THE VIEW FROM OLYMPUS

Text: Romans 2:1-11
February 20, 2005, Dave Philips

 

 

            Let's take a look at where we are and where we've been in our study of Romans.

            First, we started our study on a note of tremendous confidence.  Paul reminds us that we Christians have nothing to be ashamed of in Jesus Christ.  We can be proud of the faith that we hold.  Even though we may not be the best Christians in the world, we can be proud of Jesus Christ.

            Second, Paul tells us that God is angry with the horrible inhumanity of man.  God is angry also with the insulting way that the human race has treated him.  God is angry, and justly so.  It would be monstrous of God not to be angry with the horrible things people do to each other, in the same way that it would be monstrous of us not to be angry about the holocaust or the massacre at My Lai.

            Third, Paul goes to work on paganism.  We noted that the attitude of the pagan toward God is like the attitude of the goldfish who sees nothing beyond its own aquarium.  When the pagan concludes that there is no God, there are no answers, and there are no consequences, the logical final conclusion is that there is no hope.  So, as the pagan gives up on God, God also, out of his gracious love, makes a temporary and strategic retreat.  God lets us have our way and allows us to stew in our own juice.  But in this gracious permission of God for us to do whatever we want to do, there is hope.  Without God there is no hope, but when we come to the end of our rope and hit rock bottom, we then can realize that rock bottom is also the Rock of Ages.

            Today as we begin Romans 2, we see Paul's last salvo against paganism.  I'm calling this sermon “The View From Olympus.”  Mt. Olympus was the home of the Greek gods.  From Olympus the gods could look down with disdain on the wretched human race.  Juvenal, the satirist, who lived at the time Paul wrote Romans, said, “The earth no longer brings forth any but bad men and cowards.  Hence, God, whoever He is, looks down, laughs at them and hates them.”¹

            And not only the Greek gods, the Greek intellectuals and philosophers also looked down with disdain on all the rest of the human race who did not have the privilege of being Greek intellectuals and philosophers.  Along with the intellectuals and philosophers, the average Greek also looked down on all other non-Greeks.  The Greek divided the world into two classes: Greeks and barbarians.  If you were not Greek, you could only be a barbarian.

            All cultures have this tendency.  One of my friends whose name is Martin Van Dyk knows that if you're not Dutch, you're not much.  The Englishman is known as a self-made man who loves his maker.  The Chinese through the ages have called themselves The Middle Kingdom.  This means that they occupy the center of the world, and everyone else is off center.  The Ethiopians’ name for themselves is “The People.”  They are the human race, no one else is quite human. 

            But Paul, after attacking the worst excesses of paganism, now turns his guns on the good pagans.  He says, “But you, O anthropos, have no excuse, whoever you are, when you pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things.”

            The Greek word anthropos is the generic word for a human being.  It is the universal term that a Greek would use for a member of the human race.  Paul is saying, “You, O human being, whoever you are, from whatever nation or culture, from whatever religion, have no right to sit in judgment on another.” 

            Remember, many Greeks would have agreed with Paul’s attack on paganism.  They would condemn the worst excesses of paganism in the same way that we might look down our noses at Hitler and Stalin as monsters, and on Madonna and Mick Jagger as total amoral idiots.  Some of us look down our noses at Bill Clinton or George Bush.  We see them as unscrupulous political animals without morals, without principles, who will do anything and say anything to keep their power and influence. 

            Don’t we?!  Don’t we do that?!  Oh, there might be one or two people in Grants who don’t do that.   Most of the people I talk to in Grants, however, look down their noses at the members of the opposite party.

            There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who divide the world into two kinds of people and the kind who don’t.  Paul forces us to take a look at ourselves, and our tendency to divide the world into two kinds of people.  I think that probably almost all human beings divide the world into two kinds of people.  Who are these two kinds of people?  Us and them!  We are the good guys, although we have a few faults, and we’re honest and humble about them, but we’re better than “them”.

            Somebody said that morality is that instinctive sense of what’s right and what’s wrong that tells some people how everyone else should behave.  And Oscar Wilde once remarked that morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.

            Our press and our media by and large operate with such assumptions.  You may never hear a reporter or TV anchorperson come right and say it, but don’t you get the impression that this is where they’re coming from? 

            Don’t you get the impression as you read between the lines as they report on the latest scandal, whether in the White House or on Wall Street or in Hollywood, that they’re telling you, “I’m better than they are.  I’m smarter than they are.  I’m in a position to sit in judgment on them.”  Some of our media stars, Rush Limbaugh, for example, are not even subtle about it!  Rush tells you without apology that he’s smarter and better than the people who disagree with him.  And I think he’s at least half serious!

            Perhaps you remember Donna Rice.  She was the Monica Lewinksy of a few years back when Gary Hart was running for president.  Her overnight visit with Gary Hart made her the favorite media punching bag for about a year and a half.  Words used by the press to describe Monica Lewinsky were once used about Donna Rice.  Donna Rice had the utmost sympathy with Monica Lewinsky when she was the media’s whipping girl and the press referred to her as a bimbo, obsessed, attention starved. 

            Donna Rice has gotten her life straightened out in the intervening years.  She is now a Christian and happily married.  Reflecting on her own notoriety, she remembers that the media never could find anything positive about her to report on.  No one reported, for example, that she was smart, a Phi Beta Kappa, no less.  No one took into account some very rough experiences she went through, such as losing her virginity at age 22 when she was raped on a date.

            What bothers Donna Rice these days is the way some of her fellow Christians react to the trials of a person like Monica Lewinsky.  “I would think,” says Donna Rice, “that Christians would be the first to realize that none of us is without sin and that we’re all susceptible to falling at some point.  If anyone should understand the sin nature and carnality — if they’ve ever read the Bible and looked at King David or Peter — it’s Christians.  But then again,” says Donna, “that old fallen nature keeps coming up and saying, ‘Oooh, I’m better than that person.  I didn’t make that mistake.’”

            Paul says, “No!”  We’re not better than Donna Rice, or Monica Lewinsky, or Bill Clinton, or George Bush, or Mick Jagger, or Madonna even though we may not have made the same mistakes they have made.  We are in no position to judge others, for we the judges are sinners just like the people we judge.

            We may sit on top of our own little Mount Olympus looking down on the rest of the world, but our standard is not our elevation on Mt. Olympus.  Not at all.  The only one who is in a position to judge is the One who sits far above Olympus, as Isaiah said, “It is [God] who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers . . . who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.”²

            Think of it in these terms.  God gives the human race an assignment.  If people want to be saved, they must swim from California to Hawaii.  Imagine the whole of humanity lining up on the beach in California ready to swim to Hawaii (that shouldn’t be too hard to imagine for anyone who’s ever seen the Labor Day crowd on Will Rogers Beach in Santa Monica).  Some of the people start out and drown immediately.  They can’t swim.  Others are stronger.  They manage to swim a mile or even five miles before they succumb and drown.

            But imagine you’re the world’s champion distance swimmer.  You plunge into the surf enthusiastically, and soon you leave the lesser swimmers behind.  You swim ten, then twenty, then thirty miles.  Maybe you manage fifty miles or more.

            But eventually you, too, will succumb.  Hawaii is just too far.  And can you imagine yourself saying to yourself as you sink beneath the waves, “Ha ha!  I’m so much better than all those wimps”?

            But the assignment was to get to Hawaii!  The bottom line is you didn’t make it!  So you’re really in the same category as the person who perished in the breakers on the beach.             So, says Paul, whoever you are, whether a burned out pagan who thinks there is no God, there are no rules, there are no consequences, — or whether you’re a respectable pagan who lives a basically ethical life, at least by human standards, and avoids getting your name in the paper for embezzling or cheating on your taxes  —   or whether you’re a born again Christian who has never committed a crime of any sort who tithes and who’s in church every Sunday of the year  —  you have no excuse whoever you are  — when you judge another.

            That sneaky tendency we all have to divide the world into two kinds of people and to claim publicly  —  or tell ourselves in private — that we’re on the good side of the divide is one more piece of evidence that you are without excuse before God. 

            Are you getting the message?  Some people say, “The problem with you Christians is that you think you’re better than everybody else.”  And we say, “No, no, that’s not true.”  But isn’t it true?  Isn’t it even a little bit true?  Paul would say so. 

            And now let me tell you something about myself.  When I get through telling all of you that you have no ground for feeling smug about how good you are, I catch myself saying to myself, “My goodness, I’m really smart for knowing all this!  I’m quite a bit smarter than they are!”  You see how subtle this kind of pride is?  You’ve got the tendency to pat yourself on the back and look down on the other person, I’ve got the tendency to pat myself on the back and look down on the other person, and none of us has any good reason to pat ourselves on the back or to look down on anybody.

            I remember hearing Gert Behanna, a marvelous, bright, articulate recovering alcoholic say, “When I became a Christian I developed a whole new list of Christian sins.  When I was a pagan, I used to look down on people.  When I became a Christian, I started looking down on people who look down on people.”

            All of us, even the best of us, need the free gift of God’s grace in Jesus Christ, because none of us lives a good enough life to earn it.

            We’re going to be taking a look  at the problem religious people have in understanding God’s grace in a couple of weeks.  In the meantime take comfort from the gospel.  In the midst of the worst news about our hopeless condition without God, we see the bright light of the gospel.  God loves us.  He loved us before we had any inkling of his existence.  He loves us even when we’ve turned our backs on him.  He loves us when we’re self righteous and judgmental.  He loves us when we’re strong enough to swim farther toward Hawaii than anyone else, and he loves us if we take a few faltering steps and collapse in the breakers on the California shore.

            I’ve heard that in the north of Germany where things are more ordered and formal that people will say of a huge problem, “The situation is serious, but not hopeless.”  But in the romantic south of Germany where people are more easy going, it’s the other way round: people say, “The situation is hopeless, but not serious.”

            Paul lets us know as he shows us human nature that the situation is hopeless, but it is not serious.  God knows what to do about our hopeless situation.  He has sent us Jesus not to teach us how we may swim to Hawaii but to provide us with the boat that will get us there.  He himself is that boat, and when we stop trusting our own efforts to get to heaven and climb aboard, we discover that heaven is where Jesus is, and we’ve arrived at our destination before we ever got started.