Romans 1:18-25
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
Why do we need to engage the world with the gospel? Because God’s passionate indignation against our lack of reverence and mankind’s general filthiness appears from heaven into the lives of everyone who purposefully suppresses the truth in order to avoid having to deal with the reality that they know they have done wrong and justice demands their death.
Ezekiel 18:4, “Behold, all souls are mine; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is mine: the soul who sins shall die.”
There are times and places where not feeling moral outrage is obviously wrong. God is outraged by the morally outrageous because he is morally perfect. The issue is our tendency to minimize our own sins. The truth is that every sin is high treason against God.
Genesis 2:16-17, “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
Leviticus 10:1-3, “Now Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer and put fire in it and laid incense on it and offered unauthorized fire before the Lord, which he had not commanded them. And fire came out from before the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord. Then Moses said to Aaron, “This is what the Lord has said: ‘Among those who are near me I will be sanctified, and before all the people I will be glorified.’” And Aaron held his peace.
John 3:19-20, “And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.”
Everyone knows, deep down, that God is God. But there is a difference between knowledge and acknowledge. People know God but they refuse to acknowledge that knowledge. God made us with a God shaped hole where only He fits. People try to fill that hole with all kinds of substitutes but none of them really fit and none of them really last.
Ecclesiastes 1:2-3 Vanityof vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?
“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such a violent reaction against it?… Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if i did that, then my argument against God collapsed too–for the argument depended on saying the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus, in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist – in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless – I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality – namely my idea of justice – was full of sense. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never have known it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”-C.S. Lewis
The existence of the idea ‘satisfaction’ tells us that there must be one ultimate answer to all our emptiness. That answer is God.
And even if someone lacks basic introspection, the attributes of God are clearly on display in everything that has been made.
Psalm 19:1, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.”
Seeing the galactic and the atomic, it is only by wicked suppression that the Creator can be denied.
The necessity for an uncaused Cause is axiomatic in this world that is nothing but a chain of dependencies. (Kalam Cosmological argument) That this Cause must be greater in every respect than everything in the universe is a beginning definition of God.
In the sense that God’s existence is very evident, people know God. They choose to act as if God is behind thick dark glass and they can’t see or hear Him.
Job 21:14, “They say to God, ‘Depart from us! We do not desire the knowledge of your ways.”
“Maybe there is a God”, they say, “But there’s no way to know for sure.” They don’t find God because they are looking for him like a burglar looks for cops. The problem is that God is the basis of reality and trying to navigate life without a beginning point leads to many ridiculous outcomes. A man who uses a plumbline in a small boat in a storm has a better chance of finding true plumb than a man who denies God has of finding anything out about the truth. God is the light and refusing to see the light and everything else by the light leaves men and women in spiritual and moral darkness.
There’s an intersection of ignorance and arrogance where large numbers of ‘spiritual’ but not ‘religious’ people hang out and shout encouragement to each other, egging on ever greater depths of depravity amongst themselves. The dignity of the human soul is in the image it bears.
Matthew 22:20-21, “And Jesus said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” They said, “Caesar’s.” Then he said to them, “Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
We are created in the image of God but these who suppress the truth give away that dignity in order to try on postures of images like philosophical ideals such as humanism or environmentalism. These images become degraded moving from high ideals to unrestrained beastliness in a short amount of time.
Because they choose not to listen, God has stopped talking to them. It is undeserved favor from God to sinful man that evil is restrained. The judgment of God is the removal of restraint. In other words, God gives them what they want, freedom from His presence. Free from being held up they immediately plunge down into every degradation the devil can imagine. They trade away a birthright of honor and dignity for mad speculations and their worship turns from worship’s true object to every vain imagination of their wayward hearts.
brotherpayne 