Romans 1:18-25 "Forever Praised" Scott Hoezee

Over the last four years I have done a lot of reading in the area of science and theology. If you dip into the field of science even just a little bit, it won't take long before you begin to bump into scientists who are not just nonreligious but who are also quite loud about declaring how silly and irrelevant religion is in general. For some it's not enough to say, "I'm not very religious." A good many immediately go on in shrill tones to say, "Furthermore, how could anyone in his or her right mind be religious!?"

According to a survey published this month in the journal The Scientist, there are actually far more devoutly religious scientists out there than you might think. It's close to a 50-50 split between those scientists who claim no religious affiliation and those who remain active in some faith tradition. Even among those who say they are agnostics or atheists, most don't make much noise about it. But as is so often true, the vocal minority that pipes up to say disparaging things about religion tends to get most of the attention.

In my new book I suggest that we Christians can learn from even those scientists who are the most critical of our faith. Even though it probably drives some of those people a little nuts to see us turn their telescope pictures into a reason to praise our Creator God, that is nevertheless a legitimate thing for Christians to do. An astronomer may look at a nebula and see nothing more than a coincidence of gas and interstellar stuff. We Christians look at the same nebula and view it as yet another indication of how wonderful God's creative imagination is.

Some scientists get annoyed when they see us transform their work into a doxology of praise to a God they don't even believe in. But not a few such people would probably be hopping mad were we to convey to them what Paul has to say in this second half of Romans 1. This is one of many places in the Bible where the claim is made that the creation itself bears witness to God. Paul here goes so far as to say that there is no excuse for living in a creation as marvelously fashioned as this one and yet be ignorant of the Creator.

True, just staring up into a starry sky or examining the abundant life on a coral reef will not teach you everything there is to know about God. You surely will never learn about Jesus just by engaging in botany or geology. But according to Paul, there are certain truths about God--his eternal power and divine nature--that can be discerned through the handiwork of this same God.

Saying just that much would likely be sufficient to upset many people in our world. Suppose you said to the average non-religious person, "The maple tree in your front yard, the wonders of the human body, the intricacy of your own DNA structure--all of that should be enough to convince you there is a God who is worth getting to know!" Saying just that much might strike some folks as highly disagreeable. But Paul's words here are far more radical than that. Paul says it's not just that people look at a gorgeous world but then fail to make the God-connection. In verse 18 Paul says that they already do know the truth about God's existence but they suppress it. Now there is a statement to widen the eyes.

This is one of the most perplexing and controversial lines in the New Testament. What could Paul possibly mean that people "suppress the truth"? Are we to understand that for even the most hard-bitten atheist the truth about God is being actively repressed in the recesses of that person's mind? In recent decades we've heard stories about psychiatrists who specialize in helping people to recover repressed memories. Although some incidents of this sound far-fetched--and despite the fact that there is evidence that some unscrupulous doctors have themselves planted into people's minds the very ideas they later claim to have recovered--nevertheless there is clearly validity to the mental phenomenon of repression.

Victims of terrible abuse have been known to bury the memory of the abuse so deep into their psyches as to make it inaccessible on a conscious level. On a sub-conscious level, however, those memories still have a lot of kick and have been known to wreck havoc until they are brought out into the open where they can be constructively dealt with. A most dreadful form of repression is dissociative behavior. A young woman who was molested by her father cannot deal with the mental pain this thought causes. So she may dissociate herself from that by tricking herself into believing that daddy's fondling happened not to her but to another girl. Taken to extremes, this can lead to multiple personality disorder in which several discrete identities or personalities may inhabit a single mind. The moment Jill begins to feel pressured to recall what daddy did, perhaps she will escape the pain by becoming Christina or Janet or some other completely different person.

Mentally speaking, it is possible to bury certain thoughts, ideas, or memories deep into our minds. Is this the kind of thing Paul is talking about? Is he saying that everyone in the world knows the truth about the existence of a Creator God but that many of them choose to repress it, suppress it, pretend it isn't in their minds at all?

Let's leave that tantalizing question hang for a few minutes while we look at another facet of this passage. In theological circles this portion of Romans 1 has become the focal point for a furious debate in the area of what is called "natural theology." For centuries some theologians have believed that even sinful people can, on their own, learn a lot about God even if they themselves have not become Christians. That is to say, even without the help of the Holy Spirit to convert a person's heart, people can study the natural world and tumble to any number of valid truths related to the existence of God.

As we just noted, parts of Romans 1 do seem to teach just that idea. But there have been many other theologians, chiefly John Calvin, who have said that the human mind, once mired in sin and depravity, cannot come to a knowledge of God unless first regenerated, re-made by the Holy Spirit. John Calvin's famous image had to do with eyesight: without the Holy Spirit, all of us are theologically near-sighted and almost blind. We need the Spirit to outfit us with the corrective eyeglasses of the Bible if we are ever going to see clearly.

I began to wear glasses when I was in fifth grade and to this day I wear pretty strong contact lenses. As is often the case, poor eyesight snuck up on me gradually such that I didn't know what all I was missing visually. Eventually my deficits were detected by teachers and so I got glasses. But I still remember the ride back home from the optometrist's office as I wore my glasses for the first time. I kept making comments like this to my mom, "Hey, I can actually see branches on the trees now!" When a fuzzy world suddenly comes into focus, only then do you realize how bad off you had been before.

The Reformed position on this question of "natural theology" says that without the eyeglasses that only the Holy Spirit can provide, people will not, left to their own devices, see clearly enough to find God. However, if you believe that, then Romans 1 can be a bit of a problem. Because it sure looks as though Paul is saying not only that people can discover God's eternal power and divine nature but that they have already discovered that truth but are now keeping it under lock and key in the deep places of their hearts and minds.

So how do we make sense of this? Who's right? As is often true, I suspect that if we cut right down the middle, we may find ourselves nearer the truth than if we choose only one extreme or the other. I think it is pretty clear that Paul here indicates that on their own, and even short of becoming Spirit-filled people of faith, there are valid things that can be learned about God's existence just by observing the works of God in this creation.

Those of us who are fond of the idea of "common grace" have long affirmed that even despite our human fall into sin, many residues of God's image, of God's original grace and goodness, remain in people. A person does not need to be a Christian in order to write a cracking good novel loaded with insights into life. A person does not need to be a Christian to compose beautiful music that also Christians properly find moving and lyric. In short, a person does not need to be full of the Spirit to produce works or think thoughts that are worthy of acceptance. But if we believe that, then it is not too much of a leap to believe that people may well examine life around them and be led to the conclusion that there is a God who must be a powerful and good Deity given the fine world he created.

However, this will not always happen and it most certainly will not happen automatically. This is where verses 21-23 come into play. In verses 18-20 Paul consistently used verbs in the present tense: the power of God is on display, what may be known about God is plain to see. But then in verse 21 he shifts to all past-tense verbs. And here Paul reveals why it is that despite what is available to learn about God in the creation, it typically is not recognized by many people. Pointing to some distant past, Paul says that the minds of people became futile, darkened, foolish. A veil of confusion has fallen across people's perceptions such that folly, rather than wisdom, became the order of the day. Humanity made a silly swap: instead of worshiping the God who made the sun, people bowed down and made the sun into a god. Instead of giving thanks to the Creator who formed the majestic eagle, people made carvings of eagles and bowed down in worship before them.

All of this confusion and folly created what Neal Plantinga has called "bad momentum." People shuttled from one dumb thing to the next, each time magnifying the confusion. God then handed them over to that which humanity had foolishly chosen for itself. Verse 25 caps off this grim discourse by saying that the bottom line is this: humanity exchanged the truth about God for the lie. Notice that I just now said "the lie" because that is a better translation of the Greek there. What people took in trade for the truth about God was not just "a lie," not just any old lie but it was the big lie that comes from the lord of all lies, the devil himself. It is the lie that we are self-made people. It is the lie that there is no God anywhere to whom we owe allegiance. It is the lie that it is completely up to us to pick out our own paths and discover our own truths and make up our own moral codes based on whatever feels good, whatever seems OK, whatever the majority decides.

But once things got that far out-of-whack for humanity, once the lie took up residence in people's hearts, then they did begin to suppress any evidence to the contrary. People are not even aware they are doing this. The web of futility, darkness, confusion, and deception that began to form long ago has gotten to the point where people don't know what's what anymore. This doesn't mean people always get things wrong--recall what I said about common grace a moment ago. But it does mean that they will frequently, maybe even typically, be clouded in their perceptions. And here is where Calvin was right: the only light that will finally pierce this deluded, suppressed fog of darkness is the light that comes from the Holy Spirit alone.

Clearly this is a key passage, and I hope you have found our examination of it at least mildly interesting. But what is the application here? What can we take away from this sermon other than the potentially smug attitude that might lead us to parrot a young child as we say to the rest of the world outside the church, "We know something you don't know!"? Well, it may surprise you to hear me say this, but I think that Romans 1:18-25 should be a generator of compassion and understanding.

Because when Paul says in verse 18 that the "wrath of God is being revealed," what he may mean is the wrath poured out upon Jesus on the cross. Don't forget that verse 17 also uses the word "revealed" and it is the same word used in verse 18. Verse 17 says the gospel reveals the righteousness God is giving away for free based on what Jesus did for us on the cross. So when the very next line again mentions a revelation, I assume this revealing happens simultaneously to the revelation of the prior line. The wrath of God was made manifest on the cross where also the righteousness of God was revealed.

But why would this lead in the direction of Christian compassion and understanding? Because I think we should take pity on those lost in a fog of confusion. And this compassionate pity must not be expressed in condescending ways because we should know full well that were it not for the grace of God we'd be just as in love with the lie as anyone else. Christians of all people should not come off as arrogant or scolding.

This is a good reminder for all of us. As any number of letters printed in the Public Pulse of the Press reveal, there is too often a combination of shock and misunderstanding when Christian people comment on the thinking or behavior of people in the wider society. Whenever I read a letter in which someone essentially says, "Oh, I just can't understand how anyone could think that way!" I want to say, "You should understand such thinking because were it not for the grace of God, you might well find yourself in complete agreement with even some of the more outlandish ideas floating around society." Whenever I read a letter, or hear a comment, in which someone basically tries to argue, or browbeat, a non-Christian into a Christian way of looking at life, I rue the fact that we Christians too seldom pour that much energy into praying for the Holy Spirit to lift the veil of ignorance and repressed truth from people's hearts.

Being completely shocked by the way some people think quickly can lead to outrage and scolding, neither of which co-exist very cozily with compassion and grace. Thinking that we can, on our own, mount moral arguments and concoct theological proofs so air-tight that no one could possibly miss seeing it, underestimates the condition people are in even as it exhibits a kind of spiritual amnesia as to what it took for even us to come to faith. We weren't argued into it, and we surely were not browbeaten or scolded into belief. We came to faith because of what Paul wrote in verse 17: the revelation of a righteousness that God gave away by grace and for free.

None of this means that the field of apologetics is wrong--it is very worthwhile to defend Christian belief against those who claim it is simply irrational. None of this means that a Christian in politics or on a public school board or at work should not try to persuade people to come to some moral consensus. Common grace lets us know that despite the fog of sin, the fog is neither total nor consistently thick in all hearts. We are to work for the common good. But it may not always work out.

But we keep witnessing in compassionate, understanding ways because if by grace we have exchanged the lie for the truth, then that truth burns in us with great and joyful intensity. That's why I love the way Paul ends this section in verse 25. He has just finished saying that people foolishly worship created things instead of the Creator but then he immediately throws in the tag line, "who is forever praised! Amen!"

Precisely because our great God is the Creator and now the Redeemer of all things, his praise cannot be stopped--not now, not ever. What motivates us to witness and to speak the faith, as we thought about last week, is precisely our joyful and ardent desire to keep adding more members to God's choir. It is joy in our faith, and not a desire to be proven right in some arrogant sense, that motivates our compassionate witness to the gospel. We want people to become acquainted with the wonderful and gracious God we are already blessed to know ourselves. He is forever praised! Let's be in the business of gently helping others to understand why! Amen.