There is a change in Paul's direction in this section to the wrath of God and its application against ungodly and unrighteous men who suppress the truth in righteousness. God's work of creation has been made manifest to everyone leaving all without excuse.

We will continue our study of Paul’s letter to the church at Rome. This evening, we will be looking at Romans 1:18–25. As I mentioned in the morning service today, attending to the hearing of the Word of God and its exposition is an integral part of worship. So, I would ask the congregation to stand as we worship God by giving heed to His Word:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things.

Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

If you have ears to hear the Word of God, then give heed to what you have just heard. Please be seated. Let us pray.

Our Father, as we examine and meditate upon this portion of sacred Scripture, which comes to us through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, who is also the Spirit of truth, we pray that He would assist us by His illumination, that we might understand the full import of what we have just heard. For we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Righteousness and Wrath

Of all the passages found in the Bible, I doubt there is any one passage to which I have devoted more personal attention than the text I have just read to you, because this text is foundational to our understanding of God’s revelation and the gospel.

I can hardly help but notice the abrupt change in the tone of the epistle from what we looked at last week, where Paul introduced the theme of the entire book of Romans by speaking about the revelation of that righteousness of God which is by faith to all who believe. So, Paul introduces this epistle by mentioning the main theme of the revelation of that righteousness that is available to us in the gospel, and after that introduction and setting forth the theme of the epistle, we would naturally assume and expect that Paul would plunge immediately into an explanation of the content of the gospel and an explanation of the doctrine of justification by faith alone that is so central to the epistle. But he no sooner mentions this wonderful revelation of the righteousness that is by faith than he switches and introduces another revelation: the revelation of the wrath of God.

There is a method to Paul’s madness. I am sure the reason the Apostle introduces the wrath of God at this point is that no one can fully appreciate the good news as good news except against the backdrop of our guilt before God. The good news is an announcement to people who are universally under the indictment of God and exposed to His wrath.

People are often not concerned about the gospel because they do not know anything about the law of God. They are not at all familiar with the revelation of His wrath. If people were sensitive to this manifestation of God’s anger towards them, even if they were not moved by the Holy Spirit, they would be so moved by enlightened self-interest that they would flee as fast as they could to any hearing of the gospel.

But our necks have become so hardened and our hearts so calcified that we have no fear of God. We do not believe in His wrath. We think He is incapable of it, and many of us listen to preachers telling us that God loves us unconditionally. When we hear that, we think there is no reason to fear His wrath. But what the Apostle says here, before he develops the theme of the gospel, is that “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.”

God’s Fury at Sin

I want to speak to the idea of God’s wrath for a moment. First, when Paul speaks of the wrath of God in this text, he uses the Greek word orgē. If you are a student of etymology, of language, you might know that the English word we derive from the Greek word orgē is the word orgy.

When we think of an orgy, we think of a situation where people are involved in unbridled, erotic, sexual behavior. It is a condition where people are involved in eroticism with reckless abandon, letting their passions be expressed without restraint. So, we wonder what the point of contact is between the English word orgy and the Greek word that Paul uses here for “wrath.”

The point of contact is this: Paul is telling us that God is not simply annoyed. He is not merely irritated. Rather, His anger is an anger of passion, that there are paroxysms of rage and fury in God for the things Paul mentions in this text. Paul says God has revealed His fury for what? It is an anger directed not against innocents, not against righteousness, but “against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.” Think for a moment how perfectly appropriate it is that a holy and righteous God would be moved to anger against evil. A good judge who has no distaste for evil would not be a good judge at all.

Ungodliness and Unrighteousness

Notice that God is angry with two distinctive things that are mentioned: ungodliness or irreverence, impiety would be another word—the Latin is impiatas—and unrighteousness. When we think of those two terms, we tend to think of “ungodliness” as a particularly religious transgression—blasphemy, irreverence, or the like—and “unrighteousness” as describing an immoral activity or behavioral pattern among our people.

We might look at this text and say: “God is upset at two things. He’s upset at us for being irreverent, and He’s upset at us for being immoral.” But I do not think that is the force of the text. Paul is using a grammatical structure here that we find sporadically throughout the Bible, a structure called a hendiadys, which literally means “two for one,” where two distinct things are mentioned in the same breath but are synonyms pointing to one basic thing.

A proper understanding of what Paul is saying is that God is angry, furious with a particular sin. Then when we examine that sin, it is seen to be both ungodly, or irreverent, and unrighteous, or immoral. Those two terms, “ungodliness” and “unrighteousness,” are wide and vast generic terms that cover a multitude of sins. But Paul is not talking about a multitude of sins in this text. He has in view one particular sin. There is one sin that provokes God’s anger.

What I want us to grasp is that this sin is a universal sin. It is a sin committed by every human being. It is that sin that most clearly expresses our Adamic nature, our corruption and fallenness in the flesh.

Suppression of God’s Truth

Paul does not leave us to guess about the nature of this sin. He specifies what it is that provokes God to this orgy of anger. Paul says that His wrath is directed against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, “who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.”

There it is. The single sin that provokes God’s wrath against the whole human race is the sin of suppressing truth. The Greek word here is katechō, which can be translated as “to hinder,” “to stifle,” “to incarcerate,” “to put in detention,” “to obscure,” “to suppress,” or “to repress.”

Let me use an illustration to explain the meaning. Think of a gigantic spring or coil that you would have to use all the strength in your body to push down, to suppress. While you are pushing it down, it is resisting your strength and forcing against you, wanting to spring back up or recoil into its original position. Paul is saying that by nature, we take the truth of God and press it down. We force it into our subconscious, as it were, to get it out of our mind. Yet for all the strength that we use to suppress that truth of God, we simply cannot eradicate it. We cannot get rid of it because it is always and everywhere pushing back up, trying to come again to the surface.

We are still speaking generally, are we not? The specific sin is the suppression of truth. Now we must ask, What truth is being suppressed? Paul does not leave us to wander in the dark about that question, as he declares exactly what truth it is. He goes on to say in verse 19, “Because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them.” The truth that every human being suppresses is the truth of God, the truth that God reveals of Himself in nature to the entire human race. We are not talking now about suppressing the truth of God that we learned through the Bible. We do that too, but Paul speaks here of a truth that is known of God outside of the Bible, apart from the Bible—a knowledge of God that God makes manifest.

God is angry “because what may be known of Him is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them.” I do not want to skip over that too fast. The Greek word here is phaneros. It means “to show plainly.” We use the term phenomenon, which is derived from this Greek word.

The Latin text translates the Greek word phaneros by the Latin manifestum—that is, the knowledge that God gives of Himself is not obscure. It is not buried with hidden clues that only an elite intellectual group of people are able to discover after a painful and tedious search and sifting through the evidence. No, the truth that God gives of Himself is manifest. It is clear. It is plain, so plain that everybody gets it. He says it is clear, and we know it is clear because God Himself is the teacher.

We cannot say in this case that if the student does not learn, the teacher did not teach. That would impugn the ability and the integrity of the Almighty, who shows His revelation to everyone, making it plain and clear.

Hostility Toward God

Two weeks ago, I mentioned the young man I talked to at the door after the service, whose friend introduced him as an agnostic. The Greek agnōsis means “without knowledge.” The agnostic portrays himself as a less militant form of atheist. The atheist boldly declares there is no God. The agnostic says: “I don’t know if there’s a God or not. I’m agnōsis. I am without sufficient knowledge to make a firm judgment on this matter.” The Latin there, incidentally, is ignoramus.

I said to the young man: “You say that you’re an agnostic. You’re attempting to be gentle about your atheism. You think that you’re not as militant and maybe you’re hedging your bets, but don’t you realize that your agnosticism puts you at greater risk and exposure to the wrath of God than if you were a militant atheist? Not only do you refuse to acknowledge the God who reveals Himself plainly to you, but you’re blaming God for your situation, saying that He has not been clear and has not given you sufficient evidence. So, you add insult to injury to the Almighty by your feigned lack of militance. But your hostility against God is coming through, and you need to repent of it, because you know as well as you know your own name that God is.”

I remember being invited on the university campus several years ago to speak to an atheists’ club. They asked me as a Christian apologist to give the intellectual case for the existence of God to their group. As I went through the arguments of the existence of God, we kept things at a perfectly intellectual plane where all things were safe and comfortable until we got to the end of my lecture.

I said: “I’m giving you arguments for the existence of God, but I feel like I’m carrying coals to Newcastle because I have to tell you what I think. I think I don’t have to prove to you that God exists because I think you already know it. Your problem is not that you don’t know that God exists. Your problem is that you despise the God whom you know exists. Your problem is not an intellectual problem. It’s a moral problem. You hate God.”

Talk about paroxysms of fury. I unleashed it with that. But I did not back away from the truth. That is what the Apostle is saying here. He is saying that God has manifestly, plainly, and clearly shown Himself to everyone.

Conspicuous Revelation and the Innocent Native

“For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen.” The word “seen” in the Latin is the root for our English word conspicuous. God has made His revelation of Himself conspicuous to everyone. It was not that once in a while, every three thousand years, God popped a clue into history about His existence. Rather, since the day and the dawn of creation, every moment of creation, God is constantly manifesting Himself through the things that are made.

It is not just that God gives us a world and says, “Think about where that world came from and reason from the cosmos back to God.” We do that, but it is more than that. God does not create a world and say, “Guess where it came from?” Paul is saying that in that world, every second, God manifests Himself through the things that are made, so that His testimony to His own nature is plainly evident all the time.

The theological question I have been asked more than any question is, What happens to the poor innocent native in Africa who has never heard of Jesus? I always answer that question the same way: “The poor, innocent native in African who has never heard of Jesus does not need to hear of Jesus. He has nothing to worry about. Do not bother sending missionaries to preach to him. You will probably mess him up. That poor, innocent native in Africa, when he dies, will go straight to heaven. He does not pass go. He does not collect his $200. He has no need for a savior. Jesus did not come in the world to save innocent people. It will take you more than the lamp of Diogenes to find an innocent native in Africa because there are no innocent natives in Africa, Australia, South America, Europe, Asia, or anywhere else.”

But you see, people think, “If someone hasn’t heard of Jesus, then that person is surely innocent.” No, Jesus comes into a world that is already under the indictment of God the Father because the whole world has rejected God the Father, who has revealed Himself clearly to them. Let us disavow ourselves of any idea of innocent people, anywhere.

People ask, “Will God send people to hell for rejecting Jesus, of whom they’ve never heard?” Of course not, God is not going to punish a person for rejecting somebody of whom they have never heard. Then there is a big sigh of relief: “Well then, we don’t have to worry about them.” But that isn’t true at all. Their destination is certainly hell for the rejection of the One of whom they have heard.

Paul is saying in Romans 1 that every human being has heard of God, knows of God, clearly perceives God, yet rejects that knowledge. Because of that, lives every day are exposed to the wrath of God. The only possible way anyone can be rescued from that wrath is through the Savior. Paul is setting the foundation for the urgency of the gospel here in chapter 1.

God Seen Everywhere

“For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen.” Let me just comment on that. The great philosopher of the eighteenth century, perhaps the greatest agnostic of all time, Immanuel Kant, revolutionized the world of philosophy by giving a systematic and comprehensive critique of the traditional, classic arguments for the existence of God.

Without going into the details of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argued that you cannot move from the visible things of this world and reason back to the invisible God. God is in a realm that is not known through theoretical reason or empirical investigation. Basically, Kant was saying you cannot get here from there. If Kant was right, then the Apostle Paul is manifestly wrong. If Paul is right, then Kant was wrong, and it is time that the Christian church stop rolling over and playing dead at the feet of Immanuel Kant and show the error of Kant’s reasoning. The affirmation is so clearly set forth by Paul that the invisible God, even though He cannot be seen because He is invisible, is clearly seen.

That sounds contradictory. God is not seen directly, but He is seen through the things that are made because God, who is invisible, reveals His invisible character through that which you can see with your eyes. He reveals “even His eternal power and Godhead.”

What is part of the content of that general revelation? We are speaking of the revelation that God gives generally—that is, to the whole world. It is also a revelation whose content does not give us all the specific details about the character and nature of God, but it certainly gives us knowledge of God in general. What is included in that content?

So far, we have seen His eternal power. God’s self-existent eternal being has been revealed in every leaf, every page, every raindrop, and every inch of the cosmos since the beginning of time. This temporal world that we see is the vehicle of divine revelation to manifestly and clearly reveal that it is the result of an eternal being, a God who is not only eternal but eternally powerful. It is His eternal power that is revealed and His God-ness, which we understand refers to His inherent attributes—His immutability, omniscience, omnipresence—all that fits deity is made clear through nature.

We will see later that also included in this content that God reveals of Himself is His moral perfection, holiness, righteousness, and His sovereign right to impose obligations upon His creatures without their permission or assent. God inherently has the eternal right to command from His creatures what is pleasing to Him. Paul says that all these things are made clear to us.

Without Excuse

Paul then goes on to fully explain the reason, the rationale, for God’s manifestation and revelation of His wrath: “So that they are without excuse.” That is, they are given no basis for an apologia says the Greek. They are given no basis for a response, a reply, or an answer to God’s indictment.

What do you suppose is the answer that Paul is anticipating corrupt and fallen human beings will try to give to God on the day of judgment? Maybe something like this: “God, I didn’t know You were there. If only You would have made Your revelation clear to me. If only I could have known You, then I would have dedicated my whole life to You, and I would have been Your obedient servant. But how can You expect me to follow You when You are hidden?”

The plea people will be tempted to make is a plea of an excuse. Paul says that everyone in this world stands without an excuse. There is no excuse of ignorance before God, not when He Himself has given you the information, so that any plea of ignorance will be an empty plea and will have no effect with God. Why? “Because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful.”

The Natural Man’s Knowledge of God

There was a somewhat well-known Dutch philosopher and theologian who came to this text and he said: “Yes, of course there is a general revelation. God has objectively revealed Himself to the human race. But that general revelation yields no natural theology.” That is, the revelation never gets through.

The theologian cites Calvin, who likens man in his fallen condition to one who walks through the glorious theater of nature wearing a blindfold. I think it is unfortunate that the great Reformer used that metaphor because it was not consistent with everything else he taught about our response to general revelation.

The Dutch theologian goes on to say that the revelation is there. God does His part, but due to our sin, due to our fallen condition, the knowledge does not get through, it does not penetrate to our minds. Does Paul not write to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 2:14 and say to them that the natural man does not know God? He does, and yet here in Romans 1, Paul says the natural man does know God. How are we to reconcile those two statements of Paul?

The reconciliation is found in the language itself. The word ginōskō in the Greek means “to know,” but it can mean to know intellectually by cognition, which is the Latin term, or it can mean to know intimately, as Abraham knew his wife and she conceived. It does not mean that Adam got a dossier of Eve, met her on the street, said, “Madame, I’m Adam,” and she said, “My name is Eve,” and he said, “Happy to know you,” and suddenly she was pregnant. No, it is speaking of a deeper kind of intimate knowledge. The Bible says those who are born of the Spirit are born unto this intimate, salvific, personal knowledge of God that only the redeemed have.

When he writes to the Corinthians, Paul speaks of the Spirit who gives that kind of knowledge, and he says the natural man does not know God in that sense. But in the sense of having an intellectual cognition, a cognitive awareness of the reality of God, Paul is saying in Romans that their problem is not that the knowledge fails to get through. The reason God is angry with everyone is because that knowledge does get through.

It is what we do with the knowledge that provokes the wrath of God: “Although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful.” The most fundamental, foundational sin in our fallen corrupt nature is the sin of idolatry, the sin of refusing to honor God as He is. We want to strip Him of His attributes, turn Him into a God made in our image, a God we can live with, a God that we can be comfortable with.

Every time I preach this, someone raise his or her hand and say, “But my God is a God of love, not a God of wrath.” Then your God, who is incapable of wrath, is not the God who is, because the God of love, who is revealed in Scripture, is also the God who is angry with sin, who is the God of justice and righteousness, who is the God of holiness.

You cannot take the attributes of God you are comfortable with and embrace them while rejecting the rest. When you do that, you join the throng of humanity that suppresses the truth of God and refuses to honor Him as God or to be thankful. It is the refusal to honor God, the refusal to worship God, and hearts that are not filled with joy and gratitude for what He gives that define our fallenness.

How few people there are in this world who delight in the worship of God. Almost every Sunday morning I go out to breakfast, and after I am there and have ordered, one of the members from our congregation comes in, sits down at the table right across from me, and chats with me over breakfast.

This morning, just as I was ready to leave to come here for the service, he asked me: “R.C., what do you think about all the people in here? You know they’re not going to church.” I answered: “I know. They’re not just here; they’re at the country club. They’re everywhere except church because nothing is more displeasing to them than to worship God.” They do not want to hear about God. That knowledge is suppressed. It is pushed down. It is in jail. It is incarcerated, and they have no desire to have God in their minds. The natural man is at enmity with God, and Paul tells us elsewhere that we, by nature, do not want to have God in our thinking. When He presents Himself to our minds, we immediately suppress it, push it away.

Foolish, Darkened Hearts

Paul continues, “They did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened.”

Not only did I study and get a degree in philosophy, but I studied it in graduate school and taught philosophy at the university. One of my favorite ways of teaching philosophy was doing a study of the history of philosophy. Something that stood out to students who studied the history was that if you look at some of the most brilliant people who ever lived, you wonder how it is possible that people of such titanic intellect could come to such different conclusions about the nature of reality.

Who was more brilliant than Thomas Aquinas? Who was more brilliant than Aurelius Augustine? Yet they were fiercely convinced of the reality of God, and their lives were driven by that conviction. Their conviction of God was at the very basis, root, and foundation of everything else they believed as thinkers.

Then you have other brilliant people like Jean-Paul Sartre, John Stuart Mill, and Albert Camus. They had such gifted intellects but ended up on the other end of the spectrum, embracing nihilism à la Nietzsche, saying that there is no meaning, there is no God, and there is no significance to the human experience. How can such brilliant people end up so far apart?

If at the very beginning of your pursuit of knowledge, the very earliest stage of knowledge, the first thing you do is categorically deny what you know to be true, the reality of God, then frankly, the more brilliant you are after that starting point—the more consistent and logical you are in your thinking the rest of the way—the further you will go from God. You have built your house on a lie, so your thinking becomes an exercise in futility, and the foolish heart is darkened.

When Paul speaks of hearts that are dark, he uses the word “foolish.” To the Jew, the judgment of “foolish” is not an intellectual judgment; it is a moral judgment. That is why Jesus said to be careful not to call people fools. It is the fool who says in his heart, “There is no God.” There, the fool is not just being senseless—although saying there is no God is senseless—but he is being wicked because he is denying what he knows to be true.

God Exchanged for Idolatry

Here is the indictment for the whole world: “Knowing God, they refuse to honor Him as God.” It is not that they fail to know God and therefore do not honor and thank Him, but while they know God, they will not honor Him, and they will not be grateful. That is the massive perdition in which we find ourselves as fallen human beings. It is against that background that the gospel comes.

Notice what follows. After their foolish hearts are darkened, Paul says, “Professing to be wise, they became fools.” It really gets to me when I hear the ongoing debate in the news about the intelligent design versus science. They say, “Intelligent design is not science.”

The word science means knowledge. If you know that God is the author of all things, then you know that the affirmation of the existence of God is the purest scientific thought there is. To deny it or exclude it is not to be scientific but to be foolish. Is it not funny that those who refuse to acknowledge what they know to be true claim such activity in the name of wisdom? They call it science when it is foolishness, a foolishness that betrays a heart of darkness.

What do those who refuse to acknowledge the truth of God do? They do not become atheists, generally. They become idolaters. They become religious. They change “the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things.” They take the majestic, self-existent, eternal God of heaven and earth, exchange His truth, and begin to worship birds, bears, and totem poles. Can anything be more ridiculous than religion built on a fundamental refusal to acknowledge what you know to be true and trading in the glory of God for the creature?

The Terrifying God

“Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves”—Paul will elaborate on that, and we will look at that next week, God willing—“who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.”

The word “exchanged” is a critical term in this text. It is the Greek word metallassō. I cannot help but read this text through the eyes of modern psychiatry, which talks candidly about terms of repression and suppression. What kind of ideas do we as human beings tend to suppress or repress, to push down, out of our conscious minds? They are not pleasant thoughts. They are scary thoughts, frightening thoughts, and bad memories.

That is why when you go to see the psychiatrist and you have a nameless anxiety or dread, you do not know why you are so phobic. You are afraid, but you do not know of what you are afraid. The psychiatrist begins to probe you with analytical questions and check your background, your childhood. He asks, “How did you get along with your mother?” You answer: “My mother? I had a wonderful relationship with my mother. I loved my mother.” The psychiatrist says, “Your words are saying one thing, but your gestures are telling me something else.” The psychiatrist then asks about your dreams. He begins to probe your subconscious because he knows that when you repress something, you do not destroy the memory. You exchange it. You exchange it for something you can live with, something that will not bring terror to your mind.

Beloved, there is nothing in the universe more terrifying to a sinner than God. I know what Freud said about the future of an illusion and history of discontent. Trying to explain the universality of religion, Freud asked, “Why is it that people are so incurably religious?” He explained that we invented God to deal with the things in nature that are frightening. By inventing God, we personalize nature, we sacralize nature, because of things that threaten us so deeply, such as hurricanes, fires, tornadoes, pestilence, or armies attacking.

We know that in personal relationships, if you are hostile toward me, and you come up and you are angry, there are many ways I can try to defuse your anger. I can try to butter you up and tell you how great you are: “You don’t want to be angry with me. I’m your best friend.” If that does not work, I can try to appease you with my gifts: “If you’ll stop with your anger, I’ll put you in my will. I’ll pour money out to you. I’ll magnify your name to the community.”

We learn how to get around human anger, but how do you negotiate with a hurricane? How do you mollify an earthquake? How do you persuade cancer not to visit your house? Freud’s answer was that you must personalize nature, sacralize it. You invent a god who is over the hurricane, a who is over the earthquake, who is over the disease, and then you can talk to god and try to appease him. You give gifts and offerings to him. You say, “I’ll serve you the rest of my life if you’ll protect me from Hurricane Wilma and Hurricane Katrina and all the other natural disasters.” According to Freud, it is because of things that are frightening to us in nature that we posit a God who is above nature to help us cope.

Clearly, Freud was not on the Sea of Galilee when a storm arose and threatened to capsize the boat in which Jesus and His disciples were floating. The text tells us that the disciples were afraid. Jesus was asleep, and so they went and shook Him awake and said, “Master, do something or we perish.” Jesus woke up, and He assessed the situation. He looked at the raging sea and the blistering winds, and He said, “Peace, be still,” and instantly the water was calm. There was not a zephyr in the air.

The gospel accounts go on to tells us that the disciples were so grateful that they said, “Thank you, Jesus, for removing the cause of our fear.” No, that’s not what they said. We are told that the disciples became afraid. Their fears were increased and intensified, and they said: “What manner of man is this that even the winds and the sea obey Him? We’re dealing with something transcendent. We have xenophobia, the fear of a stranger.” The holiness of Christ was made manifest in that boat, and suddenly the fear of the disciples escalated.

That is where Freud missed the point. If people are going to invent religion to protect them from the fear of nature, why would they invent a God more terrifying than nature itself? God is holy. When fallen creatures make idols, they do not make holy ones. We prefer the unholy, the profane, the secular, the god we can control.

Groundwork for Forgiveness

In these verses in Romans, the Apostle brings us to a place where we have no excuse, where ignorance cannot be claimed. God has so manifested Himself to every creature in the world that every last one of us knows God exists, deserves our honor and thanks, and is not to be traded in or swapped for the creature.

Let me finish with this statement. Paul says that they “exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever.” Notice the comma and the last phrase of that text. Even when Paul is talking about the wrath of God and the universal sin of fallen humanity, he cannot help but break into doxology, speaking about the Creator, who is most blessed, even forever.

Paul will carry on in the rest of chapter 1 and into chapter 2 and tell us about the dreadful consequences to a race of people who live by refusing to knowledge what they know to be true about the character of God. When you do that, you end up with a futile mind, a blackened heart, and a life of radical corruption. You become so exposed to God’s displeasure that your only hope on heaven and earth will be the gospel of His dear Son.

Remember, this is preparatory. This is the groundwork. Thank God that Paul does not stop here in his letter to the Romans. If the Bible stopped here, we would be without hope, lost forever in our guilt and in our sin.

Finally, when I talk to people about their intellectual questions about the existence of God, I am as patient as I know how to be. I try to answer every intellectual question they have and then some. But at some point in the discussion, I finally say, “My final question for you is this: What do you do with your guilt?” I do not have to argue with people that they are guilty. They know it. So, I ask them: “What do you do with your guilt? Deny it? Blame somebody else?” The only refuge from guilt is forgiveness. It is the gospel, which we will look at more later. Let us pray.

O Father, the whole world is filled with Your glory. We cannot take two paces on earth without bumping into clear, manifest demonstration of Your eternal power and deity. O Father, open our eyes to see what is right in front of our face every second. For we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.