Romans 2:13 Commentary and Bible Study

In verse 12 he has spoken only of those who have sinned: the Gentiles without the law, and the Jews having the law. Both classes of men are guilty. But why has he assumed that all Jews are guilty? Will they not immediately answer that they possess the law and therefore are in a completely different category to the Gentiles? That, he will answer, is beside the point, for it is not the mere possession of the law or the hearing of it that makes a man just before God, but it is those who do what the law requires who will be justified. That is a basic truth which everyone ought to understand. The law commands obedience; it is very practical; it is about doing. We cannot just listen to the law and do nothing, and expect it to treat us as righteous. This needs to be clear before he can advance his argument.But of course in reality there is not one single person who is a successful doer of the law, not one single person. Paul will go on to argue in this epistle and to show us, that not one will be justified, accepted by God as just, on account of obedience to the law, because we are all hopeless sinners, and we have such a backlog of guilt, and we cannot be justified by our works. That, however, has nothing to do with the law itself; it is entirely due to sin being in all members of this fallen human race, and the fact that we all die in Adam. Hypothetically however, if a person were to perfectly keep all the standards of righteousness in the law, then such a person would be accepted of God on their merits and by their deserving, but not one will be, and we need grace. (There has only ever been one person who has kept the law perfectly, and he indeed earned righteousness under the law, for himself and all his people, but he was the God man who was without sin, and did not inherit Adam’s fallen nature.) The Jews need to be reminded of this: it's not having the law and hearing it week by week that counts; it's being a performer of it. Now, so many of the Jews in those times took the law, not as a standard of righteousness, but as a confirmation to them that they were special in God’s sight, because God had given it to them, and therefore they were redeemed and forgiven. The giving of the law to them was taken as a mark, a confirmation, that they were God's people. They needed no Saviour; they needed no salvation; they merited it by their birth. Not all Jews thought this way: there were godly Jews who understood that they needed the grace and forgiveness of God, but the majority were hearers only, convinced that they would be justified by that, and so the apostle rehearses these things. The word ‘justified’ will occur many times in this letter, and is used here for the first time. As elsewhere, it means that the one concerned is declared to be just, righteous before God. But here the righteousness in view is a hypothetical righteousness that comes from the law. Since the requirement of the law is perfect obedience, then in practice no one has this righteousness, no one except Christ.