⁵ But if our unrighteousness demonstrates the righteousness of God, what shall we say? The God who inflicts wrath is not unrighteous, is He? (I am speaking in human terms.) ⁶ May it never be! For otherwise, how will God judge the world?

Questions continue to flow as the apostle is on a roll. Although Paul had begun using questions in chapter 2, in this chapter he begins to provide the anticipated answers, most of which begin with the same “mē gnoito” (“May it never be!”). Notice in this passage, he is “speaking in human terms.” In other words, he says, “Follow closely what I am doing; I am asking this question from a human perspective. I am meeting you, my reader, where you are in how you think about these things.”

The apostle had just made the point in the previous two verses that the unfaithfulness of the Jews supported the truth that God is righteous. If that is so, then aren’t the Jews really doing God a favor? Haven’t they created the opportunity for Him to show what a righteous God He is, that even the Jews don’t even come close to His standard? That would seem to be the logical human way of understanding this.

Spelling out His Law in detail did not mean God was making it easier to attain to the required level of righteousness; it simply pointed out how difficult, even impossible, for anyone—even the Jews, who had God’s Law—to be righteous. This is a theme Paul develops more fully as he goes along. But more to the point of this verse, the human line of thinking calls into question God’s moral right to judge us humans! For if the Jews’ unfaithfulness somehow challenges the notion that God is righteous, then God can be challenged for being hypocritical for judging anyone, if in fact, He is not absolutely righteous Himself. He would have no standing to objectively and righteously judge.

The fallacy is that we cannot project human behavior onto God, no matter how humanistic our tendencies may be. Contemporary philosophers want to convince us that our understanding of God depends completely on our perceptions of God, and therefore we cannot know Him objectively or with any considered confidence. From their viewpoint, we can only know Him in human terms. The apostle Paul refutes this notion categorically. In fact, our human thinking leads to confusion and contradictions. The book of Romans faces us up to such limited thinking, logical as it may seem to us in human terms. Without submission to the one true God, there is no logically consistent alternative, and people must live with such contradictions. But with God all things come clearly into the light and begin to make sense.

Lord, I want to trust in You and not on my own understanding (Proverbs 3:5).