Romans No.2 When God gives up

Last time we met together we looked at the first 16 verses of this, first 17 verses of this great and glorious epistle. Now let's move into the dark, for that's what you discover from verse 18 through to the end of the chapter, but the darkness will be set over against the light and the relief of the preceding two verses, so we'll pick up the reading from verse 16, Romans 1. Paul speaking, I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes, first to the Jew, then for the Gentile. For in the gospel a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written, the righteous will live by faith.

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness. 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 men are without excuse.

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 mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.

They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts.

Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way, the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.

Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice.

They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful. They invent ways of doing evil. They disobey their parents.

They are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do those very things, but also approve of those who practice them. It's an interesting word, isn't it? The word gospel.

It's an old word, actually. If you know anything about musicals, religious musicals, and I'm not advocating the same, but you may have come across the word God's spell, and that really is the word to which you trace back, gospel. God's spell, it really means nothing to do with witchcraft, but spell the favor of God, God's favor directed towards men and women.

And it's of that favor that the apostle speaks in such elegant phraseology as discovered within the 16th and 17th verses when he says he's not ashamed of the gospel. And you and I should find ourselves in exactly the same category. We're not ashamed.

We're not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Indeed, if we were to be ashamed of our Lord Jesus, then there would be no salvation blessings for the like of us. Because in Luke's gospel, our Savior speaking says in the 9th chapter and the 26th verse, if anyone is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.

The apostle Paul takes up the thought of not being ashamed of the gospel of Christ when he writes to Timothy, sometimes referred to, perhaps not accurately, as Timid Timothy. And he enjoins him in the second letter that he writes in the 1st chapter in the 8th verse, So do not be ashamed to testify about our Lord, or ashamed of me, his prisoner. And he goes on to argue, thinking of the benefits of the gospel, verse 12, That is why I am suffering as I am, yet I am not ashamed, because I know whom I have believed, and I'm convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day.

So you see how the word ashamed is a key word, but it's to be used in a negative fashion, not to be ashamed of the gospel of our Lord Jesus. If we're not ashamed of him, he won't be ashamed of us. Hebrews 2.11 refers to the Lord Jesus not being ashamed to call the likes of you and me his brethren.

Obviously a bisexual word there, his brothers, his sisters. Hebrews 11.16 refers to God not being ashamed to acknowledge us as his people. So that word's a very key word, isn't it? As you think it through in the areas that I've just taken you, and there are many other scriptural paths down which you can trace it in the New Testament.

Paul not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Because why? Well, therein the righteousness of God is revealed. A very interesting word, that one.

Verse 17, for in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed. The same word as I think I'm right in arguing the Greek dramatists might have used if in those days they had had a curtain covering the stage. Lift the curtain to reveal what's at the back of the curtain, all the scenario.

So the gospel lifts the curtain and reveals God's way of making men and women righteous. The great apocalypsis, the great revelation. And it's the most interesting, dynamic revelation and message for the world.

But, and here's where we move from the light to the darkness, from hope almost without God, to despair. Verse 18 speaks about something else that is being revealed, and it's the wrath of God. The wrath of God.

It too is being revealed from heaven. So there are two revelations held in juxtaposition in these verses. The revelation of the gospel fully revealed in the Lord Jesus.

The revelation of the anger of God continually being revealed, and will be absolutely revealed when Jesus Christ returns to this earth and the consummation of all things takes place. So we have to talk now about the anger of God. Because it's a surprising concept, isn't it? That God should be angry.

You see, by and large, human anger is utterly unjustified. Did you hear that? On the whole, your anger is unjustified. I say on the whole because there's a tiny qualification.

There may be occasions, but they will be the minority rather than the majority when it is right to exert righteous indignation and anger. But the colloquial way in which we use a terminology that speaks of anger indicates the difference between God's wrath and our anger. Blowing your top, for example.

Losing your cool. All these expressions really just latch in or latch onto the difference. It means uncontrolled.

It means giving vent to one's spleen. It means not coming under any disciplines at all. Emotion rules supreme.

And it's the emotion of anger which can be as devastating and as destructive as the emotion of lust. Now that sort of anger God doesn't know. And it's because most people, when they think of anger, only grasp the colloquial use of the word that for them it is incompatible to place anger alongside God and suggest that it is one of God's attributes.

Modern theology admits to no concept of God being angry whatsoever. But modern theology is not biblical theology. And you cannot drive a cart and horses through this verse.

And there are many other verses too that speak of the wrath of God and the anger of God. One older preacher of last century talks about it being a passionless anger. I'm not too sure that I agree that it's passionless.

But it is controlled. I think I can best understand the anger of God as the inversion, the reverse side of his holiness. If God was not a holy God, then he could not be an angry God.

Angry in the sense that, well, let Habakkuk help us. You remember the Old Testament preacher who really is most illuminating in helping us to get from the Old Testament a correct understanding of the person of God? He says of God because he's confused. Why should God use the equivalent to the communist world in his day? The agents of the devil or so Habakkuk thought the Chaldeans were, yet God was using them.

And that for Habakkuk was a moral problem. And so he spins around on God and says, how can the judge or how can you, whose eyes are so holy that you can't behold iniquity, how can you use the Chaldeans to chastise your people? Now, it's not the problem that confronts Habakkuk that I want to get into. That would take me down a bypass.

It's the thought that God is so holy he can't behold evil. The holiness of God negatively expressed brings to us the anger of God when he's brought face to face with evil. So Paul speaks of the wrath of God being revealed again from heaven against all the godliness and wickedness of men.

God's natural reaction to sin is anger. He shrinks away from sin. He withdraws from it.

That's why you and I as Christian people have to practice holiness because holiness pleases God. It's so necessary. One of the great objectives of my life, I speak risking sounding pious, is to be holy because I recognize that any effectiveness that one may have or may not have as a preacher is largely controlled by the holiness that one is endeavoring to attain to.

So there must be this respect for God. As the hymn writer puts it, oh, how I fear the living God with reverential fear, afraid of this God in the sense of having great respect, great awe in his presence, appreciating that his holiness is such that sin on our part is repulsive to him. So that helps to set the launching pad for our study this evening.

God's anger. It's not the same as your anger or my anger, but it's a real quality in his nature. Now, what is it? What is it that makes God angry? And the apostle Paul actually tells you the answer in one word.

Man makes God angry. Man makes him angry. You see, as R.T. Kendall of Westminster Chapel put it very strikingly on one occasion, God's natural enemy is man.

Now, that's not modern theology. Modern theology seems to suggest that man's natural friend or God's natural friend is man. But if you trace this back historically, you discover that in the beginning, God had UDI to contend with in Eden.

Not so. Adam declared independence from God. Eat what is forbidden, Adam, and you will become as God.

That was a temptation. And throughout the whole history of man, there has been an enmity between him and God. Paul nails the point in Romans 8. The carnal mind is enmity against God.

You'll find it translated in the NIV, Romans 8, 7. The sinful man is hostile. The sinful mind is hostile against God. What is it that makes God so angry with man? Well, you can boil it down to two further words.

The first one is suppression. And the second one is substitution. Man suppresses his knowledge of God, and that makes God angry.

Who suppress the truth by their wickedness. Last part of verse 18. You see, man knows that God is.

Let's stop there for a moment, and let's deal and nail once and for all the so-called credible platform of atheism. There is no credibility at all to atheism. On the table of intelligent options, atheism is not a card.

The Bible never addresses atheism. It never even admits that there is such a thing as atheism. It says right at the commencement of the book, in the beginning, God.

It says of those who deny the existence of God, the fool has said in his heart, there is no God. That God is the word of God takes as obvious. And if men claim to be atheists, they do so, says the Bible, by suppressing knowledge that is available to them that God is.

Knowledge available through the material world which has been created. Knowledge available through the moral thermometer that each of us has. A scientific principle will tell you that something cannot come out of nothing.

The world is something. It could not emerge from nothing. Atheism is not an option.

The head hunter in some of the more remote parts of our world today, nonetheless, is born with a knowledge of the difference between right and wrong. As much as an MP who determines to try to play the stock market deceptively for his own advantage. He, she knows that that is wrong.

There are indications that God is. Not to admit to those indications and act on those indications is suppression. And God is angry at those who suppress the truth.

Now suppression always leads you on, Paul is so logical in his argument, to substitution. No man is satisfied without a God or several gods. So if you suppress the true revelation, you do not admit, however, to no gods.

Rather, you create your own gods. Thus, Paul in verse 23, he tells us that men have exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. When a man seems to be atheistic, the fact of the matter is that he will create a God substitute in an unsophisticated fashion.

You'll see it tonight if you flew to Bombay and wandered down the streets of that great city. In a more sophisticated fashion, you will find it here in the West. Man creating his own substitute for the God, the knowledge of whom he suppresses.

That makes God angry. Thomas Watson, a great preacher of yesteryear, says God made man out of dust. Man makes gods out of dust.

Oliver Cromwell, idolatry is anything which cools our desires towards God. So have you got Paul's reasoning thus far? God can be angry. His anger differentiates from the anger that you and I know, alas, only too well.

The anger of God is stimulated by the way that we suppress the truth and by the way that we substitute for his revelation of himself, idols. What are the results of man rejecting God? What are the consequences of him following his own, inverted commas, wisdom over against God's revelation? Well, the fact of the matter is that God does not obviously show his anger. I say he doesn't obviously show his anger.

He does from time to time. You may not admit to this, but there are a good number of us who believe that the cathedral fire at York Minster was not just a fluke of nature. Within that cathedral, a man had been elevated to the position of bishop, one of the four most important bishoprics in the Anglican community.

He had on many occasions denied the fact of the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ. Without which resurrection, there is no gospel. Paul makes that plain.

If Christ be not risen, then our faith is empty. Hollow is the Greek. It has no value whatsoever.

So in York Minster some years ago, there was a charade, a masquerade. My words may seem harsh, but I'm identifying a problem, not speaking specifically to an individual or of an individual, though obviously personalities come into this. And in a most remarkable fashion, York Minster was partially ignited as a result of a thunder flash.

Even the men who fought the blaze were heard to comment afterwards, this fire did not come about by any human activity. Blown out by the force of the electric flash were the smoke detectors, which at great price had been installed in the Minster just some months ago. If you are aware of the scenery, the background of the whole incident, it really does bring coincidence almost to the bounds of absurdity to make your conclusion that that was the only factor at play in the fire that broke out in York Minster.

Now you can accept that or reject it as you please. This is my opinion shared with others, a minority opinion, for some people the opinion of fools, but sometimes foolish opinion has proved over the centuries to have been more wise than what was thought to be reasonable opinion when issues were commented on. The Lord showed something of his anger against Baal worship when the drenched sacrifice of Elijah was ignited centuries ago.

But these manifestations of the power and the authority and the wrath of God, these visible demonstrations are rare. God generally in this dispensation shows his anger by backing off from a situation. And so you get three times in this epistle the repetition of the expression, God gave them up.

Or words to that effect depending on the translation you're using. Verse 24, 26, 28. The way in which God expresses his wrath is by backing off from men and women and from a variety of situations and allowing them to have the freedom that they have opted for.

As C.S. Lewis puts it far more eloquently than I can, men are left to enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded and are therefore enslaved. So the results of God's wrath can be traceable or traced in two ways. First of all through immorality, the immorality of man.

And secondly insularity, the insularity of man. Take first of all immorality. Paul deals with it shockingly from around the 24th verse and onwards.

But it's not just immorality that he comments on but rather he evaluates the immorality. And you can summarize his evaluation in these words, an immorality which brings no satisfaction. Twice the word exchanged is used in these verses.

23, they exchange the glory of the immortal God for images. Verse 25, they exchange the truth of God for a lie. And in the very exchanging of the truth of God, they determined sexually to follow their own wishes rather than live life according to the directions of God.

Now God backs off and says, all right, this is the way you want it, then this is the way that it shall be. If you think that you know better, then take your wisdom, the accumulated wisdom of humankind down the years and go and have a ball and see what happens. So God gives them over.

And as a result, well, verse 27, the latter part, they, men and women, received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. Now let's handle this delicately. We're talking about people and you can't talk about sin as distinct from sinners.

And one always has sensitivity towards sinners though abhorrence towards sin. You cannot sin without ultimately paying the penalty for your sin. Now, perversion and bestiality, they're not children of the 20th century.

Sometimes we can overplay this. Sometimes we can say, well, the 20th century is a cesspool and that other centuries, by way of comparison, were that much more moral. I'm not too sure that you could sustain that argument historically.

Take the very context in which the Apostle Paul is writing, the Roman Empire, what felled Rome? Well, not the armies of the Goths, not the fierce tribes north of Italy, but rather the cancer that was at the heart of Rome. Homosexual emperors, male prostitution, that they had it all in Rome. That's why Monica, the wife of Augustine, to whom I made reference the other week, prayed that her son might never hit Rome because if he got there, then it seems as though all hell would be let loose against him.

She was quite right in praying that Augustine wouldn't go to Rome. Rome was the headquarters of all this iniquity. And you see the very civilization in which Paul is ministering, ultimately, it does receive the recompense, the due penalty for the perversions that were openly practiced in Rome and other centers of human civilization.

And now, again, we don't want to be harsh. God help any man who has an addiction. There but for the grace of God go I. And therefore, with feeling, one speaks of these things.

But let's take this sort of laissez-faire attitude to sexuality today. Quite frankly, I'm appalled at some of our education authorities. I'm appalled at what they permit within our schools.

I'm appalled at the philosophical basis of much that passes for educational philosophy today. Because it is not based on Christian moorings, and it has got so avant-garde, it has got so daring that it is trying to suggest to us that wrong is right, and what is harmful is actually enjoyable. And now we're in the middle of this AIDS epidemic.

Time magazine this week, haven't read it, but the whole lead article is given over to this plague that they reckon will be the worst plague that has ever hit man. The dual penalty for their perversion. Homosexuality is not an optional practice.

We have pity for the homosexual. I repeat and repeat that. Homosexuality is a dirty, bestial practice that is harmful to the recipient.

It's harmful to the one who perpetrates it. Why don't we say these things? Well, not yourselves, but why don't people who are in the know say these things? Well, here is the apostle, you see, and he says one of the results of this anger of God is an immorality which brings no satisfaction. It's the forbidden fruit.

One film star who'd been a sort of playboy center foil, who'd been the butt end of the cameras for many a long year, she said this, when you've tasted all the forbidden fruits until they have left a sour taste in your mouth, what's left? What's left? Immorality which brings no satisfaction. Insularity which brings no illumination, verse 26 and onwards, or verse 28, rather, and onwards. Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind to do what ought not to be done.

Now, you see, this is the prodigal all over again, isn't it? Here we are, Luke 15. The prodigal moves out, and though God the Father exists, he lives as though Father has no further rights over him. Father here backs off.

He gives them over to a depraved mind to do what ought not to be done. And these men, these women, who with great self-assurance do not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, they play the game themselves. They rearrange the scenery, and as a result, well, you get that terrible, bleak picture, hardly outmatched with somber colors anywhere else in the Bible from verse 29 and onwards.

One commentator, we see what happens when a man dethrones God and puts himself at the center of his own life. He fails to recognize his obligations towards others and exploits their property and even their bodies to serve his desire. If John was to comment on the scene, then he could do no more than bring to our attention his verses.

This is the condemnation, that though light came into the world, men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. Well, as I say, this is a very, very sad passage of Scripture. Let's just go back on what we've discovered for a moment or two, and then I'll give you something to hold on to that's brighter.

We've been talking about the anger of God, not human anger, not an uncontrolled anger, an anger that is the reverse side of God's holiness. We've discovered also that the factors that make God angry are the way that men suppress the truth and substitute for the true worship of God other idols, for man is a worshiping creature in essence. And the results of all this, well, God gives them over to the immorality that they have opted for and to the insularity which they have preferred.

So how do we react to these things? How do we respond to this teaching of the apostle Paul? Well, by this, and I'll just take a couple of moments to explain. By appreciating more the truth of who God is in all the attributes of the person that he is discovered as having in Scripture. You see, you can sentimentalize the love of God, can't you? Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

Now, that's true. But ere long, you need to build into your children's knowledge, not that Jesus loves them alone, but they have a responsibility to live as Jesus's children. And the Lord Jesus finds it very hard to love the sin that they practice.

And ultimately, on attaining maturity, if they continue in their sinful way, then their very sin will debar them from fellowship with the Lord Jesus Christ and the Father and the Holy Spirit. So, we read Paul, and we're thankful for the darkness of the teaching because it helps us to see correctly the doctrine of the holiness and the love of our God. And what's more, it enables us to stand amazed at his grace.

I've said this before, not for effect, but because I mean it. You see, for me, it's never been a problem that God loves other people. I really do mean that.

I mean, I can understand that God loves you, but I do find it hard to believe that God loves me. When I think of myself and my shortcomings, I know myself more than most people here, but not as much as God knows me. And the incredible thing is that this God, with his holiness and his justice, despite all that I have done, continues to love me.

And the measure in which he shows his love is not by blinking at my sin and pretending it doesn't exist, but by allowing the Lord Jesus to go to the cross of Calvary and there die for me, to forgive me. Now, you see, we're back where we started. This is the amphitheater.

The curtain has gone up. The righteousness of God has been revealed. Was there ever a time when one needed to see alongside the manifestation of the anger of God, the revelation of the love of God, of the grace of God, of the righteousness of God? And you see, though the last verses of Paul's first chapter to the Romans bring you almost to the depths of despair, you've got to look back to the 16th and 17th verses, and you see, despite all this, the grace of the Lord, who lifts a man from the dungeon into which he has sunk, he lifts him from the mire, and he brings him to himself and puts a new song within his heart so that he's taken from the mire, if you'll allow it, and put him in the choir, because he has been reconciled to the Lord as God has displayed this amazing, fantastic way in which he writes wrong.

And that's basically it. In the gospel, a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, to the Jew and to the Gentile, that brings back to God a man who deliberately and insultingly rejected the knowledge that was inbuilt of who God is and what God is through the gospel. A further revelation is given, and in the gospel, there's a magnetism that draws the likes of you and me to the Lord.

Well then, how much should we not be ashamed of this gospel that can do and has done so much for all of us here? That's my understanding of Paul's message in these verses. Let's pray. Father, we're grateful for all that you've done for us, for every manifest token of your love, but most of all, we praise you for our Lord Jesus Christ and all that he suffered on our behalf.

And we ask that this gospel, which means so much to us, may be proclaimed by our lives, by our lips, until the moment comes. When you take us to be with yourself, we pray for our world. Help us to be more burdened.

Help us to be more sensitive. And through our prayers, may we move into situations that desperately need the cleansing power of the great and glorious gospel of our Savior. Amen.

Has anyone got a hymn or a song on their hearts that we could appropriately sing at this moment? For this purpose, Christ was revealed. Some of our friends are going to be leaving us in their singing of this hymn as a couple of songs, as a couple of meetings still to be held. And some were in earlier praying with me in the coffeehouse.

So let's stand. That will facilitate folk who need to slip out and also give you a change of position. For this purpose, Christ was revealed to destroy all the works of the evil one.

♪ To destroy all the work of the evil...