The Results of Dishonoring God
Romans 1:21-23 · Roger Henderson · Jan 15, 2023
Romans (2022-25), No. 07
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/49261929567970

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

So we're continuing on in chapter 1. We're going to talk about the last three verses, but I'm going to go back and review the previous three verses. But this is a section that kind of starts Paul's talking about where man is at and how God has made him accountable. Every man and woman is accountable to God for what God has revealed to them. And that's going to be made clear in this. And we're going to start this, at least in this section, in 21 through 23, there's like a downward, I don't want to create a spiral, but downward descent, if you will. As man rejects God, that starts, and we see that, you know, we actually see that in our society today. And actually what's interesting is that we're going to see that that's something that apparently It's referred to by Paul here, so we'll see that.

Okay, so here's the outline. I'll just put it all up here. This is just the outline for 18 through 216. This is the Condemnation. It's been called the Condemnation of the Gentile World. But you could really say it applies to all mankind. We're going to see later, he's going to talk about the Jewish people in particular, and then come back to all mankind again. But this refers to all mankind.

So we talked last week in 18-20 about the wrath of God being revealed. We're going to review that. Today we're going to talk about God not being honored. Even though they knew Him, they did not honor Him. Last week we talked about these three verses. And these three verses kind of talk about, you know, God has supplied knowledge about Himself. As Jim said, the bottom line in verse 20 is, so they are without excuse.

God has provided information in his creation, and that's available to everyone. Everyone can see his creation. And I mentioned last week about the story, and it's even so evident that even a blind and deaf person can perceive that there's a God. That's Helen Keller.

I actually haven't read a lot about that, but it's pretty interesting. Okay, so then today, we're gonna talk about this idea, and it talks about the they, the they and actually some people think that that's speaking Paul speaking of a particular group of people and what we'll see that it also talks about the fact that it's it's a past it's a past tense and we'll look at that carefully and if you notice underline the fours I think Macaulay pointed out that the fours are kind of little flags that Paul has used to get your attention. We start with, for the wrath of God, for sense of creation of the world, for even though they knew God, all those fours kind of highlight, this is what I want you to focus on now. Okay, so from last week, four, let me explain about mankind. One of his flags, the wrath of God is revealed from heaven. It's revealed. It's uncovered. It's unveiled.

And wrath here is not so much focused on punishment, even though it's kind of implied. It's focused upon God's attitude. God has a righteous attitude about man. And it's not because He has something necessarily... He loves man, right? What's interesting is we're going to look at God's attributes. The total sum of his attributes is love and righteousness together at the same time.

So that's kind of hard for us to kind of handle. But God righteously acts as God and he righteously loves us. So we're going to see this aspect of his attitude toward man and toward his sin. And Malloy has this point. It's his settled anger out from his righteousness. It's a holy and righteous wrath, not like man's wrath, which can be spiteful and for bad reasons sometimes. This verse kind of speaks to me. It kind of talks about this settled attitude toward man. And this is a wonderful passage.

He who believes in the Son has eternal life. But he who does not obey the Son, believing Him, will not see life. But the wrath of God abides on him." God's wrath abides on him, basically, until he believes. And then Constable has here, kind of summing it up, God has revealed His wrath as well as His righteousness from heaven in the Gospel. So you can't have a God, you can't make up a God that's only love, He's a God with all His attributes, including His righteousness. And wrath is part of that. Okay?

So I kind of skipped to the last part, kind of focusing on this suppression of the truth. I'm kind of summarizing here from last week. The idea of suppression is the idea to hold down, to repress, to restrain. And it's present, active. So it's going on presently. Present tense, continuous action. This is a continuous action of all these unrighteous and godly men. That's what men outside of Christ are doing. They're actively suppressing the truth. They're actively doing that.

And so what's the truth? What's the truth in this context? So I think a good point to realize, he's not talking about the gospel here. The gospel truth. that he talked about earlier. He's talking about actually what's from the context of the verses, he's talking about the revealed truth that all men can see. They can see, and this is kind of the oxymoron, they can see his invisible attributes. His eternal power and divine nature. That can be seen in creation.

So that's what he's talking about. But they suppress it. Even that truth, fallen man even suppresses that. He does not want to He knows it, but he wants to suppress it, because if he accepts it, he has to give glory to God, and he won't do that. This is man's very nature, right?

We're going to learn earlier, months down the road, in Romans 3, as it is written, there is none righteous, not even one. And we're going to kind of focus a little bit on that today. Why is there none righteous? You know, did God do a bad job in creation? Did He mess up? No. Man fell. And that started that action. When Adam fell, it included the entire race. So we're a fallen race. So how does a fallen race act toward a holy God?

He doesn't want to hear about it. He doesn't want to listen to it. So a few more thoughts on, and this is from our brother Hal. Because unrighteous man is energized by his Adamic sin nature, that's why he wants to suppress the truth. He can only manifest his unrighteousness. That's all he can do. He can't, you know, there's none righteous, no not one. He can't display righteousness because he's unrighteousness because of his nature from Adam. Therefore man can only suppress the truth. So the question is, well wait a minute, how does a man ever get saved if he keeps suppressing the truth?

Well at the same time, this is one of the mysteries of God, all this is going on, we have Satan in the world, he's blinding people, all this is going on, but God at the same time is reaching out to man. And this verse in John 12 talks about, If I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men to myself. And then the best one, which I mentioned last week, which I really love, my favorite verses in scripture is that, speaking about the ministry of the Holy Spirit, and this is how God is saving men and women today. He's convincing them. And it says, and he, the Holy Spirit, when he comes, will convict or better convince the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment. Concerning sin, because they do not believe in me. So that ministry of the Holy Spirit is how men and women are convicted and realize they need a holy God through the gospel. Okay, so the second verse of review here is, Because that which is known about God is evident within them, for He made it evident to them. So this is kind of a summary of that. So if you think about it, the truth of God is going out. Does the sun ever stop? Do the stars ever stop twinkling? Does the mountains ever fall? They do sometimes, but normally the mountains are there. Mount Evans is still there. All the mountains in Colorado haven't fallen to the ground. They're still putting out God's clear message 24-7. But man is holding down or suppressing that truth.

So no man can say there's no God, because God's putting the information out there. They can't say, I can't know a God, because He's displaying who He is. And then, you know, men will say this, but God says, you can't say this. From God's perspective, you can't say this. From God's viewpoint, there's no atheist, because He's already... and there's no agnostic, because the information is there.

Sinful man holds down or suppresses this truth, this unrighteousness. And that's his very state of being. That comes out of his sinful nature. So a man can choose to, by faith, accept that and receive God's blessing or receive God's wrath by unbelief.

Okay, so let's go on to the third verse of Review. For the invisible things of him are clearly seen. And Weiss kind of points out this seeming paradox The invisible things which are visible. They are visible through creation since the creation of the universe being understood by the things which are made. Tells us we can understand about God from his creation.

These verses talk about what's called natural revelation or maybe alluding to nature basically. Natural revelation describes what everyone knows about God because God is revealed in nature or from His creation. And special revelation, scripture is what people, theologians have decided to call special revelation. It's a special written revelation of God that God purposely gave to man. His special revelation, His written word. So back to the thought of the natural revelation, both his everlasting power and divine nature are revealed. They reveal two of his attributes, his power, which is everlasting or eternal, and his divine nature or being.

So man is without excuse. It means he has without apology, without defense. Every man in the human race and woman is without defense. And here's an important point. Some men will say, well my God is going out and walking in the Rocky Mountains. My God is walking in Rocky Mountain National Park. It's always outside someplace.

But that doesn't, it gives us indication. It shows His power, His divine nature, but it does not give us sufficient information to talk about His Son, what His Son did on the cross. It doesn't explain about what he needs to be saved. That's in the gospel. So natural revelation isn't enough to save a man. It isn't enough to hopefully change a man to want to know more about God.

Okay. So now, the verses for today are 21 through 23. So here's an overview of them. So starting in verse 21, we see a change. If you look at the tense of the verbs we're going to look at, You're going to see a change from present tense in the previous verses to past tense. That's the first change you're going to see.

Paul will now talk about the they in the past tense. The they have rejected God's message to them and for them. We saw that in the verses before. Paul is possibly, and some of this, we have what Paul has written. That's what we have. People have tried to read between the lines, looking at the verb tense and how he phrases it. He's possibly talking about a race of people. It could possibly be a pre-flood people that Paul's talking about, or maybe the Tower of Babel, or maybe the Greek civilization. Those are all things that Paul would have understanding of when he wrote this.

So verses 21 through 23 will show a decline. We'll start off with see a decline. And I have a visual for that next coming up. And it shows a decline for the they in that past time period that Paul's talking about. It also will show, it shows us today. I think anyone who's awake realizes that we're not going up, we're going down, right? As a society.

Okay, so here's a visual. It's not my original visual. It's this one from Hal. I kind of reformatted it to make it a little bit easier. So this is the stages. I think Mike's going to have, if you like this decline, I'm saying like. Mike is going to double down on declines. If you think this is a decline, wait until you get to Mike's. Okay, so stage one, step one.

And notice this, the they, And notice, you're also going to notice, it's going to be past tense as we get toward the middle of this stair step. Though they knew God, they did not glorify God. They were not thankful to God. They became vain. Notice, they became, past tense, they became vain in their reasoning. Their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, past tense. they can exchange the glory of the incorruptible God.

So we're going to go through all these seven steps. And there's a change, as you notice, talking about the past tense here. So it's pretty neat stuff. Okay, let's start off. For even though it's on the account of, just because, for this reason, they knew God. Literally. So this is amazing. Man, people say, I've never heard about God. No, you're not telling the truth.

This verse declares that man knows God. To be taking in knowledge, it's a fact, past point fact, they're taking in knowledge about God. This is saying they have come to know God and the source of this is creation. God makes His eternal power and deity emphatically clear in His creation. We saw that last week from Psalm 119. The heavens declare the glory of God. Creation is a universal language heard and understood by every man. Creation precisely tells us the world of God's glory. I was kind of thinking, just think about, think about his power and glory.

I was thinking about the, since our son was in Florida during this hurricane they had on the west coast of Florida, I was just thinking about the, and he sent us a picture of the shore where all the water was sucked out of the, out, out, miles out, or I'm not sure, miles, I may be, I don't have my math exactly right, but it was sucked out so you could walk out a long distance, and he took pictures of these big poles I'm thinking about, if I ask Courtney, I'd like you to go down to Florida, I'd like you to move that water about a mile or so offshore.

That's your job, Courtney. Get busy, dig some well, get some pumps going, we'll get that done. Or how about create a hurricane while you're doing it? How about 200 mile an hour winds and a couple other things? How about doing that? Man can't even come close. The best they can do is try to record it. And try to calculate it. And they can't do that well a job in that.

So God's power is there to be seen. God says, in fact, there's not a shadow of a doubt. Aoristens, past point fact. So it's a fact, they knew God. Except two, they did not honor Him as God. So you could say the weast has it, not as God. Did they glorify Him? So actually, I like to glorify and honor, it's the same Greek word, just different, you know, choices of English words. It's to magnify, extol, ascribe honor to God, acknowledge Him to His being and attributes and acts. Knowing God, if you truly know Him, demands awe and adoration. But man does not magnify or glorify God. God says this is reality of every unregenerate man.

So why does he do that? And we've kind of already answered that, but I'll just leave you thinking about that for a second. Or give thanks. Number three, they'll give him thanks to show oneself grateful, to be thankful. Not thankful for the revelation he is pleased to give us in creation. Man produces actions of being unthankful.

And it's a fact. It's a past point fact. Man, and I was listening to Macaulay, I listened to Macaulay, and I listened to the three M's. Macaulay, Merriman, and Malloy. And actually, Macaulay pointed out, aren't we such a civilized society? You know, we'll say thanks, we'll say thanks to the waiter and the waitresses, and we'll, whatever it is, and we're so thankful, but will we thank God for anything? Many men ever thank God for one single thing, they'll take his name in vain, but they'll not thank him. Isn't it kind of, you know, Sad. Pretty sad.

Okay. Number four. But Allah, in strong contrast, they became futile in their speculation. Futile is the idea to become vain, destitute of real wisdom, to act perversely, to act foolishly. Once again, it's a past, past point fact. And it's in the passive voice. And in listening to different people talk about these verses, one thing I kind of came across is it's in the passive voice.

So man is being acted upon. And so one of the questions is, what is acting upon man? And we know the answer here at Holly Hills pretty clearly. We'll get to it here shortly. I've already talked about it. It became futile in their speculation, their thoughts and reasoning. Man's imagination or reasoning, the thought process became void and empty and worthless of true wisdom. Man's passive voice being acted upon. So here's a verse I think that kind of answers that question. We'll see it later.

Romans 5.12. Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, so death spread to all men, because all sinned." So we see that pattern here that in these verses it talks about man being acted upon, his Adamic nature, his fallen sinful nature outside of Jesus Christ is causing him to reject God's message.

Okay, number five, and their foolish hearts The foolish heart was darkened. Foolish here is without discernment or understanding, hence senseless. Darkened is the idea to be deprived of light. And it's only used in the passive sense, so that man is causing his own darkness, if you will, because of his fallen nature. It speaks of moral darkness or ignorance. Again, it's passive voice, man's being acted upon. And here's another verse that kind of speaks to that.

This is a judgment that light has come into the world, but men love darkness rather than light, for their deeds are evil. So why does man love darkness rather than light? Because of his fallen nature, he cannot accept the light, the light of our Lord.

Okay, professing to be wise, number six. Professing to be wise, they became fools. Professing is the idea to assert or affirm. In this case, it's an unfounded assertion. They're puffed up. Nothing's worse in this world than a person who thinks he's something. In the end, he's really nothing. I'll get to my story in just a second here.

True wisdom is from God. If you think about what we studied this back, it seems like ages ago, probably two years ago by now. In Corinthians, we talked about the fact that for the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it's the power of God. Has God not made foolish the wisdom of the world? Man's wisdom is foolishness to God. True wisdom is from God. So this is a person that's professing to be wise. And that's the state he exists in. To be. A.M.E. That's he's existing in that state. Wise is Sophie, the intelligent, enlightened. So he thinks he's so intelligent and so enlightened.

I don't know whether you, if you heard the expression, my truth, it's kind of become the new buzzword. This is my truth. I've got my truth and you've got your truth. Everybody else has got their truth. My truth. I even heard someone say, My truth is more valid than objective truth. If you've been watching the news, you probably know who that is. But anyway, a person actually made that statement. My truth is more valid than objective truth.

In his case, objective truth, I think, was if there's hard evidence, you've got films or cameras or you've got people saying something or other corroborating evidence, but he's saying, my truth that I perceive is more valid. What's interesting is, we have, as believers in the Lord Jesus, we have the objective truth from the Lord. We have that as objective truth. To say that anything that I have of myself, if we agree with that, and that's in our heart, that's wonderful. But when we say, have my truth, which is outside of God, is pretty sad.

They became fools. Actually, in that word, the core is moron, meaning they become foolish or acted like fools. Again, aorist, passive voice, being acted upon by their sin natures, professing themselves to be wise. God's response, He makes them fools, like to be moronic.

And we're going to see that a lot. When Mike gets into it here, we're going to see that God does something and a man reacts and then eventually God gets involved in it. It's a pretty sad spiral down. Okay, 23. Exchange the glory of the incorruptible God. So here we have an exchange kind of going on. They want to exchange the glory of our wonderful God for these images of man, of birds, and beasts, and snakes, and the like. A pretty sad exchange. But there's kind of two words that come into play here. We'll see them shortly. They want to do this exchange. Incorruptible is the idea. It's basically not capable of corruption. Imperishable. So what's going on in this exchange?

What is the glory of God? And one of the ways to look at that is to look at His attributes. God is holy, and in His holiness He shows His righteousness and justice. He's infinite, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent. He's self-existent. He's love. Grace and mercy flow out of that. He's immutable, faithful and true. He's spirit and He's sovereign. You know, those attributes of God are there all the time. Like I mentioned before, His love and His righteousness exist at the same time. As well as the rest of them. So man wants to exchange those. And the phrase I like here, I kind of took it and I got it out of the inline here. It's just, it's rephrasing what's in the, for an image in the form of corruptible man.

It's into a likeness of an image. It's like a double speak, if you will. You're going to say two words that are very similar in meaning, likeness of an image. Likeness is the idea that which is made to resemble something. And then of an image is a word that comes from the word icon, which we've heard about that. A derived likeness of men or animals. So we have two words that are used right together. And Weiss kind of points this out. The association here of these two Greek words serve to enhance the contrast between the idols and the glory of the incorruptible God.

So he starts off, he says, we have this into a likeness of an image, first of all, of corruptible man. So corruptible here is that which is prone to decay. Man is a corruptible being. He's going to decay. So some examples I've tried to get here. The deities of the Greek society were examples of human, corruptible man. And then we have What we kind of notice here, we have another little stair step, if you will. We start off with, he starts off with corruptible man. He goes to birds. He goes to four-footed beasts. And he goes to snakes.

So I have some examples of some. I couldn't find, here's a homework assignment. Find me some, in Paul's time, what are some birds that were worshipped? Birds are sacrificed in scripture. I couldn't find birds that are worshipped. That's a homework assignment. OK, four-footed animals. A couple here. The Egyptians, that was one of their things.

And actually, it looks like the Israelites kind of took calf worship and brought it. Remember when they worshiped the calf? So that came out of Egypt, it seems like. And then crawling creatures, serpents, worship was common in the Chaldeans and also in Egypt.

Also, I'm just going to mention one other thing here I think this is my next to last chart here. What I found in kind of looking through this, Newell pointed out, we talked about men making these images and likenesses. Newell pointed out about a person you know well, not know well, you know of, Mahatma Gandhi.

And he actually, he studied, he was an Indian from India. man. He went there and studied. He got a degree of some kind. According to Newell, he heard the gospel, but it's reported that when he was heading back after his years of studying in England, heading back to India, he was still so locked into his idol worship, he was still on the ship forming a little clay idol to worship. Contra okay, that's that's man number one man number two is a person.

We also know Dwight Eisenhower I hope I have this story. I'm not sure how the story exactly right I listen to the story it's bad you have to listen to it It's reported that Dwight Eisenhower after Maybe one of his heart attacks toward an individual end of his life. He was he was concerned I guess about whether he was gonna live he asked Billy Graham to come to see him which you know think about the presidents have asked Billy Graham to visit them that quite a few and So Billy Graham came to him and talked with him. So what Eisenhower was looking for, he said, he thanked Billy Graham.

Thank you for telling me. I don't know exactly what Billy Graham told him, but I assume it was the gospel. He said, thank you, Mr. Graham. Thank you. That's what I understand. I've understood that from my life. I didn't get the vibe that he maybe believed that, but he wanted validation of that, and he trusted Billy Graham. So there's a man who looked to God's word, and trust him, we have a man that looked to idols. So that was kind of interesting thoughts here. Okay, wrap it up here. Final thoughts.

Honoring God as God and giving Him thanks should be man's response in view of creation. That's what we've learned from the verses we've been studying. Mythology and idolatry have resulted from man's need to identify some power greater than himself and it's refusal to acknowledge God as that power. Men and women have elevated themselves to God's position.

If you have time and you guys are familiar with the book of Daniel, read about Nebuchadnezzar. Now he's a guy that if he didn't worship Nebuchadnezzar, What did he do with you? He threw you into the fiery furnace, right? Fortunately, the three Hebrew guys had the Lord on their side. But if he didn't worship him, he elevated himself to be God. And then God humbled him. If you read in chapter 4, he humbled him. And he went out like a cow and ate grass. And he believed in God.

That was pretty amazing. And then lastly, In our day, it's not so much we have a person we're looking to, we just worship. We worship man, what man thinks, what his intelligence is, what university he went to. He's a scholarly man, he's a man of this, he's a man of that. That's what we worship now, which is pretty sad. We worship man. We elevate man to a position of God, which is pretty sad. So let's close. We thank you, Father. Thank you so much, Lord, for your word. Thank you for the time that we spend in it. In Christ's name, Amen.