9th
The Rational Mind Deceived
Romans 1:18-23
January 22, 2012
The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 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. 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. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.
(Romans 1:18-23 NIV)
What is it about the idea of God that makes many people uncomfortable? The idea of God does make many people feel that way, you know. For a country that has "In God We Trust" on its money, we are pretty confused about what kind of God we trust. Just the mention of His name brings forth a multitude of conflicting images. Some people want to do away with the idea of God altogether. Others simply want to modify that idea to fit their opinion of who God should really be.
God’s Word is described in Jer. 23:29 read.
Sometimes that hammer breaks that hardness around our hearts like a hammer or burns like fire. People become sermon proof to the degree that they hear the truth of God but do not obey it. They don’t repent but keep on living the lie.
In order to do this man has to justify his ungodly and unrighteous life by changing the truth into a lie and serve the creature rather than the Creator. Read verse 25.
Humanism is the end result of evolution. It is the philosophy man is the highest authority and beyond man and the material universe there is no reality. You know people who are humanistic in their thinking. They change right into wrong and make what is wrong sound right. The lie begins to sound more right than the truth does. All this is done so man can serve himself rather than God.
Whenever we sin against the Word of the Lord we will suffer. Read Jer. 2:13, 19. There are built in reproofs.
God’s Word is truth for us to live our lives. When we obey His Word we are blessed when we disobey there is built in reproof. See Proverbs 1:23-33.
Haggai 1. The people of God are not prospering. God tells them over and over, “Consider your ways.” Vs 6 describes their lives as blessed by God but it is like putting money in a bag with holes in it. Verse 9 “You look for much and it comes to little, consider your ways!”
Problem was they were ignoring God’s clear Word to put His interests and the work of the KOG first in their finances and support. God accuse them of building their own fancy homes and letting God’s house lie in waste. Is God going to bless us if we put our interests before His? Consider your ways. The reproof of God is built into our ways.
In 1938, Harry Emerson Fosdick, then a very famous preacher in New York City, published a book called A Guide to the Understanding of the Bible. In the opening chapter he described how our understanding of God has evolved. In man's thinking, God had come from the wrathful and vengeful God of the primitive mind to the God of fatherhood and brotherhood in the teaching of Jesus. But Fosdick thought that the repugnant idea of hell that Jesus had should also be abandoned in this upward quest of positive development.
Fosdick would probably also agree with Lord Bertrand Russell as he expressed this same thought in his book, Why I Am Not A Christian:
There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to His preaching .
It seems to me that one of the real reasons that the idea of God makes people uncomfortable is that they know that if God exists, we may have to stand accountable before Him one day. The idea of a God who judges us by some moral standard we must meet is a frightening idea to many, especially those who think that they should give account to no one. So, people attempt to redefine God or eliminate God. The truth is that we do not want to be held accountable for our sins.
Deep down inside, however, there is this gnawing knowledge that we are sinful people and that we must deal with a righteous God. So, because of our wickedness we choose to live without God and our sinful, rational minds become deceived and deluded as we ignore the evidence of God in favor of our own gods. This is the downward spiral of sinful unbelief. And this is what is exposed by Paul in our text. Here we will see the rational mind deceived and deluded. Here we will see the outcome of unbelief. And hopefully we will be challenged, not only to recognize unbelief in the world, but also to recognize it in the church. Wherever it appears, it is dangerous.
Do you see the danger of the rationalizations of unbelief? Let's look at the steps in the downward spiral of unbelief in order to observe where we end up when we start down that path.
Deceit
The first step in this downward spiral of sinful unbelief is deceit. Because of the godlessness and wickedness that is in the human heart, people have decided to suppress the truth. It is this deceitful suppression of truth that brings upon us the wrath of God.
Why do you suppose that we suppress the truth? Well, the plain answer given in verse 18 is because of self-will. Because humankind is willful, people choose to suppress any knowledge about God. Those who do not want to deal with God choose to restrain, not only their own consideration of God but also all consideration of God. The idea expressed in our text here is one of an active endeavor to repress or restrain the truth. One connotation of the word translated "suppress" is to "hold down." Somebody has put it this way in a little poem entitled "The Humanist":
He exists because he was created.
He's here because he was placed here.
He's well and comfortable because divine power keeps him so.
He dines at God's table.
He's sheltered by the roof that God gave him.
He's clothed by God's bounty.
He lives by breathing God's air which keeps him strong and vocal to go about persuading people that whether God is or not, only man matters.
Once a person rejects the truth of God he embraces a lie about God. The result is his heart becomes “darkened”. He imagines God to be something He is not. Man’s image of God is warped. He makes God into something to his own liking rather than receiving the truth about God. Willful rejection of God’s revelation of Himself causes man to glorify his own intellect. He de-thrones God.
a. Man likes a god who cuts corners on holiness.
b. Man likes a god who does not punish sin but who is all loving and understands and tolerates our sin. This is not the god of the Bible.
Verse 22 read. The result is they “profess” that they are wise but actually are “fools”, word is “moron”.
They changed God’s incorruptible glory for an image (eikonos: icon). Man wants something he can see touch or feel. This is the reason God warned His people not to think of Him in terms of some tangible form. See Deut. 4:12, 15-19.
Today we see a lot of activity focused against any public display of religion. But underneath it all, is the underlying desire to suppress the truth about God. This is the tragedy of the human condition. Indeed, Jesus Himself said, "This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed". (John 3:19-20)
Denial
A second step in this downward spiral of sinful unbelief is denial. People deny what should be apparent to everyone who takes time to observe the world we live in. The evidence for the existence of God is everywhere to be found.
If people were really seeking to find knowledge about God, the Scripture says that all they need to do is open their eyes, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. How has this been accomplished? Well, one way is through what has been created. Listen to the words of verse 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.
What Paul is saying here is, "Look around you. Everywhere you see evidence that God exists. Look at the sky. Look at the trees. Look at a human being. Did this all happen by chance? Surely there must be a Creator." This is what is known as the "argument from design." It is one of the most common arguments for the existence of God. But if you choose to deny the truth, no argument will make a difference.
Elizabeth Barret Browning wrote:
Earth's crammed with heaven,
and every common bush aflame with God.
But only those who see take off their shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.
It is awfully hard to see when you do not open your eyes. In our culture today, there are many with their eyes firmly shut, which will remind them of the inner knowledge they already possess that God exists and one day they will stand before Him.
Darkness
The next step in this downward spiral of sinful unbelief is darkness. Because of our rejection of the truth that has been revealed about God, we are plunged into rationalistic darkness. Verse 21 says that their foolish hearts were darkened.
Why? What was the cause of this darkness? The reason given is that 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. This darkness is a result of their own choice to reject what they knew about God. Because of this rejection, both their thoughts and their moral center became corrupted.
It is obvious that God holds us accountable for what He has revealed about Himself. When Paul says that they knew God, he is talking about the knowledge that they had come to have by virtue of God's revelation of Himself through the created order. In the creation they saw the magnificence and greatness of God. But they choose to reject that. As a result they are without excuse. Ultimately, when we all stand before God, we will have no excuse for rejecting Him. Donald Grey Barnhouse, (former pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia) observed:
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)
So people, rather than accepting this knowledge of God and choosing to live a lifestyle that glorified Him as God and gave thanks to Him, rejected what they knew and entered into darkness.
Delusion
The final step in this downward spiral of sinful unbelief is delusion. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools is the conclusion of their rationalistic attempt to dismiss God. And it accurately describes the plight of many today. For all our intellectual achievement, if we reject God we become fools. Indeed, the Scripture itself says in Psalm 14:1, "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God.'"
Notice what these pseudo-wise fools did. They exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. In other words, these sophisticated intellectuals became idolaters! They traded in the worship of God for the worship of lesser things.
But even if you worship the pinnacle of God's creation, you are still worshipping something less than God. In fact, Paul points out that it is "mortal" man. In other words, if we choose to worship man, we are worshipping dying man, for this is for what mortal means. Why have we exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man? The only possible answer is because we are deluded. And this is the direct result of our sinful unbelief.
What a tragic downward spiral of sinful unbelief mankind has chosen. Because of our self-centerdness we choose to live without God and our sinful rational minds become deceived and deluded as we ignore the evidence of God in favor of our own gods. But God has exposed the downward spiral of sinful unbelief and He challenges us to beware of any evidence of this sort of rationalization in our own lives.
Do you see the danger of the rationalization of unbelief? We are without excuse. God has revealed Himself to us all. How shall we respond? Will we reject that truth? Will we choose to ignore and suppress that knowledge? Will we go our own way, choosing our own gods, consoling ourselves with the thought that we may not have to answer to the living God? It is against this kind of thinking that the wrath of God is being revealed from Heaven.
Do not be deceived. One day we will all stand before the living God. Our challenge is to stand before Him now, in faith receiving Him as our Lord and Savior. If we do, then we will be delivered from the wrath of God. We will be forgiven and accepted into His family. We will receive His righteousness instead of His wrath. I don't know about you, but this is where I want to be.
