NOTES for Rom 2:3-4
Reasoning about judgment and condemnation, Paul proceeds from the same thing as the Savior Himself, who called His followers to refrain from judging and condemning their neighbors. The point here is not that we are unable to see another person's sin. The point is that none of us, as human beings, is able to evaluate another person's life in all its fullness. One of the great teachers of the Torah, Hillel, who lived roughly two centuries before the Savior's coming, said: do not judge your neighbor until you yourself have been in his situation. He was speaking only about evaluating concrete actions, but even here he was very cautious and understood that, for an adequate evaluation, one must know the situation in all its fullness and from within. And Christianity is the life of the Kingdom and life in the Kingdom.
And the judgment of which Paul speaks, like the one of which Jesus Himself speaks, is judgment in the Kingdom over an inhabitant of the Kingdom. Absolute judgment. It cannot exist apart from Christ Himself, and even then only at the end of time. For only He alone can see the whole life of a person in all its fullness, and not before the moment when the person himself puts the final point in it; and the final point in any case will be put no earlier than the day of the Last Judgment.
So it follows that any other evaluation of a person's concrete act in one situation or another can be only an evaluation, not a judgment. A qualification of a crime, if it is truly a crime, but not a verdict. This is also because the principle "be in your neighbor's skin before judging" remains in force for Christians. But in this case it means not only being in his situation with respect to a concrete life circumstance, but also being in the fullness of the life of the Kingdom in order to evaluate everything adequately: after all, the issue is an evaluation of a person living in two worlds, in the world not yet transfigured and in the Kingdom at the same time. We usually have no problems with the untransfigured world, but problems may well arise with the fullness of the Kingdom.
The principle here is simple: let the one who is without sin judge. Otherwise the one judging will himself be judged according to the logic of the fallen world, not according to the logic of the Kingdom. The very world where there is no forgiveness for consciously committed sin, but only eternal punishment for it. The point here is not some vindictiveness in God, but that, choosing one or another point of view, one or another way of looking at a person and his life, we thereby choose the measure of the fullness of our own existence. Or, more precisely, having chosen one or another measure of the fullness of our own existence, we decide to evaluate in one way or another the actions of those nearby. And precisely this choice becomes the choice of destruction or salvation. It determines whether in the end we find ourselves in the Kingdom or in the "outer darkness."