Or, Ambition, (Affliction), and Accurate AccountsRomans 2:5-11November 14, 2021 Lord’s Day Worship Sean Higgins

Introduction

When I was a new Kuyperian I was a naïve Kuyperian. By Kuyperian I mean someone who acknowledges that Jesus is Lord of all and that Jesus is interested in it all. This means that sermons and reading Scripture aren’t the only spiritual or significant things. God can be served and glorified by any lawful activity, by every good work done by faith. All vocations, and side projects and leisure time, has meaning before the Lord, not just so-called vocational ministry.

I was naïve to think that every Christian would be relieved, even excited, about this reality. What I thought would open skylights for sun and windows for fresh breeze became a weight of glory too burdensome. Some Christians prefer a more manageable guilt over not reading their Bibles as much as they could so long as they could consider the rest of the day their own. It was better for the rest of the day to be mundane than to think of it with eternal meaning, as something that the Lord cared about. “Can’t I just listen to country music on my commute without all this pressure?” You might be able to keep the radio on, but you can’t turn the reality off; God minds (see Proverbs 15:3).

Whether or not we want God’s attention, He sees, and unlike men, He sees the heart of man. Google may have a record of every place on the internet you’ve visited (and every place your mobile device has gone), but God has a record of that PLUS every word you’ve ever spoken (see Matthew 12:36-37).

I’ve been reading about digital data in a couple places, about how words such as exponential and logarithmic aren’t really sufficient to cover the explosive expansion of data day over day. I’ve been reading about the blockchain as a way to capture and even certify accuracy, for financial transactions and for events. It’s referred to as the “ledger of record,” with Who-What-When fixed (see here), and it’s expanded my imaginative boundaries. Mostly, these thoughts have increased my awe at God’s omniscience. Algorithms/AI/Big Tech will always be impersonal, finite, and always only be a program dependent on a programmer. AI will never offer glory to those who serve it. God is not the Great Server in the Sky, He is Lord in heaven and of the Cloud. He does not miss anything; “God will judge the righteous and the wicked” (Ecclesiastes 3:17).

The fact that men can’t help themselves from judging incriminates them, yes, but it connects to the greater reality that we all know judgment is inevitable. The fact that men keep doing what they condemn, that they keep disobeying the truth, is an investment in their coming judgment.

Invested Judgment (verses 5-8)

In verse 4 Paul referred to the riches of God’s kindness. God has a treasury of responses to draw from, an arsenal of patience and mercy and minutes. Here is another treasury, where man heaps up a pile with daily deposits.

But you are treasuring up wrath to yourself according to your stubbornness and hardness of heart on the day of wrath and revelation of righteous-judgment of God.

The key word is wrath, and the main idea is storing up to realize later. God’s wrath has actually been the key word since Romans 1:18, but in most of chapter 1 it referred to God’s abandoning wrath, an expression of judgment where God gives men over to their lusts (1:24-32). He also lets men loose in their litigiousness, as they compare and condemn one another (2:1-4). That they dispute with each other and make all their petty decrees demonstrates that they know judgment is deserved. Though they know better, they keep doing the things that deserve judgment.

It’s their stubbornness (σκληρότης, only found here in the NT, so we diagnose arteriosclerosis, “hardening of the arteries,” which derives from this word, so Paul describes a sort of “spiritual sclerosis”, the “ha[...]