Badge of honour

For merely listening to the law doesn’t make us right with God. It is obeying the law that makes us right in his sight (Romans 2:13).

Read Romans 2:12–24

My drive to church takes me through town, past the big Downtown shopping centre. I notice how incredibly busy the mall is on Sunday mornings, and I often have some pretty judgemental thoughts, like how godless and consumer-driven people can be. Do none of them go to church? I think about how most people have no idea about God or Jesus, or worship, or truth or morality … You get the idea.

In today’s reading, Paul turns the mirror onto his own people, the Jews. He’s pretty confronting.

You think that because you Jews know God’s law, his Torah given to you at Sinai through Moses, you are superior to the rest of humanity. You boast of your relationship to God based on having the law. You reckon it makes you a guide for the blind and ignorant, a light for people lost in darkness. You’re certain that God’s law gives you complete knowledge and truth (Romans 2:19,20).

But, says Paul, if you are relying on the law for your good standing before God and others, by heck, you’d better be keeping it! You’d better not be stealing or committing adultery, because under that very law, you’re condemned. Those who live by the law will be judged and die by the law!

Worse, if you don’t keep the law you boast about, you are bringing God – the source of that law – into disrepute. Gentiles speak ill of God when they see how hypocritical his people are.

Paul is saying that his fellow Jews were wearing God’s law like a badge of honour. Just having it made them feel superior, smug, spiritually proud and overconfident. A lot like me looking at all those Downtown shoppers.

I wonder what our ‘badges of honour’ are. What do we boast about and rely on for our spiritual standing? Having good theology? My church lineage or family name? Maybe it’s our performance: my regular church attendance, my service in the congregation. These are all good gifts. But if I’m relying on these things for my spiritual standing, then I must do them perfectly.

And, of course, none of us can.

Thank God, ‘a righteousness from God, apart from the law’ has been made known. And ‘this righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe’ (Romans 3:21,22). We can put down all our badges of honour and simply hold on to Jesus.

Jesus, only Jesus – he’s my salvation, my hope, my only badge of honour. Thank God I am hidden in you, Lord Jesus, through my baptism. Keep me holding on to you alone. Amen.

Pauline lives in sight of the ranges in the beautiful Manawatu region of New Zealand with her husband, Roger, and two cats. She leads a small Bible College there and offers spiritual direction and supervision to people from a wide range of backgrounds and denominations.