Man’s Rejection of the Creator (Rom. 1:19-23)

 

How many times have you heard people say that if you want to know the truth you have to look within you?  Isn’t that the perennial message of the culture in which we find ourselves?  And is it not preached to us that looking to an external authority for direction is a form of slavery and bondage and oppression?  

Brothers and sisters, beware of thinking that real spirituality appears when someone frees himself or herself from the trammels of authority and goes off instead to seek God for themselves in a sort of independent venture, whether in nature and in the world around us or in the world within our own minds and hearts.  The fact of the matter is that external authority is not necessarily bad; sometimes it is necessary in the pursuit of truth.  Imagine if someone said they wanted to understand the mysteries behind the physical laws that describe how the universe operates, but then said they never wanted to tie themselves to what scientists have learned from Galileo or Newton or Maxwell or Einstein or Planck.  You would think it odd, would you not?  You would conclude that this person will probably never actually get very far if all they do is to rely upon their own explorations, and especially if they are just relying on their own intuition.  In fact, what we’ve found is that often intuition is just plain wrong.  Some physics professors have noticed that even after their students have been taught the lessons physicists have gleaned since Newton, they tend to divert back to a more Aristotelian understanding of how the world works.  It’s because Aristotle’s ideas are really more intuitive and less rigorously and objectively examined.  Intuition is often just not a good or reliable guide for truth. Which is to say, looking into yourself for truth is often the first step out of the path to true knowledge.

Again and again people want to replace all external authority (like the Bible) with intuition.  I’m not saying intuition is necessarily always bad, but it isn’t nearly enough, not by a long shot.  And this is especially true when it comes to spiritual matters.  Our intuition is more likely to lead us astray than it is to lead us to the truth.  The Biblical text we are looking at today tells us why.  It says that by nature humanity takes what it knows about God and turns it into idolatry.  In chapter 1, Paul is talking about the Gentile society of the first century.  He is talking about the Roman world.  It was a very religious world.  People were not inoculated then, as they are today, against the realities of a supernatural world.  They weren’t drunk on materialistic secularism.  Paul tells the philosophers at Athens, “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious” (Acts 17:22, ESV).  But they took all their intellectual achievements and poured them into idolatry, and when the gospel was preached to them by the apostle Paul, at least some of them laughed at it (32).  

Paul is helping us to see why we need to be saved.  The gospel is the power of God for salvation which assumes of course that we need to be saved.  But who needs to be saved and what do we need to be saved from?  The apostle answers by telling us that all men everywhere need to be saved from the wrath of God against sin.  In the first three chapters of Romans, the apostle surveys the world: Gentiles (chapter 1), philosophers (2:1-16), Jews (2:17-29), and then helps us to reach the conclusion in chapter 3 that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God (3:23).  He shows us that we need a Savior from sin which brings the wrath upon God upon us.  We don’t just need more knowledge for we don’t even live up to the knowledge that we have.  We don’t just need to be better for we are all sinners, condemned by the law of God written in the conscience and in Scripture.  We need Christ, the Christ who is preached in the gospel and who is received by faith.

In the verses before us (Rom. 1:19-23), Paul is helping us to see why Gentile society is under the wrath of God.  They didn’t have the authoritative revelation of God in the Scriptures to sin against and to reject.  But they did have a sort of revelation, what theologians call general revelation, because it is revealed generally to everyone everywhere.  It is the revelation of the unseen God in the things that are seen.  The creation functions as a sort of mirror of the Creator.  As the psalmist put it,

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race. His going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it: and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof. (Ps. 19:1-6)

In particular, Paul says that the world around us tells us something about God: that he exists and that he is powerful (Rom. 1:20).  Of course it doesn’t tell us everything about God, but it does tell us some pretty important things.  And in particular, the picture of the Creator that the universe presents is not compatible with a God who is like us.  The one who made the universe must be beyond it and separate from it.  He must be eternal and unchangeable, all powerful and all wise.  He is not a creature.  Which is to say, he is nothing like any idol represents him to be.  Idolatry is lying about God; it is irreverent.  Idolatry demeans God by making him in our image.  It turns the Creator into the creature.  Idolatry is therefore wicked and awful.  

Gentiles are under the wrath of God precisely because they don’t respond to the revelation that God gives them.  They twist it and deform it and deny it through idolatry.  I think it’s worth mentioning in passing that Paul is not arguing that natural revelation is enough to save anyone, or that there are people out there who actually live up to this knowledge.  Paul’s argument is that no one lives up to this knowledge.  The entire Gentile world, as religious as it was, was under the wrath of God.  No one seeks God or has understanding (3:11).  

Now you may think this passage is not very relevant because in the West we are not as much in danger of polytheism as the Roman world was as we are in danger of atheism.  But atheism is in some sense the idolatry of polytheism taken to its logical conclusion.  Polytheism is idolatry and idolatry is making God in our image.  Atheism says there is no God and that we must save ourselves; that what we used to look to God for we must find in ourselves.  That really is the essence of idolatry; it is replacing the Creator with the creature.  So even though in the West we are plagued much more by atheism than by polytheism, really the argument of Paul applies as much to atheists as it does to polytheists.

Let’ s now consider this passage in detail by looking at the following things.  First of all, let’s consider what effect the creation should have had upon the Gentiles.  But of course we should not only think of how the Roman world of the first century should have responded; we should learn from this text how we should be responding to the world around us.  Second, let’s consider what they actually did with it.  Again, the lessons of the first century are still relevant for today.  And even if we believe the gospel and are saved, we can still find ourselves following the world in our attitudes.  Finally, let’s consider what the consequences of their response to the created order was, and take it as a good and gracious and true warning from God to all who hear it.

I think one way to summarize these three points is in the words obligation, response, and consequence.  We have an obligation to the way we respond to the created order (first point), but by nature we respond in all the wrong ways (second point) and there are consequences to this sinful response (third point).  

Obligation

Here is the question: What effect should the created order have upon us?  Well, I think we can answer, in light of this Biblical passage, that there are at least three ways we should respond to the world God has made.

First of all, it should cause us to know God as the powerful Creator that he is.  You will note that Paul repeatedly talks about the knowledge of God here.  In verse 19, “Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.”  The word “because” at the beginning of verse 19 is there to point us back to verse 18, and tells us that this verse functions as an explanation of how men suppress or hold down the truth in unrighteousness.  What truth are they suppressing?  They are suppressing the truth about God, what may be known about God.  How do they know it?  They know it because God has shown it to them.

Now that leads to the question: How has God shown it to them?  The answer to that comes in verse 20: “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead [that is, his divine nature]; so that they are without excuse.”  Here the apostle makes what many in our day would say is a disputed claim: namely, that the creation of the world causes people to know that God exists.

One of the objections you will almost inevitably hear from people who don’t want to believe in God is, “Who created the Creator?”  Or you might hear someone ask, “Who designed the Designer?”  This question seems to presuppose that God himself must have an explanation for his existence before he can function as an explanation for the existence of the universe.

There are multiple problems with this question.  One is that in fact you don’t have to know anything about the cause of something to know it is the effect of a cause.  For example, if we were to discover on some planet humans haven’t been to before a device that was not man-made and yet was obviously designed by someone or something, no one would argue that we couldn’t say it was designed because we don’t know anything about the designer!  In the same way, you don’t have to know “where God came from” in order to posit God as the cause of the universe.  In other words, even if you couldn’t answer the question, “Who made God?” doesn’t preclude God from being the creator of the universe.

But really the problem with this question is that it’s the wrong question to ask.  There really are only two options before us when we consider why something exists rather than nothing.  Either you have to posit an infinite regress of causes (clearly an impossibility) or you have to posit a first cause, an uncaused cause.  Even many (if not most) atheists agree with this.  The difference between an atheist and a theist is not that the theist believes in an uncaused cause when an atheist doesn’t. They both believe in uncaused causes.  The difference is that the atheist believes that the material universe is the brute fact, whereas the theist believes that God is the fundamental reality upon which everything else depends.

So the real question we should be asking is not who created God, but which functions as a better explanation for the universe: God or matter and energy?

The answer to that question ought to be obvious, because when we look around ourselves and see ourselves and this world, how can you possibly be convinced that the material world is the fundamental reality?  This world is changing, it is in flux, which is pretty good evidence that it is contingent, that is to say, it doesn’t have to exist.  There is nothing about the universe that demands the conclusion that it necessarily exists.  In fact, scientists know from the expansion of the universe that it had a beginning.  Things that begin to exist need a cause.  The universe began to exist.  Therefore the universe has a cause.  And it follows that you have to look outside the universe for that cause.  You have to look to something uncreated, infinite, eternal, all-powerful, and all-wise.  In other words, you have to look to God.

This is what Paul is saying in verse 20.  He is saying that God made us so that when we look at the physical universe we know that an unseen God created it all.  In fact, he is saying that this is clearly seen.  Those who deny it aren’t denying it because the evidence is not there.  They deny it, according to the apostle Paul, because they are suppressing the truth.  They are in fact “without excuse.”

Second, the world around us ought to cause us to glorify God.  Not just to know him but to worship him.  Paul hints at this in verse 21, when he says, “Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful.”  That is, they are without excuse (20) because they didn’t turn the knowledge of God which they had into worship.  We ought to worship God, and we ought to be inspired to do that by the world around us.

Now I am not and never will be a proponent of the idea that all you need for worship is nature.  Some people want to look in nature what they can only find in the church and in the Bible.  But nature nevertheless ought to cause us to worship God. To be honest, I feel sorry for people who think that sunsets and sunrises and oceans and forests and mountains and stars and flowers and animals are all products of unguided, purposeless, material processes.  Part of the wonder of the universe is its design – which is totally lost when you suppress the knowledge of God for atheism!

The Bible itself encourages this.  The 104th Psalm is there to help you.  It points you to numerous aspects of the creation and encourages you to worship the God who made it all.  Right in the middle of the psalm is this verse: “O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches” (24).  

And by the way, nature should teach you, not how to be an idolator, but how to worship the true God.  Idolatry is ascribing to the creature what belongs to the Creator.  Idolatry is placing the responsibility for all the wonder and the power and wisdom and the awe in something that is like us.  That’s again what atheism does too.  That’s wrong and wicked.  

Third, the world around us ought to cause us to be thankful to God.  Here is what Paul said to the people in Lyconium, who wanted to worship him when they saw the miracles he performed: “Which when the apostles, Barnabas and Paul, heard of, they rent their clothes, and ran in among the people, crying out, And saying, Sirs, why do ye these things? We also are men of like passions with you, and preach unto you that ye should turn from these vanities unto the living God, which made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are therein: Who in times past suffered all nations to walk in their own ways. Nevertheless he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness” (Acts 14:14-17).  We ought to thank God for the good he does to us, for the rain, and fruitful seasons, for filling our hearts with food and gladness.  This is what Paul says here, too.  He says a problem with the world is that they are not thankful (21).  But we ought to be.

Let’s thank God for the Savior above all things.  For every other gift is at best temporary, whereas in Christ we have all spiritual blessings in heavenly places (Eph. 1:3).  Let’s thank God for the hope we have in him.  But let’s not forget the material blessings, either.  Thank God for your eyes and your hands and your health.  Thank him for your tastebuds.  Thank him for the ways he has blessed you generously with the riches of this world.  They are gifts from him.  As the apostle James puts it, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning” (Jam. 1:17).

Now I know that we all have to endure tribulation and affliction in this world too.  Sometimes this can cause us to gripe and grumble at God and to forget his blessings like the children of Israel in the wilderness.  But God was not pleased with them!  Brothers and sisters, in the midst of trial, don’t forget God’s blessing.  Don’t forget what the hymn says:

God has not promised skies always blue,

Flower-strewn pathways all our lives through.

God has not promised sun without rain,

Joy without sorrow, peace without pain.

Instead, God has promised rest in the age to come.  He has promised to work all things for good to those who love him who are called according to his purpose (Rom. 8:28).  We work now but rest is coming.  We groan now but glory is over the horizon.  God doesn’t have to give us anything good but how often do we taste the sweetness of his material blessings!  Let’s thank him for it.

This is what we ought to do.  But what has humanity done?  How have we responded to God’s good world?

Response

Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?  Paul says that instead of knowing God, we suppress the knowledge of God (1:18).  Instead of worshiping and thanking God, we do this: “but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened” (21).

Now you may wonder why this happens?  Why is it that if God exists all this idolatry and atheism exists?  And Paul’s answer is that this is the product of ungodliness (18).  Men and women born of Adam are part of a fallen race.  Our mind is carnal, fleshly, and as the apostle will put it in the eighth chapter, “the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.  So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God” (8:7-8).  Or as Paul will put it to the Corinthians, “the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14).

In other words, it’s not a function of a lack of evidence for God.  It’s not a function of a lack of intellectual ability to perceive the existence of God and our responsibility toward him.  Rather, it the result of sin.  It’s the result of a warped heart that has turned inward away from God and toward the self.

One of the corollaries of the Biblical witness to the condition of the human race is that this is something we should expect.  We should expect this blindness and this foolishness.  Not because God has hidden himself or not given people enough reason to believe in him and worship and thank him, but because we are fallen, we are sinful, and part of that sinfulness consists in our hostility toward God.  It’s sin that causes us to look for any reason we can muster to avoid contact with the God who made us.  When Adam turned from God, he plunged his posterity along with himself into sin.  He condemned the human race.  We are not born into the world as blank slates.  We are born in the image of Adam, with original sin.  We are born, as Paul will put it to the Ephesians, dead in trespasses and sins, and by nature the children of wrath (Eph. 2:1-3).

This is a universal phenomenon.  This is not limited to this or that place on earth.  This is true of everyone.  We all need to be saved from the sinful condition we have inherited from Adam and which we follow with delight of our own accord.

Consequence

What are the consequences of this rejection of God who is revealed in nature?  The apostle reveals them to us in verses 22-23.

First of all, however, I want to reference again something the apostle says at the end of verse 20.  He says that our rejection of God is inexcusable.  We are without excuse.  I know that there are people like Bertrand Russell who said that if he died and discovered that God really did exist he would tell God that he didn’t give him enough evidence.  Well, I can guarantee you that he did discover that God exists and that he almost certainly was immediately convicted and convinced of his folly.  It’s easy for people to brag now of their atheism, but there is coming a day when God will shut their mouths.

My friends, just know that no one has an excuse, no matter where they were born, who they were born to, whether they had a Bible or not.  God of course won’t judge them for what they couldn’t know.  But that’s not the problem; the problem is that nobody lives up to the knowledge that they have by virtue of being made in God’s image.  By nature we will inevitably reject it in favor of idolatry.

A second consequence of this rejection of God is that they become fools.  I will never forget that time I sat in an astronomy class and the professor was trying to explain how the universe began. It is ridiculous the extremes that professors will go to in order to get around the existence of God.  As I was sitting there, I thought of Rom. 1:22, “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”  Our whole culture is like that.  We profess to be wise but think that our brains are the products of unguided and irrational materialistic processes.  We profess to be wise but think that all the design and order in the complexity of the universe is a fiction.  We profess to be wise but are absolutely certain there is no such thing as absolute truth.  We profess to be wise and can’t tell the difference between a man and a woman.  We are fools!

The strange and sad thing is that the world gets it exactly backwards, and if you are a Christian you are going to have to be ready to be called a fool by those who are the fools.  They are the fools and yet they call the wisdom of God foolishness.  “The fool hath said in his heart there is no God” (Ps. 14:1).  It is a part of folly, however, to think that it is wise.  I’m saying this because the world will do everything in its power to make you feel that the disciples of Jesus are the ones who are the idiots and foolish.  They will point to all the intellectuals who are on their side.  They will point to the power brokers of this world who are on their side.  But don’t buy it.  The road to destruction is broad and many there are which go down it.  Truth and wisdom are not determined by numbers.  It is determined by God and laid out plainly for us in his word.  Don’t be a fool by following the world!

Finally, although we’ve been saying this all alone, the consequence of this rejection of God is idolatry.  And here in verse 23, Paul spells it out for us: “And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things.”  How did they manifest their folly?  They did so by exchanging the glory of the uncorruptible God for an image made like the creature, whether human or animal.  The Gentiles Paul is describing here are like the children of Israel before Mt. Sinai. Can you believe it?  There they are, seeing the effects of God’s presence in the thunder and the lightening and the earthquakes and the trumpet sound, and yet at the first chance they get, they try to represent God with a golden calf!  How stupid!  How can you take God who is incorruptible and try to image him as if he is just another creature!  But this is what idolatry is.  It is as ridiculous as it is wicked.

But here’s the thing: idolatry is unavoidable when you reject God.  I don’t care if your idolatry is a godless atheism.  You are still an idol maker.  You are still doing what Paul says here: you are making an exchange: uncorruptible God for corruptible goo.  You are going to worship something and if it is not the God of the Bible it will be something infinitely less glorious.  You are turning from Reality to the shadow.  It’s folly.

So how thankful we are that God in his grace has not left the human race to perish in their ignorance!  He could have done so.  But he hasn’t and the proclamation of the gospel to Jew and Gentile is evidence of that.  Paul sermon to the men of Athens is especially relevant here:

Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, To The Unknown God. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you. God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; Neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed anything, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring. Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device. And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men everywhere to repent: Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead. (Acts 17:22-31).

Praise God that he commands all men everywhere to repent and that he has given assurance to all men that the gospel is true in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.  We can be saved because Jesus came to save his people from their sins (Mt. 1:21).  If you would find rest in the remission of your sins, I point you to Christ.  The gospel is the good news about Jesus Christ, and it is the power of God unto salvation because in it the righteousness of God has been revealed from faith to faith (Rom. 1:16-17).  Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ you and you shall be saved.