#5 “No Excuse for the Heathen” Sermon

If men are not lost, hopeless, and incapable of glorifying God apart from Christ,

(Romans 1:18-23 NIV)  The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, {19} since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. {20} For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. {21} For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. {22} Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools {23} and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

Several months ago I was called for only the second time in my adult life to jury duty. As any of you who have ever gone through that process know, it can be a difficult experience of “hurry up and wait.” Most of the time is spent sitting around in a large room to see if the judges assigned for duty that day need a jury.

After a long morning of waiting, it’s natural to jump at the chance of getting out into the warmth of the sun during lunch hour. I made my way to the closest fast food restaurant. It was filled with several collegiate swimmers from the University of Southern California, who were in town for an important meet, I learned from some simple conversation.

I saw something that struck me as very sad while there, however. I saw two men down the street and outside the restaurant who gave every appearance that their day was going to spent drinking from a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. It wasn’t too long before one of the men appeared to decide it was time to get up and go buy another bottle, as they had already consumed the first.

Now this text in Romans 1 is very relevant to these two men for it depicts their situation to a ‘T.’ But it is important to us as well for it plainly answers one of the questions most frequently asked by the unsaved, “How can a God of love condemn to eternal torment those who have never heard the name of Jesus Christ?”

Godlessness Is Ignorance (Closed Eyes) (1:18-20).

A. It is a simple ignoring of the evidence, a self-induced blindness.

B. God has made the truth plain enough, and He has made Himself evident. We will find that ignorance is no defense.

C. That’s how sin starts—ignoring reality. “God? What God?”

In this first chapter of Romans he gives us a historical sketch of religion. He maintains that religion was at the beginning monotheistic, and that man, when he turned from God’s view of Himself in creation, twisted and perverted pure religion into various forms of error and confusion.

There is available to every man a certain knowledge of God. This knowledge is attainable by observing the handiwork of God in creation. Just as we can learn much of a writer by studying his work, or of a painter by his paintings, so, also, we can learn of God from His handiwork, His creation.

We may learn, Paul says in verse 20, of God’s eternal power and of His divine nature. Who can look at the raging power of the Niagara Falls and not be struck with the power of the One Who created them? Who can study the power of the atom and not be impressed with the infinite power of the Creator? And who can ponder creation without concluding that someone far greater than mortal man was the originator of it all?

As the Psalmist put it long ago: “The heavens are telling of the glory of God; And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands. Day to day pours forth speech, And night to night reveals knowledge” (Psalm 19:1, 2). The witness of creation to its Creator has been acknowledged by many great minds.

Dr. Horstmann testified, “My scientific conscience forbids me not to believe in God.”

Pasteur concurred, “Just because I reflected I remained a believer.”

Dr. A. Nueberg agrees when he says, “God is the cause of all things, and whoever thinks in terms of cause and effect thinks in the direction of God.”

Even an unbeliever like Voltaire confessed, “I do not know what I should think about the world. I cannot believe this clock exists without a clockmaker.”

Man’s Response to God’s Natural Revelation

Man's proper response to the revelation of God should have been worship and grateful acknowledgment: “For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God, or give thanks …” (Romans 1:21a).

Man’s response to natural revelation is three-fold. First of all is the initial act of rejection: Men simply refuse to accept God as He has revealed Himself. Paul tells us in verse 18 that men “… suppress the truth in unrighteousness.”

They refuse God as He is. How often we consider the problem of the heathen to be lack of revelation. We somehow view God as withholding revelation essential to the salvation of the pagan. But Paul describes the heathen as having confined God's revelation to a box of their own making, and piling on the lid of the box their own sins. The pagan’s problem is not the sparsity of revelation, but the suppression of it.

Whenever we reject one explanation of the facts we must necessarily counter with an alternative. This is precisely the situation with the heathen. They have rejected God’s revelation of Himself and they have replaced it with another. The key word here is the word ‘exchanged’ (vv. 23, 25, 26).

Instead of worshipping the God Who made man in His own image, they made gods in their image. They worshipped the creature rather than the Creator. Bad enough to conceive of God in terms of humanity, but they went far beyond this to represent God in terms of the beasts of the earth. The Greeks had their Apollo, the Romans the eagle, the Egyptians the bull, and the Assyrians the serpent. Paul may have been alluding to these ‘gods.’

Not only did the heathen exchange the truth of God for a lie, but they also exchanged the blessings of God in His provision for sexual fulfillment for that which is unnatural and disgusting. “… for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire towards one another …” (Romans 1:26b-27a). There is here, I believe, a deadly sequence of events. Rejection of God’s revelation leads to idolatry, and idolatry leads to immorality and man at last plummets into the grossest perversions imaginable.

R. A. Torrey wisely wrote: “Shallow views of sin and of God’s holiness, and of the glory of Jesus Christ and His claims upon us, lie at the bottom of weak theories of the doom of the impenitent. When we see sin in all its hideousness and enormity, the Holiness of God in all its perfection, and the glory of Jesus Christ in all its infinity, nothing but a doctrine that those who persist in the choice of sin, who love darkness rather than light, and who persist in the rejection of the Son of God, shall endure everlasting anguish, will satisfy the demands of our own moral intuitions.… The more closely men walk with God and the more devoted they become to His service, the more likely they are to believe this doctrine” (What the Bible Teaches [New York: Revell, 1898], pp. 311-13).

A disease left Helen Keller as a very young girl without sight, hearing, and speech. Through Anne Sullivan’s tireless and selfless efforts, Helen finally learned to communicate through touch and even learned to talk. When Miss Sullivan first tried to tell Helen about God, the girl’s response was that she already knew about Him—just didn’t know His name (Helen Keller, The Story of My Life [New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1905], pp. 368-74).

          II. Godlessness Is Misdirected Worship (1:21-23).

      A. It is failing to glorify or to give thanks to the Creator.

      B. It is bowing before created things.

Donald Grey Barnhouse made this potent observation: Will God give man brains to see these things and will man  then fail to exercise his will toward that God? The sorrowful  answer is that both of these things are true. God will give a man brains to smelt iron and make a hammer head and nails. God will  grow a tree and give man strength to cut it down and brains to  fashion a hammer handle from its wood. And when man has the  hammer and the nails, God will put out His hand and let man drive  nails through it and place Him on a cross in the supreme  demonstration that men are without excuse. (Romans, vol. 1 [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1953], p. 245)

          III. Godlessness Is Sexual Disobedience, Novelty, Perversion (Sins About Which These Verses Are Embarrassingly Plain) (1:24-27).

      A. This is idolatry too. My unmanaged impulses are in charge, rather than God being in charge.

      B. Our patient in ICU yells, “Hey, this is fun. I’m free.” And we are free to suffer the natural consequences of ignoring God’s direction.

      C. “Oh, the church has always made such a big deal about sex.” That’s been because it is a big deal. It is part of our creative partnership with God. It is an identity at the center of our personality. There is a plan for our sexuality.

          To forsake God is to exchange truth for falsehood, meaning for hopelessness, and satisfaction for emptiness. But an empty mind and soul is like a vacuum. It will not long remain empty but will draw in falsehood and darkness to replace the truth and light it has rejected.

Every person is under God’s wrath and condemnation due to man-made religion, reflected in the countless systems he has devised to replace the truth and the worship of God.

          IV. Godlessness Is Practicing, Endorsing, or Ignoring a Grand Variety Of God-Hating, Self-Defeating Activities and Attitudes (1:28-2:2).

      A. Wickedness recruits partners for hell.

      B. Greed says “Only I really count.”

      C. Malice is so envious of others that it has to cut them down to size.

      D. Gossip defies Jesus. He says that we are to speak to another face to face. But gossip whispers to anyone who will listen.

      E. Some children obey themselves, and entertain their peers rather than obeying their parents.

Conclusion

Godlessness is progressive. I begin by failing to listen. Then I misdirect my worship, my honor. Then I move to sins against nature. And then I step into sins against society. It starts inside and works its way out.

God is angry with that. He’s angry with the dirtying of His world. And He will, in His time, remove all the dirt.

The human race is a critically ill patient, whose only chance for survival (to escape the old world and move into the new one) is to respond to the heroic treatment offered by a patient, loving God. Grace!