Jesus said three times in Matthew six, "The Father who sees in secret will reward you openly. Our inmost secrets may be hidden from human judgment; they are not hidden from God, and we will be judged for our motives. You either do what you do for the glory of God, or you do it for the glory of man." Welcome to Grace to You, the Bible teaching ministry of John MacArthur. I'm your host, Phil Johnson. It's perhaps God's most celebrated attribute, His forgiveness.
Yet, as the great preacher Charles Spurgeon once said, "A God who could pardon without justice might, one of these days, condemn without reason." So that raises some questions: Does God pardon without justice? And if not, on what basis can He declare a guilty sinner justified? And how can you be sure that you will be declared? Declared guilt free on Judgment Day, there may be no more important questions. John MacArthur answers them today as he continues his study called "Without Excuse" from Romans chapter two.
So turn there in your Bible, Romans chapter two, if you're able, as John begins today's lesson. There are four great reasons why the heathen are lost. Here they come. Reason number one: Creation. Creation.
Go back to chapter one, and we'll pick up a thought from verse eighteen. The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and all unrighteousness of men.
Now you see, it is not just the religious men; it is not just the people with the law of God. It is all men, all men, all men. The wrath of God is revealed against all of the ungodliness and all of the unrighteousness of all men, whether they had the written law or not. Why? Because they hold the truth.
How do they hold the truth? Verse nineteen: That which may be known about God is manifest in them. How is it manifest in them?
Well, God has shown it unto them.
Well, how did He show it unto them? For the invisible things of Him from the what? Creation of the world are clearly seen, so that they are without excuse.
So, from chapter one, we learn the first reason why the heathen are lost: creation. They can look around them and know there's a God. They can look around them and perceive that He is supernatural, and that He is more powerful than. Any being that they know of in their dimension, and so they are responsible because they hold that knowledge. But now, as we come to chapter two, we find the three remaining reasons why the heathen are lost, and why we have to send missionaries to reach them.
Verse fourteen. And the word is conduct. First, they're lost because of creation. Secondly, because of conduct. For when the heathen, who have not the law, do by nature or do naturally the things contained in the law.
These, though they don't have the law, become a law unto themselves. In other words, they don't have an outside law, but they have an internal law that makes them a law unto themselves, and it is manifest in their conduct.
Now, when the heathen do, by nature, the things contained in the law, indicates that it does occur when they do it, and it is a common occurrence. Pagans naturally do things that are written in God's law. Did you know that, without ever reading God's law? Their conduct. Listen to this now.
Their conduct proves they know what is right and wrong. Their conduct proves that there there is available within them, residing in them, the law of God.
Sometimes pagans pay their debts. Is that in the law of God? Yes, they honor their parents. There are many people who do not know Jesus Christ, do not know God, never read the Bible, who love their wives. There are many wives who so love their husbands.
There are many people who have never heard the gospel of Jesus Christ who care for their children, and there are many children who care for their parents. There are many of them who believe it's wrong to kill. There are many people who have never known Jesus Christ or the message of Christ or the Bible or the meaning of the gospel who would feed the hungry, who would help a man who was sick or a woman who was sick. Pagans will tell the truth.
Sometimes they will even seek to do justice. They will struggle for equity. You see, all of these things reveal an internal human code of ethics. That is the law unto themselves. We see it in our human system of justice.
We see it in our humanitarianism, and the humanitarianism and the justice around the world, even in very obscure and isolated peoples.
Sometimes it's warped, but in any society you ever see, you will find some of those heathen exercising things which they do naturally that are in direct line with God's law, and they therefore show that that law is in them. The Stoics said that in the universe there were certain laws operative, which a man broke at his own peril. And the Stoics, who were utterly pagan philosophers, said there are the laws of health, the laws of morality, and the laws governing life and living. And the Stoics called all of these laws Phusis, which means nature. They said men are to live kata fusin.
They are to live according to what is natural. The Stoics actually said that these laws were natural to man. You see, man can recognize that there is a right, that there is a code of ethics. The very fact that man has a guilty conscience is because he violates the very code of ethics that's in him. There's a sense of right and wrong, and when men naturally do something that lines up with the law of God, and they do it all the time, they show that the law of God is written in them.
The unregenerate world, you see, does do relative human good. They do not do good in terms of spiritual righteousness. They do not do good in terms of good that is based on the right motive, because nothing is truly good unless it is done for the glory of God. Right. But they do good in a relative human sense, and when they do that, they show the law of God at work, though unwritten, at work in their heart.
They will do good in the right manner, if not for the right motive. I think about Cyrus in the Old Testament, who did good. He let God's people go. I think about Darius. I think about Artaxerxes, and they are even commended.
Ezra, chapter seven, commends Artaxerxes, pagans who did good on behalf of God's people. What about the city clerk in Ephesus, a pagan who quieted the rioters? What about Romans of high standing in Acts twenty three who protected Paul, and even the barbarians who showed unusual kindness to Paul in building a fire in Acts twenty eight to warm him? A man is is totally depraved. In the sense that he cannot do anything that is righteously good, or that is good toward God, or that is good as revealing God, but he can do a man kind of good.
But every time he does that, he proves that there is a law within him that points to that as good. Are the heathen lost? Yes. Can they claim ignorance? No.
First, because of creation, it is around them, and they can perceive within their own minds God in that creation. And secondly, because of their conduct, they prove that there's a law within them. This may shock you. Basically, if you look at it simply from the standpoint of general human good. Most people are outside the prisons, right?
It's the few that are inside. What does this mean? This does not mean that man is basically good; he is depraved. But there is in him a sense of rightness that keeps him from being as bad as he possibly could be, and that is the law of God within him.
Now, extending the thought, let's look at a third reason why the heathen are lost, and that is conscience. And this is part of that same concept in verse fourteen, but it's in verse fifteen. They not only reveal the work of the law within them by their conduct when they do naturally the things that are written, but they also reveal the law of God written in their hearts. When their conscience functions in bearing testimony, and stop there for a minute.
Now we all know what conscience is. The word simply means co-knowledge, and I guess we could say that it means co-knowledge with oneself. The etymology of the word basically comes. Whether it's in Greek or Latin or English, from the same root, the idea is to know along with. And conscience is sort of that thing in you that knows along with you what's right.
It refers to a person's inner sense of right and wrong, the moral consciousness that pronounces judgment on thoughts and attitudes and speech and deeds. You know, I remember reading about a tribe in Africa that had a very interesting process to determine who was guilty of something. When there was some stealing that had gone on in the tribe, they would line all of the men up because stealing was normally done by men, and they would go along and they would ask them if they did it, and they would say yes or no. And then they would, after having said it, ask them to stick their tongue out. At which time they took a hot knife and placed it on the tongue.
If there was saliva on the tongue, the knife would be removed without a problem. If there was no saliva on the tongue, the knife would stick and burn its way through their tongue. And they could always tell who the liar was because he had no saliva. What makes your saliva dry up when you do something wrong? There's a conscience in you.
There's a thought process in you that knows right and knows wrong, and deals with you when you violate it. It's it's like when you cheat, and you live in this constant state of fear of being found out. That's conscience. Conscience responds to the internal norm, and. I would say in the Christian, of course, conscience is tremendously intensified because you not only have that basic law within you, but you have also the law of Christ from His Word added to the normal in natural law, and the compounding of that even excites the conscience more to respond.
And Paul listened to his conscience several times. He said, "My conscience bears witness," didn't he? In other words, he was saying, "My conscience agrees with me." That I'm doing right, that my heart is pure. The Bible also suggests that your conscience can become scarred, and scar tissue has no feeling. That's why Paul in Romans tells us, "Do not violate your conscience.
Don't violate your conscience." In other words, he's talking about Christian liberty, and he says, "If you, if somebody tells you it's okay to do that, but your conscience says don't do that, then don't do it, even though it is okay. Because if you get in the habit of violating your conscience, you're going to you're going to scar something that you desperately need to protect you. It's like losing your your your sense of feeling. You know." I read a book about leprosy, and they have discovered that leprosy is not what they thought originally. People thought that when you got leprosy, your skin just kind of ate itself, and and eventually your extremities were just disappearing.
What they now know is that leprosy creates the absolute deadening of all sense, and you wear out your extremities. Because you can't feel anything, you rub your fingers off, or you rub your nose off. Because there's no feeling. That's what happens when conscience is scarred. And so Paul says, "Don't do that." Even the heathen have a conscience, but over a long period of time, they can dull that conscience.
But I don't think they can always obliterate it. I think it's there, telling them what is right and what is wrong. And I don't care if you're in a primitive society or any other one. You show me a person who's committed a crime, and they may do everything they can to justify that crime, but they're always looking like this to see who's coming after them, because they know. What's right and what's wrong?
Little children are the perfect illustration. Why do you think an ungodly family with an ungodly little kid, the kid does something wrong, and he comes back? His mother says, "Did you do it?" What's the first thing he does? He lies. Why?
Because he knows what he did was what was wrong, even though he maybe never did it before. There's a standard. His conscience tells him that the heathen are lost because of creation conduct conscience. Fourth, the heathen are lost because of contemplation. Here is another indicator of the lostness of the heathen: their thoughts are in the process of accusing or excusing one another.
In other words, there is in us the capacity to contemplate, or to reason, and to determine that what someone does is right or wrong. For example, a person without God, without Christ, without the Bible—here's about someone who has murdered a child. What is his reaction? Unless the person is totally at the extremity of vileness, he's going to say that's awful. He's going to accuse.
We got to find that person and do something to that person. Why do you think we have a punitive system in our society? Why do you think there are punitive systems in every society? Because men know what is right and wrong, they have the capacity in their minds to accuse or excuse. They know that's all right.
We can excuse that, but not this. The heathen do that. The sum of it is this: people, creation, conduct, conscience, contemplation, what they do, how they deal with the. Good and bad in their own life, and how they deal deal with it in the lives of others, indicates that they know the law of God as written in them.
Now, here is the most important thing I've said yet. The sum of it is this: if they live up to that much light, and they accept that much light. God will reveal to them the full light of Jesus Christ. I believe that with all my heart. You see, that's what it says in Acts seventeen.
He is not far from us if we would feel after Him. You see, if they would just take what they have and accept that. John seven seventeen. Mark it down. If any man wills to do my Father's will, he shall know of the teaching.
If the willing heart is there, he'll know. God will be fair. No favorites, but each is responsible for the light he has. Finally. There is a sixth principle of judgment.
Just going to mention: God judges by knowledge, by truth, by guilt, by deeds, by impartiality, and sixthly by motives. There's another dimension, and these all interface and overlap. They're not as distinct as I've made them in the outline, but they are elements of the act of judgment. God will judge on the basis not only of what a man's deeds are, but what his reasons were. Because you can falsify the deed, but you can't falsify the motive, right?
And so, verse sixteen says, "In the day when God shall judge the what secrets of men." Judgment, you see, will finally reach down into the secret place of motives, of motives. In First Chronicles twenty eight nine, it says, "And thou, Solomon, my son, know thou the God of thy father, and serve him with a perfect heart. Why? For the Lord searches all hearts and understands all the imaginations of the thoughts.
Solomon, my son, serve God from the heart, because God knows the heart." The psalmist said, "O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me. Thou understandest my thought afar off. In that marvelous one hundred and thirty ninth psalm, thou knowest my down sitting and mine uprising." There is not a word in my tongue, but Lord, Thou knowest it altogether. Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid Thine hand on me. Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit?
Whither shall I flee from Thy presence? If I ascend into heaven, Thou art there. If I make my bed in Sheol, Thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost part of the sea, even there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me, even the night shall be as light about me.
Yea, the darkness hideth not from Thee, but the night shineth as the day. The darkness and the light are both alike to Thee. In other words, there's nowhere I can go to escape. You know me deep inside. Jeremiah seventeen ten puts it this way: I, the Lord, search the heart; I test the mind, even to give to each according to his ways, according to the result of his deeds.
Yes, God judges deeds. Yes, He judges ways, but He judges the motive behind them as well. Jesus said three times in Matthew six, "The Father who sees in secret will reward you openly." Our inmost secrets may be hidden from human judgment; they are not hidden from God, and we will be judged for our motives. You either do what you do for the glory of God, or you do it for the glory of man. And it all comes to this, people.
It'll all be determined. Verse sixteen. In the day, the day, what day? The day when God shall judge. What day is that?
The day when He judges by Jesus Christ, the final day, the ultimate day, the Great White Throne, when all judgment is committed under Christ. In that glorious, climactic, culminating day, when the Lord Jesus Christ judges, all these criteria will be put. To use, and may I close with a look back at verse five. If your sin hasn't been dealt with before that day in the blood of Christ, if you haven't confessed Jesus as Lord and accepted His sacrifice on your behalf and His atonement and His payment for your sin, then you are treasuring up wrath. Against the day of wrath, there's going to be a pile that'll damn your soul.
And don't think it says at the end of verse three that thou shalt escape the judgment of God. Let's bow in prayer. Father, we know that someday the light of divine judgment will throw its beams to illuminate the remotest universe. We know that at that point souls will face the reality of judgment. They will walk, as it were, down a hall of mirrors.
Where every act of their earthly life on all sides is seen and reseen, and they'll be judged. Father, we thank you that in Jesus Christ we never need to face that day, because there is therefore now no judgment, no condemning judgment. To them who are in Christ Jesus, may it be, Lord, that no one in this place is outside of Christ, waiting for the explosion of the wrath of God. We know you'll judge. We shall not escape.
But we know that you've already judged Jesus Christ for the sins of those who put their faith in Him. That is our prayer. You're listening to Grace to You, the Bible teaching ministry of John MacArthur. John's current series is called "Without Excuse." Well, today John made a clear case that we would all be guilty before a holy God if not for the finished work of Jesus Christ. That is life changing truth from God's Word.
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