Sermon: Sunday, 15th September, 2024
Speaker: John Johnstone
Scripture: Romans 1:18-32
Last week, Geoff was preaching on the best news we could ever hear – that although no one in the world is good enough to make it to Heaven by their own efforts, because we lack the righteousness or goodness that God requires, we can still get to Heaven because Jesus is able to forgive us and give us the goodness which we lack from his own stores of goodness. Jesus’ goodness is offered to the whole world, but there is a condition to receiving it; we must turn away from our sin and believe that Jesus if the Son of God who died on the cross in order to clean us of sin. In a word, God wants our trust. He wants our faith: For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed — a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: ‘The righteous will live by faith.’ (Romans 1:17)
Martin Luther is arguably the most influential Christian in the last 1000 years. He became a monk, living in a monastery; however, he did not have faith in Jesus. He was not a true Christian. Instead of receiving Jesus’ goodness as a gift, he tried and tried to earn God’s favour through acts of penance and self-sacrifice, and even self-flagellation. In other words, he tried to make himself good enough for God. But no one is good enough for God. If we were good enough, we wouldn’t need Jesus to save us, and Jesus would not have needed to die on the cross. Luther describes his pre-Christian days as a monk: ‘If you had asked me, did I love God, I would say love God? Sometimes I hated him. I saw Christ as a terrifying judge, who had the sword of judgement above my head, and I had no peace.’ Luther came to understand that the righteousness he needed could not come from his own actions. Rather, it is a righteousness that God makes available to us who are not righteous; that righteousness of God that is granted to us as a gift in faith. When Luther understood justification by faith alone, and not by our own efforts, he said it was like ‘the doors of paradise swung open and I walked through’. Do you understand that you cannot make yourself good, but need God to do that for you? Do you understand that this goodness only comes to those who place their trust in Jesus?
As a monk, Luther discovered that no one can find God’s forgiveness through their own efforts. Our good deeds will never outweigh the bad. The early chapters of Romans hammer this point home to us. In chapter 1 we are told that pagans fall well short of God’s standards. In chapter 2, Paul tells us that likewise, moral people fall short of God’s standards. Finally, and for some most shocking of all, we’re told that the deeply religious also fall short of God’s standards and without faith in Jesus, are under God’s wrath. Paul goes to great lengths in these early chapters of Romans to show that all human beings are in the same boat. Romans chapter 3 sums up the problem of all humans: ‘For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.’ (Romans 3:23)
Why does Paul spend so long trying to convince us of this? Imagine going to your doctor, and he asks you to sit down and tells you he has some bad news for you – even though you might feel ok, you have an extremely serious illness. However, thankfully there is a cure available. Unless you are convinced that there is a problem, you will never agree to surgery needed to cure this disease. It is crucial that you understand the true nature of your problem. The same is true spiritually. Until you understand that you cannot get into a right relationship with God by your own efforts, and that you have a problem with sin in your heart, you will never accept God’s solution, which is Christ’s death on the cross. It was when Luther stopped trying to earn God favour, and rested instead on what Jesus had done for him by dying in his place that peace flooded into his heart. So let me be blunt: like a good doctor, the best of doctors, God wants to break this bad news to you today – you are not a good person.
Let’s try to understand what lies at the heart of the human problem of sin.
1. There is no such thing as an atheist
That might sound like a crazy thing to say. Even last week, I was speaking with a group of young people, a third of whom claimed to be atheists. Are they wrong? Yes! The Bible clearly teaches us that all humans beings know something about God. They might never have heard about Jesus Christ or his death or resurrection. They might never have read God’s book, the Bible. However, they have read another book – the book of nature. That is to say, when they look at the stars in the sky, or a newborn baby, or the beauty of a landscape, they know deep down that there must have been a God to have designed and created these things: ‘… since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.’ (Romans 1:19-20)
God is telling us something logical. Just as when we see a great painting, we know there must have been an artist who painted it, in the same way, when we see the creation, we know there must have been a Creator behind it. And we know this Creator must be powerful and glorious to have been able to form the created order. This is what it says in Psalm 19: ‘The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.’ (Psalm 19:1-4)
In other words, the stars themselves are like an internationally understood language shouting out to all people – there is a God! There is a Creator! Deep down, everyone knows this fact. That’s why even the staunchest atheists often end up praying on their death beds. And that’s why the world is full of religion – we know within ourselves that there is a God. There is no such thing as an atheist.
Many times, I’ve heard people say,’Why does God make it so hard to believe in him?’ The assumption is that God is playing a horrible game of hide and seek with us, making it really hard to find him. The truth is the very opposite. We see the fingerprints of God all around us, and yet we hide from him.
2. Human rebellion
It’s an interesting fact that people do not always respond to truth in the way that we should. For example, a man with a spending problem started off opening his credit card bills when they came through the post, but they really upset him. As time went on, he began to leave them unopened, but continued to rack up even more debt. He chose to suppress the truth of his debts, and carried on spending money he didn’t have, and even managed to convince himself at times that he didn’t really have a problem.
Many people do the same with God. They know he exists, but they: ‘… suppress the truth by their wickedness.’ (Romans 1:18) The squash down the thought of God in their lives. But why? Because they do not want to be answerable to a supreme being. Instead, they want to be the boss of their own lives. God is an inconvenient truth, so rather than face this truth, they squash it down more and more, until they convince themselves that they are atheists.
I’ve been thinking about rainbows a lot recently. They are the sign of God’s covenant with Noah and indeed his covenant with all human beings and with animals too. God promises to sustain and preserve the human race until Jesus comes again. He is good to all he has made. He sends the sun and the rain and causes things to grow. Paul and Barnabas inform those in Lystra that God: ‘… has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy.’ (Acts 14:17) We ought to be so thankful to God for his gifts. However, in our rebellion, human beings have the opposite reaction: ‘For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him…’ (Romans 1:21) Being unthankful to God is a serious business.
Verse 18 describes the dark side of the human condition using the words ‘godlessness and wickedness’.
‘John Stott: Scripture is quite clear than the essence of sin is godlessness. It is an attempt to get rid of God and, since that is impossible, the determination to live as though one had succeeded in doing so… It is not just that they do wrong, though they know better. It is that they have made an a priori decision to live for themselves, rather than for God and others, therefore deliberately stifle any truth which challenges their self-centredness.’
A son went off to university in Glasgow. He had been brought up with love and the best his parents could offer. They even supported him at university. However, when he began to taste a life of independence, he began to ignore the texts and calls of his parents. He wanted no accountability and no interference. When his dad turned up at his flat and knocked on the door, he refused to answer, and even said to his flatmates: ‘I don’t know who that guy is banging on our door. Tell him to go away.’ That’s a shocking scene. But that’s how many people treat God. God has been kind to us, giving us our lives, and many of its accompanying gifts. We turn round to God and say: ‘I don’t want you in my life.’ This is human rebellion against God. This is thanklessness. This is wickedness.
When volunteering at the church café, I really appreciate it when people say ‘Thank you’. Some people don’t. Some even complain about the service, take far more than their share, as if that’s their right. Sadly, we can all be guilty of entitlement and thanklessness. Not saying thank you to me is not such a big deal. But when we behave like that towards God, the King of Kings, it is serious.
3. God is a God of both love and wrath
What have we learned so far? We’ve seen that the invisible God is made visible to us by what has been made. However, we have a tendency to ignore God in his world, to pursue our own selfish path. We suppress the truth of his existence, and this sets off a negative chain reaction. Because when we push God out of our lives, our thinking is darkened and this vacuum is replaced by all kinds of ugly idols which take God’s place. ‘For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.’ (Romans 1:21-23)
We’ve already thought of God’s love, sending his own Son to die to pay the price for our sin and to gift us his goodness. Now we come to a more unpopular truth – the wrath of God. God will not be mocked. His wrath is not like human wrath, which can often be out of control or unjust or too severe. God’s wrath is a holy wrath directed at those who mistreat him and other human beings.
John Stott: His wrath is his holy hostility to evil, his refusal to condone it or to come to terms with it, his just judgement upon it.’
I’m glad that God is not neutral towards wickedness. What kind of God would he be then, if the wicked were never brought to justice?
This leads to the question – how is God’s holy anger revealed? We know it will be revealed at the end of time on the Day of Judgement. However, what’s striking about this passage is that God is also revealing his anger in the here and now. What do we mean? Well, we see that for those who reject God, God ‘gives them over’ to the wicked desires of their hearts. We see this phrase 3 times, in verses 24, 26 and 28. The shocking thing is this: in the here and now, God’s judgement comes not by God’s intervention, but by not intervening, by allowing us to go our own way.
John Stott: ‘God abandons stubborn sinners to their wilful self-centredness, and the resulting process of moral and spiritual degeneration is to be understood as a judicial act of God. This is the revelation of God’s wrath from heaven.’
It is as if God is saying: ‘So you want to live without me – ok then do that.’ God removes his hand of restraint, and leaves people to their own wrong desires and behaviours. These wrong behaviours are anything which is outside the will of God. God is the Creator and Designer of the world, and so it goes without saying that he decides what is right and wrong and reveals to us in Scripture how we are to love God and love our neighbours. Part of this design is that the only context for sexual activity is in the lifelong marriage of a man and a woman. Of course, in 2024 our culture has completely moved away from the basic foundational truths of marriage, gender and sex.
Church is a place where homosexuals are welcome and respected and loved, but that does not mean we agree with homosexual practice, if the Bible clearly teaches it is out with his design. But we might object and say, well, why do people have these strong desires? I don’t know about you, but often I have wrong desires, and have to fight against them. Not everything which I desire is necessarily right. Sam Allberry, a pastor who is himself same-sex attracted, writes with great love and sympathy for the gay community. He says: ‘All of us have desires that are warped as a result of our fallen nature. Desires for things God has forbidden are a reflection of how sin has distorted me, not of how God has made me… as we reject God, we find ourselves craving what we are not naturally designed to do. This is as true of a heterosexual person as a homosexual person.’
Here’s the thing. When God is rejected, what happens? Society starts to unravel. Verses 29-32 catalogue 21 other sins which flow out of suppression of God and his truth. Verse 32 even says we approve of those who do evil. When we fail to honour and love and serve God, it results in the disordering of human life. It leads to envy and boasting and disobeying our parents. Let’s take a step back from this passage and think of our own Scottish culture in 2024. It seems to me that we are a culture which has repressed our knowledge of God, and exchanged him for our own idols, resulting in moral chaos.