You’d have to say that there’s nothing pretty about the picture of the world that we find in this passage from Romans ch1. Here we take off the rose coloured glasses and look, with a degree of reality, at the world we live in. I was talking to someone the other day about watching television and they said they hardly watch it because it’s all too horrible. We’ve seen in the past few months how people’s view of the world seems to have changed. But Sept 11 didn’t actually make any difference to the world. It just brought reality into a slightly better focus. The world that Paul portrays here, and the people who live in that world are no different from now, yet the reality is that they seem to be so far from perfect that there can be little hope for them.
Yet that isn’t true is it? That’s why I’ve started us back at v16, where we were last week. You see, the setting in which Paul gives us this jaundiced view of the world is the statement that the gospel "is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith." Here is the thing to remember whenever we look at our fallen world. There is a righteousness that comes from God that overturns the evil that we see in the world. But it’s a righteousness that’s gained only by faith in Jesus Christ.
As I said last week, the great search by people since the dawn of the world has been to get themselves right with God. Even in a religion like Buddhism, that doesn’t have a concept of a personal god, the aim is to attain perfection, righteousness. Even if it takes a thousand lifetimes the aim of the Buddhist is to slowly perfect their life to the point where they’re good enough to be incorporated into the godhead of all creation, in a state of nirvana.
But the reality is that people have failed in that quest. In fact their failure is so great that God’s wrath against them is being revealed. The proclamation of the gospel in fact is a proclamation not just of the righteousness that Christ has won for us. It’s also a proclamation of God’s righteous anger at the lack of righteousness in the world. God feels about our unrighteousness, if you like, the way we might feel about the way the refugees have been treated in the Woomera or Port Hedland detention centres. Or about the behaviour of Slobodan Milosevic during the Balkan war, or the acts of genocide in Rwanda recently or in Uganda some years before. Except of course that when God feels that sort of anger it isn’t compromised or distorted by sinfulness as our anger so often is. When God expresses his wrath it’s the wrath of perfect goodness directed at what shouldn’t be in the world he created.
What’s more, as we’ll see as we go further into the book, the gospel shows how this wrath, though directed at one level towards sinful human beings, ultimately is redirected to God’s only Son, Jesus Christ, on a cross on Calvary.
And look at the reason his wrath is being revealed? Because people actually suppress the truth that they have about God. He says: "what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made." He points out in the next chapter that even God’s moral law is known to people. People show by their reaction to wrongdoing that there are natural responses built into the human psyche that tell us when we’re doing wrong.
And apart from our awareness of God’s moral law, as we look around at the creation we can’t help but see the presence of God in the wonders that God has put there. It’s always amazed me that someone can study science or medicine and not acknowledge the one who created this amazing world. I worked in the area of science and technology for 20 years before being ordained and everything I saw simply confirmed me in the belief that only an intelligence, a power, far beyond anything we can imagine, could create this world with all its complexity and beauty, with the various interactions and interplay of forces that make it work. Yet people have suppressed that truth. They’ve chosen to build their own belief structures. They’ve created gods in their own image. Just think about the gods of our age: our own inventiveness, our belief in economic management, our self-confidence. In fact we’ve become our own gods, expressed most clearly, if you like, in our desire to please ourselves before all others. And we’re just the last in a long line of peoples who have exchanged the truth of God for a lie.
So, he says they are without excuse. Why? Because they suppressed the truth that’s so obvious in the world around them. Notice the irony in the way he puts it. Even God’s invisible attributes of power and deity have been seen and understood, since the beginning of time, through the things that he made. People have always recognised the God behind the creation. Yet, though they recognised the presence of God through what they saw in the creation, they refused to acknowledge him as God or give thanks to him. And in so doing they became futile in their thinking. Their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise they became fools.
You may remember that wonderful passage in Is 44 where God talks about the foolishness of idolatry. He describes how a carpenter goes out into the forest and cuts down a tree that he’s grown, to make an idol. He takes some of the wood and puts it on the fire to warm himself as he works, while with the rest of the tree he fashions an image in the form of a man. Half the wood goes to warm himself and cook his dinner, while the other half becomes an idol that the man then bows down to and worships. He sits in front of the fire feeling good that the burning wood is warming him, and he kneels down and prays for his idol to save him. It’d be hilarious if it weren’t so sad, so foolish!
Instead of worshipping the true and living God, they’ve chosen to worship mere images of created things. And notice that there’s nothing here to imply that he’s just talking about ignorant savages out in the jungle worshipping something because they don’t know any better. No, he’s talking here about all people. He says, "Claiming to be wise, they became fools." There are some very ingenious religious systems that have sprung up over the centuries. People have applied their minds to coming up with all sorts of systems of worship that felt right, to an extent, at least. But in the end none of them do justice to the God who made the heavens and the earth.
So what has God done about it? How has he shown his wrath towards sinful people, in the first place at least? I think this is one of the most chilling sentences you’ll ever hear: "Therefore God gave them up." It’s as though God withdraws his support, his restraining hand perhaps, and simply lets them do what they like. He leaves them to their own foolishness, to their own path of futility. Not forever, mind you. Remember that this passage is premised on vs 16 & 17. God had a better way prepared for those who would come to him in faith. But while people chose to do their own thing, to pursue their own methods of reaching God, he’d let them. But sadly the results aren’t pretty are they?
Impurity (24)
Instead of the pure worship of God, people instituted means of worship that involved sexual impurity, degrading acts that affected not just their worship of God, but also their own bodies. And having exchanged the truth of God for a lie, having validated their impure practices through religion, they then extended that to the rest of their lives
Degrading passions (26)
Again we get that expression: "For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions." The restraint of God that might have kept people living in pure relationships with each other was removed. And what happened? "Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, 27and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error." You see, homosexuality is not a new phenomenon. Of course that statement is used by the gay lobby as an argument for normalising our view of homosexuality. They argue that there have always been people with a homosexual orientation. It’s just because society has hidden them away through moral blackmail that they haven’t been more open about it. But now that we’re more enlightened we should accept them as a normal part of our society. Well, God’s word would agree that homosexuality has been around a long time. But it would also say that the rise of homosexuality is a result not of God being happy with it, but of God giving people up to all manner of unrighteous living of which this is just one, more obvious, example.
A debased mind (28)
He says: "Since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done." That word ’debased’ was used by a blacksmith who, when he’d made something like a horseshoe, would place it on his anvil and hit it with his hammer to test whether it was tempered correctly. If it failed the test it was said to be debased, i.e. not quite right. So the idea here is of a mind that isn’t quite right, that has some flaw in it that affects its ability to make right judgements. And look at the sorts of behaviour that flow from such a mind: "every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, 30slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, 31foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless." If we were in any doubt as to whether this passage was still relevant today, that list would probably answer our question fairly, well wouldn’t it?
As we look around our world today, what do we see? Every kind of wickedness and evil. Covetousness is what makes the world go round, according to the modern economist. Malice and envy. Just watch your favourite soap opera or even sitcom for a while. Dysfunctional people and communities are the basis for most if not all of the humour on television at the moment it would seem. Murder. Remember how Jesus expanded the meaning of murder to include even a desire to see the someone else put down. And so we could go on. There’s strife, deceit, craftiness everywhere. People are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents (we’ve got that down to a fine art haven’t we?), foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.
But how often do we think of these things as expressions of God’s wrath against us. We think of them as causing God’s wrath. But here we’re told that the rise of these sorts of behaviour is actually an expression, a sign, of God’s wrath. It’s as though God wants to teach us a very important lesson.
I remember when we had little children we’d warn them not to go near the oven when it was on because they might burn themselves. But all the warnings in the world weren’t nearly as effective as the lesson they learnt for themselves when they ignored our words and went and touched it and found out what hot really meant.
Well, it seems that this is what God is saying here. He lets us do what we want. If we choose to rebel against his rightful rule over his creation, he’ll let us. Even if the result is even greater unrighteousness. Why? Because he wants us to realise that by ourselves we’re constitutionally unable to do the right thing. Rather our natural inclination is to do the opposite. Our natural thinking, in the end, will lead us astray. Even those of us who are very intelligent and exceedingly wise, will be led astray if we rely only on our own intellect and wisdom.
We’ll discover more of the reason for that as we delve deeper into the letter, but for now, this is just how life is. By ourselves we’re lost. All the efforts of human beings to create religious systems to bring them closer to God have been a failure. All we’ve managed to do by ourselves is to raise God’s wrath against us. So there’s only one solution. The solution offered in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We need the righteousness that God gives to all who turn to him in faith. We need the righteousness that comes by grace alone, that’s based wholly on Jesus’ death and resurrection on our behalf.
Now I don’t want you to be disheartened by this dark view of humanity. I don’t want you to go away feeling there’s no hope for humanity. Remember that this is just the opening chapter of a letter that brings to us the wonders of God’s love, that brings to us the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The point of what we’ve seen today is to bring into stark contrast our flawed efforts, our failure to get to God on our own, and God’s overwhelming righteousness found in Jesus Christ and now offered freely to those who have faith in God’s promises.
The light of the gospel is such that it dispels all the darkness of the human heart and brings us to God with a renewed sense of worth, of righteousness, because of what Jesus Christ has done on our behalf.
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