Darkness Revealed
Roman’s Series
CCCAG June 7th, 2020
Scripture- Romans 1:18-32
This morning, we will be taking a journey that for some may be a little uncomfortable. Most of the time we come to church to be encouraged and strengthened for the next week, and that’s part of what coming to church is all about. We get that strength through worshipping God and hearing His Word.
Another function of the church service is discipleship- training you in the bible’s truth’s and its message to all of us.
That central theme we see in the bible is God’s love for His creation, and His means of salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
But what did Jesus come to save us from?
Many people would say our sins, and they would be partially correct. Jesus Christ indeed came to save us from sins influence in our lives,
Most importantly Jesus came to save us from the consequences of sin.
That consequence of sin is experiencing what the bible calls the wrath of God.
How many people feel immediately uncomfortable with that thought?
Be honest, because it terrifies me.
It brings up my mom saying, “Wait until your dad gets home!” because you know there is a whole can of whooping coming with him.
How much more so should the thought of Almighty God coming in wrath fill us with dread?
It’s probably the reason most Christians love to stay in the New Testament and just skim the Old Testament, and skip Revelation all together.
God takes sin very seriously as we will see this morning.
So buckle in, and turn in your bibles to Romans 1:18-32, and we will have Conrad read it for us this morning.
Romans 1:18-32
18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, 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 people 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 a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.
24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
28 Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. 32 Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.
Prayer
I. Wrath of God (Verses 18)
Today we will start by asking and answering the question- Why is God wrathful?
Within these opening verses, we see two words that are triggers for God’s wrath- Godlessness and Wickedness
Lets define them
Godlessness is something that does not reflect God’s image or purpose.
ILLUSTRATION
Has anyone ever helped their grandfather or father fix something, and you are using their tools, and using it incorrectly.
My father was a mechanic, and he also did renovations in the various houses he owned. When I was living with my dad as a teenager, we gutted his entire house and redid every wall, doorway, floor, plumbing, and electrical. One time I was on a ladder, and I saw a nail sticking out a little wear we were going to hang some paneling.
Don’t judge- it was the 80’s- paneling was the cool way to finish your basement.
I didn’t feel like going back down the ladder to get a hammer, so I took a screwdriver and was pounding it in the rest of the way with the handle, and my dad lost his mind. He was very particular about using his tools correctly, because as a mechanic he paid a lot of money to have the best tools available. Me using a screwdriver in place of a hammer was very offensive to him because it went against the natural usage and could damage the screwdriver.
That’s is a great way to see Godlessness. Our Father God designed the universe to function in the way He created it, according to His design and will. Anything that goes against that, is “Less then God’s designed”, or Godlessness.
Most people practice Godlessness through apathy or not being concerned about how everything you do is an evidence to whom you truly follow- God or the Spirit of the World. You can accidently be Godless just through carelessness and lack of thinking through a thought or action.
An example of this is the puzzling ability of the person who claims to be a Christian and yet routinely uses God's or Jesus' name as a curse word.
Godlessness is spiritual laziness, and if left unchecked will proceed to the next thing that brings God’s wrath.
Wickedness on the other hand is a purposeful choosing of evil over good. It’s not just a lazy mindset, but a decision to do that which God calls evil. It’s a conscious choice to prefer darkness over the light.
Jesus describes wickedness perfectly. In John 3:19, Jesus is speaking to Nicodemus about why He has come. After the incredible verses describing God’s love for the world through the giving of His Son for our sins, Jesus then summarizes the human condition- a condition that prefers wickedness over God-
This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.
That is wickedness- choosing the devil’s path over God’s salvation.
This is why the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against these two conditions.
It’s humanity standing in front of God saying “I know better than you do God- take you and your morals and get out of my life!”
Now it’s bad enough when people chose to be Godless and Wicked, but then there is a third thing that brings about the wrath of God-
Suppressing the truth so others have no way to knowing the path of salvation.
Not only does a person chose to be spiritually lazy
Not only do they choose to openly rebel against God and His ways
They block others from coming to the truth
It’s one thing if you want to go to hell, but when you actively block others from knowing there is a way out- God’s wrath will be revealed.
Let’s stop here and consider something-
Does this explain what we are seeing in the evening newscast?
Does this explain what we see in our society today?
Does it seems like a conspiracy? YES! It is a conspiracy- the forces of darkness want to win, so they encourage godlessness and wickedness to grow in the world today to suppress the Gospel message.
So what can we do? How can God hold humanity guilty if there are so many things that hide the truth from our eyes?
That’s what Paul addresses next.
Remember- the entire book of Romans is written like a legal argument.
It’s like Paul is standing in front of the entire world system giving a closing argument in defense of the Gospel message, so like a good lawyer, he answers the questions that are forming in his audiences mind before they even can think of asking them.
One of the most common questions posed to Christianity is- So how can God hold people guilty if the entire world system is suppressing the truth?
II. Revelation of God (Vs 19-20)
Paul starts with a concept called Natural Revelation-
A teacher was doing a field trip to the natural history museum and talking about the theory of evolution. They were standing in front of a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton, and the teacher was explaining how all animals started as primordial ooze of random proteins and eventually over the course of billions of years and a lot of random mutations and chance, that ooze became the great dinosaurs, who then died out and mammals rose to become the dominant life form.
One of the students was the son of a local pastor, who believed that the Genesis account of creation was real and asked the teacher- “Isn’t that like believing a tornado went through a cemetery filled with human remains and formed that huge dinosaur skeleton?
Or a hurricane hit a Chinese publishing house and produced an English dictionary”
We spoke about a conspiracy to suppress truth a moment ago, and one of the ways that truth is suppressed is through atheist evolution.
You all know I’m taking science classes in college, and some may worry that I’d be science out of my faith like so many young people have been when they go off to college.
For me the opposite- true study of biology, anatomy, physiology, cosmology reveals the intricacies of an ordered creation. How an eye works, how muscle fibers contract, even the structure and form of DNA/RNA all screams creator. There is no possible way that happened by chance plus billions of years.
Dr. John Lennox of Oxford is one of the most renowned and famous mathematicians in the world. He wrote a book about how ludicrous it is for people to promote atheistic evolution. Dr Lennox calculated the probability of life spontaneously developing out of random chance to be 2 ^500 power to 1. 2 with 499 zeros behind it.
The odds of winning the Mega Millions lottery- 302,575,350 to 1
God has given us creation as evidence of his existence. That is why the bible says that creation points to creator.
That’s why Paul says, humanity is without excuse. That’s natural revelation- that creation declares the Glory of God.
But we also have special revelation- the bible and the Holy Spirit both show us the way of salvation.
What about closed countries? Dreams/angels/visions
Ultimately, It’s only because people prefer the darkness over the light that they refuse to come to the truth.
They are willfully ignorant of the truth.
When we as an individual or as a society prefer darkness over the light, we begin what I call the deadly slide toward judgment we see in the remaining verses of Romans 1.
III. The Deadly slide (Vs 21-27)
In these verses, we see what starts as a mild neglect of God (Godlessness), and eventually ends up with a complete rejection of any biblical morality and a choice to become completely wicked in their thoughts, their actions, and their lifestyles.
Many of us are shocked when someone we have looked up to in the Christian community falls away from the faith.
They didn’t just wake up one morning and decide- I’m’ going to become an atheist today. Every single time a person falls away it’s because of a secret love of something sinful-choosing Godlessness or wickedness instead of God.
As we explore these verses, we will see that these steps don’t just happen in an individual, but in a society- and that is what I think Paul was really pointing out here- when God’s wrath will fall.
It’s a deadly slide toward destruction.
Let’s look at the first phase- and you will understand American history from about the late 1800’s foreward
A. Rejection of God as creator
Rom 1:21-23
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.
For our society in the Western World, this began with Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in the late 1800’s. Schools swallowed this up and began teaching evolution to the students, and dozens of generations since have rejected Genesis chapters 1-12 and in particular 1-3, and replaced it will the idea that you and I are simply evolved animals with no purpose other than to survive and spread our genetics to the next generation.
That (logically) led us to the next phase
B. Sexual promiscuity
Rom 1:24-25 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator — who is forever praised. Amen.
This has started and stopped several times in American history since Darwin’s publication in the 1850’s, although it really didn’t take off until after our Civil War.
This is just a quick synopsis- a through one would take hours
You saw it start around the turn of the century, then the Welsh Revival slowed it down.
It restarted soon after the turn of the century, and Azuza Street (Pentecostal Revival) slowed it
It really hit hard in the 1920’s, then the Great Depression and WWII slowed it.
1960’s- the free love movement hit, but the Jesus Movement (and others) slowed it
1970-80’s, Brownsville and Toronto Revivals slowed it.
Now we are 2020. Nothing has happened in the last 20 years in America that I would classify as a revival.
Nothing has flattened the curve toward God’s wrath.
So, we have slipped down to the next phase-
D. Unnatural Relationships
Rom 1:26-27
26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.
Remember we started with America’s rejection of God as creator, and with that His moral law and character. Since we viewed ourselves as animals, we started acting like animals.
Now we are doing thing not naturally seen even in the animal world.
I do want to stop for a moment here- these verses have been used by Christians for years to persecute people who have tendencies toward homosexuality. Those tendencies are not by themselves sinful-it’s acting on them that is sinful. They are a summation of our sin nature reacting with our experiences to produce a unnatural attraction.
All of us have these kinds of besetting sins- for some it’s gossip, or some it’s lying, for some it’s sex, for others its anger or rage, for some it’s stealing. Everyone has a struggle to face in life.
Homosexuality is a symptom of a larger disease called sin, and when it’s normalized and celebrated, it shows where a nation is in this slide toward destruction.
I encourage you not to see them as a disease, but as a person who desperately needs the healing power of Jesus in their lives.
This was the early 2000’s, and especially after 2008.
We as a culture and nation are now in the final step. When we took the last step, we hit the edge so to speak and started to fall.
D. Moral anarchy
Close your eyes for a moment as I read these next few verses and ask yourself- does this describe our nation today?
Rom 1:28-32 (read slow)
28 Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32 Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.
Does this sound like our world today?
Moral anarchy is the complete rejection of God as king, and has only one reaction-
IV. Judgement (Vs 28-32)
This last phase is what brings wrath and Judgement.
Two of the examples that we have in the bible of God’s judgment falling is Sodom and Gomorrah. It was not just because of sexual sin that God destroyed them- it was because they had gotten to this point here.
I could spend the rest of the afternoon pointing out from the bible multiple times when nations got to this point, and then God’s judgement fell.
Over, and over, and over again it happens.
A sobering example we see in the bible is that of that of the Amorites. They were probably in stage 2 when God told Abraham in Genesis 15 that their sin was not complete, but it was coming. Israel coming into the promised land would be God’s judgment against them.
God ordered Joshua that every single person, no matter how young or how old, was to be killed.
But before that that time of total destruction, God sends a final warning in the form of a judgement- have it your way.
Verse 24, 26, 28 of Romans 1 all have the same language- God gave them over.
The final sign that judgement is coming is this-
God removes His restraining presence.
I don’t always know the reasons God does things but perhaps it’s like a parent whose small child won’t stay next to them in a store, so they hide themselves to cause the child to panic and seek after their mother or father again.
The biblical example would be found in Ezekiel 10 when the Spirit of God leaves the temple in steps- first to the threshold to get the attention of the religious leaders who are so blinded by their own pride and sin they don’t realize it, and so then God’s Spirit leaves the temple.
This is where we are today.
For the past several years, I’ve been praying that we stop this slide before we hit rock bottom.
I love America, I love it’s people, I love it’s freedom.
But we have squandered the incredible gifts God has given us. God is removing his influence and presence from our nation.
The bible describes something that indicates that God’s wrath is imminent.
I’m hoping we are not there, because it’s at this point wrath and judgement are certain. It’s found in Jeremiah 11.
I had to wrestle with myself to even bring this to you, as I’m not sure if it’s prophetic to us, or just God letting me know what is coming.
The Old Testament prophet Jeremiah is dealing with a nation that rejected everything that he prophesies, and refused to turn and repent of their wicked idolatry.
God gives Jeremiah a prophetic word about the future of Israel and Judah, saying that they have left the covenant relationship that were to have with God
Jer 11:11
11 Therefore this is what the Lord says: 'I will bring on them a disaster they cannot escape. Although they cry out to me, I will not listen to them.
Jer 11:14
"Do not pray for this people nor offer any plea or petition for them, because I will not listen when they call to me in the time of their distress.
It’s my hope that we are not here yet- but what happens now will be largely dependent upon those who follow Jesus.
As God’s people, we need to take this seriously- the time for partial Christianity is over. Either destruction or rapture is imminent
Altar Call
