. None of us like to admit our short comings much less have them pointed out to us by others, we do not like to be told that we are wrong, we rebel against being confronted in our very core.

Paul went to great length to convince us into a realization of our desperate need to be justified in the first place. Whether it be confidence in religion, confidence in the flesh, nothing Israel could do could afford Israel an escape route from the wrath worthy status Paul is proving to be true of all the human race, Israelite and Gentile alike.

Paul’s preparing the soil of the human mind in the beginning chapters of Romans prior to getting into the reality and the necessity of a justification that would come totally apart from anything people could do. God would have to accomplish our justification for us, true of the Israelite and true of the Gentile.