Romans 2:4-16

⁴Think about this. God is very good to you, he doesn’t easily get angry with you, but he waits for you. You know God is good like that, don’t you? He is good to you. He tries to get you to come back to him, and stop doing bad things. So don’t turn your back on him.

⁵If you think you will never turn around and come back to God, you just make things worse for yourself. One day you will see him get really angry with you. On that day he will judge everybody properly and fairly.

⁶God will give each of us the right pay for whatever we have done.

⁷Some people keep on doing good things, and later God will be good to them. They are the people that want to please God. They listen to him and they do good things so that he will be happy with them. Later he will give them life that never ends.

⁸But he will get really angry with selfish other people that don’t want to know the true story but just want to do bad things.

⁹And God will not treat one kind of people any better than all the others. It will be the same for Jewish people as it will be for those people that are not Jewish. God will punish everyone that does bad things, whether they are Jewish people or not. They will all get very big trouble anyway. But God will do good to those that do good things, whether they are Jewish people or not. God will make them great anyway. They will feel really good and everybody will respect them.

¹²God gave the law to the Jewish people, so they know that law, and whenever they do wrong God will punish them the way that law says. And the same too for people that are not Jewish, whenever they do wrong he will punish them.

¹³It doesn’t matter whether you know that law or not, if you do good things God will tell you, “You are all right.”

¹⁴There are people that aren’t Jewish, but they do good things just like the law says. They don’t have that law but they know in their minds what is right and what is wrong.

¹⁵They show that God wrote his law inside them. They feel bad whenever they do something that is wrong, but sometimes they do something that is right, and it makes them feel good.

¹⁶God sees everything that everybody does and everything that everybody thinks. Nobody can hide anything from him. One day God will get Jesus Christ to judge everybody about these things. This is the message that I tell everybody.