“Without God”
Romans 1:18-32
After an incredible,
exciting, brilliant introduction to the book of Romans, from Paul, if not
from me, we move quickly this morning to the foundation that Paul is going
to build upon.
The second half of this
chapter, and on through chapter 2 of Romans doesn’t seem like very good
news.
It is about our sin, our
utter depravity without God.
But it is the foundation
for getting to the good news.
In this section Paul sets
out and faces squarely the chaos and wholesale crisis of universal man –
barbarians, Jews and Greeks.
Paul, in this section is
the prosecutor and he is indicting us for our sin.
He sets out the origin of
the human crisis, the cumulative nature of it, and the failure of every
solution on our part to find an adequate resolution to the crisis.
Message:
“But God’s angry displeasure
erupts as acts of human mistrust and wrongdoing and lying accumulate, as
people try to put a shroud over truth.
But the basic reality of God is plain enough.
Open your eyes and there it is!
By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people
have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see:
eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being.
So nobody has a good excuse.
What happened was this: People knew God perfectly well, but when they
didn’t treat him like God, refusing to worship him”
So here’s the root of the
problem of humanity.
We recognized God as God,
but chose not to worship God, to acknowledge God as God.
It began at the dawn of
creation, and has been the same ever since.
The lie of the serpent is
“you shall be God.”
Our opening page on the
internet is The Globe and Mail, and when I opened it Thursday morning this
is what I read in an advertisement:
I
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I’m
the Emperor of Efficiency
I
control what I want, when I want privately and publicly.
I can
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I can
spend on what I need, not on what I don’t.
I can
play like an optimist and pay like a realist.
I
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Doesn’t that sound like
the serpent long ago… you will be like God.
Obviously marketers for
Microsoft think our desire to god-like is just as compelling today as the
devil did.
Some things don’t change.
So we want to be like God,
we want to be our own gods, shape our own destiny, be self-made, and so we
turn away from the Creator of heaven and earth.
We turn our backs on God.
But remember from last
week, we’re going to worship and serve something, if it’s not God the
creator, then it’s our own desires, or it’s something else.
So we decide that we are
god, we decide our path, we stand for ourselves, we guide our own destiny,
we decide what is right or wrong depending on what we decide is best for us.
And suddenly we serve the
kingdom of “me”.
It’s a popular kingdom.
Many people serve it.
Business people justify
paying poor wages, polluting the environment with the words “I’m just making
a living,” or “I’m taking care of myself”, or “looking after the bottom
line,” serving the kingdom of Me.
Check out the bar scene
Friday or Saturday nights, and the train wrecks left of human lives in the
wake of everyone just doing what’s
best for me, without care for what it does to anyone else.
We lay waste to the land,
and leave a wake of broken relationships all around us when we follow our
own desires.
But the kingdom of Me is a
lonely, empty, often pain-filled place, and pretty soon many people get
tired of it.
And so throughout history
we’ve created other gods, idols is the Biblical word for them.
We will do what is right
for the market economy.
We will worship and serve
nature or creation.
We will follow the logic
of Dr. Phil, or some great philosopher like Plato.
Idols give us an edge.
We’ll follow this way or
that way, and so we will be happy, successful, healthy, secure.
“Although
we claimed to be wise,” says Paul, “we became fools, and exchanged the glory
of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and
animals and reptiles.”
Earl Palmer in his
commentary on Romans notes two important things; the first is that one idol
is never enough.
It can’t be, idols can’t
do anything, can’t help, don’t teach us the way God created the universe to
work.
So there has to be a
progression from one idol to another, to another, trying to find something
that will work, so that we will be happy, successful, and fulfilled.
The next thing that Earl
notes is that Paul lists the idols in a deteriorating order where finally
what is worshipped is “reptiles” which is symbolic of fear itself.
The tragedy of our sin,
the crisis of our situation as people is that when we turn our back on God,
when we do not acknowledge that God is God and we are not, nor can we create
nor control God, we create idols that look like us, that we can control,
that look like the world around us, family, nation, state, church our
country, down and down it spirals, until we worship fear itself.
People chose idols
precisely in order to secure acceptance, power, success and happiness.
But in Paul’s overview,
every object we cling to for meaning will at the last spiral inwardly to
isolated results of brokenness, where we are confused about our own
identity, and broken in our relationships with one another.
In C.S. Lewis’ book The
Great Divorce it characterizes hell as that state of being where every
person lives an infinite distance from every other person.
Our sins and our idols
have done this to us.
So having turned away from
God, and traded the glory of God who holds the whole world in his hands for
cheap figurines you can buy at any roadside stand, God in effect said to us;
“If that’s what you want, that’s what you get.”
The Message:
“It wasn’t long before we were living in a
pigpen, smeared with filth, filthy inside and out.”
People ask me does God
punish us.
I believe that God
disciplines us, and maybe God will punish us, but mostly I don’t believe God
has to.
The consequences of our
sin are enough.
We punish and destroy
ourselves and each other.
We become confused about
our own identity, and God gives us over to our desires.
The Message translates vs
27 “And then they paid for it, oh how they paid for it – emptied of God and
love, godless and loveless wretches.”
“Wretches” is what we
become, with God only leaving us to our own devices.
The most troubling part of
this passage for me is those few little words; “God gave them up”
These are words without
hope, or at least they would be if they were God’s final word.
But it is critical to
remember that these harsh words do not stand apart from the whole of the
book of Romans.
John Calvin wrote on the
relatedness of Paul’s words of judgment to the words of hope.
The first must precede the
second.
We must hear and fully
understand the judgment if we’re going to truly understand how great is our
hope and where that hope is rightly founded.
Calvin writes;
“Paul’s object is to teach
us where salvation is to be found.
He has already declared that we cannot obtain it except through the
Gospel; but as the flesh will not willingly humble itself… Paul shows that
the whole world is deserving of eternal death.
It hence follows that life is to be recovered in some other way,
since we are all lost in ourselves.” (Calvin’s Commentary on Romans)
So hear the words of
judgment against us and our world:
They were filled with every kind of
wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife,
deceit, craftiness, they are gossips,
slanderers,
God-haters,
insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious towards parents,
foolish,
faithless, heartless, ruthless.
They know God’s
decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die—yet they not only
do them but even applaud others who practice them.
The language of this
passage brings us to the realization that there is no possibility of
resolution apart from the mighty act of God himself.
The next to the last word
– judgment, damnation, must be heard and understood before the last word of
hope, of gospel good news can really be heard, that Jesus Christ came to
save sinners,
Which will come as we
continue in Romans
Thanks be to God!
Rev.