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This sermon in the series.
“If you’re able, please stand...” Reading Romans 1:18–25. “....Thanks be to God.”
Opening illustration: Having the right response. What about when we get an unexpected gift? CNBC:
But on none of these websites do they tell you the etiquette when someone gives you...a universe.
We’ve been talking about God’s creation. This morning the focus is on how we’ll respond to it.
“Right from the Start.” Genesis 1. A revelation of God and the creation right from the start. But something else was true right from the start: creation was not silent. Creation began a continuous, harmonious proclamation of the greatness of God, and it has not stopped.
Our passage this morning will ask us, “And what will you do in response?” Creation is not silent about its Creator. Will you be?
Our passage is Romans 1:18–23
The sermon: (1) The Passage; (2) The Revelation; (3) The Response. GOAL FOR US IS TO RESPOND RIGHTLY TO THE CREATION AROUND US!
Prayer – Israel/Palestine; Meredith Rickard; children baptized
Now we want to look in more detail at what God is saying to us here. To start, let me read verse 18 and then the two verses right before it.
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.” 18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. (Rom 1:16-18)
Paul is telling the Romans why he’s “eager to preach the gospel” to them. It’s his calling, but he also longs to do it. That’s because the gospel brings salvation. It does that by giving to us what we desperately need: “the righteousness of God.”
And it does that through “faith.”
But why? Why must “the salvation” Paul is talking about come to us by “faith”?
Aren’t we good enough to stand before God and be welcomed into heaven as we are? After all, when we compare ourselves to others, we’re better than a lot of people.
That’s where verse 18 comes in. The righteousness of God we need for salvation has to come by faith because (“for”) of the reality of “the wrath of God.”
“The wrath of God” is God’s holy opposition to sin. It’s a personal opposition, and it’s intensive and uncompromising. If we go to him with only our sin and without his righteousness, his wrath will fall upon us violently and eternally.
Paul says this “wrath” is right now being “revealed” to the group he mentions here. They are people living in “ungodliness and unrighteousness” and “suppress God’s truth” “by their unrighteousness.”
This is where our passage connects to our last two sermons in Genesis. What “truth” are they suppressing? What “truth” are they resisting with great effort?
It’s truth connected to the creation around us—The creation we heard about two weeks ago that God made from nothing. The creation we heard about last week that God made in six days.
The creation reveals something of the nature of God. The creation is a visible reality that reveals true things about the invisible reality of God.
Remember at the start I said that creation is speaking, and we are supposed to respond to it. We need to speak truth back.
But Paul says our sinful hearts will “suppress” that truth in our “unrighteousness.”
And when we “suppress the truth” revealed in creation, bad things start to happen. Bad things happen in us—and to us!—if we don’t repent.
What happens in us? “Futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.” Rejecting the truth about God affects us at the deepest levels.
Application: Your worship is no small thing. What you worship will affect you—at the deepest levels. Worshiping the wrong thing changes you in terrible ways.
Now we want to think about what creation reveals about the nature of God. Let me read verse 20:
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. (Rom 1:20)
We see something important right off the bat. God is invisible, but his creation is visible. Usually you think of invisible things as being very difficult to see—because they’re invisible! But here we see that even though God is invisible, “his invisible attributes...have been clearly perceived.”
The creation all around us allows us to “clearly perceive” God’s “invisible attributes.” And then Paul’s mentions two of these “invisible things” of God: “eternal power and divine nature.”
These descriptions of God capture so much of who he is. He’s:
John Murray adds:
Divinity does not specify one invisible attribute but the sum of the invisible perfections which characterize God.
John Murray, Romans[1]
And what God is telling us here is GOD THROUGH THE CREATION REVEALS THESE THINGS PLAINLY TO ALL PEOPLE. That’s why all people are “without excuse.” No one can say, “I didn’t know God was like that.”
The creation is God’s Masterpiece. Creation is his painting, and as he covers the canvas and the painting becomes visible, the personality and nature of the Painter is revealed. He is “clearly perceived.”
SOMETHING and not NOTHING.
Only “eternal power” can create from nothing.
Not just MATTER but LIFE.
Maybe we can say that his “Divine nature” is revealed by the fact it isn’t just a big universe that’s created, but a universe where there’s LIFE.
Not just LIFE but CONSCIOUSNESS.
And the LIFE he has created isn’t just plants and animals, bare life. But “consciousness” with human life. Not just brute strength, but his DIVINE NATURE coming out.
Something “beyond nature,” as C.S. Lewis would call it. Something more than mere matter. Something with consciousness and intentionality. We see that in us, and it points us to God himself. In our ability to reason and reflect and imagine, we show that we’re more than mere stuff. Conciousness is a way that God’s “Divine Nature” is “clearly perceived.”
A Fine-Tuned Universe
Life on earth is a marvel. As more and more research is done in more and more fields of study, it’s clear that what we experience on Earth is astounding. If things like gravity, the speed of light, our closeness to the sun, the size of our moon, our closeness to Jupiter and Saturn, the consistency of gravity, even the rate at which the universe is expanding—if any of these things had been different, life would not be possible.
William Paley (1743–1805) came up with the watch/watchmaker version of this: If you see a watch on the beach, you assume there was a Watchmaker, not that the watch created itself from nothing.
The Sophistication of a Cell and DNA
Here we go from the uber-massive or philosophical to the almost infinitely complex—and small!
John Lennox: “The human genome is the longest word we’ve ever discovered. And we can call it a word because it’s written in a chemical language of four letters.
Strands of DNA combine in the nucleus of the cells of your body. Each of these strands would be about 6-feet long if you uncoiled them. They contain massive amounts of information.
If you convert to digital storage it’s 1.5 Gb. And that information tells the cell what to do, what proteins to build, what cells to create, everything. And all this happens through a very complex system involving organic machines doing high-tech functions.
And then there about 40 trillion cells in your body.
The sophistication of the human body is astonishing.
Darwin tried to imagine the beginning of all life and said perhaps it all came from a “small warm pond.” To him cells were little blobs of goo, basically. He had no idea the astronomical complexity found in a cell.
Bill Gates said that just one part of a cell, the DNA in the nucleus of it was “like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.” He was right.
And then you consider that this uber-software program begins from the very moment of your conception and cells continue to reproduce until your death—no tech support is required to keep everything functioning.
We are a marvel!
Truly even at a cellular level, God is revealing his “ETERNAL POWER AND DIVINE NATURE.”
It was the intricacy and almost impossibility of DNA that made the Oxford philosopher Antony Flew turn from atheism to theism. He acknowledged the obvious: There’s simply no way this happens by accident and some evolutionary process.
Just what we’d expect from what God has revealed to us: This is not just a universe. It’s a creation. And a creation implies a Creator. And a Creator to bring such a creation into existence is worthy of all people everywhere “giving him glory” and “giving him thanks.”
APPLICATION: Creation is speaking! Hear its voice! Listen!
But this PLAIN REVELATION demands a response for it to accomplish what it’s supposed to accomplish. This “unexpected gift” we’ve received requires that you “say something” in response.
That’s what Paul talks about in the rest of our paragraph:
20 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. 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. (Rom 1:20-23)
The opening of the passage talked about the unrighteous way that we “suppress the truth” God is revealing. The creation is revealing truth about God, but in fallen state we “suppress the truth.”
It’s like we get that UNEXPECTED GIFT and decide it’s not that great—and so we EXCHANGE IT for something else. We didn’t realize it was a masterpiece worth millions of dollars. We thought it was just a garage sale throwaway worth 50 bucks.
What happens is a LOSS of massive proportions. We have some KNOWLEDGE OF GOD, but we lose it.
But look at what happens to us when we throwaway our knowledge of God. We begin to change. There’s a cancer inside of us that begins to affect our thinking and feeling. See the end of VERSE 21.
It begins to affect how we see and interpret the world. How we understand truth. It’s like we get the wrong prescription for our glasses and think we’re seeing clearly. We don’t.
Our world has a lot of ways we can REJECT the revelation in the creation and feel proud about it.
Some see the universe had a beginning, but don’t like where that might lead. One theory is that of multiverses. Not just in graphic novels.
Michio Kaku is also “suppressing the truth.” Astrophysicist. Brilliant and a great communicator. When he looks at the universe he sees something beautiful:
But the Oxford philosopher Antony Flew has written on the use of multiverses: “It seems a little like the case of a schoolboy whose teacher doesn’t believe his dog ate his homework, so he replaces the first version with the story that a pack of dogs—too many to count—ate his homework” (There is a God, 137).
No, the fact there is a creation confirms there is a Creator, a Creator with “eternal power” and a “divine nature.”
Some have a more hardened opposition. In some ways more honest. Like a Richard Lewontin, an evolutionary biologist. He taught at NC State before going to Harvard where he taught for 25 years. In a review of a Carl Sagan book he revealed his own bias in dramatic fashion:
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that Miracles may happen.
Richard Lewontin, The New York Review of Books[2]
Tom Bethell responded in an article for The American Spectator in April 2004:
Why must the Divine Foot be excluded? The alternative ‘is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured,’ Lewontin wrote. Miracles have to be disallowed. There is some logic to that. But I think the real problem is far deeper. Some of our most ardent intellecturals simply despise the idea that they are subordinate to a Creator who cannot be controlled, who tolerates evil, and to whom they must submit. So they rebel. They refuse to serve. So they invented this fantastic philosophy of materialism. It’s human pride masquerading as science. And that’s why its defenders are so passionate. Their disbelief is based more on disapproval of God than on scientific evidence that He is superfluous.
Tom Bethell, “Passionate about Evolution”[3]
A lot of websites on how to say THANK YOU. How to say THANK YOU to a gift you hate. To one that’s unexpected. But I’m guessing there’s not a website that gives advice for WHEN SOMEONE GIVES YOU A CREATION!
Paul tells us how to respond. In verse 21:
Romans 1:21:
For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. (Rom 1:21)
This passage tells us how we need to respond to what God has done. Take time this week and use one of the creation Psalms to provide words for your prayers to him (Psalms 8, 98, 148, etc.). As you sit down and pray before a meal, really consider that the hand of the Creator is behind it. Much "typical" providence has gone into the food, yes, but behind all that is the God who created all things from nothing.
It’s WORSHIP! And it’s THANKSGIVING! Raise your hands in the air and let's say together in response,
For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. (Rom 11:36)
“Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.” (Rev 4:11)
Prayer and close.
[1] John Murray, Romans, Vol 1 (Eerdmans), 39.
[2] Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons” (review of The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan, 1997), The New York Review of Books (9 Jan 1997), 31.
[3] Tom Bethell, “Passionate about Evolution,” The American Spectator (Apr 2004), 39. See also his book, Darwin’s House of Cards (Discovery Institute, 2017).
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