This morning, if you have your Bibles, we want to continue our study through the book of Romans. We come to Romans chapter 1, and this morning I’d like to read verses 18 through 23. Romans chapter 1, verses 18 through 23.
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; 19 because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. 20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: 21 because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, 23 and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.
Romans 1:18-23
Let’s just bow and pray.
Dear Heavenly Fathers, we come before You this morning. Lord, I pray that You would just speak to us through Your Word. Lord, help us to understand the foolishness of men’s hearts, the foolishness of our own hearts at times.
Lord, help us to see why Paul was so concerned about men that he gave us the theme of this book. It was to take the Gospel to mankind. Men, apart from the truth and knowledge of the redemption that is found in Jesus Christ, there is no hope, and yet men are without excuse.
Lord, help us, as we look at Your Word, to begin to understand the depth of the sinfulness of hearts, and the horror of how sin enslaves us to rebel against You. Lord, I pray that You would just be with us and speak to us through Your Word this morning, we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
As we mentioned during the first few times that we’ve been looking at the book of Romans as we’ve been going through it, Paul gave us the theme of the book, which we looked at last week in review, and looked at in quite depth the week before. And the fact that that theme is found in verse 16 and 17, which is, For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation, to every one that believeth, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, The just shall live by faith.
Paul is now going to explain why do we need to have the gospel. He opens up the next paragraph of his letter to the Roman church, by sharing things that should be evident to all that are Christians as you look at the world around us, and that people that are not believers should understand. It’s interesting as he looks at this, he opens up this paragraph by saying, For the wrath of God is unveiled from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who hold the truth in unrighteousness.
I talked a little bit about that last Sunday, holding the truth in unrighteousness. Paul is going to give us a greater picture of what that means. It’s not that they don’t understand or know what the truth is, they have willfully chosen to hold it in unrighteousness.
They have willfully chosen to reject that which is evident and is the truth. Now I want you to understand, there are people today, that claim even to be Christians, that would say, well we can’t really blame these people, because God had preordained that they are going to go to hell. That’s not what Paul is saying here.
Paul is saying something totally different. It’s a choice. It’s a willful choice.
God created us as moral beings. People say, well what’s the difference between us and the animals? And one of the things that you see at the end of this, which we will hopefully get to later on in the message, how that men begin to worship animals instead of God. And people today will worship animals to the extent that they place them above humans.
There are some people that would be very, very upset if you harmed an animal, but they turn a blind eye to killing a baby. And they say, well it’s our right to be able to kill my child if I want to kill my child, because it’s interfering with my plans for my life, but don’t touch my dog. What’s wrong? They have willfully chosen to change their perspective from truth to lies.
The Apostle Paul had been called to bring the Gospel to the Gentile world. In some ways, Paul’s job was going to be almost easier in bringing the Gospel to the Gentiles than it would have been bringing it to the Jews. Because once he cracked this perception that they had willfully chosen to reject the truth amongst the Gentiles and showed them the power of the Gospel to transform their lives and to reveal to them the truth of God, many came, not only willingly, but longingly.
When many of the Apostles went to the Jewish people, who had the law, who had the book, the Bible, who had the promises, who had the prophets, who supposedly had been growing up in homes where this was taught, often times it was harder to present to them their need for a Savior. Because they look at themselves as being self-righteous. And I can do it by myself, I just have to do these things.
And sometimes ours are the more difficult to reach. But it doesn’t matter whether it’s Jew or Gentile. Bond or free, man or woman, every person must choose.
And that’s what Paul is saying here. And unfortunately, most of the world has chosen wrong. They have chosen against the evidence that God has placed before them, even apart from Scripture.
Now Paul is writing to the church at Rome. And Rome is at the heart of really where pagan religion is, pagan culture. All that is wicked and evil in the world is in Rome.
They do not value life. And they have the gladiator fights where they revel in seeing blood spilled. And Paul is writing to the Christians that are in this culture.
And the first thing he says is, if you’re a pagan and say that you don’t believe in God, you are denying the very evidence that God has placed right before you, even if you’ve never heard the Gospel laid out. Now I want to tell you today, this is even more of the case in the day in which we live. People say, you know, as we have become more intelligent, I kind of want to maybe differ with that sometimes.
But we have become more knowledgeable in things because of scientific discoveries that we have made. If there is a God to bring people closer to Him, I want to tell you it doesn’t. I just want to tell you just a couple of examples of simply by having more knowledge that really should prove the fact that there is God and He is a creator.
As He reveals it to us, people harden their hearts even more. And it’s a willful choice. There has been much said about intelligent design in science today.
And why are some of the most famous scientists in the world that aren’t Christians talking about intelligent design? Because all the evidence points to the fact there had to be intelligent design. And it starts with you and me. It starts with our DNA molecules.
Every one of us has all the information of who we are in our DNA. And the minute that your conception occurred, you got half of the DNA information from your father and half of it from your mother. And it created you as a new being.
And at that moment, everything about you was there. What you would look like. The color of your hair.
The color of your eyes. How tall you would be. Everything was there.
Your sex was there. Whether you were going to be a male or a female. And I don’t care what men want to say, there’s only two sexes.
Men and women. And at the moment of conception, it was revealed what you would be. And from that one small cell that began to divide and the encoded information in the DNA within those cells was you.
Now scientists, and what’s amazing is some of them have studied this and have looked at how to encode this message and what is the language of DNA. And some of them that discovered this aren’t believers and haven’t become believers. Yet they will say DNA is an encoded language.
And they’ve been able to actually see how this language is put together. And they see the amazing things about the DNA, how God created it. And it’s so marvelous that within all of its systems, God gives you all the systems of your body.
It can heal itself. It can correct itself. It’s amazing.
And as they look at the DNA and they say that it is a language. What does language indicate? Language indicates intelligence. This language had to be put together and the code had to be put together in such a manner that it would end up becoming you.
Not your mother, not your father, not your brother, not your sister, but you. And as this language was specific to you, God put it there. It’s interesting.
Men will acknowledge it’s a language. They will say language can only come from intelligence. You know, as you look out at, and I’m sure that most of you here have a computer at home.
If you don’t have a computer at home, you’ve got a computer in your purse or in your pocket if you have a cell phone and one of the smart phones. As you look at that smart phone, did that smart phone just create itself? What’s in the smart phone or the computer that enables you to run the programs? There had to be somebody that put programs together and put the language together. I remember being back at NDSU way back in the dark ages when the computers were just starting.
And I had to do a study and I had to run an analysis of what the results of alcoholism were on people. And so I’d done all of these different researchers and I had to go and I had to put it in punch cards. And the punch cards, the whole computer language was zeros and ones.
That’s all you had was zeros and ones, zeros and ones. And when you punched it, it became, you had to punch it in certain orders in order for the computer to interpret the zeros and ones and make them into the code when the code would then be interpreted. And then it would go further.
And the computer that was running these punch cards took up a whole building at NDSU. And you had to stand in line for days with your punch cards to get them to run your punch cards. And you better hope that you’re one of your punch cards didn’t bend when they were running it through the machine or that you had them all punched right or otherwise you started off at the beginning.
There was no delete, correct, change, copy, paste. Even that computer just didn’t happen. It was developed by an intelligent mind.
What’s in your cell phone is a compilation of all kinds of men and women that understand mathematics and computer technology, that have put together programs so that you can run things on your cell phone and you can get it and use it as a phone. You can use it as a computer. You can use it as a typewriter.
You can use it as all these things. But it was done not by chance. Francis Schaeffer, when he faced the same questions by people that would say, well, I see intelligence in creation, but I don’t believe in God.
He said, if you had a bunch of junked cars and all it was was a truckload of parts and these parts were just haphazardly thrown into this truck and you took it to the junkyard and you dumped the truck in the junkyard and then you took a stick of dynamite and threw it in the middle of the pile, lo and behold, a Mercedes-Benz pops out. It couldn’t happen. It can’t happen by chance.
It would need intelligence and it would really need intelligence to take a bunch of parts that are nothing but junk and turn it into something. Paul is saying the evidence is there. But it’s not only that, because you could say, well, they didn’t have microscopes back then, they didn’t know about DNA, how did they know about the encoded language in DNA? They probably didn’t know that.
Well, God put something in every man and woman’s heart that tells them He’s there. And it’s called your conscience. I want to tell you that the most wicked person was born with a conscience.
Now, God tells us that we can take that conscience and we can listen to it and it will begin to show us who God is. Our conscience tells us there’s something wrong about killing another person. I’ll tell you, there are many young women who have aborted their babies who weren’t believers, and years later, they’re still riddled with guilt for killing their child.
If it’s like the world says and it’s just a hunk of matter, why should they be so guilty? Why should they feel such pain? Why should they not be delivered? Because God placed in our hearts, life has value. And He placed in a man and a woman’s heart the value of creating another life as a child. But the problem is, what we can do with our conscience is an amazing thing.
For people in the church to say that men and women have been condemned to hell by God when He created them is such a bold-faced lie, because every person has a conscience, and guess what? God says in His Word, you can sear your conscience by ignoring what your conscience is telling you, and you can burn your conscience and destroy your conscience, but guess what? It has to be a series of willful choices to do it. You have to willfully choose to ignore what God is revealing to you about life, what God is revealing to you about what is right and wrong, what God is revealing to you about what His Word reveals in every person’s heart. You know, it’s very interesting.
I look at, you take examples of some wicked people in the world. I want to give you an example of a very wicked, wicked person. His name was Yaya Sinwar.
I don’t know if you remember Yaya. He was the head of the Hamas. He was the main orchestrator of October 7th.
He was the one that planned it. And as they were seeking to capture Yaya Sinwar, it was a group of Israeli soldiers that happened to be in Gaza, and they didn’t even know that Yaya Sinwar was there. And they sent in a drone that had a camera on it, and he was by himself because they’d been bombing the places where Hamas was at, and he was by himself, and he knew what that drone would do.
That drone would reveal to them where he was, and that drone would mean that he would probably die. And he took something and was trying to get rid of that drone. And a young soldier shot him and didn’t even know who he was.
He just knew he was a Hamas person. Well, why should he want to hang on to life? Remember, a number of years ago, Ken Ham gave the example of a young man who came to him and he said, I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe in creation. Ken Ham told him, well, that’s your right.
You can believe what you want to believe. Then Ken Ham told him, he said, you know what I think? I think what I’m going to do is I believe that people like you should be shot. And so I think I should go get a gun and shoot you.
And this young man, you know what his response was? You can’t do that! Ken Ham said, well, why can’t I? If life means nothing, if there is no God, if it’s whatever we believe and what we want, why can’t I do it? Because you can’t! Because it’s me! You see, oftentimes, when we are ready to hold on to something that’s ours, we want the law to be there to protect us from the thief. We want the law to be there to protect us from the murderer. We want the law to be there.
But when we want to do something that’s a rebel’s heart to do, it’s my right. That’s what Paul is saying. They hold the truth.
It’s right there. God places it in their heart. But they hold it in unrighteousness.
Truth for me when I want it, but when I don’t want it, I can just cast it aside. What a wicked choice. And it’s a choice.
Now, I want us to go on and see what else he says. Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them, for God hath showed it unto them. I want you to talk to a mathematician who’s honest about probabilities.
You know, a lot of times in school you’re going, Why do I have to learn this stuff? Why do I have to learn math? Probabilities. Why do I want probabilities? What’s the probability that your systems could be put together in the manner in which they’re put together, that your body can function the way it is, that all the systems work in conjunction with one another, that your body has the ability to heal itself? For example, I got a nasty bite on my leg from a mosquito or something, and it was all red, and I showed it to my wife, and guess what, it’s healing itself. What’s the chances of that happening? What’s the probability of that happening by chance? What’s the probability of a Mercedes-Benz being in a junkyard that’s blown up by dynamite? The probability is so small that it’s improbable.
It will never happen. No matter how much junk, no matter how many sticks of dynamite, no matter how many bodies you just hope will one day, all of a sudden, there’s a new person that just happened to pop. We look all around us.
Look at the sun and the moon and the stars. What’s the probability that they came into existence by chance? What’s the probability that the Earth isn’t where Mars or Jupiter are, so chances are we’d freeze to death, and we’re not where Venus is, or Mercury, so we’d fry, or that we have just the right of oxygen, nitrogen, and all the various gases so that we can live? What’s the probability of that just happening by chance? It’s improbable. It’s totally improbable.
And scientists know this, but they will not acknowledge that God created it. I remember there was one of the new atheists that was cornered by Ben Stein. Ben Stein is not a Christian.
He’s a Jew. But Ben Stein is a very good interviewer, and he really can ask good questions. So he’s talking to one of the new atheists, and he talks to him about all of these different things just happening by chance. Talks to him about the human body, happening by chance.
Things like the eye, which is amazing. It’s the most amazing camera there is. You can focus in and out and everything else till you get old, and then your eyes start to wear out.
But when your eye is functioning properly, it’s the most amazing camera there is. And he begins to talk to him, and he begins to point various things out that are totally improbable without intelligence to be somehow interjected into him. And then he gets to the DNA molecule, and he talks to him about that, and he talks to him about the encoded language.
And he says, and this guy is saying, yes, it does show intelligence, that all of these things show intelligence. And then he hits him with this question. So then you’re saying there’s a God? Know what he said? I wouldn’t go that far.
He says, where did it come from? He just said it had to be intelligent. Nobody told him. Well, I believe in aliens.
Now tell me, does it take more faith to believe in an alien than it does to believe in God? But he says, they were aliens from other planets that came, and they brought life to earth. Well, then where did the aliens get their life from? You see, you begin to go down a dark hole that has no bottom if you leave out God. And the whole reason he wants to leave out God, this new atheist, is because God demands that you acknowledge you’re responsible and accountable for your choices, because you’re a moral being, and the Bible tells us you have been created in His image.
And being created in His image, you are a moral creature as He is one. That’s what makes you different than a dog or a cat. A dog or a cat.
You can have a… There are people whose dogs will literally knock them over when they see them. They’re so happy to see them, and they’re just all over them. And they show all this love and affection to their owner.
But can that dog tell you what’s right and wrong? Can that dog tell you it’s not a moral creature? It doesn’t have the capability of making moral decisions. And neither can a cat for cat owners, just to let you know. The thing is, we were created different than any other of God’s creation.
As moral creatures in His image. For the invisible things of Him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse. God’s power and Godhead are seen in His creation.
You’re sitting on wood pews. Now, contrary to the evolutionist thinking, they just didn’t pop into the church and drop in here from somewhere. There was actually somebody who was gifted in the skill of carpentry and putting things together that built them.
And if he didn’t build each one himself, he knew how to put together machinery that could mass produce the things that he created out of wood. They just didn’t happen. And it’s evident there was somebody that made these.
You look at God’s creation, it’s evident He’s there. But then you actually begin to stop and think about some of the things of His creation, and it begins to reveal the depth of His wisdom, power and intellect. Look at your body.
Your body has the ability to heal itself. There are elements of your body. I remember a number of years ago, we had somebody from ICR here, and he was talking about reproductive systems in humans.
And you know something? If he would give that lecture to kids in junior high and high school, they would never abuse their bodies again. It’s amazing. God created all systems that have to work or nothing works.
You know, when a woman can’t get pregnant, it’s because part of God’s created system has broken down somehow, either through injury or through disease. But if you look at the human body and the amazing things, but because of sin, you have problems. But it’s amazing.
Look at and look at the intelligence. Do you ever stop to just look at the variety in the animal world, the insect world, the plant world, and how the different plants and animals are reliant upon one another to live and to function? Did you know that there are some birds that have a bill that’s shaped like a hook like this? And there are flowers that have a trumpet shape that only this bird’s bill can get into. And this bird likes to eat the nectar from that flower.
So it goes in and fertilizes that flower. And if there aren’t those birds around, this flower can’t reproduce. Oh, it just happened by chance.
There were a lot of birds flying around with bills like straight up. And then all of a sudden, they begin to curve a little bit, a little bit, and the plant began to close a little bit. No.
They begin to stop and look at all the things like that. Did you know, they keep talking about all this stuff. When I was in science, way back in the dark ages, we learned that, guess what? Plants give off oxygen.
And we learned that when we breathe, we give off carbon dioxide. And that the plants need carbon dioxide to create oxygen, and we need the oxygen to create carbon dioxide. But that was all by chance.
You see, God’s wisdom and knowledge is all around us. But people ignore it or deny it. And he says, because that when they knew God, they glorified him not as God.
Neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Why don’t you look at the verbiage of that sentence that Paul wrote. They knew God, but they denied God and didn’t glorify him.
They didn’t exalt him as God. A lot of people look back at different cultures. And even in the Old Testament of the Bible, they look back and say, how could God judge the Canaanites so severely? They told Joshua to go into the land and wipe them out.
How could God judge the Amalekites so bad? He told, first he told Saul, kill them all. And more than one occasion, he told them to wipe out the Amalekites because they had known God and their day of judgment came. Because not only did they deny God, they decided to destroy everything that reflected God.
And they embraced everything that was Satan’s. As I’ve shared with you before, the Canaanite culture was a very wicked, evil culture. They worshiped gods where human sacrifice had no value for life.
The Amalekites were even worse. The Canaanites at least usually kept it to their own tribes. But the Amalekites, what they did is they went in and they were the cousins of the Israelites.
And they went in and when God was bringing Israel out of Egypt to bring them into the promised land, the Amalekites would go and they would pick off, not the warriors, they would pick off the stragglers. The old, the young, the sick, they would somehow. You had a group of a million people moving from Egypt to Canaan.
And in that line of people, there would be days people would drag behind. The Amalekites would attack and they’d kill them. They’d steal their possessions.
Why? Because they were easy pickings. God said a day of judgment is coming. Your day of judgment is coming.
God doesn’t forget. God remembers. And there’s accountability for choices.
That’s why it makes me so angry when I hear that the people that say they’re Christians, we don’t have to preach the gospel the way that Paul preached it, because God’s going to send some to hell and some to heaven. And he’s preordained it. No, he hasn’t.
You send yourself to hell or you choose to accept Jesus and become a child of the King. It’s your choice. Not your neighbors, not your mom’s, not your dad’s.
You weren’t born. If you’re born into the most wicked, awful family on the earth, you still have the ability to choose and make your own choices. And it’s evident there are people that choose right.
Right now, there’s the son of one of the founders of Hamas that has accepted Christ. And he is one of the greatest lovers of Israel there is. And he cannot figure out how people who say they’re Christians hate Israel.
But he made choices. He was faced, am I going to become and believe like my parents believed? Or am I going to believe what he read in the Bible as truth? And he chose. Choices.
Professing themselves to be wise, they become fools. Why are they professing to be wise? Because they’ve created their own world view with their own imaginations. And it says it’s vain.
Vanity means empty. It means with no content. It means with no foundation.
Their world views have no content, no foundation. They’re empty. They lead nowhere but to the judgment throne of God for rebelling against Him and denying who He is.
And when they did this, they became fools. You read in Psalm 14 what David said a fool was. A fool has said in his heart, there is no God.
Remember a number of years ago, I used that verse at a funeral. I knew there was going to be a lot of people at that funeral that weren’t believers. And I also knew that the man we’re doing the funeral for had been an unbeliever at one point in his life and had lived the life of a non-believer.
But he made a choice to accept Christ and I laid it out before him. I said, the fool has said in their heart, there is no God. And I said, the man that lies before you today was no fool because he accepted God.
Paul goes on and he closes out this particular paragraph by saying, why have they professed to be wise when they’re fools? Because they changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into the image made by a corruptible man and to birds and to four-footed beasts and to creeping things. They made man their God, beast their God, anything else but God their God. And as they did that, their choice was sealed.
The only way they could get out of the choice they made is to go back to God and accept his means of deliverance, which we celebrated this morning. The death of Jesus, the bloodshed for us, that our vain imaginations could be forgiven and covered and the truth and wisdom of God to be planted in our hearts. In closing, when you hear men and women say, well, I’m a Christian, but I really don’t have to share the gospel.
Number one, they’re not reading the Bible. They didn’t read Romans. I know that.
And secondly, when you hear somebody says, well, I’m a Christian and I don’t have to witness because God’s already sending those to hell who he’ll send to hell and he knows who’s going where and I don’t have to share with anything. The people we just read about today, they made choices. They were faced with the truth and lies and they chose and they chose very wrongly.
Every person that you live with today, the problem is Satan’s already got their heart if they’re not a believer in Christ. And so they’re coming from a perspective that is skewed to accept the lies. But the problem is God doesn’t give up on them.
And he will bring you into their life to share the gospel. He will bring you into their life to be a witness of the fact that God can transform somebody and make them a totally new creature and that their sins can be forgiven and their worldview can be one that glorifies God instead of condemns them. And the thing is, Christians need to come to the point that we understand what is the heart of the whole gospel or the whole book of Romans.
And that is the gospel of Jesus Christ, because there’s a world out there that’s dead and dying. Are we going to give them the truth that can set them free? Let’s just close in prayer. Father, I pray that you would just help us to understand.
Truth is all around us. It’s evident in math and science and art and music. But we skew the truth and we destroy the truth and we bury the truth because we don’t want to be accountable for the truth.
Even though you created us in your image, making us a moral being and gave us a conscience to know right from wrong, yet we will willfully choose the wrong. Lord, help us, as your children who have been set free and out from underneath the slavery of sin, to have a burden for the lost and to share the gospel with them. Yes, we ask in Jesus name.