Romans 2:22 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Romans 2:22

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‘Thou that sayest a man should not commit adultery, dost thou commit adultery?’ Yes, many of them were also adulterers, even the leaders. Remember when they brought to Christ in the temple, a woman who had just been caught in the act of adultery, and they said, ‘What should we do with her? Should we stone her?’ Well, stoning was not customarily done, even though it was in the law. However, he said to them after a pause, ‘Whoever among you is without sin cast the first stone’, and somehow, because of the power of his presence, all of those scribes and Pharisees that were accusing this woman, they had a skeleton in the cupboard. They had secret sin. They wondered how he knew, but they all went out one by one. Those who taught the law were not keeping the law and they were notorious for it.‘Thou that abhorrest idols, dost thou commit sacrilege?’ That translates a Greek term which means, ‘Dost thou commit temple robbery?’ You who are against idols, do you rob temples? What a curious thing to say, but they did. As Hendriksen argues, why else is it that ‘the city clerk at Ephesus, in quieting the tumultuous crowd, asserted, “You have brought these men … here, though they have neither robbed temples nor blasphemed our goddess”’? Some of those Jewish leaders were very rich, and they rented and sold land for temples to the idolaters. They made money out of idolaters. They did all sorts of things which enriched them. ‘Oh, we are against idolatry’ – but they were happy to make money out of it.‘Thou that makest thy boast of the law, through breaking the law, dishonest thou God.’ This is a particularly sharp reproof. The hypocrite does more harm than good. Far from getting credit to religion, he brings it into ill repute. He teaches outsiders that there is nothing real about religion, and it is all just a show put on for self-aggrandisement. But the purpose of true religion should be to bring praise to God. He should be praised because of the genuine change he works in the hearts of his people, and the genuine righteousness which he creates in them by his power. If not, then what the outsider sees is just another variant of human deceitfulness and corruption, but this time done in the area of religion. How will he ever seek the Lord for himself on that basis?

Application

Do we maintain a tight self-watch over our own sins, and examine our hearts, and repent daily? Do we pray, avoid worldliness, engage in stewardship, put the kingdom of God first? The challenge to the Jews, who were so disappointing in the main, is to be applied to us and to our hearts. Here we are, saved gospel men and women, but do we witness, do we reach the people around us? Do we exercise a ministry of intercession in our personal prayers? Do we involve ourselves in the efforts of the church, to teach the community and to reach the children?

Let a man be very careful not to think that mere head knowledge is enough. Some know a great deal, but they have never repented. No amount of knowledge will be able to save a man if he does not live according to God’s law, for God will not judge us by what we know, but by what we do. Knowing the truth does not make you a child of God. You are a child of God because you have gone to Christ in repentance and faith, you have received a new life and a new heart, and now you are conscientiously, by the help of God, striving to keep his law. Your conscientious striving is alone evidence that you have really found Christ and eternal life. Knowledge without obedience will make our punishment more severe. Knowledge ought to make the conscience more sensitive, but when it coexists with a hard heart, our case is desperate.

There is a huge industry of people making entertainment records for Christians. And some of these organisations that make a lot of money, they are reformed, of all things, and they are imitating worldly music, putting substandard Christianised lyrics to it, and selling it for thousands and thousands of dollars. There is a whole industry! You can go on the websites of some of these preachers and they are selling entertainment, really. There you are – we are against worldliness, making money out of it themselves. So it can even be, not just the Jews of old who were hypocrites, but even reformed Christians in these days. I put that into your mind.

Of course, you don't rob temples or churches or take things away, but Bible believers may do something equivalent. Every time we come into a church and sing a hymn without thinking about it, perhaps just to get a slight lift out of a tune which we happen to like and think of the odd thing here and there, we are robbing God of worship. The person who puts a band at the front, and people come for the performance and the beat, the sound drug, the regular beat: that person is robbing the Lord of the genuine praise of God’s people. They swing their bodies about, and they play the Baal music and so on, and have the foolishness to try and attach Christian lyrics to it. But they are stealing from the temple. They have taken its reverence. They have taken its God-centeredness, its sense of the divine, and turned it into a concert hall. That is stealing temple robbery wholesale.

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Romans 2:22 Commentary and Bible Study

The meaning of Romans 2:22 explained