What if we reject God? (Romans 1:18-32)
Billy Milton - January 9, 2005
Happy New Year to you all! Many of us, including myself, missed last Sunday when we began our new series in the book of Romans but hopefully Mary and Ron’s little dialogue and Mary’s very helpful blue sheet [HOLD UP] will have brought you up to speed? How important is this series on Romans? Well, someone once said to me, “You can take a good Roman anywhere.” In other words, if you can get a grasp of what Romans says, you will be well on your way to understanding the message of most of the New Testament and of big chunks of the Old Testament. I can’t stress this enough, but if you are at all serious about your faith then you really need to make a concerted effort to get along to church as often as possible this year. Make it the priority in your week and don’t surrender lightly this time with God. Get serious - open up a file on Romans and update it every week. You’ll need to bring along a pen and notebook and maybe your own Bible to scribble in the margins. Get serious!
There are a couple of facts that you need to know if you’re going to get the best out of Romans. Add this to your blue sheet. At this stage in the early church there were 2 factions who were perverting the gospel. They are still with us today but we just call them different names now. They were known as the Antinomians and the Judaizers. The Antinomians were a group who were ‘against the law’ (anti-nomos). They taught that since man was saved by grace, not by the Law, he could live any way he wanted. The more he sinned, the more it demonstrated the grace of God in forgiving that sin! Hence, for instance, Paul’s question in Romans 6:1, “Shall we continue in sin so that grace may increase? By no means!”
The second group were the Judaizers who taught that although a man was saved by grace he was ‘kept’ by the Law. They added circumcision and other ‘works of the Law’ to faith in Christ. They measured a person’s spiritual maturity by how well they kept the rules. As I said, both groups are still with us today and both views are anti the true gospel message. Bearing that in mind, let’s listen to what Jesus said.
In Mark 2:17, Jesus said to the Pharisees, ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.’ Now, he didn’t mean here that some people are so good that they don’t need to repent. What he was actually saying was that, “Some people think they are so good that they don’t need to repent – namely you Pharisees!” People in that self-righteous condition will never come to Christ, not then – not now. One of the first steps in the 12-step recovery programme for Alcoholics Anonymous says, “I admit that I am powerless over alcohol – that my life has become unmanageable.” Until an alcoholic reaches that stage she cannot be cured of her addiction. In a Christian sense many people are in a similar position. They don’t recognise that they are in a perilous position spiritually and so see no need to respond to the gospel message. People need to come to a true understanding of where they stand before God, otherwise they will never respond to the gospel. This is exactly what Paul is trying to do in this passage and in the next few chapters.
His main aim in the early chapters of Romans is to show that God has no favourites. Salvation is equally available to the Jew and to the Gentile, but before he can do that he must prove that they are all equally in need of it. If he can do this successfully then, as John Stott puts it, no-one will be able to plead innocence because no-one will be able to plead ignorance. What we have before us today is just the first section in a sequence of four which will take us right through to 3:20. Today we are looking at 1:18-32 where he addresses the unbelieving Gentiles. Later on he addresses the self-confident Jew, and ultimately the whole human race.
One of the big stumbling blocks to people trusting in Jesus is that he offends their sense of what is fair. How often have you heard, or maybe even said, “How can God condemn those who have never heard the Gospel? That’s not fair.” Let me say right away that ‘fair’ would be every single one of us falling under God’s wrath! That would be fair. Grace is that even one of us is saved. However, Paul anticipates this response to his accusations by insisting that everyone has access to knowledge of God.
The one thing no-one will ever accuse Paul of is beating about the bush. He is so full of love and concern for the reputation of God that he launches a blistering attack on the godless Gentiles. Alex Ferguson would be no match for Paul I promise you, because quite simply, Paul is miles more passionate about the gospel than Alex Ferguson could ever be about football! In vv18-23 he infers very strongly that mankind does know the truth about God but simply suppresses it by being: (a) Godless and (b) wicked.
Now at the moment, given the tremendous outpouring of goodwill and generousity by British people towards the Tsunami victims, the feeling abroad is that most people are basically good. The Bible disagrees. Most people are basically not good…but are capable of acts of kindness and goodness for a variety of reasons. Mans’ inhumanity to man is well documented and reveals a latent badness in us all, I’m afraid. These are not my opinions by the way – I’m simply applying God’s word. Paul says in Rom 3:10-12, “There is no-one righteous, not even one; there is no-one who understands, no-one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no-one who does good, not even one.”
This ‘truth’ of Paul’s day is still ‘truth’ today. Every single one of us is in a perilous position without God and in vv19-20 Paul tells us that its not God’s fault. He hasn’t been hiding from us. We are ‘without excuse’ because we have been given a knowledge of God through the creation of the world and through nature itself. This argument, powerful as it was in Paul’s day, has lost some of its power these days mainly due to the theory of evolution. The vast majority of the population no longer accepts the fact that God created the heavens and the earth. We’ve looked at that fairly recently so I’m not going to cover it in any detail again today but - buy this book (HOLD UP “The Case for a Creator” by Lee Strobel)
The vast majority of our population, many professing Christians included, no longer accept God as creator and sustainer of the world, so Paul would accuse them of ‘suppressing the truth’ that is so eloquently presented to them in creation. To anyone with eyes to see it, its perfectly obvious, so mankind is responsible for their own condemnation.
But, let’s just backtrack slightly for a second or two. Is Paul saying in these verses that it is possible to know God through nature? Well yes, in a very limited sense it is, but not in the same way that a believer can know God. People can perhaps have a limited objective awareness of God but not a subjective awareness. Not relational. This limited knowledge of God falls far short of the knowledge necessary to establish a relationship with him. Real knowledge will lead to reverence and gratitude. Instead of acknowledging God “as God”, by glorifying him and thanking him, mankind has perverted their knowledge of him and sunk into idolatry. Paul puts it this way, ‘Their empty minds are filled with darkness,’ a darkness that only the light of the gospel can penetrate.
This perversion of the knowledge of God shows itself in our behaviour. Paul says in v 23, “They exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling man and birds and reptiles”. His Jewish readers might catch the very pointed allusion to one of Israel’s less illustrious moments - when they danced naked around a Golden Calf at the foot of Mount Sinai. (Comment on the stupidity of this – the glory of God so close and so awesome yet they settled for an inanimate object to worship.)
So Paul describes the terrible inclination of all people to corrupt the little knowledge of God they do possess by making gods of their own. This tragic behaviour is still typical of many of the world’s religions today but far sadder is the person in our society who has made something else their god. We are so privileged in our knowledge yet we will still dance around our lusts and possessions! And we shouldn’t be too surprised at the terrible litany of sins that result from this rejection of God.
But, the title of today’s talk is “What if we reject God?” Can we do this with complete impunity? Most people seem to believe that they can, but the Bible’s answer is an emphatic no. There are consequences for rejecting God and arguably the most frightening of all is that God will let you reject him. Three times (24; 26; 28) Paul says, “God gave them over…” Its almost like he had us protected and then took his hands away and said, in the words of Harry Enfield, “If that’s what you want, that’s what your gonna get!”
The result of God allowing us to do what we want is truly awful: sexual perversion, depraved minds, a litany of sinful behaviour that is truly hellish in its consequences. And to cap it all, Paul closes this section with the chilling observation that not only will people indulge in perverted behaviour but will encourage and applaud others who do likewise. The result of jettisoning God is a total emptiness and meaninglessness in life. I read a very telling quote from Ravi Zacharias, the Indian Christian leader in this book, “A Long Way East of Eden – Can God Explain the mess we’re in?” He said, “I am absolutely convinced that meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain, meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure.”
In closing just let me look at vv 26-28 in a bit more detail. Sexual perversion was an issue that was big in Paul’s day. It was said of Julius Caesar by Suetonius the Roman historian that, “He was every woman’s man and every man’s woman.” Tiberius and Nero were even worse. Many people blame the fall of the Roman Empire on the sexual perversions that so weakened the fabric of their society and especially their leaders. It is happening in our society today and it’s going to become the major issue facing our church in the next decade. I’m particularly concerned about the wide spread use of pornography, particularly since it’s so easy to access now on the Internet. TALK ABOUT THE CARE CONFERENCE AND ITS PREDICTIONS AND ADVICE. OFFER HELP TO ANYONE CAUGHT UP IN THE SNARE OF PORNOGRAPHY.