1:18-32
Paul begins his letter to the Romans by telling them how proud he was of them for their faithfulness which had spread all over the world…he wrote about Jesus and how He was sent down from heaven as a descendant of David…and as such makes Him the rightful owner to the throne…how He came to offer people salvation through His death and resurrection.
Paul’s letter to the Romans was to eliminate a number of issues that was keeping the Church from progressing towards God’s intended purpose…in writing to the Romans, Paul wanted to unite two diverse people groups under one unifying message: the gospel of Christ.
The church, comprised of Jews and Gentiles, was experiencing significant theological conflicts…God was expanding what had primarily begun as a movement within the Jewish community but now was spreading to all the world.
This left the Jewish Christians confused as they tried to understand how to handle the influx of Gentile believers into their churches.
The Jewish Christians believed they had a preferred status with God because of their ancestral relations with God…they thought themselves to be superior to the Gentile believers.
Some Jewish Christians claimed Gentile believers needed to follow the Jewish religious rituals in order to receive salvation…in other words, they were adding works to what God had freely given in the death and resurrection of His Son… salvation to all who believe.
The first three chapters of the Book of Romans are some of the most discouraging and depressing chapters in the entire New Testament.
Starting in verse 18 Paul speaks of the wrath of God…this is the first negative thing written in this letter…but it’s only the beginning…Paul elaborates on the hopelessness of human nature and the eternal destiny that awaits every person who has ever lived.
When I first began this study, I listed some of the reasons…I prefer excuses… why people reject the Bible…reject Church…reject any form of Christianity.
Statistics show 1/3 of all Americans want nothing to do with the Church… doesn’t mean they don’t believe…because I think many of those who are rejecting the church at one time possibly did make a profession of faith…but for whatever reason…they have elected to exclude themselves from the church.
I’m not referring to unbelievers who reject the Church…I’m talking about Christians who have elected to separate themselves from the church because it’s just not important anymore.
When that happens…when someone decides to separate themselves from the church…eventually there is no difference between them and someone who rejects the church…they will eventually fall back into the lifestyle they lived before conversion.
Here’s the problem…Satan’s mission is to separate us from the presence of the Holy Spirit…to separate us from God’s will and plan for our lives…without the guiding of the Holy Spirit we backslide and fall back into our old sinful ways.
That’s the importance of [Hebrews 10:25] that says…do not forsake meeting together…the word ‘forsake’ in the Greek is referring to an abandonment.
It’s easy to drift away from God when you’re not connected to His people… Satan’s mission is to separate us from the presence of the Holy Spirit and the assembling of ourselves together with other Christians.
When we are not regularly communing with God and His people, we are vulnerable to Satan’s attempts to disrupt God’s plan and purpose for our lives.
Starting in verse 18 of chapter one Paul begins vividly portraying the sinfulness of all people…he elaborates on the hopelessness of human nature and the eternal destiny that awaits every person who has ever lived.
He states the condition that every person who has ever lived at one time has been in…or is still in…Paul states those conditions.
—Romans 1:18-23—
It’s important for us to ‘un-pack’ these verses so we have a clear understanding of what is being written…for example…what do you think of when you hear the phrase, “the wrath of God”?
Most people think of the wrath of God as something that is yet to come… something that follows death…referring to the judgment of God on unbelievers …and it is true that what follows after death for unbelievers can be summed up in the expression…the wrath of God…BUT…that’s not what it means here.
Most people think of the wrath of God as thunder…lightning…fire…and smoke like what was on Mt. Sinai when God spoke to the people…or…the sudden destruction that comes upon sinners…like Sodom and Gomorrah.
There are some within Christianity that seem to emphasize the wrath of God more dramatically…while others are unable to fit a wrathful God into their idea of a loving God…so between those two extremes are those who are not quite sure what to make of a God of wrath.
There’s really no good way to soften “the wrath of God” to mean anything other than an angry response on God’s part to human disobedience.
But…the wrath of God is not something in the future…it’s here now…the phrase revealed in the Greek is in the present tense meaning…because God’s assessment of the human race is— that all are useless…and there are none that are good and no one is righteous – not even one.
This is confirmed by the wording that which is known about God is evident ‘within them’ for God made it evident ‘to them’.
Said earlier…this is probably the most defining verse in the entire Bible that states the reason an unbeliever excludes himself from heaven…Paul offers up three reasons:
1) FIRST…God can be known through His creation
God has two witnesses that say He exists…creation and our conscience…the inner witness of every person is their conscience. God is evident within them …and the outward witness is God made it evident to them in creation.
That’s why people are without excuse…atheists can reject God…blaspheme God…curse God…deny that God exists…but they can’t do any of those things without God.
It’s like people who hate America…they burn…loot…find fault with…but the freedom they have to express themselves in that manner is because of the freedom given them by the very country they say they hate.
They’re protesting against the very document—the Constitution—that gives them the freedom to act the way they do.
It’s the same with unbelievers…they’re condemning the Church…Christianity… and the very person who gives them the life and breath to reject Him.
God’s common grace of life and breath is the evidence within people that He exists…and it is creation itself that testifies to His existence.
Both witnesses are summed in two verses:
–[Acts 17:24-25]–
2) SECOND…God can be known through our conscience.
TWO THINGS:
…FIRST…Paul reveals a theological truth…the wording “within them” is referring to the grace that God gives to every person who has ever lived that stirs up within us a desire to know Him and empowers us to respond to God’s invitation to be in relationship with Him.
When we accept Jesus as Lord and Savior the Holy Spirit comes and permanently dwells in us…you are God’s temple because God’s Spirit dwells in you.
The function of the Holy Spirit dwelling in us is to…teach us all things…testify of Jesus…convict us of sin…be the intercessor between God and us in prayer… be the guiding power in the life of a believer.
SECOND…people have been endowed with an innate knowledge of what is good and evil.
Because man was made in the image and likeness of God they have a God-given conscience by which they instinctively know what is right and what is wrong… what is good and what is evil…what is moral and what is immoral.
As such the Bible says they actually become a law unto themselves, because moral laws are effectively written within a person’s conscience – they are written in their heart.
As a result, some do what is good because they heed the call of their inner conscience while others do what is wrong by ignoring this inner moral witness …and because of this inner conflict…it is people’s conscience that either accuses them or excuses them.
3) THIRD…God is at work in the world restraining evil …as strange as this may sound this is actually a valid argument for the existence of God… because left to ourselves we would all be purely wicked…that’s part of the job of the Holy Spirit.
We all get glimpses of this from time to time when we hear of the horrific acts that people are capable of committing against one another….such as mass killings… brutal tortures …and extreme forms of abuse.
The reason not everyone commits those horrific crimes is that God is at work to keep our depravity in check…what’s going to make hell such a horrible reality is that God will not be there to restrain evil…all of humanity’s worst tendencies will be indulged in with no hint of goodness mixed in.
Hear people say… ‘you Christians mess everything up’ …well…those left behind after the rapture occurs will see in full force just how messed up things will really be…because God’s common grace to restrain evil will be removed from the world and then anything goes.
For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only He who now restrains will do so until He is taken out of the way. II Thess. 2
Implying things are going to get worse…because there is a restrainer in the world…believe it or not…at times it doesn’t seem like it…but evil would be much worse if not held in check by God…[2 Thess. 2:6] the Apostle Paul writes “and you know what is restraining (him).
The man of sin is being restrained or withheld from appearing in the world until a particular time…that he may be revealed in his own time.
Two words in Greek for time…chronos, the normal word used for time…and kairos, which means the “time of opportunity”.
The word kairos, used here, means that he will be revealed in his own time of opportunity.
The restraining force that opposes wickedness is preventing the man of sin from coming into power…He will continue to restrain him…but…once the “restraint” that holds back this iniquity is removed…the man of sin will come forward with all power…the Antichrist will finally have the opportunity to rule unhindered.
Paul then states God’s reaction to man’s rejection…Therefore God gave them over…sounds pretty final…it is…eventually God’s patience will run out.
In His righteous wrath and judgment God gives us up to sin and to our evil heart’s desire…He allows us to experience the self-destructive results of sin.
The phrase God gave them over is so important that Paul repeats it three times in the next three paragraphs.
— God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts for they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator. [24]
— God gave them over to degrading passions referring to sexual misconduct [26].
— God gave them over to a depraved mind to do those things which are not proper. [28]
We make a mistake when we think that because of God’s mercy or kindness that He allows people to continue in sin…being depraved means having a mind that is corrupt and worthless…it is those whom God has left to their own devices… in His wrath He allows them to go on destroying themselves with sin.
Paul reveals two times in this passage the fundamental, bottom-line, root problem with the human race…has to do with what we make of the glory of God.
In [verse 21] Paul says, “Even though they knew God, they did not honor him as God” …that is the fundamental problem with the human race…we do not acknowledge, value, treasure, or honor the glory of God.
Then in [verse 23], Paul puts it another way: “we exchange the glory of the incorruptible God for an image” …idols…the other problem concerns what humans are making of the glory of God.
This is the issue of our life…our culture…our country…with all the nations of the world…in this century and with every century.
The issue that Paul describes is the depths of man’s sinful condition…what do we make of the glory of God? …do we magnify it by treasuring it above all things…or do we belittle it by preferring other things and exchanging it for created things?
And because people chose not to acknowledge God their thinking became frivolous and impractical…the result was a foolish, dark, and hard heart that leads to devastating results.
Paul begins verse [29] by listing 21 effects of having a depraved mind.
The wording…these people are ‘being filled’ is a key statement….in the Greek this word is in the perfect tense…implying being filled to the maximum… that something that has already occurred …these people have already become filled and remain totally under the control of that which dominates and controls their thoughts and actions.
When we ignore God’s truth we suffer the natural consequences of our decisions …Paul gives a list of sins of the unrighteous…even identifying the sins by name I guess so you can pair up the ones that are specific to you.
Left to their own devices this is the result…we are:
—Being filled with unrighteousness…wickedness…and greed.
—Being full of envy…murder…strife…deceit…and malice.
—Being gossipers…slanderers…haters of God…arrogant…boastful… inventors of evil…disobedient to parents…without understanding… untrustworthy…unloving…and unmerciful.
It’s easy for us to deny that at one time this was the condition we were in…it’s easy for us to be tempted to think… ‘this is just about unbelievers, not us’ but in 1st Corinthians Paul confirms God’s assessment of us [1 Cor. 6:11].
And such were some of you; but you were washed…sanctified… justified in the name of the Lord…and in the Spirit of our God
Then he concludes by saying…not only do they do the same but have pleasure in those that do them.
The Jews have a saying that sums this up: “no man is suspected of a thing but he has done it; and if he has not done the whole of it, he has done part of it, and if he has not done part of it, he has thought in his heart to do it, and if he has not thought in his heart to do it, he has seen others do it, and has rejoiced.”
God has just stuck a dagger in every one of us…He has us pegged us right down to the souls of our feet…God is saying…all people are responsible for the revelation that God gives.
As a result, people cannot claim that they have insufficient information about God and are therefore excluded from their thoughts and actions.
God has revealed Himself to us from the beginning, it forces us to make a choice. We can either glorify Him as God or we can choose to walk away.