Studying His Word and His Works

Romans 1:18-25, Out of Excuses

Listen here: Romans 1:18-25

Read here: Romans 1

  • Review of Romans 1:8-17
    • In Romans 1:8-17, we learned the Gospel is real power, and the only power we should seek. No “mana” of ancient Hawaii, no “venerating” of either the relics of Catholics or the saints of Russian Orthodox.
    • Verses 16-17 introduced righteousness, and included a reference to Habbakuk 2:4 that “the righteous shall live by faith.” Also translated “the just shall live by faith”. The righteousness of God is revealed thru the gospel. This righteousness is made available to us through Jesus Christ, who purchases our sin debt, trading it for His righteousness at that moment we believe. This is more than just a “surrender”, a common phrase in modern “church talk.” “Repent” is what the Bible says (Mark 1:15, etc.) “Believe” is what the Bible says(John 3:16, etc). Our identity now is as doulos (v. 1), slaves to Christ. “Surrender” is not salvation, but our response to salvation. Paul first gives thanks to God in verse 8 because salvation is first a work of the Holy Spirit invading our souls so that we can repent and believe. If we could repent and believe on our own, then salvation is works based, and that’s not what the Bible says. And then we surrender. Daily.
    • Sproul mentions what Augustine said about v. 17, that “the righteousness here is not God’s righteousness, but that which he provides for his people.” Later, Sproul describes this as Jesus’ righteousness. But Jesus=God, so I think this is one of those mysteries where it is and is not God’s righteousness. The only way we can be righteous is through Christ, we have no righteousness in ourselves. I don’t know why God chose to do it this way, to be one and many. A Trinity. But, everything about God is that he is first and foremost relational, it is part of His nature. And he wants exclusive devotion to Him, so he sent His son to be the final sacrifice for all sins, imputing Christ’s righteousness to us as a gift, which is the same, but different than God’s righteousness. This could only be accomplished through God in human form, as a bridge between God and man.
    • Christ and God are the same but not the same. They are unity and diversity perfected. God gives us hints of this (I think) in His creation. Look at the complexity inside just one of our cells. We have DNA, an information storage molecule. DNA has instructions for making us, and cell organelles called ribosomes are like the bridge between the input of DNA and the output of proteins. We have the infinitesimal, where we can be at a point and not at a point at the same time. We have light, which is a particle and a wave, it’s two different things at the same time. Chemical compounds, like H2O, with distinct elements yet together in a 2:1 ratio form water. Machines have an input and output, they must have an input to create an output, and all their parts must work together properly to produce something. The output depends on the input, there’s a relationship there.
    • Without Christ’s righteousness gifted to us, we are like a machine with no righteous output, only wicked. I Cor 1:30 says as Christians “you are in Christ Jesus, who became wisdom to us from God, righteousness, and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.” 
  • Verse 18
    • God’s wrath is against the unrighteous.
      • Ka Baibala Hemolele(The Hawaiian Bible), unrighteousness=wickedness
      • Greek, unrighteousness = injustice
      • To understand what something is, it is often helpful to understand what it is not. Paul is about to take a deep dive into what righteousness is not, so buckle up! If any of the truths Paul is about to describe convict you, then simply repent and trust God with that. If instead you are just offended by Paul’s words, then be patient. God’s kindness and patience is meant to bring you to repentance (Romans 2:4). Don’t just walk away from the Word because you currently can’t handle the truth inside it. True believers are called to walk away from the world, not the Word.
    • A sign of the unrighteous is they suppress the truth.
      • suppress=katacain (Greek), to hinder, to put in detention, to obscure, to repress.
        • Sproul says to imagine God’s truth as a giant spring that takes all our strength to push down. Our human nature is to try to keep it down. To suppress it. But it constantly wants to spring back up. 
  • Verses 19-20
    • The truth being suppressed here is not necessarily Scripture, but the truth of God revealed in creation that everyone can plainly see. 
    • Verse 20 basically says God is invisible, but also visible. How can this be? Well, life begins at the moment of conception. A human being goes from not existing to existing in a moment. How can this be? In calculus, you get your most accurate answer when you are not at zero and at zero at the same time. How can this be? How can light be a wave and a particle at the same time? How can electrons flowing through a wire produce an electric force field perpendicular to a magnetic force field? How is it that we are able to turn a wilderness into a productive garden? Why are we able to do this at all, over and over again throughout the centuries? How is it that we can use the stars to navigate, almost like they were set in place to help us get back home to our loved ones, ever since the beginning of creation!?
    • Everything I just described is real. And I can’t 100% perfectly understand any of it. And neither can you. Nobody can. Real and measurable things designed by an infinite God who is everywhere revealing his attributes, his eternal power and divine nature and relational character (i.e. the Trinity).
      • Every human has experienced His power. In the wind, in the surf, in fire, in lightning and thunder, in the conception of new life, in earthquakes and volcanoes, in an avalanche, or explosives like dynamite and atomic bombs, or the intensity of a Sun that is so bright we can’t even look at, etc. Jesus called out the Pharisees for two things, not knowing Scripture, and not knowing His power (Matthew 22:29).
      • Sproul said some claim that people who have not heard of Jesus are innocent and will go to heaven, but there are no innocent people. Or maybe you’ve heard or believe that God is not going to punish someone for rejecting Someone he never heard of. But see, that’s the thing, everyone has heard of Him. And still they reject Him. The wrath that awaits them is Paul’s foundation for the urgency of sharing the Gospel. It should be our urgency, too.
    • We are without excuse
      • We have no apologetic, no way to defend our “non-faith.” We like to say, “I would follow God if he made it clearer,” or “I would follow Jesus if he showed me the sign I wanted him to show me,” or “I would follow Him if bad things didn’t happen to good people, etc.” We are good at making excuses, but God says we are without excuse. 
      • Here’s how Leonhard Euler, the best mathematician in the history of the world put it: “It is God therefore, who places men, every instant, in circumstances the most favorable, and from which, they may derive motives the most powerful, to produce their conversion; so that men are always indebted to God, for the means which promote their salvation.”
        • Euler knew math well because of, not in spite of knowing God well. Euler wasn’t lukewarm about the whole “no excuse thing,” looking for possible exceptions. No, he took that ball and ran with it and saw the reality of God’s design and plan for humanity.
      • While it might be a hard pill to swallow (I warned you to buckle up haha), I do believe the most reasonable and realistic way to look at it is that there is no “I didn’t realize God is real” excuse that is good enough. Jesus saves, not our excuses.
  • Verse 21
    • That Paul can identify excuse-makers (the wicked) in the real world, is evidence his claims are true; namely that by Christ alone the saints are righteous, and that our wicked human hearts basically destroy our minds.
      • Don’t honor God
        • And it’s not only that they don’t honor him, but they don’t honor him as God. The problem started in the garden, in Genesis 3. Satan deceiving, telling Eve you will know more and be more omniscient (all-knowing) like God if you eat this. You will elevate yourself to an equal status with God if you eat this, so you will be a god, too and you don’t have to acknowledge him any more.
      • Unthankful
        • Remember what Paul said in verse 8, FIRST I am thankful.
        • Many Psalms describe making a “sacrifice of thanksgiving”: Psalm 50:14, of giving thanks amidst the congregation; 35:18, 46 reference giving thanks.
      • Look at what happens when you have ingratitude and ignore God as Lord and Savior:
        • You have useless thoughts (futile). You become foolish. Life gets really dark.
  • Verse 22
    • They are the opposite of who they claim to be
      • This reminds me of the “legacy media” and how they made so many false claims about the presidential race and then the candidate that most supports biblical values wins (Trump 2024, and yes he is far from perfect, but you cannot say he was less supportive of biblical values than the loser, Kamala Harris).
      • Watch out for people and groups who claim to be the voice of reason but then reality does not match what they are saying.
        • One place I see this is in creation, and the secular world’s rage against the Bible’s claims that God created, as well as the Bible’s historical claims. I could write a lot more about this, but let’s briefly look at these two topics of creation and history and the world’s “wisdom” regarding these.
          • Creation-a.k.a. origins, that humans evolved from monkeys and monkeys from something else, etc.
            • The impossibility of these claims becomes more apparent as time goes on. For example, when Charles Darwin wrote his book Origin of Species back in the 1800s, he claimed that cells were just a “bag of salts”. But the more we learn, the more we know this “wise” claim is absolutely false. Cells are designed more like complex machinery, with countless working parts that clearly had to be thought out beforehand in order to work together. As we learn more about creation through scientific discovery, we can use mathematical probability to show more and more the impossible odds of things creating themselves.
            • One example of “wise” claims was during Texas biology textbook battles of the 2010’s. Public schools could not teach Bible verses about creation, but they definitely were able to teach about the latest molecular biology research, which was revealing more about the impossibility of molecules-to-man evolution. Back then, I would present research to the Texas State Board of Education to put in books about new findings like epigenetics and other things. Others argued against me, stating that the topics were “too difficult” for high school biology. But, biology textbooks were already full of even more complicated topics, describing how genes are made of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and the DNA is a coded message for making specific proteins in a process that involves transcription, translation, etc. That is SUPER complex, yet it would supposedly make it “too difficult” to include epigenetics, the science of what turns genes on and off at certain times and places so that you don’t have eyeballs growing out of your knees. The opposition’s only defense was to suppress the truth. And every time I would comment on anything online, the opposition behaved just like Paul says they would in Romans 1. The hate of God, the perversion in their comments, the death threats; it was really amazing how true Romans 1 was in this real situation I was involved with. 
          • Regarding history, it is important to think of biblical history as just that, history. History is something we interpret, which differs from a scientific claim. The “wise” conflate the two, and will call you “anti-science” for believing the Earth is thousands of years old as biblical history claims, while doing no real, testable and repeatable science to disprove.
            • What they are doing -what we are all doing – is interpreting history. They are just drawing a different conclusion by using a different time scale. The interpretation differences really just boil down to two things, energy or time, and which one is emphasized more in the interpretation. Do you believe that what you see today, right now, the way the Earth looks, is a result of slow and gradual processes over billions of years? Or do you believe that high energy, short-term events brought most of that about?
    • Verse 23
      • Paul lists a bunch of things: images of man, birds, animals and creeping things. I think Paul is giving us specific examples of a more general idea of how, in our wickedness we will worship anything but God. Verse 25 expands on this and gives the more general reference, of worshiping things instead of the One who made those things.
        • Hawaiians had all kinds of gods and “spirit animals” or aumakua, animals like sharks and turtles that they believed their deceased ancestors’ spirits inhabited. Some still believe this.
        • Before Christ invaded Hawaii, the Hawaiians had an entire system of false gods: wooden statues of Ku, Kane, Lono, Kanaloa and many others. Miraculously, they gave it all up just a few months before Christian missionaries arrived from America. Hewahewa, the high priest over all the gods, was the first to start burning them down. He later became a Christian, and is buried in Waimea Valley. 
    • Verse 24
      • “God gave them up to,” Paul repeats this phrase three times, verses 26 and 28 also. Greek is paredoken, “handed over.” Making a point that hating the true God will result in him giving you over to wickedness.  Schreiner says that sexual sin is a consequence, or outworking, of the rejection of God and a failure to honor him. It is like a giant warning flag God has given us to know what path someone is on. If they reject God’s design for them (to glorify God and enjoy Him), then He has a natural consequence for their rejection. Some will obviously try suppress this truth, but there literally is a warning flag (rainbow) or flags (LGBT+) out there that show rejection of truth. Many churches today are fully complicit in the truth suppression and flag waving.
        • Sexual sin is just one consequence of rejecting God, there are other evidences of wickedness as well that Paul discusses later. This must have been a big issue in Rome at the time. It is nothing new. 
    • Verse 25
      • Verse 23 also mentions this exchanging of the true God for a lie. The lie is that they worship created things instead of the Creator.
      • Schreiner says: “The fundamental truth of the universe is that God exists and that he should be worshiped and served and his name should be praised (v. 25)…..Those who worship, serve, and glorify God bring praise to him. The fundamental task of the creature is to bless the name of God.” Amen!
    • Click here for Romans 1:26-32.

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