Romans Explained Part 1 | Heathens, Hypocrites & JesusÀpẹrẹ

| Romans 1:20-25 | The Godless & the Wicked

Welcome back to Romans. Court is in session, and we are on trial. Actually we left off with me on trial. A little review might help. Remember that Romans is the gospel - how to get right with God. But first, we need to know that we are not right with God.

Now everyone was invited to court, but the guests split up into three groups. The wicked sat down at the defendant’s table, the religious jumped right in the jury box, and I sat down in the back with the godless. Well, 21 year old me that is. I was good at science, good at school, and good at excuses.

I called myself agnostic, no need for God. I had science. Well to be quite honest, what I had was an excuse, and a good one. If somewhere in the afterlife I were called into court, I had a very good alibi. Evolution. There’s evidence, right? And besides, I never saw God. But in verse 20, Paul called me out:

“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 1:20).

Catch that? No excuse.

Did you know that the simplest cell known to man has more than 100,000 moving parts, performing a thousand complex activities every second? Think about it this way: forming the simplest cell - by accident - would be like hitting a mountain with a bomb and out pops a jet airplane with the most advanced computer technology ever seen. And that jet - somehow - makes baby jets. That’s the complexity level.

And consider forming DNA by accident. It would be like throwing scrabble letters on the floor and writing the blue prints for the space station - in a language that did not previously exist. Seriously, DNA has a language. How does a language invent its own letters and meaning at the same time?

Listen, there is a lot of evolution that I still agree with. All the parts that have good evidence: mutation, survival of the fittest. But the idea of creating life from non-life, or creating new species and new systems and new abilities - that were not already coded into the DNA, and doing it by accident - are theories. They have never been observed, never been proven, and in my humble opinion, are an absurd conclusion for the given data.

Evolution makes for a fascinating theory, but a worthless replacement for God. All of creation shouts the evidence of a Creator.

But as for me, I suppressed it. And I had an excuse. As a kid, I was the king of excuses. I talked my way out of everything. But one day I realized that excuses never got me into anything, they only got me out of stuff. And if I didn’t lay them down, my excuses would eventually get me out of Heaven.

So Paul makes his case, “…people are without excuse.” Verse 21:

“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” (1:21-23).

Notice the word exchange: they traded in the glory of God for images. It’s a reversal. Instead of man created in God’s image, it’s a god created in man’s image. Or maybe an animal’s image. It’s called idolatry, but it’s more than just ancient people carving gods out of wood and stone, it is any replacement for God: money, pleasure, power, even yourself. Any time we let go of the immortal Creator and design a lesser god according to our desires, that is idolatry. Paul says:

“They exchanged the truth about God for a lie” (1:25).

And that exchange changes everything.

In verse 24, Paul moves his gaze from the godless sitting in the back to the wicked right up front. And here we see that wickedness is the natural end of godlessness. If you carve out your own god, you get to choose right and wrong, and change it whenever you want.

So how did God respond? In verse 24 and in 26, “God gave them over… .” That means He let them go, let them chase their own desires. Free will, but not without consequence. You’re free to drink the poison - even enjoy the taste - but it will still kill you.

So Paul lays out the poisonous deeds of mankind, and his case against the wicked, next time.