“But if our unrighteousness highlights God’s righteousness, what are we to say? I am using a human argument: Is God unrighteous to inflict wrath? Absolutely not! Otherwise, how will God judge the world?” (CSB – Read the chapter)

The picture of God as judge is not a popular one nowadays. This wasn’t always the case. The pre-modern world didn’t have much of a problem with it at all. Our being repulsed by the idea is a consequence of modern and postmodern philosophical movements over the last roughly 200 years changing the way we think about ourselves and right and wrong and God more generally. As we work through Paul’s concluding argument in his grand presentation of the hard news of the Gospel in order to set up the good news (which we’ll finally get to next week), he starts things off by highlighting some potential reactions to the argument he has been making. We dealt with the first of these last week. Let’s take on the second today: Is God right to issue judgment against sin?

Out of the gate here, let’s clarify that this is a bigger question than we are going to be able to come even close to comprehensively answering in a single blog. But we can at least think through some of the matter here. Paul’s potential objection here flows smoothly from the last one. The last one was the question of whether or not our unfaithfulness could somehow disrupt or nullify God’s faithfulness. Can we mess up God’s plans? Paul’s response was that of course that wasn’t possible. God’s perfect righteousness combined with His omnipotence means that He is able to accomplish His plans just fine regardless of what we do. He’s big enough to redeem and restore our brokenness and to use it to accomplish His ends.

This, however, leads into the next objection Paul highlights. If our unfaithfulness and unrighteousness just serve to draw attention to God’s righteousness, is He wrong to be angry about our sin? “Is God unrighteous to inflict wrath?” That is, if our sin just makes God’s righteousness stand out all the more, then why does He get so upset about our sin? We’re really doing Him a favor, aren’t we?

I remember when I was little I had done something wrong that resulted in my losing TV privileges for a week. I couldn’t begin to tell you what it was anymore. But I do remember that on the Saturday morning of my punishment period, I had gotten up early – earlier than the rest of the family – like I always did. I went downstairs to our family room. All of my toys were down there…but so was the TV. And I always watched my Saturday morning cartoons. That was the golden era of Saturday morning cartoons. I don’t think I tried to resist the temptation very long at all. I flipped on the TV while no one else was awake.

A few minutes later, my dad came down and caught me in the act of defying my punishment. He took the typical parenting approach of asking me what I was thinking. My mental wheels started whirring and out popped an answer. I knew that I watched too much TV generally, and so this punishment was really good for me. In violating my punishment, I was really doing them and me a favor because they were just going to extend its duration which was going to be good for me in the long run. I don’t honestly remember what came next beyond my turning the TV off for that morning. Either way, my thinking in that moment wasn’t so different from that of Paul’s hypothetical interlocutor here.

The argument Paul is anticipating here is wrong and on a couple of different fronts. Paul highlights one of them in his response to the argument in v. 6. “Absolutely not! Otherwise, how will God judge the world?”

As a fun aside, the phrase “absolutely not” there is a translation of the Greek phrase me gnoito. It’s pronounced “may g-noi-to.” It’s one of the strongest negations the Greek language had to offer. Translating it as “absolutely not” or “by no means” as it appears in some translations really doesn’t capture the rhetorical strength of the expression. A more colloquial translation that gets closer to the full meaning would be to insert your favorite curse word followed by no. That kind of an expression wouldn’t get past the editors of the various Bible translations, though, so we’re stuck with “absolutely not.” In any event, Paul disagrees with the argument. A lot.

God’s righteousness may be highlighted by our unrighteousness, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that He is still just and the rightful judge of the earth that He created. In fact, God’s justice is part of His righteousness. If He just gave up punishing sin because it made Him look good, then it wouldn’t really be right to call it sin anymore. If promoting God’s righteousness is a good thing, and if sin only promoted God’s righteousness, then sin would be a good thing. But if sin is a good thing, then it’s not really sin at all. It’s just a good thing. It would be an act of righteousness, not unrighteousness. And if it were all an act of righteousness, would it still highlight God’s righteousness?

The logic to this potential counterargument falls apart pretty quickly. It’s little more than a bad attempt to justify ourselves. That is, the whole argument is rooted in a mindset of self-righteousness. Self-righteousness can’t highlight God’s righteousness. It’s disconnected from His righteousness entirely by definition. God is righteous and a righteous judge. Sin is unrighteousness that will be dealt with justly. If it wasn’t, then God isn’t really righteous after all.

The other major flaw in the counterargument here is that God’s righteousness isn’t just about Him. Definitionally it’s not. Righteousness is being right with God and with others. God’s good with Himself. That’s obvious. But He’s also good with us. And part of His being good with us is that He loves us. Love informs His righteousness and His righteousness motivates His love. Because of this, even though our sin might make Him look better by contrast, His looking good isn’t His only goal. He wants for us to not be caught in the grip of sin and the destruction it invariably unleashes in our lives and in the lives of the people around us.

To put that another way, if God refrained from judging sin because it served to highlight His righteousness, this would result in our not seeing sin as sin any longer. Indeed, if we aren’t told something is wrong, we tend to assume it is right. But regardless of what we think about sin – living in ways that are out of sync with God’s character as a result of our open rebellion against His sovereignty – it’s still going to have consequences for us and the people around us. If God refrained from judging sin because it made Him look good, He would be leaving us in the misery of sin rather than helping us to be freed from it. That’s not loving. It is also not righteous. That is, if God doesn’t judge the world, then He’s not really righteous at all. Again, the argument falls apart.

God’s righteousness leads Him to love us. It led Him to love us so much that He laid down His life for us so that we could experience true righteousness for ourselves. In order for us to experience this grace, though, we have to know and recognize our sin, our unrighteousness. God’s judgment leads to that end. His judgment, in this sense, is driven by His love. The more we lean into this, the better.