04.04. LESSON 4

LESSON 4

God’s justifying righteousness is revealed only in the gospel of Christ. But from the creation, his wrath "against oil ungodliness and righteousness" has been revealed in various ways. Because they work against the grain of eternal truth and law, sinners always encounter the wrath of God. "Every one that doeth sin doeth also lawlessness; and sin is lawlessness" (1 John 3:4). When Eve and Adam disobeyed the law of God, they were denied access to the tree of life, and consequently became subject to death. Their posterity became more and more lawless until God in righteous wrath destroyed the world of law breakers in the flood. Only a few centuries after the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah became so lawless that God consumed them with fire. All secular history agrees with Biblical history that lawlessness leads to ruin. In fact, secular history, when we climb high enough to read it correctly, is a continued story of God’s wrath against sin, demonstrated over the earth in disorder, disease, decay, and death. "Righteousness exalteth a nation; but sin is a reproach to any people" (Proverbs 14:34). Moreover, man’s conscience tells him that sin deserves punishment. But the climax of the revelation of God’s penal wrath against sin is the cross of Christ.

"They Became Fools"

Through physical nature, human nature, and personal revelation combined, God sufficiently revealed himself to primitive men to test their attitude toward him. The test proved them to be so ungrateful, irreverent, and self-sufficient that they thought they could get along better without him. They did not discard God because of a lack of knowledge, but because their affections did not keep pace with their knowledge. "Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools." Nothing can so warp reason, darken the "senseless heart," demoralize the whole man, and defeat known truth as do depraved affections, perverted will, and corrupted life. What men love influences their lives and destinies more than does what they know. Made in the likeness of God, designed to be dependent on God, and required, "having heard the word, (to) hold it fast... in an honest and good heart," man is verily a presumptuous fool to think that apart from God he can live morally any more than he can physically. When men think that human wisdom is supreme, they have reached the pinnacle of folly.

Satan’s lie to Eve, "Ye shall not surely die," but "Ye shall he as God," by convincing her that the forbidden fruit held the key to some knowledge which God had no right to withhold from her so shattered her confidence in her Maker that she spurned creatural faith, and deified herself. Her disloyalty was the very essence of sin, for "sin is lawlessness;" her relationship to God became ungodly. Men must accept the distance between Creator and creature, or else they die. In both nature and religion, they live by faith, and must allow God to know some "secret things" (Deuteronomy 29:29), which he withholds from them for their good. Since "Now we see in a mirror, darkly," and "know in part," only (1 Corinthians 13:12), we must trust God to be infallibly strong, wise, and good. From the creation until today, mankind has been allergic to all such "forbidden fruit." With Romans 1:1-32 declaring that heathen peoples are responsible, reprehensible, and reprobate, who can declare them innocent? Of course, they are not guilty because they do not accept Christ of whom they have never heard, but because they lack moral integrity, and fail to use the knowledge they do have. They are not expected to know the Trinity, but the Godhead. Monotheism was the primeval religion, and got the start of polytheism. The Bible makes no mention of idolatry before the flood. Joshua’s farewell address to the Hebrews, warning them that their ancestors worshiped idols, is its first mention. Instead of man struggling slowly up out of savagery, he from the beginning struggled against God, and consequently fell into savagery. If man has the principle of organic evolution inherent with him, and if he had evolved much by Paul’s day, why have not heathen people continued to evolve since then? If man has ascended from the beasts, why are heathens today sub-bestial in some respects, especially in their nauseating abuse of sex? "What fools these mortals be" (Shakespeare’s Puck).

"God Gave Them Up"

After men and women gave God up, God in retributive wrath "gave them up... that their bodies should be dishonored among themselves." The moral world is so constituted that renouncing God is self-avenging. By dishonoring God, men dishonor themselves—mind and heart (Romans 1:21) and body (Romans 1:24). According to this chapter, God punished idolatry in descending steps, avenging sin with sin. Since men by nature must worship, when they ceased to worship God, they worshipped "an image of corruptible man." Then follow abominable, elaborate systems of worshipping images "of birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things" (Romans 1:23). The Apollo of Greece, the eagle of Rome, The cow of Egypt, and the serpent of Assyria are all here. The boasted wisdom of the Euphrates and the Nile, and the proud learning of Hellas and Rome are summarily dismissed with a word—"learned ignorance." In this down-ward plunge, unnatural prostitution became prevalent, all restraint of animal passions being lost, and finally moral distinctions were obliterated and all ethical codes and "natural affections" were violated (Romans 1:28-32). This snapshot of heathen life shows man helplessly wallowing in the filth of the flesh, reconciled to his own sin and encouraging gin in others, although he knows both his sin and his death sentence. Such men are already in the suburbs of hell. When God gives men up, what may they not become! None of the purity and goodness now on earth is due, primarily, to human nature. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh" (John 3:6), and Romans 1 shows what the flesh is. Is it not fair to judge God by what happens to men who respectively obey or disobey him? If his friends are not blessed above his foes, is he not a fake? That Paul’s picture of lust-sick, sin-sunk heathenry is still true, not a color too dark, is granted by all who know heathenry first hand. As he was in Corinth, notorious throughout the Roman Empire for its hideous social vices, when he painted it, he had not far to seek his colors. It faithfully portrays the world Christ came to save. Any religious message that does not begin with man’s ruin and deep, hopeless need is not from God. Of all religions, only Christianity, because it has the specific for sin, does not minimize sin.

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