Read
Rom 1:18-24 --- and let the reading stop there for today.
Many portions
of the Word of God speak of God’s wrath. But what you just read
is more than just another one of them. This is more, and different.
The Scriptures prior to Romans reveal to us an awful lot about
God’s wrath. But Paul covers new ground, never covered before.
It’s the fullest statement in the Bible on why God’s wrath is coming
upon all mankind; and the most ingenious statement in the Bible
about how God’s wrath smites mankind. And sometimes we’re getting
a smiting when we don’t even know it’s happening – and that’s scary.
Paul pens a brilliant
analysis of the situation of mankind. And understanding Rom 1 will
help you understand some of your own personal history better; it
tells us a great deal about men who will not come to Christ. And
it really explains a lot about our world. It explains the culture
you live in, and it even explains to us more than we could ever
learn about other cultures, even by studying them! Diverse cultures
of the world that you’ll never have opportunity to visit – these
verses give us understanding of them from the vantage point of
God. Not from the vantage point of studied expertise or human experience,
but factors revealed to us by God.
One thing you
can say about the Bible: it is relentlessly God-centered in its
approach to subjects. No matter what the Bible brings up, it keeps
taking us back to how everything relates to God, how everyone relates
to God, how everyone’s situation relates to God. And that gives
all the Bible says a perspective of lofty heights and a climate
of seriousness, in ways found in no other book. After all, think
about what we just read, and then ask these questions:
-- Can it be that only men who have heard the gospel of Christ are
accountable to God? You mean
others are not?
-- Is there any valid reason for men who never heard the gospel of
Christ, but who relentlessly do evil,
should not be answerable to God and punished by God for relentless
pursuit of evil?
-- If men are already under the judgment of God, before they hear of
His Son, ask this: how does that
change how you witness? You’re about to find out.
I read through v 24 for an important reason. It is the first verse
in Romans to use the phrase “God gave them over” or “God gave them
up”, as some put it. Sometimes we hear, “Have it your way”. What loaded
words! Words that can mean we surrender and you win. Or, words that
can be a service, like Burger King’s little jingle. Or, they can be
the words of a sentencing – you are going to experience the full consequences
of your choice. “Have it your way.”
When God decides
to let a sinner “have it your way”, it’s the beginning of the worst
that can happen. God’s wrath does not always give men their own
way; but His wrath at its worst does: give men the full measure
of what they wanted, with none of its ramifications left out.
V 24 is the first
of 3 places in this chapter to say those foreboding words, “God
gave them over.” Here is a whole section about God leaving men
in their sin, just as they are, because that’s what they want:
to be left alone to sin as they please. At first, it doesn’t sound
like such a bad thing. But it doesn’t face up to the fact that
God has not merely told us the “thou shalts” and the “thou shalt
nots”, but He has given us reasons for them, which even have to
do with our own safety and self-preservation. It’s like leaving
a toddler in a high-rise apartment building freedom to walk where
he pleases. Or like letting a paraplegic freedom to swim where
he pleases. The outcome of such freedoms is frighteningly predictable.
We’re in an undeniably
painful section of Romans – probably the most painful section of
all 16 chapters, which should be a relief to you to know ahead
of time. In a book that speaks so much of grace, Paul decided to
get the necessary preliminary out of the way early, and show men
how great this grace is which we don’t deserve, by showing us what
we do deserve. And so we talked last week about
1) The Reasonable Reality of God’s Wrath in the World – v 18
It makes all the sense in the world (if we can put it that way) to
say that God has a decisive and stable anger at sinners. Not a reactive
outburst of anger, but a decisive, calm, settled anger. And I said
it this way last week:
When you think
men are good, the wrath of God sounds all wrong – it sounds outrageous.
What right does He have to be angry with us when we’re good people
who just mess up a little once in a while?
When you admit
you’re a sinner, the wrath of God can seem inappropriately overdone.
But when you
understand how sinful you are, the wrath of God appears as part
of God’s goodness. He wouldn’t be good if He didn’t have wrath.
Men can never
righteously complain that God is wrathful at unrighteousness and
ungodliness. If God does not return to sin what it has coming,
who will? God is certainly the best qualified. And then we talked
about:
2) The Reasonable
Reasons for God’s Wrath in the World – vv 18-23
There are many reasons – we have given Him many! The first one Paul
names is in v 18:
A) Unbelief,
Stage One: Suppressing the Truth – vv 18-20
Why is God wrathful towards men? Because He has so kindly revealed
a great deal of His goodness and glory to men, and they hate it. And
we established that, the peoples of the world actually have enough
knowledge of God to be judged for refusing to obey what they know.
They are suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. We all have. And
so we saw that condemnation is the result for anyone who sinfully rejects
what he knows of God and persists in sin: which all men are doing.
Now, we must
not overstate this and say, as some do, that God has shown everyone
the gospel of Christ. There is no Scripture which says that we
can all see the gospel or that the gospel is obvious to us. No,
the good news that Christ the Son of God came into the world to
die for sinners, that His death was an atonement presented to God,
and that He rose again in a way which gives us new life, is not
one of the truths which is obvious from creation. “How shall they
know without a preacher?”, Paul asks. That has to be revealed in
spoken words. But other things are obvious, and because of those,
men are without excuse for rebellion.
God has shown
men enough about Himself that we know better than to pursue evil,
and know enough to have no excuses when we face judgment. And the
“enough” is this: we innately know there is a God and we innately
know things about God. The word “evident” in v 19 means, easily
seen. It means this:
You do not have
to be an intellectual to see that God created! You have to work
very hard at pretending to be intellectual to deny it. You have
to put a lot of purposeful, creative thought into seeking alternative
explana-tions to what’s obvious – what’s “evident” – to get to
where you really think it’s a profound idea worthy of entertaining
that there is not a God, or that God is not the explanation for
this universe. And you really have to be hardened to believe it’s
the only respectable explanation and to arrive at a position of
contempt for the obvious explanation. That’s why Paul calls it
“suppressing the truth.” It’s the ultimate living in “denial”.
Other Scriptures
hint at this. Eccl 3 calls it God placing “eternity in their heart.”
Heb 2 calls it men “living in the fear of death all their lives”.
Because they know there is a God and that death is His appointment
for rebellious sinners.
But Paul doesn’t
stop at saying that God made Himself “evident within them”, v 19
– he tells us what evident information about God is actually reaching
our awareness and impacting our conscience, v 20. Here is what’s
actually reaching us: His invisible attributes of eternal power
and His Divine nature. Let’s talk about each of those. Just so
long as you understand that, Paul’s point here is that God has
made us in such a way as we respond to the obvious evidences seen
in creation. 2 separate thoughts: He made Himself obvious; and
we aren’t missing it, we’re getting it. Because he says they “have
been clearly seen” and are “being understood through what has been
made.” It’s the difference between saying to a student “The lesson
is clear and you ought to understand” and “I can see that you do
understand.” (in actions, responses, expression: illustrate this?)
“His eternal
power”
I have sat on a dark night in the grass with fellow-believers, looking
up at the skies, and laughed together about how all that we see just
happened to be, by chance. Have you ever done that? Just joke about
it because, as one has said, it’s easier to laugh than to cry. Johann
Kepler said “the undevout astronomer is a madman.” – insane. Much learning
hath made thee mad. As a friend of mine has said, “You have to go to
college for a really long time to believe some of the things men think
up.” That may sound offensive to those in college, but everyone (and
it’s not just becoming old fogies that makes us say this) everyone
in the room who once was in college and now is an adult will tell you
that, it’s possible to invest so much time into the study of ideas
and theories, speculating and contemplating that, your mind’s eye stops
seeing what’s obvious – what’s evident. It takes major effort to stop
believing that “the heavens declare the glory of God”, Ps 19:1.
I come to my
seat in the church and find a sketch like this, with several crayon
colors, and I know that a child has drawn it for me. No one has
ever found such a drawing and asked himself first, “Could this
be accidental?” (get the one by Laura Ferguson off the fridge?).
I come home and
find a beautiful painting of 19th-century art on the table, and
I know that Mrs. Whitney has designed another cover for one of
our books, in about 10 hours of skillful oil-color painting.
I leave home
for a lunch date and come home in 1 hour to find my house entirely
gone and the most magnificent palace in the world built there instead!
– and I know that someone with astonishing, unnatural power has
been there! A miracle-worker has been present, to accomplish such
a feat in one hour! These things are obvious! It cannot be missed.
Go back to the
first one: let the wisest evolutionary scientist in the world come
home from work one day, and find no more than a single, very uncomplicated
crayon line scrawled on his fine mahogany desk, and if his child
dares to suggest it was an accident, he will be in trouble. Because
it’s just not credible.
But people you
know – so now we’re not talking hypothetically or generally, about
scientists or about how “mankind” is! People you know – lots of
them! – look at a vast universe in which there was once nothing
and now there are huge planets and vast stars, rotating in orderly
patterns, living creatures of thousands of species, majestic mountains,
rivers 1,000 miles or more in length and seas in which you could
lose a continent, a sun shining on it with enough force from 93,000,000
miles away to keep it warm and lit – and he says “I know it was
all by accident and you’re a fool if you differ with me” – to encounter
that and decide that no personality with intelligence or power
was involved, makes the words “the fool says there is no God” the
grandest massive understatement! There has to be moral insanity
behind that. To call this accidental or evolutionary.
And that “moral
insanity” is what Paul labels in v 18, “suppressing the truth.”
And that’s just one truth suppressed. The other is:
“Divine nature”
His God-hood! The fact that He is God! Men know that it’s not someone
of ordinary power at work behind this. Not someone like themselves.
So not only do they know that the source is not accidental or random;
they know it’s personal. And that the Person is majestically mighty,
toweringly so.
Now, do a little
hard thinking on v 20 with me. When v 20 says they “have been clearly
seen” and are “being understood through what has been made”, we
can say this much: Paul either means that:
1) All men are seeing it and getting it, or he means
2) So many men see it and get it, that anyone who doesn’t, could get
it and should.
Either way, men
are without excuse. For as long as there has been a creation, facts
about God that would have been invisible and unknowable, are clearly
seen. Unless God had made what He made, chances are, we would not
know that an Almighty, Divine Being with such immense power existed.
But He did. So we know.
So v 20’s final
words are the line of a new threshold: “so that they are without
excuse.” People doing wrong tend to seek an excuse; some grounds
to say, “But I didn’t know!” or “I wasn’t sure what to do with
that. How was I to know there was a God? Who can really tell?”
The witness of creation and the responder of conscience say “Come
on!” They allow no excuses. Creation is the mailman and conscience
is the mailbox. And the mail is in the box. Together, the team,
renders excuses intolerable. And it makes God’s wrath more than
reasonable, because men know better than to think in the hostile
ways they do about God and to live as they do in resistance and
rebellion to God.
When printed out: is this paragraph necessary or redundant?
Men don’t refuse to serve God because of insufficient evidence that
they ought to. The reason is the personal hostility. It’s the enmity.
There is no innocent ignorance; there is guilty knowledge. So, when
men are not persuadable by the things that are made that there is a
God and that they should not live wickedly but righteously, their slip
is showing. They show their cards. They don’t want to believe. And
no amount of evidence would change their minds, because personal hostility
is not overcome by evidence.
Bertrand Russell
– philosopher, logician, mathematician, prolific writer – is without
excuse when his intellect and scholarship make him cavalierly dismiss
“Argument from Design” in 3 paragraphs. The L.A. cabbie who hasn’t
read anything deeper than the Sunday comics in years is without
excuse too. The Zulu tribal warrior who doesn’t even know writing
exists and never heard of a book is without excuse too. All 3 men
are suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. Each of them has
enough truth about God to not deny that there’s a God; each of
them has enough truth about God to not bow to idols; each of them
has enough truth about God evident to not sell out to wicked behavior.
Some of us have
seen and heard a lot of God’s truth. Some have very little. But
to suppress truth is a trait common to man – some know a little
and suppress it, some know a lot and suppress a lot. But we all
show our cards: we’re members of a wicked race who hear what God
says and see what God does, and muffle our ears to silence it.
As Jesus implied, that he who is unfaithful in a little matter
is really very much like the one who is unfaithful in much, Luke
16:10. It’s the same test, only different in the size of the contents.
Is the purpose
of life and the world hard to understand? No, the picture the Bible
gives is, it’s hard to escape! Everything you look at is a witness
to God. Not to mention your own mind telling you and your own guilt
screaming at you. And if you argue with that and say it’s not obvious,
the Bible is stubborn about this and won’t let you off the hook.
To say that is to become proof of the principle: you’re already
deeper into the dark than you know.
So if we ever
question, “Do the peoples of the world actually have enough knowledge
of God to be judged for not obeying what they know? To be considered
guilty of suppressing it?” They most certainly do, yes. And that
brings us to the 2nd reasonable reason for the wrath of God:
B) Unbelief,
Stage Two: Perversion of Truth – v 21-23
There is a terrible fruit to this deliberate suppression of truth.
It’s predictable: what do men do in our time when they dislike the
lessons of history? They re-write it. Disliking the truth about God
as it is, they re-write it. They pervert the truth and make up something
else about God in its place. Instead of worshipping the God Who is,
they worship something else. Read vv 21-23:
“For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God, or give
thanks; but they
became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
Professing to be
wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible
God for an image in
the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and
crawling creatures.”
That’s one unit
of thought, suggesting this: knowing enough about God to know better,
men chose not to serve or worship Him. Instead they chose to speculate
– think up their own reality about God – which, in so doing, darkened
them all the more, so that they got to where they’d worship things
that were obviously either the same as themselves or even beneath
them. Now let’s break it down into segments:
V 21a: “they
knew God.” How can he say that? I thought man could not “know God”
until he’s saved? Yes, Paul does say elsewhere that man is ignorant
of God and without the knowledge of God. But in those places, Paul
is talking about a thorough knowledge of God and an intimate knowledge
of God. Here, by saying “they knew God” Paul obviously only refers
to the ways he just spoke of: they know there is a God and that
He has eternal power. But knowing that, moving on to the next phrase:
V 21: “they did
not honor Him as God or give thanks” – men should be praising Him,
and do not. Men should be thanking Him, and do not. Much of men’s
disinterest in coming to church is simply, distaste for and dislike
of praising God and thanking God. They want His gifts and don’t
want to say “thanks.” They see signs of the glory which is His
and casually ignore it.
V 21b: “but they
became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was
darkened” – KJV says in their “imaginations”, and that doesn’t
mean “imagination” as we use it, but speculations, reasonings,
the way we think through a subject. The more you hear men in Western
culture speak with admiration of religions that are long-proven
to have been barbaric, sacrificing people and children, etc., but
erecting museums and drawing art to the praise of such religions,
you see allegedly wise men succumbing to futile thinking. Glorifying
practices of horrendous cruelty and asking, “Well, who are we to
say their religion was wrong?”
Doug Wilson said,
“Those who say that witches should never have been burned show
they do not understand either what a witch was or what witches
did.” Ask me more later if you dare to really want to know.
Seeking other
explanations for the obvious created universe around us; any explanation
other than that God made it – because then there is truly a Supreme
Being Whom we ought to serve and avoiding that is the quest of
man, regardless of how scientific he claims he is being. Men make
up lies and errors even about God, so that, as far as we are concerned,
there will not be a God Who judges our behavior! Or, a God who
we can please with certain specific works or behavior. And the
more men do this, the darker our hearts become, 21c: “their foolish
heart was darkened.” The result of this is that men’s minds become
more dark than they even were naturally by sin to begin with.
Setting God below
your own level encourages corruption, because you lose the elevated
idea of God which gives you someone higher to seek and to know.
It can only lead to debasing consequences. It cannot lead to otherwise.
It does not help
at all to say that those who make idols say the idol is not God,
but only a physical image of their God. It was not without reason
that God said we should not try to represent Him with physical
images. 1st, men do end up serving what they bow before, even the
image. They render it service that they don’t render God, don’t
they? Can that go unpunished? No. 2nd, you cannot form a beast-like
image and say that it represents God, without that affecting the
shape of your ideas of God. And forming our own ideas about God
becomes a huge step in the darkening process; a major step downward
into darkness. So that:
V 22: “professing
to be wise, they became fools.” This is the beginning of the results.
And the exchange of God’s glory for other things is always believed
to be a wise exchange by those who make the trade. And with that
as the first result, the passage shifts to “The Reasonable Results
of the Wrath of God in the World.” Vv 22-23 start the shift to
the attention there. Now realize, when we talk about the reasons
for God’s wrath and the results of God’s wrath, they cross into
one another. The behavior which makes God angry starts to become
the behavior which God makes your own punishment.
This speaks of
a progressively degenerating idolatry. First, “their foolish heart
was darkened” – and “heart” is a comprehensive term for all of
man’s faculties. Not only was their moral discernment darkened,
but their intellect and reasoning power suffered also. The tragedy
of idolatry is that it falls infinitely short of giving the people
who buy into it any idea of what God is really like! So the darkening
of the heart leads to v 23:
“and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the
form of corruptible
man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.”
It is not accidental
that the list starts with man. When we refuse to worship the true
God, this is where the false worship starts: worship of ourselves.
And thus the process of degradation begins: God, disgusted that
we exalt ourselves, permits our self-worship to blind us and lead
us to choose still lower things than ourselves to worship, and
convince ourselves that this is intellectually respectable. Mankind
already being appropriate to worship, we go down from there.
And here is some
of the worst of man’s situation: not only is he unaware of how
corrupt he is, but the very things of which he ought to be ashamed
become things he is proud of. So that instead of worshipping God,
they begin to perform religion in ways that insult God. Have you
ever thought about how idolatry is in fact insulting to God? –
in that it debases the idea of Him to such low planes. To serve
God by murdering your children? To serve God by burning babies
alive? To serve God by cutting other people’s heads off? To serve
God by abusing women? To serve God by multiple sexual partners
on an altar of sacrifice? Or, one of the worst offenses: finding
contentment in myself and not in God. How utterly insulting to
God!
So, we need to
sum this thing up:
The Reasonable Reasons for God’s Wrath:
Men Suppressing the Truth (they squash it)
Men Perverting the Truth (since they don’t like it, they alter it –
to nobody but themselves).
Now, this may
have seemed like “preaching to the choir”, rah rah, let’s talk
about those folks out there and how they do wrong and worship the
wrong gods, etc. But let’s get the reasons for looking at this
right: Paul is showing us that all humanity have done this; all
are morally bankrupt, none of them are able to get a favorable
verdict at the bar of God, and so we desperately need His mercy
and pardon. Yet God doles out wrath patiently, in small doses and
measures; but His mercy He pours out without limits. Even though
all of us know more than we live up to, and the most ignorant of
us could have discovered more about God in His works than we did,
and were only held back by enmity against God reigning in our hearts.
But He saved
us. He has left others in their sins, I do not know why, but He
saved us. So that Paul can say “you were once darkness, but now
you are light in the Lord”, Eph 5:8.
The human mind
has many faculties. But there is no faculty of producing light.
If we are now light in the Lord, it is His doing, not ours! The
Holy Spirit can lighten any darkened mind, at will! In a flash,
in a moment. We can’t turn on the light. We can contribute to the
dark. How do we best avoid doing that?
Keep yourself
aware of the great, Divine, eternal power of God. Guard your soul
by staying aware of Who it is you are dealing with. We often hear
God addressed in casual terms today, ways that we would not dare
address a boss at work, a parent at home, or a mayor of a city;
we hear music that so sentimentalizes God and speaks mushily of
Christ that it obscures Who He is. We must keep our own creatureliness
and His supremacy before us. Worship is good for us in this way.
After all, why
are we different? Were you not suppressing truth? Were you not
hell-bent on sin? If you respond differently, you are a debtor
to mercy alone. God has done something in you and invaded your
stubborn will and gave you a desire to serve and love Him.
This also is
encouraging about our witnessing: be encouraged by this! Men know
more about God than is commonly admitted. Atheists are merely people
who would like there not to be a God. Sometimes I feel silly saying
these things, because I was on the other side of it. I remember
what it was like to object to it. I did so.
Today’s conclusion:
everyone you meet in this city that you witness to shares a certain
common ground. The truth is suppressed in them; it’s there, just
buried and distorted. Covered up and twisted. But it’s there. You
can take advantage of that. And let this motivate you, too: this
darkness results in them not giving God the glory and thanks which
He ought to be getting from their lives! But since you love the
glory of God and want Him to receive the worship and glory due
Him, you will tell men about Him. You will face them with their
lack of excuses and tell them about Christ.
