The Slippery Slope
TCF Sermon
February 4, 2001
Read from Romans 1:18-32
Here we read a passage that shows how clearly sin has captured our world
- we read a disturbing picture of a culture in moral free fall, all restraints gone, full of compromise with righteousness, headed toward destruction and judgment
- a society not unlike the world we live in
But, you know what this passage of scripture makes me think of?
Niagara Falls
How in the world do I get Niagara Falls from the Apostle Paul’s sobering picture of a sinful world?
How many of you have been to Niagara Falls?
If you’ve never been there, you can only imagine the power and majesty of the sight
Pictures or video do not do it justice
One of the amazing things about Niagara Falls is the amount of water that goes over the brink of the falls each minute
-averaging about 194,940 cu ft per second, - that’s about 93,150,000 gallons per minute
One of the things I remember about living near the falls is that each year, you’d hear two or three times about someone going over the falls
Some, stupidly, did it on purpose, and most often paid for their stupidity with their lives - we read of stupidity in this passage from Romans 1
- others fell in close to the brink and never had a chance
But what makes me want to relate this passage of scripture we just read with Niagara Falls is this:
- you could be a mile or so upriver from the brink of the Falls, and there were places that the water was not too deep so that you could have walked across the river.
- but the flow of the water to the brink was so strong, the current so rapid, that there were warning buoys several miles upstream, to warn boaters, swimmers, whoever might be in or near the water
- because once you got caught in that current, you were on a slippery slope, a downhill slide to the brink
- which meant almost certain death
That’s why this message this morning is called The Slippery Slope
Because Paul’s picture of sin in Romans 1 clearly reveals the downward spiral that’s common of sin in a culture
- and in the individual
As we look at this passage this morning, we’ll see this downward progression
First people reject God - we’ll take a look at how that can start
- that makes it easier to compromise right and wrong
- next, they make up their own ideas about what a god should be and do
then they fall into sin
—sexual sin, greed, hatred, envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice, gossip and more
Finally, they grow to hate God and worse still, encourage others to do so
It’s also clear that God does not cause this steady progression toward evil
Rather, when people reject him, he allows them to live as they choose
God gives them over, or permits them to experience, the natural consequences of their sin
Once caught in the downward spiral, no one can pull himself or herself out.
Sinners must trust Christ alone to put them on the path of escape, to pull them off of the slippery slope, to rescue them from the downward spiral which is inevitable once we start down that wrong path.
- and that involves a choice we make to acknowledge God’s rule in our lives
- literally His right to be Lord - which brings us full circle
- that means we want to stay so far from the brink of the falls, so far upstream from the cliff over which these millions of gallons of water cascade each minute
- that we cannot get caught in the current of culture and get swept along into sin
To ask how close to the brink can we get is the wrong question for us as believers
The right question is, how far away can I get?
Now, it’s important to remember the entire context of this passage this morning
we must remember this:
In Romans 1:18-through chapter 3, Paul develops his argument that no one can claim by their own efforts or merit to be good in God’s sight
—not the masses, not the Romans, not even the Jews
- in our case this morning, not even we believers can claim righteousness through our own efforts or merit
All people everywhere deserve God’s condemnation for their sin
- he leads off with this argument we’re seeing in Romans 1, and ends up with Romans 3:23, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God
- then vs 24 tells us:we are justified freely by his grace…
Only when we come to understand that, can we truly receive and appreciate the mercy of God as the wonderful gift it is
So I believe this passage of scripture can accomplish a couple of things for us this morning
1. It can serve as a sobering reminder of how lost humanity is, hopefully prompting us to be tools of God in bringing His light into the darkness - spreading the gospel of grace
2. It can serve as a warning to us as believers in our Lord Jesus Christ to guard against falling into the same traps that lead men into ruin and destruction - to put barriers between us and the slippery slope, and most importantly, to honor God as Lord of our lives - 1 John tells us if we love him we’ll obey His commands
The signs of the slippery slope are all around us
- the erosion of standards
- the decay of morality
- the compromise of righteousness
Sometimes we justify compromise by assuming it’s necessary for peace - and indeed, on issues that don’t affect righteousness, compromise can be a good thing
- but it’s part of the slippery slope and has unintended consequences when right and wrong are involved
A New York family bought a ranch out West where they intended to raise cattle. Friends visited and asked if the ranch had a name. "Well," said the would-be cattleman, "I wanted to name it the Bar-J. My wife favored Suzy-Q, one son liked the Flying-W, and the other wanted the Lazy-Y. So we’re calling it the Bar-J-Suzy-Q-Flying-W-Lazy-Y." "But where are all your cattle?" the friends asked. "None survived the branding."
Things that would have caused us to blush 10, 15, 20, 25 years ago or more
- don’t even cause us to think twice today
Values, in terms of society, culture, life and death, that were commonly held not too many years ago,
- have eroded, been undermined, been literally changed 180 degrees from where we stood on these things a few short decades ago
A few weeks ago in his sermon, Jim Garrett read a commentary from Chuck Colson
- showing how there’s a growing segment in our culture that now wants to normalize sexual behavior that was universally condemned even a decade ago
A few weeks ago, we marked Sanctity of Life Sunday
30 years ago, we took the sanctity of the life of the unborn for granted, and could never have imagined how far we’ve come in these past three decades - how far down the slippery slope we’ve fallen
- we have otherwise "normal," civilized people who believe it’s acceptable to deliver a baby almost completely, puncture its skull and suck out the brain to kill it
- we have Congressman and Senators who’ve voted to allow this barbaric procedure, and a former president who speaks of a woman’s right to choose to do this as a noble thing
- we have organizations dedicated to keeping this legal, where they dress up in tuxes and evening gowns and have expensive banquets to raise funds to make it possible
Let me read a couple of quotes to you:
While the deep concern of a woman bearing an unwanted child merits consideration and sympathy, it is my personal feeling that the legalization of abortion on demand is not in accordance with the value which our civilization places on human life. Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights which must be recognized -- the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grown old.
When history looks back to this era it should recognize this generation as one which cared about human beings enough to halt the practice of war,
to provide a decent living for every family and to fulfill its responsibility to its children from the very moment of conception."
Sen. Edward Kennedy, August 3, 1971
"There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of [a] higher order than the right to life ... that was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation
because that was private and therefore outside your right to be concerned.
"What happens to the mind of a person, and the moral fabric of a nation, that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience? What kind of a person and what kind of a society will we have
20 years hence if life can be taken so casually? It is that question, the question of our attitude, our value system, and our mind-set with regard to the nature and worth of life itself that is the central question
confronting mankind. Failure to answer that question affirmatively may leave us with a hell right here on earth."
Rev. Jesse Jackson, January 1977
Senator Kennedy doesn’t believe anymore what he said so eloquently 30 years ago.
- he consistently votes for abortion, and voted against a ban on partial birth abortion
Jesse Jackson has changed his tune in the past 24 years, too, and is now a strong supporter of abortion.
If these men were on the radical fringes of our culture, these quotes might only illustrate that they’re wishy washy and easily swayed by popular opinion, which may be true, too
But they aren’t the radical fringe
Unfortunately, sadly, these men speak for a large part of our society
- these men help us to illustrate how far we’ve slipped
They were speaking for the mainstream then - it’s what most of our culture believed
- unfortunately, their position now reflects a large segment of our population
How did we get to this sorry state of affairs?
Well, first of all, history repeats itself, again and again
Though it might appear that Paul wrote this passage exactly for our time, he didn’t
He wrote it two thousand years ago, and what he wrote has been true of human nature throughout history
Men still suppress the truth by their wickedness (vs. 18)
People are still without excuse, because it’s just as true today that what may be known about God is plain to all (vs 19-20)
Romans 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. 22Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.
Here we see that the first step downward was their failure to adore or glorify God as God
- that was followed by the sin of ingratitude
- ingratitude appears in more than one biblical list of sins
Now, Paul is obviously thinking more in terms of thanksgiving as a characteristic of a whole life
-as the appropriate response of one whose daily experience is shaped by the recognition that he stands in debt to God
- that his very life and experience of living is a gift from God, our Maker
In Paul’s perspective, this attitude of awe and thankful dependence is how knowledge of God should express itself
- this failure to give God his due and to receive life as God’s gift is Paul’s way of expressing the primal sin of humankind
But look what a great picture these few verses present of the slippery slope:
At first glance, we think Paul’s clearly writing of the example of Israel, and obviously, what he writes does apply to Israel
Israel fell to idolatry countless times, and sometimes we look at them and shake our heads
After all, we’re way too sophisticated to worship idols
- golden calves
- statues of deities
- anything such as those
Right?
How could intelligent people turn to idolatry?
Paul shows us here that idolatry begins when people reject what they know about God
- instead of looking to him as the Creator and sustainer of life, they see themselves as the center of the universe
Uh, oh….
Getting a little too close for comfort now, because we’re getting out of the abstract of history - out of the safe ground of "other" people’s sin
Paul notes that when we don’t give God the credit He deserves
when we do not glorify Him as God
- that means He’s this guy we sing about in worship
but we’re not willing to give Him control of our lives
- after all, we’re in control - so what’s obedience have to do with anything?
How do our life’s priorities matter here?
So, now that we’re in control
- we invent "gods" that are convenient projections of our own selfish plans and decrees
That’s what Israel did
That’s what the heathen nations did
That’s what we clearly see in our society, our culture
Relating this to something we’ve looked at this morning on the slippery slope - our society’s view of life
What we see is
- people don’t acknowledge God as creator of life
- if God’s not the creator and sustainer of life
then who is at the center of the universe?
We are
If we’re at the center of the universe, why should we let an inconvenient, or even a crisis, pregnancy rob us of our plans?
- if you’re a young woman with school to finish
- if you’re a little older, and you have a good career in front of you
- if you’re unmarried and poor
- if you already have too many children to care for
Why should you have to change your plans, suffer the loss of freedom, the loss of career and income, even the indignity of shame among some of your friends or family? Why should you give up what you have a right to have?
Now, I’m not unsympathetic with the plight of those women who have a crisis pregnancy
- but our culture has told them it’s OK to abort their unborn
Our society has essentially allowed them to glorify their own wants and needs above life - forgetting the creator of life
And they’ve told them this because of what we’re looking at this morning
Paul says it’s because they knew God, but didn’t glorify Him as God
- they didn’t recognize Him as the creator and sustainer of life - with a right to tell us what to do and how to do it
Now, these gods, written with a little "g", may be wooden figures, as history shows
- but as we noted, we’re too sophisticated for that
- they may also be goals or things we pursue such as money, power, or comfort
- they may be people in our lives
They may even be misrepresentations of God himself—making God in our image, instead of the reverse
The common denominator is this
—idolaters worship the things God made rather than God himself
- it may not be a literal worship as we think of it, but it’s worship nonetheless, revealed by the amount of importance we place on something or someone
Let’s look again at verse 22:
Romans 1:22
Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools
This failure to recognize God for who He is was not simply an oversight
- Here, Paul says they actually claimed they were being wise in turning their back on God
- that it was an act of sophistication and sign of high intelligence to declare their independence from God
- as though the refusal to acknowledge God as God in their daily living made them something more than a creature, a creation of God
- but what they took to be an attitude of great wisdom demonstrated their foolishness
The consequence was that they became less, not more, capable of directing their own life.
Seeking to rise above the fact that they were created, they actually regressed rather than progressed
When the true Source of wisdom is rejected (cf. Ps. 111:10), people’s claim to be wise is an idle boast.
Progressively, like sliding down a slippery slope, they became fools (lit., "became stupid")
- a reality demonstrated by the worship as gods of idols in the forms of people and animals (cf. Rom. 1:25).
Man’s refusal to acknowledge and glorify God leads to a downward path:
first, worthless thinking;
next, moral insensitivity;
and then, religious stupidity (seen in idol-worship).
So then, we see in verse 24, the first of three times Paul notes that God "gave them over"
These people chose to reject God, and God allowed them to do it
God doesn’t usually stop us from making choices that are against his desire for us
- He lets us declare our supposed independence from him, even though he knows that in time we will become slaves to our own rebellious choices—we will lose our freedom not to sin
Life without God looks like freedom to some
-but look more closely. There is no worse slavery than slavery to sin
I think it’s important to note that this divine "handing over" is at least potentially redemptive
- if God gives us over to the natural consequences of our own freedom
- the idea is that we’ll get so miserable we’ll realize we cannot live our lives separated from our Maker
- it’ll be a wake-up call - a slap in the face
This is the idea in 1 Cor. 5:5 - where Paul instructs the church regarding a sinner in their midst:
"hand this man over to Satan, so that the sinful nature may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord."
Vs 28 is the last place in this passage where Paul says God gave them over
why?
"as they did not think fit to keep God in mind…"
Vs 28: NIV-didn’t think it worthwhile…NAS & NRSV-did not see fit…KJV-did not like to retain God in their knowledge
This is an important thing to understand, because it’s where we, even as believers, can take a wrong step toward that slippery slope
The implication is of a deliberate act of disqualification
- it wasn’t simply a case of humans being distracted by something else and losing sight of God
… they gave God their consideration, and concluded that God was unnecessary to their living
(that is, presumably God as Creator with rights over His creation)
- consider how often we hear modern disclaimers of God as "an unnecessary hypothesis", an infantile projection no longer needed by man, who, due to the advances of evolution, has "come of age."…
- the implication being that we’ve outgrown God
clearly this is a choice they made
Even the original language here for two phrases reveals this:
- "did not think it worthwhile"
- "depraved mind"
dokimazo, dok-im-ad’-zo; from Greek 1384 (dokimos); to test (literal or figurative); by implication to approve :- allow, discern, examine, × like, approve or prove, try
- so the idea here is that they tested the worth of acknowledging God, giving Him Lordship in their lives, and found him wanting!!!
God gave them over to a depraved mind
….The point is not that God chose to test and to deprave or disqualify their minds, or caused their minds to degenerate
- but that the act of making God the subject of a test was itself the act of an unqualified mind, of an intelligence "below par."
- the mind of the creature depends on the light of God (vs. 21) for it to function properly
- When God leaves it to itself, it is not adequate, it is insufficiently qualified for its task of informing relationships with others and the rest of creation
In light of this understanding, isn’t it interesting that in this list of sins which includes horrible things such as murder, Paul includes something seemingly out of left field:
vs. 30: they disobey their parents
- young people, when you consider your parents advice or instruction, and find it wanting, largely because it’s not what you want to hear
- you’re doing the same thing Paul admonishes against here
- even the phrase depraved mind reveals the folly here
- it’s from the same root as the phrase we just looked at:
"did not think it worthwhile"
adokimos, ad-ok’-ee-mos; from Greek 1 (a) (as a negative particle) and Greek 1384 (dokimos); unapproved, i.e. rejected; by implication worthless (literal or moral) :- castaway, rejected, reprobate, not standing the test…primarily applied to metals…always used in the NT in a passive sense… of things rejected… of persons (as here in Rom 1:28), a mind of which God cannot approve, and which must be rejected by Him, the effect of refusing to have God in their knowledge
In claiming the ability to evaluate God, they simply proved the unfitness of their own rational powers
- by saying they were so smart they proved they were so stupid
And so God handed them over to the maturity they claimed - the maturity which only the immature would be bold enough to claim in the first place
I think as parents, when we do something similar, we call it "letting our children learn the hard way"
Think of the phrase you hear young children say, literally, and sometimes you hear youth say with other words…"I can do it myself…"
- it’s the idea that I know better… "no, you don’t understand me, I know, I understand, I know better"
Ultimately, it starts with a breaking of the first and second commandments
I am the Lord your God - you shall have no other gods before me…you shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below
The NT equivalent might be: Seek first the Kingdom of God
When we do not obey the first commandment, it leads to idolatry
- perhaps a more sophisticated kind than we read of in the OT, but idolatry nonetheless
Is there anything you feel you can’t live without?
Is there any priority in your life greater than God? Something that’s more important than obedience to Him, to His word?
Do you have a dream you would sacrifice everything to realize?
Does God take first place in every part of your life?
Do you worship God, or idols of your own making?
- what are your priorities?
- do you have other "gods" before the Maker of the Universe?
- do you seek first God’s Kingdom and His righteousness?
These are the questions we must ask ourselves as we consider this passage of scripture this morning
Pray
