Full Transcript

Welcome to Share the Word. Now, whether you’re a first-time listener or you’ve been here before, we are grateful for this time together in God’s Word. We are currently on Romans chapter 1, part 3. Yes, part 3. If you haven’t listened to part 1 and 2, may I suggest going back and making sure you listen to those segments as well. For now, let’s get started.

Romans chapter 1, part 3. Good news and bad news. The first chapter of Romans sets the stage for fleshing out the monumental ideas that undergird the Christian faith. The author, the Apostle Paul, presents the human race’s situation clearly in terms of good news and bad news. The good news is, well, the good news, the gospel of Christ that God called him to carry to the Gentile world. But the bad news, it’s just as necessary to understand too and to confront, because the good news can’t be appreciated fully until the bad news is understood.

In this podcast, I need to get to the bad news. But before we do, let’s go back to those flashcards for a couple moments. Last lesson, we were defining some big theological vocabulary words that readers of Romans need to understand to fully understand its message. We defined gospel, salvation and its cognate saved, and faith and its verb form believe. I focused in on one very key verse, Romans 1:16, where Paul used all three of those words. I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes.

You may want to go back to episode 92 if you aren’t sure you know for certain how Paul used those important terms, so you don’t get lost. Because here come a few more. First, righteousness. As Paul used the term, it means perfectly conformed to God’s will and character, righteousness. It’s a characteristic of God’s, but not of man’s. Paul could write later in chapter 3, There is no one who is righteous, not even one.

None of us comes close to perfectly conforming to God’s will and character. That’s why we need the righteousness of Jesus applied to us. When we believe into Jesus, put our faith in Him, God gives us Christ’s righteousness. He accepts what Jesus did in His life and on the cross as a payment for our sins and transfers the righteousness of Jesus onto our account. Big history moment. Did you know that it was when the Roman Catholic monk and scholar Martin Luther was at his university studying to teach Romans chapter 1 in the 16th century, wrestling with these very same terms to be sure he understood these very same verses, that the spark that ignited the Reformation occurred.

Luther’s own conscience constantly reminded him, he said, that he was a sinner and that all his religious acts could not make him righteous enough to measure up to God’s standard of perfection. But then he came to Romans chapter 1 in his studies, and verse 16 and 17. And studying that text, he realized, to his great relief, that God offers us righteousness of Christ as a gift, and if we will receive Jesus as our Savior by faith, we will receive eternal life through Him. As Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians chapter 5 at verse 21, God made Christ, who knew no sin, to become sin for us so that we could be made righteous through Him. Think about that. Luther wrote in his notes upon discovering this amazing truth in Romans, Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.

That was the moment Martin Luther understood why the gospel is such good news. He realized he could have the righteousness of Christ applied to him simply by believing into Jesus. I have two more key terms for you from this chapter. One is grace. I just said Luther realized that God’s offer of salvation is a free gift. That’s what grace means.

It means receiving favor we do not merit or deserve. The term is used 25 times by Paul in this letter alone, as at verse 5, and more than 75 more times in the rest of his New Testament writings. For example, in Ephesians 2, verse 8, he wrote, For we are saved by grace through faith. It is the gift of God. Salvation is a free gift God wants to give us. Grace undergirds Paul’s whole understanding of salvation.

It cannot be earned. It’s God’s gift offered to us because Christ paid for it when he laid down his life for our sins on the cross. It was in understanding and embracing that truth that the tremendous burden of guilt and conviction lifted off Martin Luther. I hope you’ve come face to face with that great truth yourself and embraced Christ by faith as your Savior. Have you? If you’d like to talk with someone more about it, you can email me at paul@sharetheword.org.

I’d love to hear from you and do my best to answer any questions that are unclear. But this is all still good news, isn’t it, Paul? I thought you said this was the bad news day. Well, my last key word is at verse 18, and it slaps us in the face with bad news. And the term is wrath. We just saw in the Thessalonian epistles recently Paul writing about the wrath of God that is coming at the end of this age.

The wrath of God. Wrath is God’s righteous anger against sin and rebellion. Jesus warned his generation, this is in Matthew 24, flee from the wrath to come. And he wasn’t suggesting there’s some physical place sinners could hide out and escape it. He meant we better find the way God made for us to escape it. Maybe you remember from early in our podcast series, John chapter 3, where Jesus was talking to a Jewish religious leader named Nicodemus, a man many would have considered righteous.

But Jesus told him that he needed to be born again if he expected to see the kingdom of God. He needed a spiritual transformation that only God could work in him. You know, John finished that whole section about Jesus and Nicodemus’ conversation by saying, Whoever believes in the Son, meaning Jesus, has eternal life. Whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him. Hmm. That’s the ultimate good news, bad news situation.

Having a personal relationship with Christ by faith is the way to eternal life. Turning away from that means you are under the wrath of God. We don’t like to hear about the wrath of God that is coming, but it’s coming nevertheless. Here in our chapter at verse 18, it says, For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God has made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, being understood by what He has made, so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their imaginations, and their senseless hearts were darkened.

Claiming to be wise, they became fools. Wow. Starting with verse 18 and continuing through chapter 3, verse 19, the apostle Paul is indicting the human race like a prosecuting attorney, declaring that we humans, although created by God in His image, have all, to one degree or another, rebelled against Him and are all guilty before Him without excuses. He presses home the truth that there is plenty of evidence for our Creator around us and more evidence within us. When he wrote, Since the creation of the world, His, that is God’s, invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have clearly been perceived, having been understood by what has been made, so that they, that’s us, are without excuse, he’s arguing that the creation alone, the natural world around us, is screaming for us to acknowledge God.

When men do not acknowledge something that obvious, but make up far-fetched legends or, in our day, far-fetched scientific theories to try and explain God away. Paul says he will abandon them to their own empty reasonings. If you want to be that stupid, go ahead and be that stupid, God is essentially saying. In Paul’s day, most of the world had made up legends about gods and goddesses and worshipped their images in idol practices. In our day, the stories may sound more sophisticated; they’re no less ridiculous. Apparently, serious people in my lifetime, like Carl Sagan and Bill Nye the Science Guy, and many others have told fabulous stories about the origin of our world and everything in it, and most modern people have lapped up the nonsense.

I remember being in Florida many years ago at the Epcot Center when I was taking our kids down there to the Disney places. We went into a big domed theater and watched a show running billed as explaining our origins. I can’t remember the name of it, but it sounded interesting. And once inside, in the darkness of the theater, the film played out around us on massive wraparound screens with powerful visuals and moving music. And the presentation was narrated by someone with a deep authoritative voice. It went something like this: Sometime in the distant past, billions of years ago, there was only the darkness and the silence of the unformed cosmos, with the exception of one small fireball of energy floating in the blackness.

Suddenly, in a fraction of a second, from that point of light, an unimaginable, unexplainable force ignited a terrific explosion, distributing immense amounts of matter and energy in all directions. Over millions of years, the ever-expanding matter and energy cooled, forming the countless galaxies we see now in our universe. In one tiny speck of this universe, our own small planet of Earth, in the Milky Way, appeared with amazingly perfect conditions to become something unique. The surface of our planet was a kind of primordial soup, but contained the ingredients essential to the formation of life itself. But it needed a spark. That spark was provided by a flash of lightning in the atmosphere that struck the compounds in the soup just right, fusing some of them, so they formed ingredients creating tiny basic life forms, living microbes.

It took millions of years for these tiny life forms to mutate, to adapt as our planet’s atmosphere and weather changed. But they evolved, ever growing, ever adapting. They grew into fish, crustaceans and lizards. Eventually, some crawled out of the water and realized they needed lungs, so they developed lungs and fur because it’s cold sometimes. Brrr. Thousands upon thousands of unguided mutations kept occurring as life forms continued getting more and more complex and more and more intelligent.

Finally, relatively recently in our planet’s history, only a few million years ago, mammals emerged. Some grew thumbs, developed language, decided to walk upright and invented fire. They smashed lesser animals than themselves over the head with clubs to eat them, and figured out how to grow gardens and build shelters. They also invented games like bowling and cricket, and better weapons like bows and arrows, and eventually, the wheel. The internal combustion engine and the Apple computer. Which brings us to where we are currently on this amazing journey of evolution, a surprising, never-ending journey into the uncharted future, unless we ourselves destroy this beautiful planet and cause our own extinction.

It had to, of course, end with that cautionary note. This was like 30 years ago or so, so maybe I added a few parts of the narration, but that’s essentially what I heard. People we, and they themselves, consider wise have imagined and pieced together that fantastic narrative, and in doing so, in Paul’s words, exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worship and serve the creature and creation itself rather than the Creator who made it. This narrative that the amazing beauty and complexity of our world and all of life itself just randomly somehow created itself is foolishness. Step back and think about it for even 20 seconds. It’s foolishness.

There’s no evidence for the miracle of life occurring spontaneously. There’s no evidence of one species ever turning into another species. Our world, our bodies, DNA, even a single cell of any living thing is so incredibly complex. Complexity always demands design. What we have in this false narrative is a deliberate attempt to explain everything there is while at the same time denying there needs to be a designer, a brilliant, powerful Creator responsible for it. What would drive men to imagine and embrace such fantastic theories?

Isn’t it that acknowledging a creator would mean acknowledging some kind of accountability to him? I think it was Bertrand Russell who admitted in an off-scripted moment that he and his intellectual friends accepted and perpetuated humanistic philosophy and evolutionary theory in opposition to Christianity because belief in a personal God had too many moral ramifications for them. So men exchanged the truth of God for lies, and claiming to be wise, they became fools. Besides the creation all around us, Paul argues that the evidence for God is also deep inside of us. In verse 19 he continues, That which is known about God is evident within them, for God made it evident to them. The image of God is impressed in us, is embedded in our own reason and moral nature.

Have you ever wondered why we even have a moral nature or a conscience? I mean, how and why would biological natural selection ever produce those things? But they are undeniable. Why do you think we react to pictures of starving children with compassion, or to atrocities of war with repugnance, or to injustices with anger? Or why, on the other hand, when we hear about selfless sacrificial acts of heroism, as I was just reading about recently on the 80th anniversary of D-Day, why do we feel such awe and admiration for those men? Don’t these responses come from something deep inside of us?

Don’t they demonstrate that we are spiritual beings, that we have a measure of God’s attributes, his holiness, his righteousness, his justice, his compassion, that those things are stamped into our very being? Similarly, why do we appreciate and respond to beauty? How many times have you heard someone say they feel close to God when they are out in nature, or that watching a stunning sunset was a religious experience for them? Haven’t you felt inspiration when gazing at a beautiful work of art or listening to the very best of music? Isn’t there something about the beautiful that lifts our souls, that literally transcends this world? I can think of no naturally occurring explanation for these things that’s reasonable.

I remember years ago watching something that to me clearly demonstrates this truth. It was on one of the many TV talent shows that have become so popular. Contestants come out who believe they have some talent that needs to be discovered, and the judges and audience members let them know if they really do. I think this one I saw was on Britain’s Got Talent. The cynical Simon Cowell was one of the judges, and Piers Morgan and a couple women I didn’t recognize the others. During one now famous episode, a middle-aged woman came on stage as a contestant.

She was kind of dowdy, a little bit unkempt. When she tried to introduce herself and answer a few questions, she came off as perhaps somewhat slow. Her name was Susan Boyle, and people in the studio audience were trying to restrain their giggles. Simon looked bemused too as he chatted her up for a moment, trying to hold back from laughing himself. As the accompaniment started, the camera panned around the big audience, and members were rolling their eyes and poking each other in the ribs. Everyone, it seems, was waiting for this woman to make a fool of herself.

And then she began to sing. And it was a beautiful song, and her voice was just as beautiful as the music. And she sang confidently, clearly, masterfully. She had perfect pitch, perfect command. It was the kind of performance that just makes your spirit soar. Within the span of only seconds, the entire feeling in that auditorium changed.

Simon looked stunned, and the female judge beside him was wiping away tears from her eyes. People in the audience were looking at each other with their mouths agape. And before Susan finished her song, I Have a Dream, everyone was feeling collective shame that they had prejudged her. Everyone was on their feet now, applauding her. The change that came so quickly over that room, what caused that? Beauty melted scorn.

The image of God in every person there, or even those of us watching it on TV, was touched. Consciences pricked over the injustice of our prejudice. It was as clear an example of the moral nature of humanity as I have ever seen. There’s a lot of evidence that we have a Creator with moral attributes like holiness, justice, love, beauty, and that we, like Him, are essentially spiritual beings. But despite all the evidence around us in His marvelous creation, all the evidence inside us from the imprint of His image, Paul says, Nevertheless, men suppress the truth in unrighteousness, and that’s why they are without excuse. It’s not that there isn’t enough evidence for God and what is right.

There’s plenty. But the evidence is deliberately suppressed. Men push it down, away from their consciousness. People don’t believe because they don’t want to believe. And in place of the truth of God, men invent false narratives. Instead of worshiping God and celebrating His goodness and celebrating righteousness, men worship themselves, their own pleasure, and celebrate things they should never celebrate.

If I haven’t been controversial enough in this podcast, let me go where Paul goes in the rest of his chapter for a couple of moments. He says, Because men deliberately pushed God from their consciousness, choosing evil over good, God morally gave them over. That’s a judicial term Paul uses there in verse 26. For this reason, God gave them over. Gave them over to what? He says, to degrading passions.

Fittingly, as I write this podcast, it’s the eighth day of Pride Month, as many call it in America, June, Pride Month. For the whole month, we’re supposed to celebrate lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer behavior. There’s rainbow flags everywhere to remind us. Jesus’ birthday still gets a day on our calendar, and Thanksgiving still gets a day on our calendar, nominally anyway. But for a whole month, we’re supposed to celebrate what God holds up here in Romans 1 as the final example of rebellion against Him and His ways. Think about that.

That’s exactly where we are as a culture. Although I’ve heard some try and desperately make the case that homosexual behavior and related unnatural sexual acts are not really sinful. They’re normal for some people. It’s unmistakable what Paul is describing here when he says, degrading passions, because he gets explicit and says, their women exchanged natural relations for that which is contrary to nature, and likewise the men too abandoned natural relations with women and burned in their desire toward one another, males with males committing shameful acts. And then he says, God gave them up to depraved minds to do those things which are not proper.

In verse 29 and following, Paul literally could be describing much of Western culture today when he continues, People have been filled with unrighteousness and wickedness and greed and evil, full of envy and murder and strife and deceit and malice. They’re gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, and so on and so on. Listening to that list, the decadence is every bit as bad today as it was in Rome or Corinth or anywhere else in the world in the first century that Paul was writing about. And that’s very bad news, for he closes this chapter with this sad truth. Although they know God’s sentence that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do them, but they applaud others who practice the same things. Clap, clap, clap.

Let’s celebrate our rebellion against our Creator. Man, I don’t know about you, but count me out of that celebration. Willful rebellion against our Creator is exactly why the wrath of God is coming and why it will be justified when it does. This all sounds very grim, doesn’t it? Thank God He made a way out of this mess for us. We’re given the choice, as Jesus put it, to follow along with a crowd on the broad road that’s leading to destruction, or to travel the narrow road, which will pass through a narrow gate that leads to life.

Stay with us through this crucial book of Romans. It’s sometimes not easy to hear, but we will tell it to you straight, because that’s the task we’ve taken on at Share the Word. Thank you, Paul. I want to take a moment to thank all of you who have shared your thoughts with us and continue to be part of this Great Commission project by sharing what you hear on the podcast with others. Now, whether it’s sending a link or sharing the website, we can’t do this alone. We need your help.

And the instructors, they take on challenging subjects to bring you the truth of God’s Word. If you have any questions, we invite you to email us at info at sharetheword.org. Lastly, if you’d like to support us financially, you can make a contribution of any amount simply by going to sharetheword.org and click on Give. From all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.