The apocalyptic imagery is
concerned with those who are brought before God at the final and ultimate
judgment of humanity, when each one is rewarded according to their response
to—whether they have chosen to ignore or endorse—the divinely embedded
knowledge that they have been given. Those who have ignored it are the focus of
much of the discussion here, where Paul makes clear that their reward is
clearly condemnation, because they have acted upon their ignorance and
disregard in wilfully inverting divine moral values. The wonder, according to
Paul, is that God has not acted sooner for those who have been accumulating
wrath for the day of that revelation. However, Paul notes that God’s
graciousness has been extended to allow for repentance. Those who repent are
the ones whom Paul addresses further in the letter when he articulates what it
means to be justified, be reconciled, and live the life of the Spirit (and whom
he is addressing already as his actual addresses in the letter to the Romans).
However, here he anticipates this life in the Spirit by noting that there are
‘those who seek glory and honor and immortality’ (Rom. 2.7). These are the very
kind of qualities that Paul has depicted earlier as representative of the
divine nature (e.g. glory and immortality; Rom. 1.23). These qualities
characterize those who have repented of their inversion (note that repentance
in Rom. 2.4 comes before depiction of judgment in Rom. 2.5) and have sought to
restore or retain those characteristics of God. They are the ones who are then
rewarded with glory and honor and peace (peace is mentioned here in
anticipation of Rom. 5.1 and Romans 9-11, that is, reconciliation). Thus,
‘evil’ is that some people do is not a single evil thing, or even a series of
particular evil things, but the life of unrepentant evil that inverts divine
values and ‘good’ is not any particular good action, but the good of having
heeded the embedded knowledge of God in repentance and then appropriately lived
life according to the knowledge. These are not hypothetical alternatives,
but, for Paul, the lived-life realities of the repentant or unrepentant person
(including those of broader humanity who thought they were qualified to pass
judgment on others), for both Jews and Gentiles alike. (Stanley E. Porter, The
Letter to the Romans: A Linguistic and Literary Commentary [New Testament
Monographs 37; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2015], 75, emphasis in bold
added)
