WWUTT 1162 For Although They Knew God? (Romans 1:21-23)

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Romans 119 says what can be known about God is plain to everyone because God has shown it to us and more than just his existence, we even know his eternal power and divine nature when we understand the text.

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You're listening to When We Understand The Text, committed to sound teaching of the Word of God. For questions and comments, email whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com.

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And don't forget our website, www .txt .com. Here's our host, Pastor Gabe.

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Thank you, Becky. We come back to our study of the book of Romans, and for today, I'm going to begin reading in chapter 1, verse 18, and read through verse 23.

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The Apostle Paul wrote, For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.

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For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.

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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.

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So they are without excuse. 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.

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Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal

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God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

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I want to come back to a concept that I concluded with yesterday. We often read

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Romans 1 .20 and maybe even adding in verse 19, where it says that God's invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, are clearly perceived in all that has been made.

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So man is without excuse. No one will be able to say on the day of judgment that they did not know that God existed, for he has made it evident in all that has been made.

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The famous atheist Bertrand Russell, who lived in the 19th century, he was once asked, if God does exist and you have to stand before him one day, what are you going to say to him?

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And Bertrand Russell said, I'm going to ask him, why did you take such great pains to remain so hidden?

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But that just demonstrates Russell's hubris in the matter. How he would claim that God didn't exist, but he had thought the situation through enough to even come up with a question he would ask

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God, should he indeed exist? Because deep down, Russell knew that God existed.

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So what would be the statement that Russell would make before God when he has to stand before him?

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He would say, why did you take such great pains to remain so hidden? In other words,

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Russell's response would be, it's your fault that I did not believe. If you had just made it more obvious to me, then

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I would have been a believer. But it's your fault I didn't believe, so therefore you can't judge me. And that's not any new kind of argument, because Adam tried that in the

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Garden of Eden. He tried blaming God for his sin.

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When Adam and Eve had eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which they were told not to eat from,

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God came and found them and said, what have you done? Have you eaten from the tree that I told you not to eat from?

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And Adam is the first one to speak up, and he says, the woman you put here with me gave me some of the fruit and I ate it.

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So he's throwing everybody under the bus there. God, it's your fault. You made this woman and she's the one who ate the fruit of the tree and then gave some of that fruit to me.

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So he points the finger at God and he points his other finger over at Eve. It's everybody's fault but me.

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But most especially that Adam was blaming God with that remark.

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But the Apostle Paul says in Romans 9, of course, as we're going to continue on our study here, he says, who are you, oh man, to answer back to God?

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Will what is made say to its maker, why have you made me like this?

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So Bertrand Russell's very response that he planned on using against God had already been thought out and even written about in the

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Word of God. If he had actually read the Bible, maybe he would know something about how foolish his response truly was going to be.

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Romans 9, verse 20, will what is molded say to its molder, why have you made me like this?

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As Paul goes on in verse 21, has the potter no right over the clay to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and one for dishonorable use?

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What if God desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory?

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And again, we'll get to that as we continue in our study of Romans here. But in the meantime, sitting here in Romans 1, 20, this verse is actually saying more than simply that a person knows of God's existence, although that's certainly being stated.

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But it's more than that. Look, look at it more intently. Verse 20, for his invisible attributes, for God's 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.

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So they are without excuse. Bertrand Russell is not going to have any excuse on the day of judgment to point the finger at God.

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God is going to say, I did show myself to you. And in fact, I showed you more than just my existence.

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What does Romans 1, 20 say? God shows his eternal power and his divine nature in the things that have been made.

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So we can know even in our observation of creation through general revelation, we can know that God is eternal and he has eternal power.

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And we can know that God is divine in his nature, simply in the things that have been made.

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How is that? How can we know in just what has been made that God is eternally powerful and divine in his very nature?

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Well, very simply, because we see that everything around us is finite, it's limited.

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It has a beginning and it has an end. And we are able to perceive beyond the finite that there is something infinite that exists that has no beginning and has no end.

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We're able to perceive of that, by the way, because God has put it in the heart of man to perceive such a thing.

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It says in Ecclesiastes 311, he has made everything beautiful in its time.

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He has put eternity into man's heart yet so that he cannot find out what

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God has done from beginning to the end. So we know that God is eternal.

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God has even put that into our hearts to conceive of the eternal. But we can't know what

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God is doing from beginning to end. He's put limits on our understanding of the eternal power of God.

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But we can perceive of the eternal power of God simply in the things that have been made.

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We're looking at limited things. And yet we're able to conceive of the the unlimited things, the eternal power of God just in all that has been made.

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Furthermore, we also know God's divine nature. What does it mean for him to have divine nature?

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Well, simply that he's not mortal. We know that God is immortal. We know that he is above all and in fact reigns over all because all things have been created by him.

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All of this stuff has an origin. It all comes from somewhere. And like I said yesterday, no one has any concept of anything ever coming into existence by accident or on its own.

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That's absurd. That's completely mythological for anyone to believe that something could just pop into existence or that it does not have a creator or a divine originator.

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We all know that all things come about from somewhere. Nothing just happens by accident or comes into existence by itself.

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We know that we inherently know that. And so to believe something as absurd as like spontaneous generation or what's also called abiogenesis, that life can come from non -life used to be called spontaneous generation.

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Then they just redefined the term and came up with abiogenesis so that these Darwinian evolutionists didn't have to sound so ignorant.

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But it's still the same concept in in spontaneous generation. You probably heard about this when you were in grade school.

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It would be the sort of a thing where a person would look at a mud puddle and then they would look away. And when they look back to the mud puddle.

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Now there's a frog there. And so they would have this idea. Oh, mud puddles generate frogs like that's where frogs come from, is out of mud puddles or they would see a piece of meat and then they would go away for a while.

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And when they come back to the piece of meat, it's got maggots and flies on it. So now they're going, oh, well, flies and maggots come out of meat.

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This was the old mythology, a kind of like a folk religious myth, so to speak, of spontaneous generation.

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That was the idea. And it was Louis Pasteur that would take a piece of meat, put it in a jar and put a lid over it and demonstrate that flies and maggots can't just spontaneously generate out of meat.

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But if you take the lid off, then flies get in, lay eggs on the meat, and that's where the maggots come from.

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OK, that's a Louis Pasteur experiment for you there. So then what ended up happening from these

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Darwinian evolutionists is that instead of believing in spontaneous generation, now that they had been shown up to be fools, they just changed the terminology a little bit.

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Well, we're going to call it abiogenesis. It's still the concept of life coming from non -life.

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But now we can just make it sound more scientific. So it's the sort of a thing where you've got like a primordial pool and you have all the basic building blocks for a cell in that pool and it gets struck by electricity like lightning strikes the pool and it kind of energizes the things in the pool and they start coming together.

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And then these things that were previously non -living matter is able to form some parts and become living matter.

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And then it even is able to replicate itself and it duplicates and and multiplies and on and on it goes.

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OK, so now you have abiogenesis. It's the same thing as spontaneous generation, just less myth sounding and more scientific sounding.

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So now it sounds intelligent. But life cannot come from non -life. No one has ever witnessed that.

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No one has ever seen life come from non -life. It's never happened.

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So you have to believe a myth in order to to have such a concept, have such a naturalistic idea that all these things that exist around us can come about through unintelligent causes.

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I believe it was Carl Sagan who once said and then later it would be repeated by Stephen Hawking.

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But there is not a need to have to believe in God for all the things in the universe to come into existence.

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We just don't have a need to have to believe in God anymore. Well, that's just an absurd statement because you have never been able to demonstrate that anything's been able to come into existence without God.

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No one ever has. So it is by their unrighteousness that they suppress the truth.

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It's because they have a hatred for God. It's because they're ungrateful for God. That's what's being said here is that because they did not give thanks to him, they did not honor

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God or give thanks to him, but became futile in their thinking. They did not honor God.

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They did not worship God. They weren't grateful to God. They didn't express thanks to him for any of the things that they had, including life itself.

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So they became stupid in their thinking and they started believing absurd things like life can come from non -life.

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Like, think of the you know, the movie Frozen. I don't know why this popped into my head, but the film

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Frozen, the Disney movie from several years back, I know they just came out with Frozen two. I haven't seen that one.

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But in Frozen, there's these rock trolls, right? These these little rocks turn into these trolls.

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That's a myth. That's a fantasy story. No one believes that a rock would turn into a creature or that it could give life to anything of any kind.

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But this is the kind of stuff that the pagan religions believed, like a Mithras was one of the

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Persian gods. It was said was birthed from a rock. So a god figure was born from a rock.

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See, then it comes from the pagan religions and then it just gets adapted and add some science to it.

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And now we're able to make it sound more intelligent. It's almost like comic book characters that are done this way.

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Used to be that when the comic book character origin stories were really simple.

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But then when they take those comic book characters and they put them in the movie, they feel like they have to add more science to it to make it sound a little bit more plausible for this to exist off the comic book page.

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And in the real world, it's kind of the same way that Darwinian evolution works.

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We're taking things that were mythological, that existed among pagan religions way back when.

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We just add some science to it and suddenly it sounds like a pretty intelligent thought.

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But when it comes down to it, no one really rationally believes even the scientific things could really happen in real life.

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Let's say that you had a test tube of a basic saline solution and you took a cell and you put it in that test tube and you had a little microscopic needle and you poked that needle into the cell and you let all the guts of the cell come out of the cell and into that saline solution.

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No one in their right mind believes that on accident, all of those little building blocks for the cell that now exist in that saline solution, no one believes that all of those little things are going to come together and form a living cell again.

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No one believes that. And yet you have a far more likely scenario in that test tube for those things occurring than you do some primordial pool in the ancient past being charged with electricity and giving life to non -life.

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But a person will subject themselves to such mythologies simply because they hate

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God and they become futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts are darkened, claiming to be wise.

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They became fools, which is why a guy as brilliant as Stephen Hawking was still a fool.

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He's not going to be able to flash his quantum physics credentials before God on the day of judgment.

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He was foolish in his thinking. His heart was darkened. He claimed to be wise.

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He was a fool. And he exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

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In other words, a guy like Stephen Hawking worshipped the created rather than the creator.

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He found more awe in what was created than the awe he should have had for the one who created the created.

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The creator is the one who is worthy of all of that awe and wonder and worship and glory and praise.

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We give it to nothing else and no one else. And we can even perceive of God's eternal power and divine nature as being the only one worthy of our worship.

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We can perceive that even in the things that have been made. So consider the Egyptians who worshipped the sun

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God Ra, right? They looked at they looked up in the sky. They saw the brightest thing up there in the sky.

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This thing that has existed before man, this thing that is full of such power, you can't even look at it for very long.

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Are you going to burn your eyes right out of your head? So they're looking at this all powerful thing that governs over all of us, provides light for us in the day.

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They look at that and they say, that's God. And so they worship that as God. They worship the created thing rather than the creator.

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They beheld this created thing as having awesome might and power. And indeed, it does.

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The sun has an incredible amount of power as far away as it is. What is it? 90 something million miles away.

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And yet as far away as it is, it could cause you irreparable damage if you stand out in it long enough without sunblock or clothing or some kind of protection.

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Or even if you look at it for just a few seconds, you could do permanent damage to your eyes.

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So we know that the sun has power. And yet God's power is even greater than that.

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In the futility of the thinking of the Egyptians, they did not recognize that that sun came from someone even more powerful than the sun itself.

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So their glory and honor and praise should have gone beyond the sun to the one who created the sun.

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But they were not grateful to God, although they knew God, although they could perceive of someone powerful in the demonstration of the power of the things that had been made.

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They knew him, but did not honor him. They didn't honor the creator. They gave glory to the created and they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened.

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So, again, all of this is to say that even in the things that have been made, we have an understanding of God's eternal power and divine nature that can even be understood through general revelation.

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We don't know the father, son and Holy Spirit. There's no Trinitarian revelation. There's no understanding of the gospel.

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There's no understanding of God having given his son to die for mankind so that all who believe in him will be forgiven their sins and have eternal life.

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That message is not understood through general revelation. We don't know that just by looking at the things that have been made, but we can perceive of the creator's power in the things that have been made so that on the day of judgment, no one will be able to say we didn't know what this judgment just came upon me.

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I didn't even know that I was going to be subject to this because God was invisible. How was I supposed to know that God existed?

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No one's going to have that excuse on that day for his even his eternal power and divine nature are clearly perceived in everything that has been made.

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And more than this, we even know judgment is coming because of what is said back in verse 18 for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who, by their unrighteousness, suppress the truth.

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We even know through general revelation that God is pouring out his wrath on sinful man.

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I mean, we know that just looking at how the world is in such a fallen state right now, you know, the thing that has captured everybody's attention around the world is the coronavirus.

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Is this virus going to spread as rapidly as some of the forecasters think that it will?

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Is it really as dangerous as they are saying that it is? You know, all these things. Am I at risk if I go out in public?

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I better go out and buy a whole bunch of toilet paper. I don't know why everybody's doing that. But anyway, so just to say that this disease has captured the imagination.

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It is stricken everyone with fear. Fewer people are going out and doing things.

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This is actually causing the gas prices to drop because people are afraid to go places right now.

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So, hey, take advantage of that. You can fill up your tank. But through things like this, when we hear about a pandemic or a disease spreading, this is a reminder that our world has been subjected to futility, as it says in Romans chapter eight, the world is in a fallen state.

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Why? Because God is subjected to futility as part of the curse because of the unrighteousness of man.

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So we can see we can see it through general revelation, even in the world. Storms, earthquakes, natural disasters, evil that persists and continues evil men who flourish while the righteous are oppressed.

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Even in things like this, we can see the wrath of God revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.

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But we don't want to acknowledge God even through those general revelation things because mankind in their unrighteousness loves their sin.

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And so they suppress the truth and it takes the very grace of God to penetrate the heart, remove that heart of stone, put in a soft heart, as God says in Ezekiel thirty six, that we might be able to worship

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God in a way that is honoring to God and walk in his statutes in a way that is pleasing to God.

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All of this is the work of God in our hearts, the Holy Spirit that is poured into us. When we hear the gospel and believe it, then that dead man or woman that we once were has been brought to life, no longer doing dead, dirty deeds with dead, dirty hands.

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But now we offer up praise and glory to the living God who has given us life in Jesus Christ, our

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Lord. Amen. So we're going to talk a little bit more about these things, at least tomorrow.

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This is the way we're looking at Romans one for now. Romans one, verses 18 through 32.

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We're going to talk more about the things that God has revealed to us through general revelation that Paul argues for here in this particular passage.

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After we do that this week, then when we come back to this section again next week, we'll talk about the sin and the depravity that is observed in the world that Paul is even showing here, worthy of the judgment and wrath of God.

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So that's kind of how we're going to break apart Romans one here this week and then next week.

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Let's conclude now with prayer. Our Heavenly Father, we thank you for the goodness that you have shown to us in Christ Jesus, our

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Savior. And I pray that in rejoicing in these things, we are going through our day looking for ways that we give glory to God.

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How can in this I give glory and thanksgiving to God? Let us not fall into a darkness of heart where we're not giving glory to God, for it's in our ungratefulness that we fall into deeper sin.

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Every time we sin, it is a proclamation against you that you're just not good enough.

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So I need this other thing to be happy. Let not our hearts stray toward those things, but we hate the things that you hate.

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Instead, we want to love the things that God loves so that we may do all things pleasing to our

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Creator who is in heaven, who alone is worthy of all praise and honor and glory.

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In the name of Christ we pray, amen. Thank you for listening to When We Understand the

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Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. If you'd like to support this ministry, visit our website www .tt

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.com and click on the Give tab in the top right corner of the page. Join us again tomorrow as we continue our