Ignoring God's Plain Truth

Invocation:  May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. 

Father, we seek insights into Your holy word, asking for Your blessing on each one who comes in worship, and we offer prayers of supplication for those unable to join with us this morning.  We ask these things in the name of Him who loved us first, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  Amen.

Today's Scripture: Romans 1:18-23, 28-32

¹⁸ For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. ¹⁹ For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. ²⁰ 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. ²¹ 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. ²² Claiming to be wise, they became fools, ²³ and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

²⁸ And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. ²⁹ They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips,³⁰ slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, ³¹ foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.³² Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.

Key Verse:  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.  (Romans 1:20)

In the English Standard Version Bible, this part of scripture has the subtitle: “God’s Wrath on Unrighteousness,” which we have titled, “Ignoring God’s Plain Truth.”

          Evangelist and author Bill Bright has said, “We can trace all our human problems to our view of God.”  Is that true?

          What is truth?  Scripture says God is truth.  But what is truth?  We can circle back around again and answer, “God is truth.”  But what is truth?

          The concept of truth has clearly fallen on hard times, and the consequences of rejecting it are ravaging human society. So let’s go back to the starting point and answer the question: What is truth?

One of the most profound and eternally significant questions in the Bible was posed by an unbeliever. Pilate — the man who handed Jesus over to be crucified — who turned to Jesus in His final hour, and asked, “What is truth?” It was a rhetorical question, a cynical response to what Jesus had just revealed, saying He had come into the world to testify to the truth.”

Two thousand years later, the whole world breathes Pilate’s cynicism. Some say truth is a power play, a metanarrative constructed by the elite for the purpose of controlling the ignorant masses. To some, truth is subjective, the individual world of preference and opinion. Others believe truth is a collective judgment, the product of cultural consensus, and still others flatly deny the concept of truth altogether.

So, what is truth?

There is the story about the preacher who learned a lesson about truth one day when he saw a group of kids in an alley with a box of kittens.  He stopped and asked them what they were doing.  One kid explained they were telling lies and the one who told the biggest whopper would win the kittens.

“My, my,” the preacher exclaimed, “that’s terrible, telling lies just to win something?  Why, when I was a kid we’d never think of doing such a thing,” he exclaimed.

“Okay, Preacher,” they all said, “you win!”

Well, here’s a simple definition drawn from what the Bible teaches: Truth is that which is consistent with the mind, will, character, glory, and being of God.  Even more to the point: Truth is the self-expression of God.  That is the biblical meaning of truth.  Because the definition of truth flows from God, truth is theological.

Truth is also ontological—which is a fancy way of saying it is the way things really are.  Reality is what it is because God declared it so and made it so.  Therefore, God is the author, source, determiner, governor, arbiter, ultimate standard, and final judge of all truth.

The Old Testament refers to the Almighty as the “God of truth” (Deuteronomy 32:4; Psalm 31:5; and Isaiah 65:16). When Jesus said of Himself, “I am the way, the truth…” (John 14:6), He was thereby making a profound claim about His own deity.  He was also making it clear that all truth must ultimately be defined in terms of God and His eternal glory.  After all, Jesus is “the brightness of [God’s] glory and the express image of His person” (Hebrews 1:3).  He is truth incarnate—the perfect expression of God and therefore the absolute embodiment of all that is true.

Jesus also said that the written Word of God is truth. It does not merely contain nuggets of truth; it is pure, unchangeable, and inviolate truth that (according to Jesus) “cannot be broken” (John 10:35).  Praying to His Heavenly Father on behalf of His disciples, He said this: “Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth” (John 17:17).  Moreover, the Word of God is eternal truth “which lives and abides forever” (1st Peter 1:23).

That God is truth is attested to 21 times in scripture:

once in 2^nd Chronicles

once in Numbers

once time in Psalms

3 times in Isaiah

once in Jeremiah

10 times in John

once in Romans

once in Hebrews

once in Titus

once in 1^st John

Before we get to the specific verses of today’s lesson, let me share some grounding information with you about whom Paul was writing to, and the specifics of what he was attempting to share with them.

So what we have before us this morning is a portion of a letter written by Paul to the members of one church Paul did not found.  These are believers who came together themselves and became the church of Jesus Christ at Rome.  And Paul had yet to even visit them.  These are mostly Gentiles, rather than Jews, and Paul sees himself as a missionary to the Gentiles.

Paul is writing to commend them in their faith, and also to express support for their stand for Christ.  But at the same time, Paul is preparing for a missionary trip to Spain – which at that time was at the far end of his Mediterranean world.  So Paul is writing to this group of believers to provide pastoral counsel for unity, and to enlist the community’s financial support for his continual work among fellow Gentiles.

In this letter, which our lesson begins at verse 18, it’s actually important to know what he says in the previous verse, verse 17, to put into context what he says later. 

It’s kind of like the fellow said, “I know you think you understand what you believe I said, but you don’t understand that what you heard is not what I meant.”

For in verse 17 Paul mentions three phrases that are important to understanding what he says later on:

1.  Paul writes about “the gospel of God;”

2.  the Jew first and also the Greek;

and 3.  the righteousness of God.

We see Paul using the word “God” more than a hundred times in his letter to the Romans.  He also uses “Jesus Christ” often, but his frequent use of “God” early on signals Paul’s intent to highlight the character of God as the ground upon which to build an understanding of Jesus Christ.

Paul’s use of that phrase, “the gospel of God,” is his way of explaining that the gospel proclamation concerning the Son is tied ultimately to God’s covenant with Israel, by flesh in David and through the Spirit in resurrection.  God’s plan of salvation, now made available for all people, through Jesus, remains God’s plan, first initiated by God’s choosing of Israel.

Where Paul uses the term “the Jew first and also the Greek”, we see Roman citizen Paul writing to God’s chosen people who may be among his readers, and also to the Gentile or Greek-speaking audience.

Paul sees himself as ministering to the Gentiles, but at the same time, his letter to the Roman church is full of allusions and references to the Hebrew scriptures, and Paul deals at length with the law of Moses and the legacy of Abraham. 

We see Paul’s concern for the relationship between Jew and Gentile running throughout this letter, suggesting that Paul assumed he was addressing both groups in Rome, with the likely majority being Gentile.

Then there is Paul’s use of the phrase “the righteousness of God.”  He mentions it in his introductory remarks, then several more times, including in Chapters 3 and 10.  However, the phrase appears only once outside of Romans, and that’s in 2^nd Corinthians 5:21.  So why it is so crucial here?

According to some scholars, while Paul is concerned with the inclusion of Gentiles within God’s plan of salvation in this letter to a predominantly Gentile church in Rome, it is possible that also of major concern in Paul’s mind was his approaching requirement to defend his “law-free” gospel before the still-skeptical leaders of the Jerusalem church.  And so he grounded the presentation of his gospel in a conviction these leaders could affirm: that God’s righteous justice falls equally upon all.  From that he argued that God’s saving righteousness must also be equally available to all.

In fact, many in the church world-wide today disagree with whether or not Paul actually taught a believer’s freedom in Christ and how we are to live a godly life apart from the governance of the Mosaic Law, and even today many still believe we should be living under the Mosaic laws.  Just for clarification, there are three types of Mosaic Law:  the moral, ceremonial, and civil law.  I believe scripture affirms Paul taught that Israel alone had received the Mosaic Law and was under its administration. Gentiles were excluded from the Law, as was the Church, the body of Christ (Ephesians 2.11-13;Romans 3.1-2, 6.14). However, Paul taught that when Gentiles or the Church come in contact with the Law, it has the same effect it had on Israel: it condemns (Romans 3.19), it does not save.

Looking then at the verses in today's scripture, beginning with verses 18-22, Paul’s writings accept that human beings have an innate leaning to idolatry of the familiar, turning away from God, suppressing the truth of God as sovereign Lord and Creator.

He sees the obvious evidence for God’s existence in creation, in the handiwork of God, observable by all creatures on earth.  God is and always has been on display. 

It is in describing this dilemma that Paul lays the groundwork for what he will later declare about Christ: That because all have had access to the knowledge of God – through creation or through covenant – and because all have failed to honor God as God, or thank Him, as it says in verse 21, all are under condemnation.  No one has an excuse.

In verse 23 we find an echo of the Genesis creation story.  Again, what Paul is doing is restating the fall of humankind, the essential human problem: that the creature refuses to be dependent upon the Creator.

Then we jump to verse 28.  The conspicuous result of humankind’s willful attempt to take God’s place is, as one commentator put it, “Not a rise above human creatureliness, but a fall below humanity to a level of human beastliness.”  The consequence is that God gives them over to the natural consequences of their behaviors.

Now, as to this business of putting ourselves on part with, or even replacing God with our own wonderful self, perhaps you heard the story of the scientists who prayed to God that He was no longer needed.  That they had advanced human science to the point where they could create human beings out of the dirt of the earth, just as God did with Adam. 

“Well,” God said, “let me see you do that.”

Whereupon they reached down and grabbed a handful of dirt.

“Ah-ah,” said God, “get your own dirt.”

Verse 28 of today's scripture lesson reads: “Since they didn’t think it was worthwhile to acknowledge God, God abandoned them to a defective mind to do inappropriate things.”  Unlike what we saw in the prophet Zephaniah, here God’s wrath is made manifest not in the handing out of divine punishments but in self-inflicted human perversions.  The brokenness of the moral compass is its own punishment.  Destruction comes to humankind not from above but from within.

 Ending up finally at verses 29-32, we find sadly that the “decision” Paul mentions in verse 32 is the death sentence made inevitable by all those who practice and – even more – celebrate a self-destructive lifestyle, knowing full well what they are doing!  Paul’s intent here is to expose the realities of human depravity in the context of the Torah, the Law of Moses.  For even if we are not under Ceremonial and Civil Law, we remain under God’s Moral Law.  Later on Paul comes back to this.

At this point, though, Paul is, as one scholar observes, counting down a “disguised version of the commandments … (1) evil, covetousness, (2) malice, envy, (3) murder, strife, (4) deceit, malignity, (5) gossips, slanderers, (6) haters of God, (7) insolent, haughty, (8) boastful inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, (9) foolish, faithless, and (10) heartless, ruthless…For Paul and those in the scribal Pharisaic tradition, the whole world heard God’s Ten Commandments, although only Israel was God’s covenant partner…”

The romantic poet William Wordsworth wrote a sonnet titled, “The World is Too Much With Us,” part of which reads,

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune…..”

To put it more bluntly, every day injustice and hatred abound, and people do not walk with God.  This is the world we live in.

This shouldn’t be news to us.  It wasn’t news to those who first read Paul’s letter – but then Paul wasn’t trying to inform; he was aiming to indict.  His intent was to state the obvious, the undeniably bad news of the human condition, in order to stir a response to the unbelievably good news of Jesus who is the Christ.

  

The point is that we are called to commit to discerning and following God’s will.  If we take Paul at his word in his opening statement to the Romans, then the necessary step before we can ever discern or follow God’s will is to acknowledge and turn away from our own will.

The writer of the student book quotes William Barclay as observing that people willfully reject God’s truth so ”that their own schemes and dreams may be furthered.” 

But I ask you out of your own experience, is it really that easy to become enamored with our own schemes and dreams, so much so that we turn our back on Almighty God?

What do you think?

I wonder, if we had a small hand mirror we could look into, would we be reminded of those moments of reality, when our own self-centeredness, and the consequences that followed, would they come rolling back to us?

Actually, you and I are not any different from those around us who may be caught up in turning their backs on God, except for that one promise from the Word of God such as we find in Hebrews 13:5 – “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”

That being the case, how then could we possibly, as the lesson title says, “Ignore God’s Plain Truth”?