God's View of the World

What a beautiful, beautiful series of truths we've been declaring together. And now we're going to turn to hear God speak to us after singing to him in Romans 1. And this morning as we continue our series, I'm going to begin in verse 16 and read to the end of the chapter.

We're calling this summer series "Good News," because that's what it's all about. The gospel of God. God has good news for the world, and it's all about Jesus, and how he makes his righteousness, his right standing before God freely available to people just like you and me simply through faith alone.

But to learn about why that is such good news, we got to hear a little bit of bad news this morning in Romans 1. We're gonna pick up in verse 16. If you're able, let me invite you to stand with me as we honor the reading of God's word.

Verses 16 through 17 are kind of Paul's introduction to the rest of the letter and then he'll get into our material for today.

It sounds like people who need some good news. So let's sit down and hear about it. You can be seated.

I thought a lot this week about my favorite ever Twilight Zone episode. If you know that old 1960s TV series, it's all about using science fiction type stories to teach us things about the human condition, to help us see ourselves as we really are, what our problems are, what things we need to work on. And it uses these wild stories to do that. Well, this particular story that I like so much is called, The Monsters are Landing on Maple Street or something like that. And it's about this neighborhood full of people who suddenly have this power outage. And they get kind of nervous and jumpy about it. Then they start throwing out accusations, "well, he caused it or she caused it." And then some little kid says, "well, I read a book the other day that said one time when the power went out in somebody's neighborhood, it's because aliens were preparing to land on earth and take over and kill everybody and brainwash them." And everybody's like, "yeah, yeah, aliens, I think Burt's an alien. Burt says, "no, no, I'm not an alien. Kevin's an alien." "No, no, it's, it's Sandy over there. She's an alien." And they flip out, and they completely turn on each other like wolves and by the time it's over with, this once happy neighborhood where everybody was just kind of washing their cars, and mowing their grass, and throwing the ball in the front yard, they are killing one another! It's really uplifting, chirpy kind of stuff, you know?

But in the last scene, the camera pans out and you see actual aliens watching all of this take place from a distance, saying to one another, "See this is what they're like. Just watch. All you have to do is just upset one little thing in the world, just turn off the electricity and they'll turn on each other, and we'll be able to take over this place one Maple Street at a time.

We'll come back to that in just a second. Romans 1 is all about Paul announcing the "good news" that God has for the whole world. This news that is so good that when people hear it, God unleashes power that saves them, that rips them out of what they're enslaved to and brings them into his kingdom, into freedom, into life, into joy, into what he made them for. It's good news about how a righteous God makes unrighteous people righteous before him again, forever through faith in Jesus. And Paul has just told us that he's not ashamed of the gospel. Even though some people get kind of jumpy about it, and uncomfortable with it, and it even makes other people really fight mad, Paul still is not ashamed of it! He's eager to share it because he knows God uses it to save people by his mighty power.

So we might then ask Paul, "what's so good about this good news? Why do we need this good news so much? Why is it such good news that God makes sinful people righteous before him through faith in Jesus?" And Paul says, "well, I'm so glad you asked. It's good news that God offers to give you his righteousness because none of you are righteous. What you need more than anything is to be righteous before God and none of you are righteous before God."

That's Paul's message from Romans 1:18 all the way to Romans 3:20. He's gonna work his way through all these different groups of people, different backgrounds, different families, different races, different educations, different jobs, different parts of the world, saying "what y'all all have in common is you are not righteous before God. And so you need the righteousness that God gives to you through faith in Jesus."

Now, sometimes as Paul works his way through our unrighteousness, it's gonna feel a little grim. It felt a little grim to us when I was reading Romans 1:18-32 a few minutes ago. But we really need this! This section of Romans, this early part, the bad news about our unrighteousness, it's kind of like laying the foundation for a house. Some of y'all are doing that right now. Others of y'all have done that recently. Your foundation--it's not that glamorous. It's hard, sweaty, muddy work. When your friends come over later, you don't show off the foundation. "Oh, let me show you these blocks. Let me show you this hole that Greg Young dug for us." You don't do that! But the foundation is essential for a stable home. It's essential! And if you don't have the foundation right, it doesn't matter how beautiful you make it later on, you're gonna have problems.

And if we're being really honest with each other today, I think that a lot of our love for God and commitment to the gospel is shaky today, because we've never done this deep foundation work of understanding how profound our need for Jesus is, how deep our need for the righteousness of God to be given to us. I think a lot of us think that we need Jesus a little bit. And so we love Jesus a little bit. But when we see in fact that we are in desperate need for the righteousness of Jesus, then we rejoice and say, "Hallelujah! I've been given the righteousness of Jesus."

So this is important work, and Romans 1 is really going to help us with that. Now, as you're reading through Romans 1, you need to know that in the back of the Apostle Paul's mind as he is telling this story in Romans 1:18-32, in the back of his mind is another story, the story of creation. He's thinking about Genesis 1, 2 and 3. You may have picked up on some of those echoes of the creation story as you were hearing Romans 1, He's thinking about the story, this true story of a good, glorious, immortal God who is blessed and happy forever and ever, a perfect God who chooses just out of the overflow of his good and loving heart to create, to create out of nothing, this beautiful, wonderful world filled with human beings who he makes in his image to rule over the created order, and to reflect his character back to him.

He creates a world like we were singing about a few minutes ago, "All Creatures of Our God and King," singing to him, humbly loving and serving him and one another, with everything in its right place. Sun, moon, stars, breezes, oceans, grass, animals, human beings, everything in its right order under this magnificent King. That's the world that God made! But that's not the world that we have anymore is it? In a shocking turn of events (this is the story Paul tells today), human beings have taken that righteous world that God made and have twisted it into an unrighteous, ungodly world.

And this is God's view of what we've done--just like that pan out in the Twilight Zone episode of those aliens watching those human beings doing their thing. Romans 1 is God's view of human beings taking his righteous world and turning it into something very, very different, showing us how much we need the good news.

We're gonna look at it in three steps.

Now, it's maybe kind of a warm afternoon. So let's say you decide to jump in the swimming pool. Any kids plan to swim today? Any grownups plan to do some cannonballs today? Let's say you jump in the pool later and there's a big ol' beach ball floating there in the middle and you decide to go over there and push it under the water. Now, if you just push it under the water like that, what's that beach ball immediately going to do? It's gonna pop right back up. Why? Because everything in that beach ball is designed to come to the top. It's full of air. It wants to come back up to the surface. And so if you want to keep that beach ball down, you're gonna be fighting against design, you're gonna be fighting against nature. You're going to have to be working constantly to press it down, to suppress it, to keep it from doing what it was intended to do.

And Paul says this is the first thing as God looks at the world that he made that he sees human beings like us doing. All over the world, they are suppressing the truth about him.

See what the Bible tells us here and in places like Psalm 19 and elsewhere is that God has made himself known really clearly. He's revealed himself to all people through the creation, through the things that he has made. So Psalm 19:1 says that, "the heavens declare the glory of God, the sky above proclaims his handiwork, night unto night it pours forth speech." That means the environment that you and I live in never stops talking to us, never stops preaching to us about God, about the maker, about the king. The sun does this, the moon does this, food does this, music does this, beauty does this, the love that we have for one another does this too. It's all proclaiming to us, "this didn't just happen!" And we didn't make it ourselves. No, there is a God who is great, who is above us, who is wise, who is careful, who is powerful, who's generous, who's beautiful. That's what the creation is constantly preaching to us.

And we call this general revelation because it's available to all people at all times. God has made himself clearly known through the things that He has made, so clearly in fact that all people are accountable for this knowledge. Paul says, "nobody has any excuse to say, 'well, I didn't know that there was a God. Nobody ever told me. I didn't know.'" Paul says, "no, that's not the way that works. God's made himself so clearly known that no one is gonna get to the end of this thing and say, 'well, I had no clue.' No, you did know. But it's because the creation never stopped telling you about it. Your conscience never stopped telling you about it." This is what Romans 2 is going to say.

So we're all walking through this beautiful world that God has made. It's singing to us, it's preaching to us, it's talking to us about God. What is the natural and righteous response to that general revelation? The natural and righteous response is "All Creatures of our God and King." Lift up your voice. Let us sing how good it is to belong to a God like this. How gracious he is, how generous he is, how he loves us, how faithful he is day unto day, night unto night. That's the natural response. That's the righteous response.

Is that what every human on planet earth is doing right now as they walk through the world? Is that what you do every minute as you walk through this world? No, we're not singing "All Creatures of Our God and King." Instead, we're doing verse 21 of Romans 1. Although they knew God, they did not acknowledge him as God or give thanks to him.

Romans 1:21 is the essence of sin. It's the essence of sin. The essence of sin is, "I know God's there, but I can't bear for Him to be God over me." And so I am either going to not acknowledge him altogether or pretend that there is no God. Some people do that, really not that many, honestly. What is much more common is I'm not going to acknowledge him as God. I'm not gonna treat him as God. I'm not gonna give thanks to him for all that he's constantly doing for me. I'm just going to use and enjoy his stuff all the time. But if I thank him, then I've got to admit that I'm a creature under a creator. I have to admit that I'm a mortal in the hands of an immortal God. I have to obey Him. I have to worship Him. I'm accountable to him and I can't bear to do that.

So instead of acknowledging this God who I know is there, Paul says, we suppress the truth about him like that beach ball in the swimming pool. Even as we walk through this world that is singing out to us about God's character, we deny it. We pretend it's not there even as we constantly depend on God. And so as God watches us like that Bette Midler song, "From a Distance," as he watches his world that he made, what he sees is verse 18: "for the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth."

Now, we've got further to go in this story, but it all starts here with human beings' denial of the truth about God. That's the beginning of all unrighteousness. And so if we want to begin to reverse that in our lives as the redeemed children of God through Jesus Christ, we need to start by acknowledging God as God and giving thanks to him. That is the way back home. So first, there's the denial of the truth.

So we've started with the suppression of the truth about God. "I'm not gonna acknowledge him. I'm not gonna give thanks to him."

Well, what happens next? Well, Paul says, these human beings who do this, who kind of reject God, they think they're being really wise to cut themselves loose from him. Their attitude is basically, "man, who needs God? We're too smart for all of that. I don't need that kind of repression in my life of serving and worshiping him." And that's just how the serpent pitched it to Adam and Eve, the first human beings in Genesis 3, isn't it? I think Paul is thinking about that. The serpent comes to Adam and Eve and says, "Hey, wise up! Wise up, you're being stupid. You're living under the authority of this God with all of his rules. Why don't you ditch him and be your own God? Then you can be free, then you can be happy." And Adam said, "Yeah, that's really smart. That's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna be a smart guy, a wise guy and live in this world without God." And that's what the true God has been watching all human beings do ever since.

And when human beings make this really smart choice to live in God's world without God, it's kind of like an astronaut floating out in space and severing that tube that connects him to the space shuttle that he's in. It's like a scuba diver being way down deep under the ocean saying, "I'm gonna get rid of this stupid tank. I'm too smart for that. This is all a trick." It's like the guy who's about to jump out of the airplane, telling the pilot he doesn't know what he's doing, telling the sky-diving coach that he's an idiot. He doesn't need that parachute. That's for dopes. And he just bails out of the plane, right? We think we're being really, really wise to live in God's world without living under God. But God sees the truth. We're really being the biggest fools in the universe, because no matter how smart we may think we are, at the end of the day, you and I are still creatures.

Now we're the highest form of God's creatures. We're the only creatures made in the image of God, but we are still creatures, under a creator, dependent on a creator. And among other things that means that we are still worshipers. This is so important to understand yourself and understand how the world works. As a human being, it is coded into your DNA to worship. You cannot simply just make your way through your life going from one task to the next never thinking about a transcendent meaning or purpose. You cannot do that. A dog may be able to do that. A house finch may be able to do that. You can't do that! No, Ecclesiastes 3:11 says, "God has set eternity in the hearts of all men." You have a sense of eternity. You have a sense of divinity. You know that God is out there and you were made for him. We all need a higher reason to live. We all need a glorious, ultimate 'something' to build our lives on, to give us meaning, and to give us purpose. But since we're all too smart to build our lives around the God who made us and who sustains us (you know, the immortal, all glorious One who never stops giving us good things), we're all too smart to worship Him. We're gonna find something else to worship. And so we trade in the true God for a substitute God.

I know some of y'all are in the car business. It would be like a guy bringing his brand new land cruiser to the lot and trading it in for a borough who's gonna die in the next 30 minutes, and walking away saying, "suckers, I really took them for a ride today." That's what we do. That's what God sees us doing when we exchange worshiping Him for worshiping a created thing. If you refuse to worship the creator, all that you have left to worship is something that he created. So look at verses 22-23, this is God's view of the world, "claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged, (traded), the glory of the immortal God, (that's who we were made for, that's what we had), for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things." Do you hear the echoes of Genesis 1 and 2? Do you see how sin is turning Genesis 1 and 2 on its head?

If you go back to Genesis 1, you'll read that God made us, human beings, in his image to worship Him, to have dominion over the creation. But we say, "Nah, I'm too smart for that." And so we immediately turn away from the true God and fall down in front of a bird statue and worship it. That's what God sees going on. It's silly. It's ridiculous. It's tragic. And it's not just a first century problem is it? Paul has seen lots of idol worship going on in all these Gentile cities that he visits in temples and with statues and all that kind of a thing. That may be what we think of when we think of idolatry. But an idol is anything that we substitute in the place of God.

And the old theologian John Calvin is right when he called our hearts, "perpetual idol factories." Our hearts never stop producing these substitute gods who we worship instead of the true God. Because we must worship, but refuse to put ourselves under the authority of our creator, we have to start looking around at some created thing that we can worship, and we trust it to give us the meaning and significance that we crave. We have to trust it to save us. Now, we may not do that with a golden calf. We may not do that with a statue of a fish like someplace in Egypt. But we might worship our work. Work is such a good gift from God. It's one of the ways that we're made to image and reflect God's character. But when I say, "I've got to work all the time. I gotta work harder, and I've got to do more than that other guy. And I've got to make more. I've got to be seen as successful because that's what shows that I have value and significance as a human being!" That's when work has risen to a level that only God can occupy, right? And that work, which was a gift from God, becomes my God.

We might worship our work, or we might worship our reputation. Everybody has to think that we're respectable, good, solid, salt-of-the-earth people, or cool people, or beautiful people, or intelligent people. We have to work so hard to maintain our reputation in the eyes of the people around us. We might worship money and the freedom it promises, and the comfort that it brings to us. We might worship our appearance. So that all of our value comes from how we look and what other people say about how we look.

We might worship our family, one of the Lord's greatest gifts to us. But it can become our God that we build our lives around. We may worship popularity, or our kids successes, so that we not only just want them to be all and do all that God made them to be, but we get our sense of personhood from how our kids are doing out there. And when there's any little bobble, any little shake up with our kids, whether it's at a T-ball game, or a report card, or how they act from the car into church in the parking lot, when we lose our minds because they don't perform for us the way that we have poured everything into them. That's a sign that we don't just care about them being everything God wants them to be. We've made their performance and their reputation, we've made that our God. We can do that with anything.

The idea is we take all these good things that God's given us and instead of just using them and enjoying them for his glory, no, we trade them for God, and we use them as our gods. We serve these things. That's the language Paul uses over and over again. We think about it excessively, obsessively. We will do anything to get our idol, we'll do anything to keep our idol. We give our idols our highest loyalty. What is it in your life that you say, "Man, nothing comes before that. If anything tries to get in the way of it, I'm gonna smash it." Whatever that thing is, that's probably your God. It's your highest loyalty.

We get our identity from our gods. Again, if anything goes wrong with this idol of ours, we're gonna spiral down into fear, or depression, or anxiety, or anger. Whatever is making you do that, that's a pretty good sign that that's your God functionally in your life.

So we thought that we were making such a smart trade when we traded in worshiping that creator for this created thing, but instead of this new God that we've chosen for ourselves freeing us and saving us like we thought, our idols only end up enslaving us and degrading us. And that's what God sees as he's standing back watching this old world spinning around, watching these human beings he made in his image. Instead of "All Creatures of Our God and King," he sees his image-bearers rejecting him, bowing before, worshiping, giving all their heart and soul to created things, and being degraded in the process. And that leads to the third step.

And you know what disintegration means? It means when something breaks apart, when something dissolves, like if you leave a piece of press board out in the weather for any length of time, it's eventually just gonna completely lose its shape, lose its strength, lose its form. It's just gonna become mush. It's gonna become nothing. And that's actually what Paul is describing here in Romans 1:24-32:  God's design for human life at creation coming apart completely.

And God's watching all the stuff that we've been talking about: human beings denying the truth about him, and disordering their worship, and bowing before idols, all that kind of thing. God is watching unrighteousness and ungodliness on display. How does God respond to that? Now he could just shrug and say, "well, I mean, who cares? It's not that big of a deal." But if God did that, would he still be a righteous God? Would he still be a good God? Would he still be a loving God if he just was totally indifferent to unrighteousness and ungodliness? We know that that's not the case. And he is righteous. And the only righteous response to unrighteousness is this big scary word Paul uses in verse 18, "wrath."

Now, the wrath of God is not like my wrath, which can just kind of flare up in a sinful way when somebody does me wrong and I can just kind of fly off the handle. It's kind of unpredictable. The wrath of God isn't like that. The wrath of God is just his settled policy against evil. It's the settled policy of a good and perfect God against all that is evil and wrong in the world. The truth is we want a righteous God who has wrath against evil. And that is God's response to the unrighteousness he sees. And so we might expect Paul to say, "all right, there's gonna come a time now, y'all are kinda acting crazy and doing your own thing right now, but there's gonna come a time now where God's gonna reveal His wrath from heaven on judgment day, so get right." That's what we expect Paul to say. But he doesn't say that.

If you look back at verse 18, the first verse in this whole passage, he doesn't say, "the wrath of God is going to be revealed one day." What does it say? "The wrath of God is revealed from heaven." It's happening right now in a way that we can see! Paul's saying, "if you'll look around, you'll see God's wrath being revealed against unrighteous in the world." Well, how is that? I mean, God's not setting the world on fire. God's not sending a flood like he did in the days of Noah. In fact, it kind of seems like people are just kind of doing whatever the heck they wanna do and God's not intervening. And Paul says, that's the point. That is the wrath of God. The judgment of God on these rebellious human beings and on this rebellious world is that he allows these rebellious human beings to go their own way, to do what they want to do, to pursue their ungodly passions. He gives us what we want. He lets us serve our own gods.

It's like in the prodigal son story where that smug kid comes up to the father and says, "Give me my money. I wish you were dead already. Just give me my money and let me go and live my life without you." And the father says, "OK." And he goes to the far country and he gets the absolute heck beat out of him. That's what God is doing with the whole world, with every human being who refuses to worship Him and worships a substitute God instead. He says, "ok, go ahead."

CS Lewis said one time that the most terrifying sentence that God can ever utter is to turn to a sinful human being and say, "Your will be done. Go ahead, live without me, cut yourself loose from me." And verses 24-32 describe the world that results from all these people turning away from God and God letting them do what they want to do. The result is God's righteous, "All Creatures of Our God and King" type world being turned upside down.

Now, the first example that I'm sure we all notice in verses 26-27 of this world turned upside down is homosexuality. How could it not stand out to us in a month that the United States culture sets apart as pride month? So it stands out to us as the first thing that Paul mentions in verses 26-27. But that's not because it's the worst sin. It's certainly not because it's an unpardonable sin. Paul celebrates the salvation of all kinds of formerly homosexual people in 1 Corinthians 6, who turned to the Lord Jesus Christ. So it's not an unpardonable sin. I don't think it's even the worst sin. It's just such a vivid example of how rejecting God causes us to lose touch with reality and with God's design.

I think that's the whole point of Romans 1, set against Genesis 1. Because again, the most basic elements of human life are laid out for us in the creation story. Do you remember? God made them male and female. And he told them to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. And yet, Paul says one of the results of human beings refusing to just come under the authority of their creator and to worship other things instead, is a turning on its head that basic design for human life, what he calls "exchanging natural relations." It's attempting to rewrite and redefine God's blueprint for human biology. If I could say this delicately, for human anatomy, for human reproduction, the most basic elements of God's plan for human life. It's an attempt to rewrite all of that. And that's what's happening in, let's say 'Pride Month' or the LGBTQ+ agenda. It's humanity's attempt to make life work in defiance of God's most basic design.

But what I want you to notice is that's just one example that Paul gives you. It's a very vivid example, but the same pattern continues in verses 28-32. So what did God make human beings for? He made them to reflect his good loving heart in the world. And instead, what do we do? Verses 28-31: we do things like:

Covetousness. "I want what you've got and I'm mad that you've got it. And I'm about to do something about it." That's what we do.

Malice. I'm going to nurse a grudge against you for years. And I'm going to quietly celebrate every time anything negative happens to you. And I'm going to rage against God when anything good happens to you. That's malice.

Envy, deceit, slander, haughtiness, boastfulness, disobedience to parents. That's a rejection of God's natural design for how human relationships are supposed to work. All of these are a twisting, a misshaping of God's good design for human life that reflects his character of loving God and loving others. But this is the world that we've made instead. We take that righteous design and twist it into something selfish and ugly. And here's what's really wild about it. We know it's wrong, we know it's not right.

In fact, we get into Romans 2, and what we're gonna find is even though sin has messed us up so bad, we still have a conscience. We still have a sense that some things are right and some things are wrong as we will see. And we know that living as a person of malice and slander is wrong. But do we repent of it and come under the authority of that good and generous, loving creator God? No siree, not me. So instead, verse 32 says, we just find other people who will do it too. And we'll surround ourselves with them. And we'll congratulate each other for being so smart that we've thrown off all those old outdated values of God. And we can live on our own.

But what we're living in is a world that's like one of those fun-house mirrors that aren't really that fun at the fair, where you look in the mirror, and it's all kind of dark and twisted, and I mean, let's be real, it kind of smells like BO in there, and you're in there, and you're seeing this kind of wild, distorted looking picture, and that's what the world is like. It's a distortion, a dark distortion of what God made. You still see signs of God's presence, and God's activity, and God's design, certainly. But you also see that something is not right. The lights need to be turned on. Everybody needs a good scrub and a bath. And we need this mirror to get fixed. That's what this world needs.

And that's why we need this good news of God. I know this has been a lot, but we're coming to a close. This is a really foundational passage of scripture for us to understand the human condition and the world that we live in, but also our need for God and his good news. Because there's no room left by the time you get to the end of Romans 1 for anybody to feel self-righteous. There's no room for anybody to feel like they're righteous before God by the time you get to verse 31, because he got me way up at, well, evil. Yeah, I think it's the first one. Once we got to evil, I'm pretty much done. I'm not righteous before God anymore. And then it just got worse for me. Anybody else in the room? I mean that hole just kept getting deeper.

So I'm not righteous before this God. His wrath is already being revealed against me that he lets me do all the stupid stuff I don't wanna do all the time. And then there's more wrath to come at the end. So, what is my hope? Well, my only hope is the good news that this righteous God also loves us so much even as he sees all of this. He's not like those aliens on that Twilight Zone episode. He's not really watching from a distance, planning something sinister. No, he's watching from a distance planning something very good.

And then he came into the world in the person of Jesus Christ to live a perfect "anti-Romans 1" life, a "Genesis 1" life, in our place, righteous from the heart. And then he went to the cross and bore our unrighteousness in his body on the tree. And God poured out on his beloved son Jesus all the wrath that we deserve for defying God. And then he raised Jesus from the dead three days later. And now here is the good news for anyone who will just see themselves in Romans 1 and say, "whatever the details are, I'm unrighteous before God. I'm gonna stop comparing myself to other people's righteousness. I just need to think about how I stack up with God, and I'm unrighteous. My only hope is if God gives me his righteousness through Jesus, Jesus, would you give it to me?"

Those people are made righteous before God forever and ever and ever. Now isn't that good news? And it's all by the grace of God. If you're here today and you have never come to Jesus with those empty hands, knowing that you're unrighteous, and he is, and he can make it right, if you've never received the good exchange, (we've made plenty of those bad exchanges of the creator for the creature, and the truth about God for a lie), here's a really good exchange: Jesus will trade you your unrighteous life for his righteous life. And if you've never made that trade by faith, today's the day. In fact, this moment is the moment. Call out to him right now.

And if you're here today and you did make this exchange long ago to receive the righteousness of Jesus, man don't you want to say "thank you?" Don't you just wanna worship Him? I think that's a really good idea. Let's pray.

Sermon by Eric Smith
Senior Pastor, Sharon Baptist Church