Romans 1:24-28 And They were Given Over to a Depraved Mind

Coram Deo Reformed Baptist Church

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Alrighty. We're in Romans 1, again, 24 through 28.

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Everybody already there? That was quick. Well, yeah. Starting in 24, therefore

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God gave them up in the lust of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the

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Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. For this reason

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God gave them up to dishonorable passions, for their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women, and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men, and receiving in themselves the due penalty of their error.

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And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.

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So last week we talked about God's wrath and it being revealed because humanity in its natural state being unwilling to recognize

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His glory through nature and creation and His Word.

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Now this week we're going to talk about part of what that wrath looks like.

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Starting in 24, therefore God gave them up to in the lust of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the

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Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. Notice the language

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Paul is using here. He says, therefore, as in as a result of man exchanging the truth of God for a lie, and worshiping the creature rather than the

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Creator. As I said last week, I spoke about how man has always either worshiped

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God or himself. Doesn't matter if it was a snake or a beaver or a tiny little statue that you carved out of wax in your garage.

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It's yourself. Because our natural state, or as the

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Bible says, refers to it as our flesh. In our flesh, our desires are...

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our desire is corrupted, and because of this, we naturally choose to do what is offensive to God.

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We prefer it. For Scripture says, sin.

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Offense. But because the common grace of God, we are restrained from being completely consumed by our natural state.

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Matthew 5 45 says, you have heard that it was said... I can wait if anyone wants to turn there.

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I apologize. Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

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Yes. Oh, no.

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Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is God the

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Son speaking. Yeah. Yeah. Them red letters. Starting in 43.

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You have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.

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But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your

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Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust.

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For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have?

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Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others?

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Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your

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Heavenly Father is perfect. I know

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I tend to read more than is typically necessary, but I like context.

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But the part that I am referring to is 45. It rains on the just and the unjust.

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The sun rises on the evil and the good. This is part of that common grace that everyone is blessed with, because we live in his creation, and he promised after the flood that it would continue season after season.

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The sun and the moon, the earth would continue to rotate. Everything would work as it should, until he decided that it wouldn't.

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This is usually referred to as common grace, as I said before. And when a nation or people rejects

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God and turns to false idols, they turn away from him. God judges them with abandonment.

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Now, that doesn't mean that the sun stops, you know, we don't quit rotating around the sun and the rain keeps falling.

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But he withdraws that aspect of his grace that restrains us, leaving them to their sins and their foolishness.

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Judges 10, 13, and 14. I'll read through.

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Yet you have forsaken me and served other gods, therefore I will save you no more.

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Go and cry out to the gods whom you have chosen. Let them save you in your time of distress.

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This is God talking to Israel. His chosen people, if he will judge them with abandonment, how much more will he judge a pagan nation?

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Matthew Henry says, how much are we beholden to the restraining grace of God for preserving anything of the honor and decency of human nature?

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We are absolutely and utterly at the mercy of his grace in restraining us.

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26, for this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions.

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For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature.

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The men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty of their error.

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Now, I don't think I need to explain what he's talking about. He's explaining actions, not a lifestyle.

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But this is part of the results of God's abandonment of a people.

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It is a judgment in and of itself. Men and women debasing themselves, their own lusts and desires, and in all manner of shameful, dishonoring sexual acts.

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Not just those described. This is why it would seem to be a downward slope of behavior that can be observed.

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Notice that in the West alone, the slide into depravity over just the past 20 years, it has gone from overlook to accept, to affirm.

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Just these behaviors. From don't ask, don't tell, to constant bombardment of campaigns to erode morality, teachers teaching young children about things that no child should ever see or hear.

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That quickly. The only sexual acts that God approves are those which he designed for us within the confines of marriage that he created.

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Jesus addresses this about what

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God considers to be marriage in Mark 10, 5 through 9.

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And I'm addressing marriage here because by addressing it, to borrow from from Bodhi, because Christ addresses marriage, he is addressing everything else.

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Everything that isn't marriage and everything that isn't proper sexual activity within the confines of marriage.

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Mark 5, or Mark 10, verse 5. And Jesus said to them, because of your hardness of heart, he wrote you this commandment.

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But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife.

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And the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh.

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What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate. And also in Matthew 5, 31 and 32, it was also said, whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.

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But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery.

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And whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. In Matthew 19, 4 through 9, have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife.

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And the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh.

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What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate. They said to him, why then did

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Moses command to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?

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He said to them, because of your hardness of heart, Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.

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And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.

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Now in these passages, Jesus is specifically speaking about divorce, but in speaking about divorce, he goes to Genesis.

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And since he is the Word, and the Word created all things,

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I think he knows what he created and how it should function.

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So let's use Jesus' grounding for his own argument and go to Genesis real quick.

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Genesis 1, I apologize. No, it's 2. Genesis 2. Genesis 2, starting in verse 18.

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Then the Lord God said, it is not good that the man should be alone.

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I will make him a helper fit for him. Now we went over this a couple of weeks ago, where I talked about this is the first time that God said that something that he created wasn't good.

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He created everything else. Say one, two, three, four, and five, and at the end of the day said it was good, and it was evening, and it was morning, and he creates man, and he said it is not good for man to be alone.

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That's fair. Now out of the ground the

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Lord had formed every beast of the field, and every bird of the heavens, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them.

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And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. I will sidebar here and say what a fantastic honor that God calls his creation what

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Adam named it. How amazing. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.

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The man gave names to all livestock, to all the birds of the heavens, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.

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So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.

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And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman, and brought her to the man.

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And the man said, This is at last bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.

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She shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man.

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Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother, and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

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And the man and his wife were both naked and not ashamed.

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Because Christ is addressing marriage, he is therefore addressing what moral sexual behavior is, and because he is addressing that, he is addressing what is not.

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And I will add, moral sexual behavior is not between a man and a woman.

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It is between a husband and a wife. Period. The first step down the staircase of depravity that this that every nation takes, is the relaxation of that view.

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Before we ever get to where we are now, a people, a person, a small people group, have to consciously and willingly dismantle the family, and say that doing these things are okay outside of marriage.

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It's okay for me to do this with multiple people. You get there before you get to men with men and women with women.

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It is between a husband and a wife only. And immoral sexual acts, which include adultery, as so egregious,

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Jesus tells us, this is the only cause allowed for divorce. The only one.

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The only one he allows. How many causes for divorce can you think of living in 2023, and not a single one of them is on this list?

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Just one. And it's not even illegal. That's a different argument.

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But it's not. It's not even frowned upon. Marriage and proper moral sexual behavior are defined by their

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Creator, no one else. Not me, not you, not the church, and for sure not a rogue pagan people who prefer to worship creatures rather than their

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Creator. And when God withdraws himself from a people, this is the debasement and dishonor that they follow every time, because it is contrary to his creation.

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28, and since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.

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I'm going to include 28 here and next week also, because one, there's a conjunction at the beginning, so it has to do with the previous verses, but it also has to do with the next ones.

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It's not a break. There's no natural break there. For some additional context, some translation used the word depraved instead of debased.

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But what is debased mind referenced to in the previous verses?

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To put it simply, it is an illogical one. Matthew Henry says this in the commentary, "...the

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blindness of their understandings was caused by the willful aversion of their wills and afflictions.

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They did not retain God in their knowledge because they did not like it. They would neither know nor do anything but just what pleased themselves.

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It is just the temper of carnal hearts, the pleasing of themselves in their highest end.

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There are many that have God in their knowledge. They cannot help it.

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The light shines so fully in their faces, but they do not retain Him there.

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They say to the Almighty, Depart. And they therefore do not retain

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God in their knowledge because it thwarts and contradicts their lusts.

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They do not like it. And their knowledge in epigenosis, there is a difference between gnosis and epigenosis.

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Gnosis refers to the knowledge, and epigenosis is the acknowledgment of God.

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Pagans knew God, but did not, would not acknowledge Him. It is made plain through creation that there is a

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Creator and that He is wonderfully amazing, and it is purposefully ignored so that men can do what they want.

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If you have ever given a gospel presentation to someone that you knew was not a

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Christian, how many times in the conversation did their gears turn in such a way that you saw it?

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How many times did they try to work themselves out of admitting that there's a

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God? Another aspect of the depraved mind, and of people being given over to it, is that there are people that may not practice the dishonorable acts described in the previous verses themselves, but approve of them all the same, or take a neutral position.

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If you think Jesus likes lukewarm, read Revelation. Knowing that it is sinful, they say, it doesn't affect my life.

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What someone does in their home doesn't affect me one single iota. They take this position so that they won't offend the world, but this position should be offensive to the church, because it is offensive to God.

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We should absolutely be offended, and because it is offensive to God, we should speak against it.

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We should be the ones crying out from the rooftops, from street corners, from pulpits, from everywhere that we can imagine, everywhere that we can get to.

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We should be crying out with the truth. Unfortunately, a large part of even the church not only turns a blind eye to these behaviors, but they have begun to approve of it and affirm it.

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Not only these things, but all manner of depravity and illogical thinking.

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We have churches that affirm and ordain homosexuals.

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That was just addressed. That in no way, shape, or form qualifies you biblically to lead a congregation, but we also have churches and pastors that deny

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God's account in Genesis of creation. Now tell me, how do you go from there being no

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Adam and Eve to needing a Savior? How does that even work?

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But that's the consequence of the depraved mind. It's illogical thinking.

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How do you hold ghosts, period, because of what

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Scripture says, and aliens and Christian theology at the same time?

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How does that work? I'll tell you a depraved mind. Illogical thinking.

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There are so many people in this country that hold so many irrational things in their head, and they never once think to figure out whether or not they go together ever because they can't.

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We're going to do this thing over here. I'll use an example.

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I'm not usually one for stories and all of that, but this is a perfect example. How hard the

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West harps on clean energy, right? And let's say,

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I can't remember the exact numbers that the guy used, but it was so many million metric tons of carbon that Australia releases into the atmosphere every year.

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They were all manner of different things, and he looked at just regular trees and how many they had.

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They had over a hundred billion trees in what way more than a hundred billion trees in Australia, and each tree pulls out of the atmosphere like a hundred thousand tons of carbon a year, right?

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Something like that. So how much carbon did the trees pull out? Not including mangroves, he said, because mangroves pull five times as much carbon.

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How much carbon that trees pull out of the atmosphere every year versus how much

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Australia pumps into it? The trees win by like 20 times.

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The trees absorb 20 times as much carbon as Australians release with their cars and industry.

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Well, we got to cut down the trees to make solar farms. Do you see what

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I'm saying? It's debased illogical thinking. I know that was a long story, and I do apologize, but it is a perfect example of just complete stupidity, but getting back to what we were talking about, the

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Apostle John, by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, says at the beginning of his gospel that Jesus, our

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Savior and King, is the what? The Word.

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He's the Word. In the Greek, this is the word logos, meaning it is the root word from where we get logic or the divine reason.

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When a nation is judged with abandonment, their ability to reason is lost.

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It is removed, and they begin to debase themselves with sinful acts and foolishness that they claim to be wisdom, such as something coming from nothing, but this leads to the most offensive and egregious acts that you can imagine, and I did not put it in here because I've gone on too long, but if you do not believe me, read the progression of just Israel during the reign of Manasseh.

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Israel, God's chosen people, went from in one generation loving

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God and being obedient to the very next king completely destroying themselves and dishonoring

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God, to the point of instituting mass child sacrifice to false gods.

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Read the progression of it, and then look at every other nation throughout the rest of human history.

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Just look at where we are right now.

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This country on whole approves of the things that we just talked about, and it's not just approval, it's affirmation.

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You had better affirm it, or what? You get silenced, or thrown in jail.

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Right? We have businesses that solely exist to sacrifice children to the

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God of self. I hope no one deigns to consider themselves better than the

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Jews during the reign of Manasseh. This country is not.

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Neither is any other country for that matter. But I'll stop there.