In this sermon, the speaker emphasizes the constant presence of deception in the world. He urges young people in college to be aware of this and not fall into its trap. The speaker also discusses how humans gain knowledge from both external creation and their own inner selves. He highlights the complexity and orderliness of the world as evidence of its reality and the existence of God. The sermon concludes with a reminder that reality is narrow and that there is only one way to God.

Let's open our Bibles to Romans chapter 1 again. We'll read this evening from verse 16 to verse 23. For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, but the righteous shall live by faith. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Because that which is known about God is evident within them, for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculation, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. Let's pray. Our Father, we are so helpless without You. We ask You for Your Holy Spirit. Blessed Holy Spirit, we pray that You would be pleased to help this evening, to give us a spirit of faith and power and love, a sound mind, strength, quickening, understanding, utterance, hearing. Help this evening for Your namesake and Your glory. Would You be pleased to be glorified this evening? Help us to see things as they are. And we ask You in Jesus' name, Amen. Well, we have been looking at these opening verses of Paul's presentation of the Gospel. And we have seen that in this portion of Scripture, Paul gives a very systematic presentation of the truth. He starts out in verse 16 saying that he is not ashamed of the Gospel. Why is he not ashamed? Well, because the Gospel is the very power of God unto salvation, to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. How can the Gospel be so powerful? Well, there is something that is manifested and revealed in the Gospel. And that thing that is manifested and revealed in the Gospel is the righteousness of God. In other words, there is something manifested in the Gospel whereby I can receive righteousness from God and be justified in the sight of His law and have my sins taken care of. Why do all men need this righteousness? Well, he tells us in verse 18, For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. What is this wrath of God? Well, it is God's holy revulsion and hatred toward all that is evil. The wrath of God is His holy determination to make every wrong right and to balance out the scales of justice perfectly. Far from being something to be ashamed of, God's wrath is one of His greatest glories. It has to do with His perfection. It has to do with how good He is. He is so good that He hates evil and abhors it. And His anger burns against it. And because God is so holy and so good, He has withdrawn from this wicked world. In wrath, He has taken away His smile. And as a result of that, all kinds of miseries are upon this world. We live in an abnormal world. All the sin and suffering and death and destruction and misery and tears and anguish are a result of the absence of God's smile and the presence of His wrath upon this world. We live in an abnormal world. All other religions have to look at this world and try to make sense out of it as being normal. And that is an impossible thing to do. But as Christians, we can look at this and say something cataclysmic has happened. Sin has entered into the world, and God's wrath is upon this world, and things are not normal anymore. And so that is the position that the Bible gives us. Paul says in verse 18, the wrath of God is resting upon all men for their sins. Now the question comes up, what about the man who has never heard anything? What about the man who has never heard the Bible? Never heard about God? He has never heard even one of the Ten Commandments. Never heard anything. No special revelation at all. The way the question is often worded, well, what about the heathen? And so Paul sets out to answer that in verse 19 and following. Why is the wrath of God upon the man without the Bible? And Paul's answer goes like this, the wrath of God is upon the man without the Bible for two reasons. One, he has an inescapable revelation of God. He doesn't have the Bible, but he has an inescapable revelation of God. And two, he deliberately suppresses. The Authorized says he holds this in unrighteousness. The word means hold, not in the sense of holding it in your hand, but hold it like this, hold it down. He suppresses the truth in unrighteousness. Now notice what Paul says in verse 18 and following. We'll just look down through here. I'm using the New American Standard. You may have a few of the words different, but the equivalence will be there. Verse 18, they suppressed the truth. And I underline these words in mine. They had truth that they suppressed. Verse 19, that which is known about God. I underline the word known. They knew some things. And it's evident to them, manifest to them. So there it is, something manifest or evident. And God made it evident to them. He manifested it to them. In verse 20, His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen. Underline that. Being understood through what has been made. There's understanding. So they are without excuse. There's more knowledge. They're without excuse. And then verse 21, even though they knew God, so here they had knowledge. See how much of this is in here? They had knowledge. They knew God. Even when they knew God, they didn't glorify Him as God. Their foolish heart was darkened. They had to have some light before that, didn't they? In order for it to become darker, you have to have light. And professing to be wise, they became fools. They had to have a certain amount of wisdom that began to elude them, and they became fools. So they started out with more than they ended up with. And they're foolish. Sorry, verse 23, "...and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God." They knew something. They had something of the glory of God. In verse 25, they exchanged the truth of God for a lie. They had truth. Verse 26, they exchanged the natural function for that which is against nature. They had to go against nature. Verse 27, the same thing. Verse 28, they did not see fit to have God in knowledge anymore. There's knowledge there again. Verse 32, "...although they know the judgment of God, that those who commit such things are worthy of death." They have knowledge again. You see how much knowledge this guy has? And he's never seen a Bible. But he has all kinds of knowledge. The man without the Bible has all kinds of knowledge. A lot of times on college campuses, you encounter people who say, I don't believe there is a God. And you don't have to try to convince them that there's a God. They know that there's a God. Not only do they know that there's a God, they have knowledge of the God who actually made them. And that knowledge that they have of the God who actually made them is an inescapable knowledge. Where does that knowledge come from? Well, it comes from two places. From the external universe, or you'd say the creation, and it comes from within the heart of man. Two sources of this inescapable knowledge. The external universe, and from within man's own heart. Now let's look at the first of these first. From the external universe. Look here at our text. Verse 18. It says, The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Verse 19. Because that which is known about God is evident within them, for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen being understood through what has been made. The external creation. So that they are without excuse. In other words, when God created the world, He didn't just throw out some blob. He made creation so that it would tell us about His attributes. It would display His attributes. Tell us about Himself. Now, Psalm 19, verse 1. You remember, here is a good example and we will talk some about the heavens. Psalm 19, verse 1. He says, The heavens declare the glory of God. The heavens are telling the glory of God. The firmament is declaring the work of His hands. Day to day pours forth speech. And night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor are there words. Their voice is not heard. Their line has gone out through all the earth and their utterances to the end of the world. Now, the heavens are speaking, He says, all the time. Not audibly. But they are speaking and their speech has gone everywhere in the entire world. Nobody that hasn't heard the testimony of their speech. John Paul Starr was an atheist. He said the basic philosophical question is why is there something here rather than nothing here? And if you are any least bit atheistically inclined, that one thing right there is enough to destroy it. Beloved, you are here and I am here. And the question is why in the world am I here? This thing right here is here. And it shouldn't be. Why is there something here rather than nothing here? You see, the testimony is that close to you all the time. If you just stop, like Brother Baker said, turn off your iPod and stop for a little while. Not only is there something here, but the something that is here is precise and perfect and orderly and beautiful and complex beyond imagination and vast beyond imagination. This world is real. When I was in college I studied physics and I used to just look at the room. You look at the corners of a room. These aren't too good to show it. But when they are all white you can see it better. But just the way the shadows are on there. Try to imagine to perfectly draw that even. You have got to look at those shadows. That is like that all the time. You can come into this room drunk or high on drugs and the whole room can be spinning. The fact is it is all right here just perfectly in order all the time. There is a real world all around you and you can dream all you want to. It is real and it is orderly and it is perfect. You see? That is the testimony. People say, I don't like this idea that there is only one way to God. Well, you may not like it, but see it just has to do with reality. Reality is narrow. You might like to believe that you can walk out through that wall whenever you get done with the meeting, but you can't. See, that is just the way reality is. And if this room just happened to have one door back there, it has got a few more, but if it just had one, that is just reality. You are going to go out through that door. Reality itself is narrow. I say this universe is vast beyond imagination. Now we are talking about how God created. Just the heavens declare the glory of God. God wanted to tell us something when He made the heavens. All right, young people, you have got to tell me now. How fast can light travel? How fast does light travel? 186,000 feet per second? Miles a second. That is even better, isn't it? 186,000 miles a second. That means in one second, you can't really do it fast enough. It will go around the world seven times in one second. How big is the known universe right now, what we have been able to observe? Well, you let that light that travels 186,000 miles in one second, and let it start out, it only takes 30 billion years to cross the universe. 30 billion years. That is the size of what they can see now. You let one inch equal 10 million miles. So you draw your little thing here on your paper that represents the earth, and nine inches away, you draw the sun. About that far away. And then you draw the nearest star, 40 miles away. That is the closest neighbor. You go out and look at the Milky Way, that thing that looks like a swath of milk up there in the Milky Way, that is all individual stars that are so far away that they just blend together. And our nearest neighbor is on that scale of one inch equals 10 million miles, the nearest neighbor is 40 miles away. Of course, there aren't very many stars. 10,000 billion trillion. How many stars? Isn't that unbelievable? We can't even. Take 1,000 stars, and take 1,000 of those 1,000. There you've got a million. Now take 1,000 of those millions, and you've got a billion. And take 1,000 of those billions, and you've got a trillion. Now take a billion of them. Getting pretty big, isn't it? Now take 10,000 more of them. That's how many they've seen so far. I'm talking about the known universe. It wasn't too long ago they talked about the galaxy. You know, they're just a galaxy. Now, they can look in the area the size of the Big Dipper, that space there, the cup of the Big Dipper. Through that, on out, they can see over a million galaxies in that space. What's God saying? Why didn't He just throw out some ball of mud or something? Because He wanted us to realize that He's not a little God. You see that? The heavens declare the glory of God. It's an incredible thing. We live down here. We walk around in a tunnel. We've got that sky up above us every night. In some ways, we're more ignorant than the people were 2,000, 3,000 years ago when they used to set out and gaze at the sky. I mean, in the old days, a guy would sit there and look at the fire and he thought, I don't have it. What is this? What is this? And we sit there and look at the fire and think, well, it must be that the chemical here is bonding with that one there. You don't have any more clue of what that fire is than they do. What is it in its essence? Hallelujah! Now, beloved, we said the universe is vast beyond imagination. You know what? It's just that little going inwards. We are about in between in orders of magnitude. Our size, my size, the size of my body compared to the known universe with a 15 billion year light year radius, the size of my body compared to that is how big I am compared to the little stuff. It's just unbelievable. The Bible says, The creation testifies inescapably of its Creator, not just a God, but the God. And because of this, men are without excuse. Now, how does this work out in practice? How does a man without the Bible suppress this knowledge and make himself without excuse? Well, we are going to look at two groups. First of all, we are going to look at this proverbial man in the jungle. Where is Mason? The man on the island. They are always saying there is a man on the island that has never heard. The bushman by the riverbank. What does he do? Well, he looks up in the sky. The vastness of the world. Looks at the ocean, maybe. Or he looks at the fire. Stares into the fire. And then he goes and gets him a stick and cuts it out and falls down before it and says, You are my God. Now, the Bible says he is without excuse. He may not know much, but he at least knows that God has to be bigger than he is. And he makes him a God that is less than himself and falls down before it and says, You are my God. He is without excuse for that. He knows better than that. But he doesn't want to know better than that, and therefore he is blinded and given over to it. Now, let's look at Isaiah on this. Isaiah 44. I debated on some of this whether to use the King James. I used it for many years and love it. And it is good whenever we can all follow along. But I will go ahead and read it in mine. Isaiah 44, verse 14. It is actually the same. Talking about the idolater. Surely he cuts cedars for himself and takes a cypress or an oak and raises it for himself among the trees of the forest. He plants a fir and the rain makes it grow. Then it becomes something for a man to burn, so he takes one of them and warms himself. He also makes a fire to bake bread. He also makes a God and worships it. He makes it a graven image and falls down before it. Half of it he burns in the fire, over the half he eats meat as he roasts the roast and is satisfied. He also warms himself and says, Ah, I am warm. I have seen the fire. But the rest of it he makes into a God. He is a graven image. He falls down before it and worships. He also prays to it and says, Deliver me, for Thou art my God. Now look at verse 18. They do not know, nor do they understand, for He, God, has smeared over their eyes so that they cannot see, and their hearts so that they cannot comprehend. And no one recalls, nor is there knowledge or understanding to say, I burn half of it in the fire and also bake bread over its coals. I roast meat and eat it. Then I make the rest of it into an abomination. I fall down before a block of wood. There is no understanding to realize what you are doing. You are taking half of this thing and burning it in the fire and the other half you are making into a God. There is no understanding to say that, to realize it. Verse 20, He feeds on ashes. A deceived heart has turned Him aside and He cannot deliver Himself, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand? Brilliant men believe all kinds of crazy, stupid lies. I mean, deans of the university believe in that stuff about Joseph Smith, the Urim and the Thummim, or big pair of glasses that he found that you can look through and decipher his Reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics. Isn't that crazy? One more passage, Acts 17. Verse 22, I am reading this to try to get you to realize what I am saying and not just some observations. This is what the Bible says about it. Verse 22, Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, Men of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in all respects. For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription to an unknown God. What therefore you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. Neither is He served by human hands as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all life and breath and all things. He is made from one. Every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitations, that they should seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us. For in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, for we also are His offspring. Being then the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the divine nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man. See what he is saying? If we are the offspring of God, you know that God is at least bigger than you are. So you ought not to think that God is something that you have made, something less than you. You see? Men are without excuse. We have a fellow in our church that drives the bus for the college classes, and there is a class on Hinduism. And all those kids are proud. They are so proud of their New Age stuff and their intelligence. And they were driving up to Chicago to see some of these bigger Hindu temples. They got to the first one and they announced, they said, we are really lucky tonight because we get to see them put the gods to bed. Isn't that unbelievable? Trey Rousey was here from Japan for a few hours. I got to talk to him a couple of hours ago. He said during one of those earthquakes, one of the buildings caught on fire, and this lady had managed to escape as the building was collapsing. And she realized, this Japanese lady, she said, my gods! And she took out and ran back into the burning building to try to rescue her gods. Try to save them. Men are without excuse because they have a god that is smaller than they are. Some people say, well, that is not true of all the heathen. I mean, look at the intellectual Hindus. They believe in this great world force, you know. May the force be with you. That is from pantheism. Now that god encompasses the whole universe. That god is bigger than we are. No, that god is not bigger than we are because that god is not personal. It is an it. And you have got to always talk about the gods of Eastern religion as it. And an it cannot hear and cannot think and cannot speak and cannot will, and we can. We are bigger than that. See that? The god of Eastern religion is infinitely smaller than we are. I mean, you look at a star. I can look at a star. A star cannot look at me. It may be bigger than I am physically, but I am bigger than it is in terms of my being. You see that? One of our neighbors I was witnessing to kind of came from a hippie background. She said, I believe in mother earth and father time. Problem is, mother earth and father time cannot think, hear, act, or anything else. Psalm 94.9, He who planted the ear, does he not hear? If God gave you that ability, doesn't he have it himself? He who formed the eye, does he not see? See, men really are without excuse. Well, let's talk a little bit. That's the man out in the jungle. What about this intellectual atheist? What's he doing? What does he do? Well, he looks outward at the vastness of the universe, and he looks inward at the molecular world and looks around him at life and all the complexity and everything, and he says, there is no God. Just chance. Chance is the explanation. It's all a product of chance. Well, the Bible says he is without excuse. Again, the Bible says that God has made it obvious on the surface that that can't be true. Now, keep your minds on here, especially the older ones. Young people won't have any problem with it, but you've got to think about this a little bit. I just want to talk about two or three things. In the area of order and complexity alone, there's a thing nowadays called information theory. And what it is, say this piece of paper, this is my notes, scratched up with red ink, but you could look at that and you could say, what is this? Well, it's nothing but this paper and these blotches of ink around on it. On one level, that's all there is. There's paper and blotches of ink. But those blotches of ink are arranged in such a way that there is a whole message, hopefully a rational message on there. That information is in a different realm than that paper that's carrying the information. Alright? This came off of my computer. It's back there at home, Lord willing, right now. On a hard drive, and if you looked at that hard drive, you'd say there's nothing there, but all there is there is a bunch of magnetic dots. But you've got to rise to a plane above that to see what's really on it. And lo and behold, it's carrying information that a mind can read. Alright? Information doesn't weigh anything. It belongs to a different realm. I could memorize that. But hopefully I could memorize that and it would be stored somewhere else. But the information exists above the medium that it's on. Now, beloved, in the realm of life, the DNA molecule is just like, it's like a floppy disk. You put it in the right place and it unravels and you've got this huge encyclopedia. It's not just molecules. These things are, it's a message. How much information in the DNA molecule? One molecule? Three billion bits of information in one molecule. Three billion in that encyclopedia. And you get any of the pages mixed up and you don't get a person coming out whenever you're born. One chromosome contains information equivalent to 500 million words. Half a billion words in one chromosome. You just picture taking Scrabble letters and drop enough of them to make half a billion words and get a perfect, meaningful message. That's what we're talking about. What's the chance, likelihood, the likelihood of arriving at a single protein molecule by chance? Well, let me give you what it is. It's one chance out of 10 to the 161th power. Well, we don't know what that is exactly, but I'll say this. There's only 10 to the 80th atoms in the entire universe. So if you blindfold and pick one atom out of this whole universe and get the right one, that's a much, much smaller chance than there is of getting one protein molecule by chance. In fact, you would need 10 times as many universes as there are atoms in the universe, and you'd have to blindfold and pick out of those 10 times as many universes as there are atoms in the universe, and you pick out one atom. That's the chance we're talking about. Let me just... I don't know how much I can tax you here tonight, but let me just give you a quote from... This is from an evolutionist. He says, He says, Imagine the whole solar system filled with blind people standing shoulder to shoulder. Our solar system is our planet. But it's a lot of people. 10 to the 50th people. And they're all standing blindfolded, or blind, they're blind people, and they're all holding a Rubik's Cube that's been scrambled up. And they're not real easy to solve, are they? He says, The chance of all of those blind people hitting the solution of the Rubik's Cube at exactly the same moment by chance. He says, Then you have the chance of arriving by random shuffling of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers, but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial soup here on earth is evidently nonsense of a high order. We're not talking about a Christian. It's nonsense of a high order, alright. You know, in Darwin's day, they used to think that the cell was just kind of a blob of jelly. Now they've discovered that the cell is like, you start getting into it under a microscope, it's like looking at New York City. That's how complex it is. Well, let me tell you one more thing. This has to do with irreducible, what's called irreducible complexity within living organisms. There are structures, like a mousetrap, where you have to have every part there in order for the thing to work at all. If you've got one part missing, it won't work. You can have the whole mousetrap and just be lacking that little hook thing that you put on there, and none of it will work unless you have everything together. Now, you can think right off of things like your eye, you know. If you cut your eye in half, you don't have half vision. You know, it doesn't work that way. You've got to have all those things together. But even more amazing than that is what they've found on the molecular level. I just want to give you one example of this. Of the bacterial flagellum. Now, what's that? Well, there's a bacteria, you know, just a germ. A lot of them have those little tails whipping around. You remember that? And for a long time, they thought that's just a tail whipping around. But they found out that that's actually a rotary motor. I figured if Mark LaCour can use props, so can I. Brother, could you help me hold this thing up? Now, you may not be able to see that too well, but this is the filament that comes out that spins around. This is a shaft that comes down. And inside, this is a cell membrane right here. Now, beloved, this is with an electron microscope. This hook right here, which is a universal joint, is one protein molecule. One molecule. This is a rod that comes down. And inside here, there's a stator. And on the drive shaft of the rod, there's a rotor that turns with an S ring and an M ring. These are all molecules. And on the stator, you've got these studs and the C ring. And as the chemicals flow through, they produce. They think the way it works is like this. The chemicals flow through, and it fires these in sequence so that the thing will spin. Now, they only turn at 100,000 RPM. And it stops in half a turn and starts spinning the other direction. All came about by chance. Isn't that amazing? Men look at this. They spend their lives studying this, and they go away and say, there's no God. It is a deliberate choice. And God says you're without excuse. And the smarter you get, the more you're responsible for. You see? And these guys are getting on this level. They're responsible. They've got more reason to doubt. They've got 10 million times more reason to believe. It's like every level of understanding and knowledge that man arrives at, that God is way ahead of him, leaving him inexcusable for his unbelief. You know, this is all around us. You think about even a spider's web. I used to, when my co-pastor and I were single and we lived together, we had these orb-weaving spiders. And I'd sit out there and look at them. That spider, which was about like the tip of my little finger, would drop a line down, maybe eight to ten feet long. It'd be the equivalent of a human taking a rope and spreading it out over two or three football fields. And when it dropped those lines, when it got done, it had a perfect spoke and all the web arranged perfectly around the whole thing. So it's a beautiful, symmetrical, beautiful thing. It never stands back and looks at it. And it doesn't have any plan in its mind because it doesn't have a mind. And isn't it amazing how chance arrived at that beautiful symmetry of that whole thing? Isn't it incredible? You look at a peacock. My father-in-law had peacocks at one time. A peacock spreads its feathers out and it just so happens that all those feathers line up so that the eyes make a symmetrical pattern. And you stop and think of what it takes to put an eye in this feather and an eye up there in that feather and get them so they all line up symmetrically. I was in a museum one time with the children. We were looking at different animals. And I was looking at these fish. I don't know. This may have a simple explanation. I don't know. I doubt if it does. But these fish had beautiful stripes, you know, going this way through the fish. I got up there and looked close and the stripe went through the center of its eyeball. These things are incredible. I mean, what is it that causes, I mean, I can see stripes in your skin, but something had to line up that stripe in the eyeball. Charles Darwin said this, I cannot believe with my mind. He's talking about a bivalve. That's a simple thing, just a clamp. He says, I cannot believe with my mind that this is a product of chance. He didn't say with my emotions. He said, I can't believe it with my mind. Then later on he says this, Then with me the horror of doubt always arises, whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind if there are any convictions in such a mind? He says, I don't know whether I can trust my mind or not. Now, there's a catch here. He doesn't trust his mind when it tells him that there's a God, but he does trust his mind for the theory of evolution. And God says, you're without excuse. The intellectual world is riddled with this kind of blatant contradiction and intellectual dishonesty. That quote I read to you from Fred Hoyle, an astronomer, about the Rubik's Cube, it didn't make him believe in God. You know what he says? He believes that aliens came and seeded our world with life. Do you realize what would happen if a Christian said that kind of thing? How they'd ridicule and laugh at you. I mean, anything that stupid. There's a physicist at Oxford. We're not talking about some little school. We're talking about highest level physics in the world. He said, the universe came into existence as a quantum fluctuation of nothing. So you take, here's a circle, and inside of it is everything that is, and there's nothing in there. Then you erase the circle. That's nothing. And now there's this quantum fluctuation. See, that's irrational. God says, you're without excuse. There are men writing doctoral papers saying that there's no such thing as communication and that communication is impossible. You see the contradiction? They're communicating. They're self-condemned. Back when I was in college, B.F. Skinner was a well-known behavioral psychologist. He said, all your beliefs are a result of conditioning and response. You know, like Pavlov's dogs. You ring a bell and they salivate. That's all your beliefs are. Of course, it goes right down to the Christian. The only reason you believe that stuff is because you were conditioned that way. All beliefs are a result of conditioning and response. Oh, there's a problem, Mr. Skinner. What about your beliefs? And what about the theory you just told me about? It's a result of conditioning and response too. And that means it's worthless. John Dewey affected American education maybe more than anyone. Here's what he said. There's no absolute truth. All truth changes every 15 years. Now here's the problem. It's been a lot longer ago than 15 years that John Dewey put forward his theory. That means it's false. You see, any statement that destroys itself must of necessity be false. Now let me give you an example that Christian students hear all the time on the college campus. There are no absolutes. You see it? They said it absolutely. They said there are no absolutes. It's just like me saying, I come to you and I say, I cannot speak a word of English. And you believe me. See how stupid that is? That is the degree. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. We're not talking about just moral fools. We're talking about intellectual fools. A man that is one of the most intelligent men in the world saying that the universe is a quantum fluctuation of nothing, that's a fool. Again, back in my day in college, there was a very influential series called The Ascent of Man. And the man that made the series, Jacob Bernowski, was a Jewish intellectual, Humanist of the Year. And what he did, he talked about the ascent of science. I'll just explain this a little bit. I think it's worth telling you about it. In one of his lectures, he was talking about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Anybody that's studied in physics knows a little bit about that. But what he said, he said, this teaches that you cannot have absolutes. You cannot know anything for certain. The whole video was that you can't know anything for certain. He didn't come right out and say it, but you knew what he was saying. He said because these bigoted Christians think that they have absolute truth, that's what led to Hitler. He believed in absolutes. And Bernowski was a Jew. He managed to escape with his life. He's standing behind a concentration camp. And he says, he's standing by this mucky stream. He says, the ashes of my relatives were flushed into this stream. And the reason that all this happened was belief in absolutes. He's standing there with this nice suit on. And all of a sudden, he wades out into this muck and picks up a handful of it and holds it up. The camera freezes. Here's the message that these students go away with. There is no such thing as right and wrong. There are no absolutes. And that's what led to something like Hitler. Okay? That's the message they get. Now let me ask you a question. I'm going to ask Jacob Bernowski a question. Mr. Bernowski, are you saying it was wrong that Hitler killed the Jews? Do you get it? He believes in absolutes too. He just picks the ones that he wants to believe in. He's without excuse. Because he knows that it was absolutely wrong what Hitler did. He knows it. There was this wise man. One more example here from Eastern religion. He comes forth. He's going to deliver his wisdom. This is typical of Eastern religion. He comes forth and he says, He who speaks does not know. He who knows does not speak. Now the problem is, he's talking. You know, it's funny, but this is constant. It's everywhere. And you young people that are in college, you've got to learn to recognize this. It gets to you after a while and you stop realizing what's the catch in it. But the catch is always there. Every time. The catch is always there. Self-condemned. Without excuse. Alright. Stand up. And rest just a minute because I want to get started. I've taken too long here. I want to get started into the last half of this. It won't take too long. I started out in this series. I had six messages and I made it into five. And then Bob Jennings talked me into giving four messages, so I condensed five into four. And that's where we are here tonight. Amen. You may be seated. Where else does man, this won't take quite so long, but where else does man get this knowledge from? He gets knowledge from the external creation. But we've barely scratched the surface. He has much more knowledge from within of God than he even has in the external creation. He gets his knowledge from within his own personality. Now you saw over there in Romans 1, at the end of this whole chapter, it says that they know the judgment of God that those who commit such things are worthy of death. Isn't that what we read in verse 32? How do they know that? They haven't ever heard the Ten Commandments. How do they know that they're worthy of death doing those things? Let me give you another example. In Acts 28 and verse 4, you remember Paul was shipwrecked on that island, and this serpent fastens onto his hand, and the native said, this man must be a murderer. And vengeance, with a capital V, or justice, is my translation, justice has not allowed him to live. Now let me ask you a question. How did they know murder was wrong? And how did they know there was such a thing as justice that balances the scales out for people that murder? See how much is written? What is this? It's a law written on the heart. Alright, where does the Bible talk about the law written on the heart? Anyone? Paul talks about it here in Romans. Romans chapter 2. Romans 2 and verse 14, For when the Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness, and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending themselves. All men have the law written within their hearts. Not the law in its details, but the law in its essence. What is the essence of the law? Well, we heard it today I think it was. Those two great commandments. On those two things hang all the law and the prophets. Love to God, love to your fellow man. And men know in their hearts it's wrong to go out and kill that guy living next door to them. They know that. This man must be a murderer. See, they know that's wrong. And they know that they ought to love God. That's why they're killing chickens and sacrificing them in the South Sea Islands. See, they know they've got sin. They know they're in trouble. Men have that written on the heart. Even the idea, you know, Jesus said that the so-called golden rule, that it sums up, He says, that's the law and the prophets. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Well, if you look in the world of religions, you find some form of the golden rule. That shouldn't bother you. That's exactly what the Bible leads you to expect, you see. God showed that to them. That's the law written on the heart. All men have a sense of right and wrong. The most primitive tribesmen, they have those taboos. And the most intellectual atheists say there is no such thing as right and wrong, and they get angry because you Christians are so bigoted. They know there's right and wrong. There are certain things that people know inescapably. I mean, you don't have to prove it. Everybody knows you ought to play fair. They all know that. It's just a simple little thing. Everybody knows that inescapably. Even the person who claims that there is no right and wrong knows. You're standing here on the street, and there's a little old lady here, and there's a bus coming. Now, I'm talking about the people who say there isn't any right and wrong. You know. I mean, you could shove that little lady under that bus and grab her purse, or you could help her cross the street, and you know that one course of action is higher than the other. And everybody knows that, and don't you let them try to tell you that they don't know it. They know that one course of action is higher than the other. Not only that, they know they ought to do the higher one. And you don't get that from the dinosaur. And you don't get it from the hydrogen molecule. All men have an inescapable knowledge of God within their own personalities. Another way of saying this is that man is made in the image of God. Now, part of that image has been defaced, but he's still in the image of God. That's why capital punishment there in Genesis 9, where it's talking about Noah. It says anybody that sheds man's blood, by man his blood needs to be shed, because in the image of God he made man. You're doing a serious thing when you kill a man. And in James, it talks about we bless God, and then curse man who's made in the image of God, you see. So the image still remains even though it's been marred. Men have been made in the image of God. Now, you know what that means? In order to escape an immediate knowledge of God, you have to become non-man. Because you're made in the image of God. So you've got a testimony all the time of God. And you never can become non-man. People try really hard, but they never can make it. Because even when you get to the end of Romans 1, and you think they're complete animals, Paul says, no, they know. They still know! They still know at verse 32, after you've read all that stuff, they still know that those who commit such things are worthy of death. What does it mean to be in the image of God? Well, there's a number of things. I'll just say a few here. Rationality. The laws of logic. If I say this circle is a square, immediately you know that's wrong. You can't prove it, you know it. That's just part of the image of God. Rationality. Morality. A sense of right and wrong. A sense of ought. That's part of the image of God. Self-consciousness. Now, animals are conscious, but they're not self-conscious. I can stand here talking to you right now, and in my mind I can rise up above this building and look down on us. Man can walk around inside his own head. You're conscious of yourself. Use the word, I. One student said to his professor, Sir, prove to me that I exist. He said, Who shall I say is asking? You see, men, they know. You know that you are. You know you're not a machine. You know you're not an animal. Self-consciousness. Sense of beauty. Sense of love. Sense of justice. All these things. We could talk language itself. The very concept of it. Well, what do men do with this knowledge? They suppress it. They deliberately do even the things that they know are wrong. Verse 32, Who, knowing the judgment of God that those who commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but they have pleasure in others doing it. They encourage it. So men take the knowledge that they have of right and wrong, and they suppress that, and they deliberately do things that they know are wrong. Now, you may be dealing with somebody that says, I don't believe that outmoded morality of the Bible and all that. Well, what do you believe? There are some things that they do believe, and if they're honest, they'll admit they do that too. And they're without excuse. They suppress the truth, and that's precisely why they're condemned. Now, we're almost totally done, but I want to say a little bit here. This same thing is true of the so-called heathen. This idea of the happy heathen is a myth. Paris Readhead was a missionary to Africa. He said, I went to Africa to try to keep a bad God from putting good men in hell. Now, he said, I would have never said it that way, but that's what was in my heart. I had the feeling, you know, these poor people, they haven't had a chance. And I went to Africa to keep a bad God from putting good men in hell. He said, when I got to Africa, I discovered they were monsters of iniquity. They had all kinds of light they were trampling on every day, and they didn't even want to take the time to listen to Him share the Gospel. This idea they haven't had a chance to accept Jesus is more like they haven't had a chance to mutilate the missionary and his family. Why does the man without the Bible go to hell? Not for rejecting a Jesus he's never heard of. That's not why he goes to hell. He goes to hell for his sins. He goes to hell because he has truth, and he deliberately suppresses it and sins and does things that he knows are wrong. People are so mixed up on this. Suppose Christ hadn't come into the world at all. How many people would have gone to hell? Everybody, the whole world would have gone to hell. Did God have to send Jesus to die for our sins? He didn't have to send Him. And if He hadn't sent Him, all of us would have gone to hell for our sins. We wouldn't have gone to hell because we rejected Jesus. You see, that doesn't have anything to do with it. Here's a guy out here dying of malaria. You say, well, the reason he's dying is because he hasn't got the cure. The cure is back over there. No, the reason he's dying is he's got malaria. That's the reason he's dying. Men are going to hell for their sins. Beloved, the man without the Bible really is lost. It's becoming more and more popular in our day, and you're seeing more and more of these big-name preachers even saying that people out here, you know, as long as you're a sincere Hindu or a sincere Muslim or whatever, you'll go to heaven. That's a lie. It doesn't matter how sincere you are. There are sincere frog worshippers. That frog is not going to take away your sin. That's why Christianity is so exclusive. Jesus said, I am the way. Why? Well, because there's a real God, and that real God has a real character. And you've sinned against His character, and there's only one way to get back to Him. Somebody's got to pay for your sin. And it so happens there's only one person that's ever done that. And believing in a frog or something is not going to take care of it. Men really are lost, and they really do need the Gospel. And God has ordained. Now, He can save. He can do that. I mean, Abraham was an idolater. Apparently, God just revealed Himself to him. He can do that. But in general, He does not save anybody by direct revelation like that. He saves them through the preaching of the Gospel. It's important that we go to men with the Gospel, but the reason we're going to them is not because they're innocent. And we've got to give them a chance, these poor innocent people. That's not the reason we're going to them, because we're wanting to glorify God and to see Him glorified in their salvation and to obey what He tells us to do. Well, amen. Lord willing, tomorrow we'll look at this last portion of Romans 1. Good to know we're not accidents, isn't it? Real food. Real warm bodies. Real beds. Real rest. Real sleep. Real sunshine. Yes. Praise God. Good night. The Lord bless you.