The Great Exchange Series

THE GREAT EXCHANGE

ROMANS 1:23-32

• This morning we looked at the wrath of God. The swelling of God at work in the world. Present tense today. Wrath is not for someday but is being stored up each and every day.

• We saw the reasons: Man’s UNGODLINESS(taking God lightly), his UNRIGHTEOUSNESS(impure behavior), and man’s SUPPRESSING of God’s truth.

• We also looked at why man is so guilty: He has rejected God’s revelation of Himself;

1) Revelation within: Conscience

2) Revelation without: Creation

Able to see three things about God

1) His invisible attributes

2) His eternal power

3) His divine nature

• Tonight we will how the wrath of God is being worked out in our world today. Wrath is God’s settled response to sin.

1) Human history is not as many think: The evolutionary idea that man began as something very unhuman and has progressed through stages such as worshipping many gods to the point of becoming monotheistic.

2) Bible teaches that human history is devolution: man initially walked with God and sin caused a fall and man become progressively more wicked until a final rebellion. MAN IS NOT FALLING UP BUT HAS FALLEN DOWN.

• America is an accurate representation of the passage we will look at tonight. If we were wise we would not be so interested in the origin of the species but more concerned with the destination of our species. Where are we all going. Man’s rejection of God’s revelation of Himself will demand a response from God.

(21) For even thou they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. (22) Professing to be wise they became fools,

(23) and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four footed animals and crawling creatures. (24) Therefore…..

• How does God response to such behavior. To attitudes which reject Him.

• The primary message in these verses is that man made an exchange. He made a decision regarding God in his life.

1) Exchanged giving God His rightful honor and glory for exalting himself and even worshipping animals instead of God.

2) Exchanged lit means ‘to stop one thing and start another’. They stopped the glory of God and started seeking something to replace Him with.

Imagine a father who might murder his son and then go and by a ventriloquist dummy and spend the rest of his life introducing the dummy to everybody as his son. What kind of exchange would that be. That is the choice man made with God. It makes no sense, it is a foolish decision but man makes it because his will says ‘if I can get God out the equation I can call my own shots, set my own agenda and be responsible to no one’.

• They settle for a false glory. When man cannot explain God then he reinvent’s God. Mother nature – Great Spirit – the force – man upstairs. Ways to try to explain what we see going on in that there is something/someone greater than ourselves to admit but we don’t want to acknowledge the God Who has already revealed Himself to us. Try to exchange Him for more comfortable options.

IDOLATRY: exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image… (25) For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, Who is blessed forever. Amen.

• Strange for us to think of idolatry as being something in the modern world but consider this:

• There are actually people who worship crawling creatures: In a museum in Egypt there is a monument to the scarob beetle.

• The philistines actually worshiped flies. Hindus today won’t swat a fly lest it be an ancestor of their paying for wrongs.

• Today you find that there are 330 million gods of the hindus, 8 gods for every person.

• In Thailand there are 20,000 buddist temples. In one there is a 2 inch tooth supposedly saved from Budda’s funeral.

• In China a buddist statue actual fell on a man and the family sued the budhas in the temple and it was found guilty and it and 14 other statues were actually beheaded. IDOLATRY is rampant in our world.

• The Roman Catholic Church has relics: Mary’s hair, Mary’s wedding ring, Mary’s holy girdle, the last supper basin, the burial cloth of Jesus, the lance which stuck in His side, actually footprints of Jesus, and John the Baptist: 3 shoulder blades, 4 legs, 5 arms, and 50 index fingers that supposed pointed and said ‘Thou are the lamb of God’.

• Someone has said that the god of the last half of the 20th century is MATERIALISM. I can’t think of another generation that has spent more of their resources and time to accumulate more stuff than we do today. It is the reason many people go to school or choose the kind of work they do. To get bigger and better and nicer.