brother payne

Romans 1:18-32 The Wrath of God

                The revelation of God’s anger concerning want of reverence toward God and injustice among men who treat truth with contempt.

                There’s a lot about God, about the truth, that is known or can be discovered. Even the endlessness of God’s powerful doing and his necessary supremacy are easily deduced from everyday experience. People know about God from looking out at creation or looking in at their internal constitution. There’s no where to look that doesn’t make truth concerning God evident. People who refuse to see what is plain to see, refuse to recognize the handiwork of the Creator, and refuse gratitude lose the guidance of reason and intuition. They become like a compass that has no magnet and just points at random.

                People who lose reason and intuition by suppressing what ought to be obvious still retain the human necessity to worship. They point at random to whatever seems like the best way to maintain the suppression. They worship the sun and moon or animals or statues or ideas or themselves, anything but admit responsibility before the Almighty.

                See what happened to Pharaoh. Exodus 8:15, “But when Pharaoh saw that there was relief, he hardened his heart and did not heed them, as the Lord had said.” First, Pharaoh refused humility before God and then in Exodus 9:7, “the heart of Pharaoh became hard.” we see that this became his habit. The judgment of God was revealed in Exodus 10:20, “But the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart.”

                People who are lost to reason and intuition have no destination in mind that would override the impetus to act out every whim, seek out every delicacy, try every novel thing, indulge every desire. And why not? They aren’t going anywhere.  

                Have you ever been in a situation where you weren’t sure what you were supposed to do? One common way of dealing with that is to look at what others around you are doing and do what they do. These people having refused the Way, the Truth and the Life (Jesus) have to do something. What gets approval? They do that, no matter what it is because one direction is as good (or bad) as another when your compass no longer points north.

                In a large group it can be easy to assume that the direction of the group is purposeful rather than random. In truth, the only purpose of most of the world is to run away from God and toward anything else.

                The ten commandments in Exodus 20 are like guardrails that keep our lives from tumbling into the canyon. Why does the presence of guardrails make us want to drive recklessly? Adam and Eve only had one rule to follow and they couldn’t break it fast enough.  

John 3:16-20, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. ¹⁷ For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.

¹⁸ “He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. ¹⁹ And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. ²⁰ For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed.”