You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things.

We saw last week the key verses in Romans are 1:16,17. “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile.  For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”

We will all someday stand before the Lord, the righteous judge, and give an account of our life. Paul makes that very clear as we talked about previously. Paul uses the metaphor of a courtroom. The first group of people who will stand before the Lord includes the pagan, heathen, and Gentiles. All mankind have a general revelation from God shown in two ways; an internal consciousness of God where we have a sense of right and wrong, (yet people ignore that inner confirmation of the divine), and secondly - and more clearly - there is the visible record of the creation by Intelligent Design. God has made His glory known. In all He has created we see His divine attributes and His invisible qualities. In nature we see His artistry, His beauty, His grace, His love. In spite of these two revelations, people reject, replace, and rebel against what they know, so they are without excuse for their rejection of God. They are guilty and will experience the consequences of their foolish thoughts and acts. They are described as having futile minds, imaginations, and immorality.

Just listen around you - how people say they should run the country with entirely different values and morals than what the Bible says. You will see intelligent minds become as fools when Universities will fire well known professors because they believe God created the world and it did not happen solely by evolution. When a panel of psychological experts will disqualify anyone from their organization that question the homosexual lifestyle and offer help to any who wants to change, they defy what biology clearly demonstrates.

When you change your minds around gender it is an example of extreme foolishness. In fact, if you offer any help to those who want to get out of it, you must warn them of religious bigots and affirm and refer them to homosexual counseling groups that promote the gay causes.

People will offer a couple of excuses before the Lord. The first one is we didn’t know. We were ignorant of the ways of salvation. And secondly, everyone is doing it so it must be okay. They are without excuses.

There is a second group of people we will address - the nominal religious person. In this context there is no question the Old Testament divides people up into two groups- the Jews and the Gentiles. The Jews had the revelation from God and worshiped Him alone. In contrast, the Gentiles had many gods, idol worship was prevalent, and lived lives filled with all types of evil.

What you have in this chapter are Jews discriminating against the Gentiles and saying, “They are getting what they deserve”. Their attitude is "The Gentiles are reprobate and to hell with them all."

The judgmental Jews will come before God and will face Him at the return of Jesus. Instead of using the excuses they didn’t know, they use the excuse “We are not as bad as they are. We are generally good. After all, we are human. You can’t expect anything more than that. We haven’t killed anyone, or cheated on our spouse, or done really bad things.”

This response will be the subject of this week’s study.

Dale