The Bad News - Part 2
INTRODUCTION:
Last Sunday we began talking about the bad news of the gospel which is that we are all guilty, condemned sinners deserving God’s wrathful judgment. We began last week by looking at God’s wrath that is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness. I said that as humans we do not like to talk about God’s wrath against sin and as such many have taken that subject out of their gospel thus making their gospel incomplete. We must understand that we are deserving of God’s wrath because we are condemned by our sin, if we do not realize this then there is no need for the good news that Christ died as our substitute and paid the penalty for our sin and was buried and rose from the dead on the third day proving that our sin was paid for and triumphing forever over death. Because Jesus Christ did this, we can have our sins forgiven and God will impart His righteousness to us in Christ so that we can stand before Him justified.
With that being said, we understand that we are born sinful, but why should we suffer God’s wrath against sin when we never asked to be born? Paul answers that question with four reasons that God is justified in His wrath against all sinful people. Last Sunday we looked at the first reason that sinful man deserves God’s righteous wrath and it was because God has made Himself known to us. God has made Himself evident to us. Each of us knows that God exists internally, and God has shown us His invisible attributes through the creation, by what He has made. But we suppress this knowledge, we oppose this knowledge, but because we have it within us and all around us in creation we are without excuse. That was the first reason that we deserve God’s righteous wrath. This morning we are going to look at three more reasons that Paul gives us in verses 21-23, first we will look at man’s rejection, then man’s wisdom, and finally man’s religion. Then time permitting we will begin to look at God’s response to man’s sinful rebellion against Him.
Let’s pray and ask God to teach us from His Word today, then we will get into our passage of Scripture for this morning.
--PRAY--
SCRIPTURE:
Turn in your Bibles again this morning to Romans 1:21-25. Please stand if you are able in honor of the reading of God’s Word and follow along as I read.
Romans 1:21-25,
“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. Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.” (Romans 1:21–25, NASB95)[1]
MAN’S REJECTION (Romans 1:21)
The second reason given to us that God is justified in His wrath and judgment against sinful man is because of sinful man’s rejection of God. Paul begins verse 21 by declaring plainly that man knew God because of the evidence that God has placed in man, in man’s conscience he knows that God exists, and God has given witness of Himself in creation, witness to His eternal power and divine nature, yet man in his wickedness has chosen to reject this knowledge, to reject this clear witness of God that is all around him. Man, in his unregenerate state would rather reject the truth about God, than embrace it.
In this verse Paul outlines for us four ways in which man rejects God. Man displays his rejection of God by dishonoring God, by not thanking God for His provision, by being futile in his speculations about God, and by being darkened in his foolish heart about God. Let’s look at each of these ways in which man rejects God.
First, man rejects God by not honoring Him as God. This word translated “honor” might better be translated “glory” or “glorify” as it is in some versions. Man was created that he might glorify God and enjoy Him forever. Throughout Scripture we are told to glorify God. The Psalms abound with verses that speak of the glory to God and of giving glory to God. To glorify God or to give glory to God is to exalt Him, to acknowledge and give Him the supreme honor that only He is worthy to receive, to praise Him for His divine attributes which are revealed to us in creation and through His Word that reveals God’s character to us. Because God is perfect in all that He is and all that He does we cannot add to His perfection, when we give God glory, we are not adding anything, but we are praising Him for His perfection. We glorify God by giving our praise for His glory. Psalm 96:7-8 call us to give glory to the Lord, the psalmist writes, “Ascribe to the Lord, O families of the peoples, Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength. Ascribe to the Lord the glory of His name; Bring an offering and come into His courts.” (Psalm 96:7–8, NASB95)[2] Paul wrote to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 10:31, “Whether, then, you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” (1 Corinthians 10:31, NASB95)[3] But sinful man seeks to avoid God and deny His glory, sinful man denies the very existence of God. If there is a God who deserves to be glorified by man, then there is a God to whom man is accountable. It is easier to reject God, deny His glory, deny His existence, than to admit there is a God, glorify Him and admit that we must answer to Him for our sin. Sinful man lives surrounded by God’s wonderful creation and yet proudly refuses to acknowledge God as the Creator and uphold His majesty and glory. Because of sinful man’s willful and foolish rejection, he is without excuse as he comes under God’s righteous wrath and judgment.
One day Christ will return in glory to judge sinful man. Matthew tells us this about His return, “But immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from the sky, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.” (Matthew 24:29, NASB95)[4] At that moment when all the natural lights of the universe go dark, the dazzling light of God’s glory in His Son will light up the whole earth and sky. Matthew writes in chapter 24:30, “And then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky with power and great glory.” (Matthew 24:30, NASB95)[5]
Because man refuses to give honor and glory to God as Creator, sinful man also refuses to give thanks for God’s gracious provision. God in His goodness and grace provides rain and sunshine to provide food for us even though we do not deserve anything from Him. Sinful man does not acknowledge all that we have is from God, thus his unbelief and rejection is made worse by his ingratitude. Why would the natural man give thanks to a God that he denies even exists? Because man rejects God and refuses to give Him the glory due Him and the thanksgiving due Him, man is without excuse and will come under the wrath of God in judgment, and God is justified in His wrath because of man’s rejection.
When man refuses to honor and thank God this will lead men to become futile in their speculations. The word translated “futile” means “vain” or “worthless;” speculations is defined as “the thinking of a man deliberating with himself.” So, all of man’s reasonings are worthless. Why is that? Because sinful man has rejected the greatest reality in the universe, to reject God and God’s truth is to reject that which gives meaning, purpose, and understanding to everything else. Any other reasoning would then be worthless, a worthless quest for wisdom that will only lead to falsehood which will lead to greater unbelief and ungodliness and unrighteousness. If we reject the truth the only thing left is the false.
What does this mean when we forsake God, it means we exchange truth for falsehood, it means that we exchange the meaning of life for hopelessness, we exchange true satisfaction for emptiness. When we reject God, our mind and soul must be filled with something else and having rejected truth and light we will be filled with falsehood and darkness. The world’s wisdom says man is evolving, but in truth man is devolving. The enlightened unbeliever likes to say that man in rejecting and dishonoring God becomes free and enlightened, but in truth the man who rejects God has his foolish heart darkened and becomes further enslaved to sin. To reject God is to give up truth, light, eternal life, meaning, purpose and joy. When our hearts are darkened, we also give up the foundation and the motivation for moral righteousness. No longer is there an absolute moral code, each man decides for himself that which is moral. Godless philosophy will always lead to moral perversity because the two are inseparable, this is the ungodliness and unrighteousness that God’s wrath has been revealed from heaven to be against. God is justified in His wrath because of God revelation of Himself and because of man’s rejection of God.
MAN’S WISDOM (Romans 1:22)
The third reason that God is justified in His wrath against every person who was ever born is that man has made his wisdom to be on the same level as God’s revelation or superior to God’s revelation. Man, in Paul’s day, just as in our day, professes to be wise. They profess to be wise about God or the fact that there is no god, they profess to be wise about the universe and how it came into existence, they profess to be wise about themselves and they develop philosophies about their origin, their purpose, their destiny, and the meaning of the universe in which we live. Paul writes in verse 22, “Professing to be wise, they became fools,” (Romans 1:22, NASB95)[6] Why did they become fools, because they rejected God’s truth, the mind devoid of truth, of God’s truth, cannot distinguish between what is true and what is false. David centuries earlier had basically said the same thing that Paul says here. David thought it so important that his words are recorded twice in Psalm 14 and in Psalm 53. Listen to his words in Psalm 14:1-3, “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, they have committed abominable deeds; There is no one who does good. The Lord has looked down from heaven upon the sons of men To see if there are any who understand, Who seek after God. They have all turned aside, together they have become corrupt; There is no one who does good, not even one.” (Psalm 14:1–3, NASB95)[7] The one who takes God out of the equation and says that He does not exist and He did not give us a revelation of Himself, his wisdom is foolishness.
Unfortunately, some of the wisdom of sinful man at times infects the church, because for so long unbelievers have loudly claimed evolution as scientific fact rather than a philosophical theory that holds no weight, but because of this many Christians have been intimidated into adapting their theology to include evolution. Calling it theistic evolution or progressive creationism. Doing this not only compromises scientific integrity, but more importantly and more disastrously it compromises God’s Word. By doing this they put the foolish and unproven words of sinful, depraved men above the flawless truth of the Word of God. Trying to adapt man’s philosophies to God’s Word will always cause us to compromise the truth of God’s Word. Man’s speculations can never replace the revelation of God. When we allow them to influence us or to compromise the Word of God, we give into the foolishness of the world system which rejects God and His truth. Paul told the Corinthian believers in 1 Corinthians 1:18, “For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:18, NASB95)[8] The greatest fool is the one who rejects the wisdom of God in exchange for the wisdom of man which is deceit and darkness. God is justified in His wrath against sinful man because sinful man has rejected God’s truth in exchange for his own speculations which are sheer foolishness and falsehood.
MAN’S RELIGION (Romans 1:23)
Do you see the downward spiral that mankind is in? First, we suppress the evidence about God, then we reject God and deny His existence, then we make our own speculations about how everything came into being and its purpose and meaning, this then leads us to our own man-made religion. The fourth reason God is justified in His wrath and judgment is man-made religion. Because of sin man is not naturally godly, he is naturally religious. Man’s wisdom tells us that religion shows us man’s upward ascent from primitive ignorance and chaos. Man has climbed from animism to a polytheism (many gods) to monotheism (one God). But if we look at history and at the record of Scripture it was not a climb, but a descent and it began with monotheism (one God). After the fall, when Adam and Eve sinned, there was only the knowledge of one God. Though man was sinful we read of no idolatry before the flood. Idolatry rose after the flood. The earliest mention of idolatry in the Bible is the idolatry of Abraham’s family. Idolatry developed sometime after the flood among the descendants of Noah. Before that there was only one God, but when man turned away from God after the flood, man began to create substitute gods to replace the one God they had turned away from. Paul writes that they exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for that which had no glory, for that which was corrupt. First, sinful man fashioned images of corruptible man, instead of worshiping God, man attempts to deify man. Was not this Satan’s lie at the beginning, he promised Eve that if she ate of the fruit she would be like God. A.W. Tozer in his book The Knowledge of the Holy “wisely observed that idolatry begins in the mind when we pervert or exchange the idea of God for something other than what He really is.”[9]
From images of corruptible man, sinful man descended to making idols in the form of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. Even today there are religions that revere animals and birds and insects. But before you begin to think that we are too modern and sophisticated for such foolishness we cannot rule out the rise in astrology and the occult right here in North America. Besides that, our Scripture reading this morning spoke of idolatry, listen to Paul’s words in Colossians 3:5-7 again, “Therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, which amounts to idolatry. For it is because of these things that the wrath of God will come upon the sons of disobedience, and in them you also once walked, when you were living in them.” (Colossians 3:5–7, NASB95)[10] If you look at the things that modern man now worships they fit into this list that Paul gives here to which he says, “amounts to idolatry.” What does man worship today? The idols of wealth, health, pleasure, fame, sex, sports, education, entertainment, success, power. Can you not put each of these under one of the categories which Paul lists: immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed? We may not deify birds, and animals, and insects, but we certainly practice the idolatry of self and see it in our world every day. God is justified in His wrath and judgment of sinful man, because man has denied God and made himself the god of his worship.
I am going to stop here this morning. I had hoped to get through verse 25 this morning, but we will save that for next Sunday. When man rejects God’s revelation, whether that be general revelation, that which is known about God in our conscience or from creation, or special revelation which is God’s Word, when man rejects the evidence given to us about God, man begins that downward spiral and he rationalizes his sin and makes up his own morality, and believes the lie about origins, meaning and purpose and believes that each man decides his own destiny, this then develops into false religion that ultimately leads to condemnation in which God is justified in His wrath against each person ever born, because unless there is forgiveness, unless there is a way to remove that condemnation then every person ever born deserves God’s wrathful judgment because we have rejected Him and believed the false wisdom of the world, and worshiped the creature rather than the Creator. Man is without excuse. Next Sunday we will look at God’s response to man’s rejection and rebellion against God.
[1]New American Standard Bible : 1995 Update. La Habra, CA : The Lockman Foundation, 1995
[2]New American Standard Bible : 1995 Update. La Habra, CA : The Lockman Foundation, 1995
[3]New American Standard Bible : 1995 Update. La Habra, CA : The Lockman Foundation, 1995
[4]New American Standard Bible : 1995 Update. La Habra, CA : The Lockman Foundation, 1995
[5]New American Standard Bible : 1995 Update. La Habra, CA : The Lockman Foundation, 1995
[6]New American Standard Bible : 1995 Update. La Habra, CA : The Lockman Foundation, 1995
[7]New American Standard Bible : 1995 Update. La Habra, CA : The Lockman Foundation, 1995
[8]New American Standard Bible : 1995 Update. La Habra, CA : The Lockman Foundation, 1995
[9]MacArthur, John F., The MacArthur New Testament Commentary – Romans 1-8. Chicago, Ill. : Moody Press, 1991 (The Knowledge of the Holy [N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1961], pp. 9-10).
[10]New American Standard Bible : 1995 Update. La Habra, CA : The Lockman Foundation, 1995