Without Excuse

Let’s pray.

Gracious heavenly Father, we are so glad to call you our Father and to know that you have sent your Son to be our king, our refuge, our rock, our shield, our redeemer, and that to you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, our life belongs. Help us now as we come to your Word. Help me to preach with humility and yet with boldness and conviction, and give to all of your dear people ears to hear. And if there are any who do not yet truly know you, would this be the means of illuminating saving grace through the preaching of the Word? We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.

We come this morning to Romans chapter 1, verses 18-20. Romans chapter 1, 18-20. As we continue with this series in Romans, having heard in verses 16 and 17, really, the great theme of this greatest letter ever written, about the gospel and the revelation of the righteousness of God, we now, on the heels of that theme, introduce a new but related subject, which will be our companion, I expect, for many weeks. Verse 18:

“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”

This is one of those passages in Romans, and there will be many more like it, where you need to ask yourself this question: does this book know me better than I know myself? Romans is going to teach some things that are hard to understand. It’s going to insist upon some truths that may be unfamiliar and at first you may not like. And it is going to show some things about the human heart and the human mind and the human psyche that men and women do not even know about themselves. One of the most important things, and this has to do with all of your reading of the Bible, but in particular as we go through this book together, is to keep coming back to this fundamental reality. God sees some things that you don’t see. “Some” is a bit of an understatement. He sees an infinite number of things that you don’t see. He has insight that you don’t have. This book is going to explain why things are the way they are in the world, if you and I have ears to hear it.

There’s certainly some value in being caught up on the news. There’s lots of news going on in our world, and it prompts us to pray. We ought to. We should. I trust we are praying. It’s good to get some commentary, listen to some trusted voices, articles, podcasts, feeds to give a perspective and information, insofar as we realize that it’s the Word of God and texts like this – though there’s nothing in here that, on the face of it, is giving punditry on the events of today – has everything to do with what is really happening in the world, and you and I must keep coming back to that fundamental question: does this book and the God who authored this book, does he know me better than I know me? Does he know our world and what’s going on better than any of us?

Here’s the context as we come to this new section. You can see the heading in the ESV, “God’s wrath on unrighteousness.” This section – hope you have your Bible open – that goes from chapter 1, verse 18, all the way through chapter 3, verse 20, is one long, unrelenting argument about the universality of sin. So there are going to be a lot of sermons about sin. Make sure we also hear at the end of each of those about the remedy for sin. But each of these are about this continuing theme. Look at verse 17, “For in it the righteousness of God is revealed.” In the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed. That’s 1:17. Now, turn the page, and look at what Paul picks up with in chapter 3:21. The very same theme: “But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law.” 1:17, 3:21 introduce this theme of the righteousness of God. He’s going to come back to it in 3:21 to tell us, “But now” – and after we have many weeks about the universality of sin, it is going to be a sweet, sweet Sunday to come to verse 21, “But now…” That’s what Paul is doing. Everything in between 1:17 to 3:21 is about the desperation of the human condition. You can look at chapter 2, verse 9, for example: “There will be tribulation and distress for every human being.” Look at 3:9, “Are Jews any better off? Not at all, for we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin.” And then chapter 3:19, “We know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law so that every mouth may be stopped and the whole world.” And then the final indictment in chapter 3:20, “For by works of the law, no human being will be justified.” Did you notice there the “every,” the “all,” the “no”? Paul is making this argument with hammer blow after hammer blow that every human being falls under this universal indictment of sin.

You can think about it – in chapter 1:18-32, he’s primarily focused on the world of the Gentiles. And then in chapter 2:1 through 3:8, he’s primarily going to talk about the Jews, that they, too, fall under the condemnation of sin. So, the Gentile world, the Jews, and then in chapter 3:9-20 is where he brings it together with “no not one” – every single person. So, the context here is a series of arguments, first about the Gentiles, then about the Jews, to insist with hammer blow after hammer blow, there is no one righteous, no, not one. Now look at verse 18. You see that word, which is such an important word in Romans, the word “for.” So, this connects us to what has gone before. Yes, this is starting a new section, but it’s also connected to what came before. Notice these three phrases in verses 16, 17, and 18. “The power of God,” verse 16; “the righteousness of God,” verse 17; “the wrath of God,” verse 18. Verse 18 is the problem for which verse 17 is the solution. Now, we usually think “give us the problem, then the solution,” but Paul’s introduced in 16 and 17 the power of God in the gospel and the solution, and now he’s going to turn and explain for many verses the problem, the predicament. Why is the gospel necessary? Why must the righteousness of God be revealed from faith to faith? So that’s the connection from the power of God, the righteousness of God, the wrath of God.

Verse 18 is the problem that we’ve already seen introduced the solution to in verses 16 and 17. Notice another connection between 17 and 18. You see in verse 17, “in it,” the gospel, “the righteousness of God is revealed.” We saw a couple of weeks ago the word – we get our English word apocalypse – apocalypto, the revealing, the unveiling, that Paul is taking the blanket, he’s pulling it back, and he’s revealing the righteousness of God. And it’s the righteousness of God that is counted to us when we believe. It’s God’s own righteousness that becomes ours through faith. He said, “I want to reveal that and show it to you in the preaching of the gospel.” Now, you see the same verb in verse 18, “The wrath of God is revealed.” So, pulled away that blanket, that tablecloth: here’s the righteousness of God revealed. Now, he’s going to talk about pulling away and saying, “Here is the wrath of God, revealed.” What do we mean by the wrath of God? We do not mean that God is wrathful in the way that you and I would usually experience wrath: uncontrolled, capricious, a passion that takes over us, an anger. We lost control. Think about some of the euphemisms we use for anger or human wrath. He blew a fuse. Something just happened to him and tripped his trigger. Or, he’s just letting off steam. That image is of you just so pressurized with anger, you have to open a vent to let the steam out. Or boy, he just exploded. So, that’s something that’s emerging with great pressure and can hardly help itself. That’s often how human anger works. It’s why Paul says, “In your anger, do not sin.” Because usually in our anger, we do sin. This wrath of God is not like that. God is not capricious. God does not have things just happen to him or sweep over him. The wrath of God is his righteous, implacable opposition to everything that is unholy. His righteous, implacable opposition to everything that is unholy. It is his hostility, unfailing hostility, toward evil.

This is a theme all throughout the Bible. Can’t escape it. And before you think to yourself, well, boy, really, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this idea about the wrath of God – think about the alternative. Do you want a God who is indifferent toward evil? Certainly not when the evil is against you. And we feel this strongly for even minor inconveniences. You have to go through the rigamarole of a Byzantine phone tree. How many times do I need to enter the last four digits? And now I need to enter this passcode, which I set 12 years ago, and I’m holding a phone like – it doesn’t exist like this anymore. I know. But you’re using the rotary, and you have to go through all of this, and then you can’t actually get to a human being. Would you like to use our virtual assistant? “I hate you” is what you feel like. And that’s just an inconvenience, and you’re all ready to say, “Where are the imprecatory psalms to go for here?” So, we know that feeling, and when you have real, justified indignation, real sin against you, injustice in the world, cruel evil, certainly you say, “I want a God who is not indifferent to the great crimes and evils and unfairnesses in the world.” That’s the wrath of God, his hostility toward evil. Notice what it says here, just continuing in verse 18. You’re wondering when is he giving us the outline? The outline is verse 18, verse 19, verse 20.

The wrath of God is revealed from heaven. Now, that’s important, because it tells us this is not simply just the way things are, and some bad experiences, or – this is from heaven. This is God. We’ll come back to the word “reveal” in just a moment. But from heaven, this is God exercising justice against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. Now, first, don’t miss the word “all.” All. You ever say to somebody, “Well, yeah, of course I’m not perfect, but” – and then you want to defend why God shouldn’t judge sinners. No, as soon as you said, “I’m not perfect,” there’s no place for the “but.” All – not just the things that, you know, dictators do. All ungodliness and all unrighteousness. You can think about it as ungodliness is that impiety toward God, and unrighteousness is that lawless behavior directed toward man. It’s perhaps not to put too much of an artificial construct on it to think that these two words roughly correspond to the first table of the law, our duties to God, and the second table of the law, our duties toward our neighbor. Everything that is contrary to God and his character – God is opposed to that. Everything that is hurtful to men and women made in his image – I mean, genuinely, you hurt them, not just that they’re sensitive and got hurt – all of that. All of that. If you want an example of the sort of ungodliness and unrighteousness that Paul has in mind, you can just go down to the end of the chapter. Look at verse 29. Does anything in verse 29, 30, and 31 describe anything you’ve done or felt in the past week? “They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice.” Were you envious of anyone? “Murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness, gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents” – just in case the kids were tuning out –“foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Okay, you just – and that’s not even the sermon on that paragraph. You want to say, “Okay, okay, okay.” If we’re honest, every one of us has something in that list – not just in our lifetime, in our week, our morning. That’s what Paul is talking about. All unrighteousness and ungodliness. God is opposed to it.

Now go back, I said, to that verb “is revealed.” I want you to notice this is in the present tense. We might expect Paul to say the wrath of God will be revealed, that is, the wrath of God as a future reality on the day of judgment. And that is certainly true. Look at chapter 2:5, “But because of your hard and impenitent heart, you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath, when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.” So clearly, 2:5, he says the wrath of God is something that will be revealed. You’re storing up in hard hearts for the judgment of God to come upon the world. And we’re used to thinking of the wrath of God as that day that is coming. Beware. But notice the verb is present. Not just that it will, but the wrath of God even now is being revealed. How is the wrath of God now being revealed? Some people suggest Paul has in mind here the preaching of the gospel – the preaching of the gospel that warns people of the wrath of God. And that’s true in a general sense. And you can see that possible connection. Verse 16 is “not ashamed of the gospel, it’s the power of God,” and what does the gospel announce? It announces, first of all, the righteousness of God is revealed, but that’s the solution. It also is going to talk about the problem, which is the wrath of God. So there’s truth to that in a general sense, though that’s not usually how the word “gospel” is used with connection to God’s wrath upon sinners. So that’s true in a general sense. The preaching of the Word does announce the wrath of God. But Paul is saying something more than just an announcement. He’s saying now, in the present world, God’s wrath is revealed.

How is God’s wrath now revealed in the world? Well, there’s a couple of reasons or examples to come later in the book of Romans. We can think about Romans 13:4, which is about the power of the governing authorities, and they don’t bear the sword for nothing. And that when the civil magistrate wields the sword and truly rewards what is good and punishes what is evil – it says you ought to be afraid. He bears the sword and acts with God’s authority. He does so. So when a police officer arrests someone who has violated the laws and committed a crime, when a judge sentences someone who is guilty to jail, when the state administers that justice, Romans 13 says that is an authority derived from God, and that is part of God’s execution of his wrath, even now, in the world. It’s not his final wrath, and there’s opportunities to repent, but it is one way that the wrath of God is revealed, to show in a temporal way what God thinks about sin and lawlessness.

There’s another example, even more obvious, and that’s Romans 6:23, “For the wages of sin is” – what? – “death.” Sin has a wage. What’s the payment for sin? It’s death. Now, this doesn’t mean that when someone dies, that’s God’s, yep, I just punished that person, and that’s why they died. It is to say, however, that every death is a reminder of the wages of sin. Every death – young person, middle age, at the very end of their full life of 90-plus years – every death is a way of saying God is angry with sin, and death has not finally been destroyed. It has been, and yet we haven’t wiped up everything that death remains.

So those are examples to come, but that’s not what Paul is talking about in this immediate context. Those are ways that the wrath is being revealed. Rather, I want you to notice the structure in this section, which we’ll have opportunity to come back to in the weeks ahead. The immediate context tells us that the wrath of God is being revealed now, in the present, in that God gives people up to the sins they want to commit. Look at this pattern. Once you see it, it’ll become very obvious in the rest of chapter 1. There are three exchanges. Look at verse 23: “They exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images,” so that’s the first exchange. Look at verse 25: “They exchanged the truth about God for a lie.” And then verse 26, “For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature.” Three exchanges that Paul’s going to say, what does sin looks like? It looks like an exchange, a truth for a lie. Interwoven with those three exchanges are three times that Paul says God has handed over, or he has given you up, to your sins. Look at verse 24: “Therefore, God gave them up in the lust of their hearts to impurity.” Look at verse 26: “For this reason, God gave them up to dishonorable passions.” And then the third time in verse 28: “Since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind.” You see how these work in interlocking pieces? And this will be where we’re heading in the next three, I think, probably four sermons. We’ll have much more to say about this, but just let this sink in for a moment. We are used to thinking that when you commit worse sin and worse sin that you’re deserving of more and more judgment. And there’s rationale for saying that. But Paul’s saying something different. He is telling us that the more people give themselves over, headlong, into sin, it is evidence that God is already exercising judgment. The point of Romans 1, the wrath of God here is poured out in the present – not so much in what God does to you, though we’ve talked about the civil magistrate, we’ve talked about death – but here the point is what he allows you to keep doing. One of the worst things that can ever happen to a fallen human heart is that God says, “Go, do whatever you want to do.” Gives you over to the desires of your heart. You see, that’s the pattern. The wrath of God is being revealed in these three steps, that God lifts his restraining hand. It’s easy to look out and see how many things are broken in our world, how much evil there is. And then you realize if God were to lift his restraining hand upon sinners, how much worse it would be. And in fact, where he has rightly judged, he loosens, and he lets go of that leash to say, “I give you over to your sin.” That’s judgment.

You think about, you know, you dog owners. Sorry, this will be a little sad of an illustration, but it didn’t really happen. But you know, some of you, you’re walking your dog, and sometimes you can tell the dog is walking you, and the leash is taut, and he’s barking, and I run by on the other side, and oh, he’s a nice dog. Really? He’s foaming, but they’re always nice dogs when you hold the leash. But if you were there, and the dog is yelping and barking and scratching and trying to run away with everything that he’s had, to say, “Sit, boy. Sit.” And you’re walking by a busy road. A judgment upon that animal would be to let go of the leash. Fine. Have it your way. You don’t want me to hold you here? You don’t think I know what I’m doing? Yelping, barking, scratching, biting, fighting me with everything. And then that dog runs off into the street. A judgment. The wrath of God is now revealed from heaven in that God says at times in his righteous judgment to sinners, “Have it your way.” So be it, if that’s what you want to do. He hands them over. It is a judgment to allow sinners to continue headlong into their sin. Now, you go back to verse 18, “who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.” See, the unrighteousness of mankind is worse than we think. It’s not just that people are irreligious, or they break the Ten Commandments, or they’re dismissive of God. Paul says it’s worse than that, because at some level, they know better. They know better. Now, we’re going to come back to that word “suppress” at the end, but I just want you to know here, “suppress the truth.” So, verses 19 and 20 are going to explain what is that truth that they know, and how did they come to know it? But the point here in verse 18 is they are running off into unrighteousness and ungodliness, and they know better. They know something. They have something of the truth, and they just don’t want to look at it. They push it down.

I want to step back here, as we do verses 19 and 20, to understand this argument about the knowledge that everyone has by virtue of being made in God’s image. Just a step back, get some theological terminology. Some people distinguish between natural theology and supernatural theology. That is, supernatural theology is that which comes through the person of Christ and through the word of Christ. Supernatural theology. And then natural theology is that theological understanding that we have through the natural world. Psalm 19, “The heavens are declaring the glory of God.” And that’s not a wrong way of distinguishing, because it is true that there’s a knowledge that comes through the supernatural Scriptures, and there is an awareness of God that comes through the world of nature. So, natural theology, supernatural theology. However, there might be a better term. Herman Bavinck makes this point – great Dutch theologian from the last century – says, “Okay, that’s true, but a better term is general revelation and special revelation.” So, general revelation is that revelation of God and his character which is known to all, and we see here in Romans 1 that the means by which is the natural world perceived in creation. So, it’s a general revelation, and then there’s a special revelation. So, this is a revelation that is known to some, and it’s in the Scriptures, and it’s in the gospel, and it’s those who especially receive it in faith and with a new heart – a general revelation and a special revelation. Now why did Bavinck say that’s maybe a better terminology? Because of that term revelation. It’s important to realize both kinds are a revelation. The fact that a human being would know something about God is dependent upon God sharing something about himself. Both are a revelation. Now Paul’s whole argument here is this general revelation is insufficient to save. It’s inadequate. It’s sufficient to condemn. It’s in insufficient to save. But it is nevertheless a revelation. Some theologians and philosophers will sometimes talk about reason and revelation, and it’s not necessarily wrong to think about there are things that we learn by reason, but this particular point in Romans 1 is really the track of revelation. This is what God has revealed about himself through what has been made.

In the Westminster confession – here, this is a Presbyterian church, and we have doctrinal statements that we think are fair, good, accurate summaries of the Bible – the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Westminster Larger Catechism. Eight times in those two documents, we find the phrase “the light of nature.” So, there are things that can be known about God by the light of nature. Just look here in verses 19 and 20. What are the things that Paul thinks we can know? Now, just hold that there. We know, and yet we don’t know. But there’s things, on one level, we can know. He thinks we can know there’s a God. He’s invisible. He’s eternal. He’s powerful. He possesses a nature unlike ours. Here’s what the Westminster Confession of Faith says, “The light of nature shows that there is a God who has lordship and sovereignty over all, is good, and does good unto all, and is therefore to be feared, loved, praised, called upon, trusted in, and served with all the heart and with all the soul and with all the might.” That’s something. That’s a fairly significant list. There are things that the light of nature can tell us. You might put it in just one sentence. The light of nature reveals there is a powerful God who ought to be feared and worshiped. There’s a powerful God who ought to be feared and worshiped.

Did you know there are about 200 billion, give or take a few billion, stars in the Milky Way. The Milky Way – just our galaxy. There are billions of others, and God knows every one of those stars by name. As I’ve said before, there’s a reason you can pay $65 and name a star after your loved one, because they’re never running out of stars. Never. You name it after your cat, your dog, everyone. Chickens, everything. You can get all – there’s billions and billions. If you were to fly to the sun – don’t recommend it – but if you were, and you got in a plane traveling 500 miles an hour. Now this is a beautiful day outside, and you can see the sun. I mean, you can feel the warmth. It’s very bright. I mean, you know it’s a long ways away, but really, it’s right there. How far can it be? You get in a plane, 500 miles an hour. You have some anti-Icarus wings, so you don’t melt as you get there. What do you think? I mean, that’s going to take, I mean, obviously a few days, few weeks, probably. Maybe it’s going to take a couple of months. If you’re in that plane, you better plan for over 20 years, just to make it to that big sun that we all can see. How many Earths can fit into the sun? I mean, there’s got to be, what, hundreds of them? 1.3 million of them. The deepest part of the Mariana Trench is almost 7 miles deep. We could go on and on and on. You stand at the foot of the Grand Canyon, and nobody feels big. You feel small. There’s a God. He’s powerful. He’s mighty.

Now, notice what else – because this is important – how we understand how general revelation works and what it means to have an awareness of these divine things. God has shown it to them. So, 18, what can be known? So there are things that can be known. God has made it plain. He’s shown it. And then verse 20, “having been clearly perceived.” So, notice this knowledge is something plain, something given to us by God, and this is important, something that Paul thinks is perceived by all. There’s a play on words in the Greek here. You can’t see it in the English, but he says, “Those things that cannot be seen,” aorata, “have been clearly perceived,” kathoratai – same root word. He said there are things you can’t see, and God’s helping you see them. The flow of Paul’s argument makes clear that this perception of God is universal. This is important, because it means Paul is not saying that this awareness of God is acquired by just a genius or some long proof. No, there are so-called proofs of God’s existence, which can be helpful for bolstering the faith of Christians, or maybe helping non-Christians say, “Okay, this is not an irrational thing to believe in God.” But those are not the foundations. Those are not the starting point. Paul is not arguing that, by a long syllogism of deductive reasoning, the smartest people in the world can say, “Ah, Eureka, there’s a God.” Calvin calls this “a sense of divinity.” He writes, “There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity. This we take to be beyond controversy.” Well, I’m glad you didn’t think it was controversial. But he says everyone knows this. One of the arguments that has been made, and it’s helpful to a degree, is to say there is a universal religious impulse everywhere around the world throughout human history. Maybe this tells us something about an innate sense that there’s a God. And you say, well, some people are atheists. Some people don’t believe in any god at all. Even in places where religion per se is absent or religion is waning, what do you find in its place? You find that the state becomes the supreme, ultimate good, or politics, or pagan ritual, or the worship of the environment. Something else will come into its place, because people are yearning for meaning, trying to prove themselves to someone or something. They’re in fear, in worship of someone. People have been throughout human history, and they always will be, incurably religious. Let me give one more quote from Calvin. He goes on to say that even when people try to reject God, “yet, the sense of divinity” – that awareness – “which they greatly wished to be extinguished, thrives and presently burgeons. From this we conclude that it is not a doctrine that must first be learned in school but one of which each of us is a master from his mother’s womb and which nature itself permits no one to forget, although many strive with every nerve to this end.” Did you hear what John Calvin is saying? Just the same point I was making. This is not the product of genius and learning and taught to see this, but rather, he says, even from very infancy we have within us, from God himself, a sense that there’s a god, and he’s a mighty God, and he’s to be feared and worshiped. That’s why I said at the beginning this book knows you better than you know you. This book knows the non-Christian better than the non-Christian knows himself. Everyone in this room, everyone you meet, has from God through nature an implanted feeling of the transcendent, a sense of God, whether they have any conscious or cognitive awareness of that sense, even if they couldn’t explain it or even know what’s happening.

Here’s a good analogy. I was listening to Gray Sutanto – he teaches at RTS in D.C. He was giving a lecture recently on this, and he used this analogy. He says you think of a newborn baby with its mother. You ask that newborn baby, tell me who your mother is. Nothing. Can you explain to me? Can you prove to me that this is your mother? Can you – how could I find her? Well, of course, the baby’s not hearing, not understanding what you’re saying, the baby cannot articulate, and all of us, yet, have had the experience – that baby knows its mother. Believe me, because I’ve marched into a lot of rooms and said, “Oh, I love this baby, I’m good with babies,” and then, you know, crying, pleading, you’re not my mother – sometimes with my own children. I am your father, but what’s going on in that newborn’s intellect – don’t know. Certainly can’t articulate any sort of cognitive – it’s not a long, discursive process, the baby is reasoning from X to Y to Z that this is – but knows, with every fiber of its being, that’s my mother. I have a mother; she’s my mom.

We have this sense, this awareness, of divinity within us, which leads us back to verse 18, that word “suppress.” Now think about the fact that something is suppressed means we have something to suppress. Namely, there is truth that everyone knows. So, this is a point of contact: what you know about what everyone knows, even if they don’t want to know it. Now, you have to hold in tension these two senses of they know, in a way, and yet, because of the suppression, well, they don’t know. They don’t know in a way that can save them. But if you suppress something, it means you have something, and we stifle it. We muffle it. We repress it. We hold it down, like trying to – some of you may be like this with God – you’re trying to hold down this uncomfortable reality underwater. You’re trying to drown out your conscience, drown out this awareness that there’s a God, and you owe him your life and your love. Now, many people will not be aware of this suppression. That’s how suppression works. It happens by ignoring your conscience. Maybe you find religious substitutes in politics or the arts or in sports, or you convince yourself that science can explain everything, or you drown yourself in distractions. I imagine the most common reason people suppress the truth is simply that they want to live the way they want to live. I just want to do my own thing. I don’t want to have to deal with a God who might have wrath and might have holiness. I don’t want to deal with that. And so, you suppress it, and you think about – to use again the parent child analogy. You suppose a child was born of two loving parents, and those parents cared for him, and they loved him. They raised him, and they fed him and provided for him, and he grew up, and he forgot all about those parents. People would say, “How are your parents?” He’d say, “I don’t know anything. I don’t have parents. I don’t have any parents.” And Mother’s Day would roll around and you say, “Did you call your mother?” I didn’t have a mother. A Father’s Day would roll around. Nope. No father either. That’s fine. Some people believe in fathers and mothers, and some people have those holidays, but he was convinced to himself that he had no parents. He had arrived on the scene some other way. Meteor, stork, by chance. Now, what would we say? I know it’s a far-fetched example, but we would say that this child, this grown child, though perhaps with an awareness of what he was doing, had yet committed a great sin by suppressing the reality of his parents, saying, “Nope, I don’t.” We would not think that that was a light or small mistake. Well, to each his own. We would say, “What ingratitude!” which is why, we’ll see next week, the very heart of this sin is described, surprisingly, as ingratitude. Is no one to thank for his life, no one to thank for his existence? But rather pretends, suppresses, muffles, stifles. I don’t have any parents. We would say that child has committed a great sin.

And so it is with every human being who has, implanted through general revelation by God’s own hand, this awareness of divinity, which brings Paul to this conclusion at the end of verse 20, which he’ll come to again in chapter 1 and 2, “So, they are without excuse.” You ever ask the question, or have someone to ask you, yes, well what about the innocent tribesmen somewhere who’s never heard about the gospel? Will the innocent tribesman be judged? And the answer should be, well, of course, he won’t. However, there is no innocent tribesman. There is no innocent person somewhere. Of course, if you say he’s innocent, he won’t be judged. But Paul’s point here in these three dense, brilliant verses is to say we are all without excuse. There’s no one who is innocent. All of us, every human being everywhere, has this divinely given awareness that there is a God. He’s eternal. He’s mighty. He’s powerful. And yet, the hardness of the human heart is to push that down. It’s a knowing, yet an unknowing. The rejection is concurrent with knowledge.

I can’t leave you there. can’t leave you here every sermon for five weeks. I think this is – I think this is a fair observation, and we even heard it in that language from the Westminster Confession, of all the things that the light of nature reveals to us. There’s a God. He’s eternal. He’s powerful. He’s to be served. He’s to be feared. He’s to be worshiped. There’s not, by the light of nature, a revelation of redemption. There’s not, by the light of nature, a revelation of “how can I be forgiven?” It’s probably one of the reasons that, for most of human history, every religion has some form of appeasement in it – some form of “you need to achieve some enlightenment.” You need to do some good work. You need to appease the gods. There is something necessary to reach the blessed reality in the next world, because that’s people understanding instinctively there’s a god, and there’s something that must be done in order to get on his good side and get to the next place. And the light of nature does not reveal the cross of Jesus Christ. But this revelation, the gospel, the power of the gospel, reveals to us that this wrath, which is now being revealed on earth – that wrath – God’s just, implacable hostility to all that is unholy was poured out on the Lord Jesus Christ, not because he had done anything unholy, but because he who knew no sin became sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. That God’s wrath, just wrath poured out on Christ, so that through the gospel, through this word, you have the privilege not just of a general revelation, which is enough to condemn, but this special revelation, which is more than enough to save. There is no excuse, but hallelujah, there is a Savior. Let’s pray.

Gracious heavenly Father, as we come now to the table, would you feed us? As you have with your Word, now feed us with the bread of heaven, that we might be nourished in our most holy faith and strengthened in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whose name we pray. Amen.