“There will be affliction and distress for every human being who does evil, first to the Jew, and also to the Greek; but glory, honor, and peace for everyone who does what is good, first to the Jew, and also to the Greek. For there is no favoritism with God. For all who sin without the law will also perish without the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

We love the concept of judgment for sin. If that sounds funny to say, allow me to clarify. We love the idea that people who have done what we recognize to be wrong will face the just consequences for their misdeeds. It doesn’t sound quite so bad when you put it that way, does it? In fact, if you recoiled a bit at the first statement, you may have found yourself nodding along in agreement with the second. That’s because, deep down, we love the concept of judgment for sin. There’s a reason for that: we were created in the image of a God who does too. Let’s talk about why judgment is a good thing, and the way God approaches it is best.

Our culture leaves us predisposed to think that God’s judgment is a bad thing. We are taught from almost the moment we are born that we should be able to have our environments finely tuned to our tastes and desires. Burger King’s company slogan aptly captures the zeitgeist of our society: Have it your way. We expect for things to be the way we want them to be. If they aren’t, we start looking for a way to adjust them to bring them into alignment with our expectations fairly quickly.

If you don’t like your job, find another one. If you don’t like your house, buy a new one. The same goes with your car. If a restaurant doesn’t satisfy us sufficiently, we can go somewhere else. If a particular product on the shelves at the store is not to our liking, there are dozens of other options we can choose from. And if we can’t find one on the shelves, we can order only from scores of other options beyond that. We want our thermostats set just right and our lighting at just the right color and brightness. We can adjust the softness or firmness as well as the temperature of our beds. Used to be, when you listened to the radio, you got whatever they played. Now, with the aid of various streaming services, you can play pretty much literally whatever you want to listen to depending on your mood. We even treat people as disposable.

The theme here is that, again, just like Burger King declares, we should be able to get what we want, when we want, the way we want. And there’s one more thing: whatever we want is okay. All of these things are just personal preferences, and no personal preference is necessarily right or wrong. They are all just that: personal preferences. If I like my bed soft, my thermostat cool, my music classical, my lighting moderate, my house modern, my car used, my cereal bran, my milk whole, my shower hot, my deodorant non-aluminum, and so on and so forth, there’s nothing objectively wrong about any of that. It just is. It’s me. And you can’t legitimately judge it.

The trouble with living in a world in which practically everything can be tuned to our tastes is that we start to let this mindset drift beyond the inane to the more significant. The more morally significant, that is. The mindset that I should be able to have what I want without any judgment from you gradually broadens to be one that I should be able to do what I want without any judgment from you.

What we quickly run into here is the fact that doing what we want without judgment from anyone else is pretty hard to pull off. The reason for this is that our desires can veer from the benevolent to the selfish and petty and hurtful-to-others remarkably quickly. When someone has done something hurtful to us, what we want is to respond in kind. If not in the moment, then we’ll store it up until we can even the score later. Or, if our offender is not in a position that allows us some kind of retribution, we’ll take out our frustration and angst on the next closest convenient target. Or perhaps we are trying to grab power for ourselves. If we imagine that power is a zero sum game, then grabbing that power is necessarily going to come at the expense of someone else. When we take power this way, we are going to hurt them. It could be that we have a physical desire that we want met. Sure, our tastes for meeting that desire have departed somewhat from the “normal” way that desire is met, but what is “normal” except someone else trying to force their preferences on us. If I want it this way versus that, who are you to judge me?

We live like there is no objective standard to which anyone can appeal to evaluate our moral choices. At least, we live that way until someone around us does something that violates the moral code we happen to have adopted for ourselves. In that moment, our first, instinctive cry goes something like this: “That’s not fair!” Or maybe this: “That’s not right!” What are we doing then? We are appealing to a standard we think should be applied more broadly than to merely our own moral choices. We are casting judgment on someone else’s moral choices.

So, to come full circle here, we don’t actually mind the concept of judgment at all. We simply want to be the ones in charge of doing the casting. And want to be the ones in charge of doing the casting because that way we can still have it our way. To put that same idea a bit more uncomfortably, that way we can excuse our choices that might possibly fall into the gray area of violating someone else’s moral expectations. To put that same idea even a bit more uncomfortably than that, we want to be God.

Given our comfort with judgment, and in spite of our strong preference for judgment to be solely tailored to our tastes, what we need here is an objective standard to which everyone can appeal at the same time. This will mean that we are occasionally going to fall short of it and be subject to judgment ourselves, but that’s the only way things will ever truly be fair for everyone. And that’s what we want, right? Fairness for all?

Ah, but this is where we run into another problem. In spite of clamoring for fairness for all people, that’s not really what we want. We want fairness for ourselves which is defined however we want to define it in a particular moment. If that happens to be for the benefit of some of the people around us, great, but that’s not our first concern. Our first concern is ourselves. We want fairness for us and everyone else can eat off of our leftovers. But if that really was how the world worked, the only possible outcome would be moral chaos and Nietzsche’s will to power in which the strongest get what they want and everyone else can get over it or get trampled. That’s a recipe for nothing but violence and injustice on an unimaginably large scale. That’s not a world anyone actually desires to live in.

No, the best possible world is one in which there is a clear and unyielding objective moral standard to which everyone is held accountable regardless of who they are or where they are from. We will not like it at times because it means we can’t have it fully our way. We’re not the ones who set or enforce the standard. But when the standard has been violated by someone else at our expense, it’s there for us to appeal to in our defense. And when this standard of judgment is paired with a Judge who is good and righteous and just, we can trust that all our appeals will eventually be satisfied properly.

This is what Paul is pointing the Jewish background believers in his audience to understand here. They had been raised to think that because of who they were, they were going to be held to a different standard than everyone else. As a result, they tended to be unfairly judgmental toward others with blind spots for their own faults and failings. Paul wanted them to understand that “there is no favoritism with God.” He will judge impartially, justly. Everyone gets held to the same standard: His righteousness.

This is inconvenient for our project of getting what we want all the time, but there’s not a better alternative. Every deviation from this approach leads unavoidably to chaos and brokenness and pain on a massive scale. God is just and the ultimate source of justice. You can look elsewhere, but you won’t find justice there. You’ll find nothing but personal preference rooted in selfishness. When we fall short of God’s standards, we will all be equally held accountable for that. When we keep God’s standards, we will all be equally rewarded for that.

The catch here, of course, is that all of us equally fall short of God’s standards. We fall short in different ways, but falling short is falling short. Falling short by what we determine to be just a little bit is different only in degree from falling short by what we determine to be a lot. The deceit there, though, is that our determination doesn’t matter. It’s not our standard. It’s His. As Paul would write elsewhere, if you are trying to live by the law, you’ve got to keep the whole thing or you are a lawbreaker. Period. How much of a lawbreaker you think you are is irrelevant.

Okay, but doesn’t this just mean that everyone is guilty and subject to judgment? Yep. Well then how do we fix this state of affairs? We don’t. God did. But it’s not time yet to talk about that. Stay tuned.