Thank you for reading this sermon from Christ Fellowship. I hope and pray that this sermon will be a blessing of grace and truth to you. With that said, let me encourage you not to use this sermon as a replacement for your local church. Christ Jesus did not establish his Church simply for us to consume content. Instead, He calls us to be part of a real, covenant family.
I want you to think of a decision you made recently (it doesn’t matter how big or small) but, if you’re honest, you knew what you were doing before you knew why you were doing it.
The reason came second. You wanted something, and then your mind went to work building the case for it. Maybe it was putting off something you knew you should do. Maybe it was buying something you didn’t really need. Maybe it was something bigger.
We all do this. Constantly. We are extremely good lawyers for our own desires. We do what we want to do and then we go looking for the argument that makes it okay. Breaking a diet. Skipping a deadline. Holding a grudge.
This is actually a predictable pattern in the human heart. We would rather reconstruct reality than surrender to it. And as we continue our study of Romans 1, that’s something we need to wrestle with.
For the sake of context, I want to read verses 16 and 17 again before we move on.
[16] For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.
The Gospel is for everyone who believes.
[17] For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”
This is what Paul is about to defend. This is how God makes sinful people righteous… by faith alone. And it must be done by faith alone, because of the nature of the problem.
The Gospel says a lot about God, but it also says a lot about us. And before I start reading this, I want to tell you up front… you don’t want to hear it.
No one wants to be told they have a problem. Especially not in today’s culture. We can’t even handle someone telling us we snore at night or that our breath stinks.
I can’t hear myself snoring and I can’t smell my own breath. We deny and defend ourselves from even the slightest accusation.
But Paul is about to hold up a mirror to the entire human race, including me and you. And if you want to understand the Gospel, you’re going to have to look in the mirror.
[18] For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.
This is a general statement about the lost human race. This is our starting position. Ungodly. Unrighteous. Suppressing the truth.
What does it mean to suppress something? It means we try to keep the truth from being known. God is revealing truth and we are actively denying it… eyes closed, fingers in our ears.
This posture towards God and the kind of behavior it produces was earned us the wrath of God, and we need to talk about it.
We don’t like thinking of God as angry, but a truly loving God must also be an angry God.
We must be careful here. God is not spiteful or vindictive. This is not a divine road rage. God is not like the overzealous fan yelling at the referee for a bad call.
It’s difficult for us to imagine, but God’s anger is purely righteous. God by nature refuses to condone or come to terms with evil. He is eternally hostile to it.
Would we want a God who doesn’t care about justice? Would we want a God who tolerates evil? Would we want a God who shrugs at things like child trafficking or genocide?
Every culture in the world has some sense of right and wrong, and some form of justice – that evil deserves to be punished. This is not the part we suppress.
What we suppress is that we are personally part of the problem. But this is what it means to be lost… to need the Gospel.
[19] For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.
[20] For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.
We call this general revelation. Some of what can be known about God is available to everyone. You don’t need the Bible to know God is real and that we are accountable to Him. That’s Paul’s argument.
And it’s a bold statement in the 21st century. Almost everyone believed in some kind of god 2000 years ago. That’s not true today. Half a billion people now describe themselves as atheist or agnostic. And they will say things like, “I believe in science.”
But science cannot account for everything. Logical and mathematical truths cannot be proven by science. Science uses or presupposes those truths. It assumes what we see is real, and that time and space work the way they seem to.
Ethical beliefs can’t be proven by science. You can’t use science to prove that what the Nazis did to the Jews was wrong or that serving the poor like Mother Theresa is a good thing.
Science can’t tell us what is beautiful or valuable or good.
There are lots of things that human beings accept about the world that we didn’t learn from science.
And yet, there are things we learn from scientific observation that reinforce my belief in God… that the universe is orderly. It obeys certain rules and functions. It is irreducibly complex. There are forces working all around us that we take for granted and don’t understand – things like gravity and light and energy.
Paul says that these things are preaching to us about our Creator. No one can live in this world and at the end of their life say, “I didn’t know there was a God.”
I want you to imagine that every year on your birthday you receive a gift in the mail. There’s no name on the package. There’s no return address. But the gift is always perfect. It’s always exactly what you need. You can say you don’t know who is sending the gifts. But you can’t say that no one is sending them!
That’s the point here. You may not know God’s name, but you can know a lot about Him by the world He’s put you in. And instead of honoring Him as Creator, people choose to live as if He’s not there.
[21] For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.
Suppressing the truth about God leads to futile thinking and dark hearts. The idea here is adaptation. The longer you sit in a dark room, the more you adapt to it. If someone comes in and turns on a bright light, it can be blinding.
Paul says that humans have adapted to living as if God doesn’t exist.
[22] Claiming to be wise, they became fools,
David says something very similar in Psalm 14 – the fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”
Claiming to be wise, they became fools…
[23] and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
This is the result. This is what we do. We replace God with counterfeit gods… We needed some explanation, so we created our own.
This is God’s accusation against humanity. He is not hiding Himself from us. We are hiding ourselves from Him.
In fact, you can take what Paul says here and compare it almost thought for thought with Genesis 1-3. Adam and Eve did the one thing God told them not to do and then they tried to hide from God in shame.
And that choice started with believing a lie – a conspiracy… that God is the problem, not us. That’s the diagnosis. We’ve deceived ourselves into believing a conspiracy about the world we live in. And it has led to all sorts of problems. But is it true? Does Paul have it right?
Let me ask it a different way, as my friend Robert always says. If you were deceived, would you know it?
We’ve all had a dream at some point that felt real to us. I had one last night. And while you’re in that dream, absurd things happen. But you don’t realize how absurd they are until you wake up. While you’re in the dream, everything seems normal.
What if you’re living in God’s world and it’s exactly how the Bible describes it, but you’re deceived. If you don’t want that to be true for some reason, your mind and your heart are going to find ways to cope.
I love the way Alistair McGrath says it. “Human beings are very good at inventing worlds they would like to be real, and figuring out intellectual justifications for these views afterwards. The desire comes first; the rational justification comes later.”
You want to break a law? Just say it’s a bad law. You want to cheat on an assignment? Just say you have a bad teacher. You want to leave your spouse? Just say we grew apart. You want to skip church? Just say you worship better in nature. You want to gossip? Just say it’s a prayer request.
And the ultimate justification to do whatever you want is to claim moral relativity. God doesn’t exist. Religion is the opiate of the masses.
Men who believed that were responsible for the bloodiest century in human history. The 20th century was the most godless and the most violent in human history.
One of my seminary professors said that “people with blood on their hands and cowardice in their hearts prefer nihilism to religion.”
Of course they do… but God is real and what we do matters.
We are foolish to believe otherwise. Choosing to suppress the reality of good and evil, the reality of beauty and pain, the reality of truth and lies… it’s foolish.
It’s also dangerous. God’s wrath is being revealed against the wickedness of men. There is no Gospel without the wrath of God.
And so, here’s where we are. Paul has held up the mirror, and it’s not flattering. We knew God. We suppressed Him anyway. We traded the truth for a lie we could live with. And the result isn’t neutral… it’s wrath, because a God who loves what is good cannot ignore what is evil.
If that’s the end of the story, we’d have no reason to be here this morning. We’d just be people confirming what we already suspected — that something is deeply wrong with the world, and deeply wrong with us.
But remember verse 16. Paul isn’t ashamed of the gospel, because the gospel is the answer to this problem. This is the bad news that makes sense of why Jesus had to come for us. You don’t call for a rescue unless someone is actually in danger.
And so, here’s the question I want to ask you. Not “do you believe in God” — you already do, whether you admit it or not. The question is: what counterfeit gods have you built to cope with this on your own?
What’s your version of exchanging the glory of God for something you can manage — success or money, relationships, sex, power or control, health or beauty, a perfect image, dopamine?
Paul says we are without excuse. But he doesn’t say we are without hope. He tells us the wrath of God is being revealed. But he’s also told us that the righteousness of God is being revealed.
These two things intersected in Jesus. That’s the spoiler that Paul has already given us in chapter 1. Jesus took our wrath and gave us His righteousness, so that we don’t have to keep suppressing the truth.
If you want to be right with God, it starts with the recognition that you’re not right with God. Jesus Himself said it best: “Those who are well have no need of a doctor, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”