Romans 1:21 - What We Do with What We Know

"Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened."

As I suggested earlier, the problem is not with what we do not know, but with what we do with what we do know.

There will always be more left unknown than grasped with our mortal minds. We do not know all there is to know about God. We don't know a fraction. What we do know is enough to call us to worship.

As I write this entry, I am preparing for Sunday - Palm Sunday to be specific. No one in the crowd that greeted Jesus fully understood His coming. They did not get it. Some got it more than others and they welcomed Him. He did not reject their welcome. He received it as praise to God.

He received it so well that some of those who rejected the knowledge they did possess wanted Him to rebuke the worshippers. Jesus replied that if they were to be silent, the stones would cry out. ( Luke 19:30). Stones don't know much, but they know enough to acknowledge the presence of God.

Here is how Peterson translates the verse:

"What happened was this: People knew God perfectly well, but when they didn't treat him like God, refusing to worship him, they trivialized themselves into silliness and confusion so that there was neither sense nor direction left in their lives." (The Message, Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002 by Eugene H Peterson)

People knew God perfectly well. They knew enough to treat Him like God. How is that? Worshipfully, doing what we call "glorifying."

To glorify is to recognize the extreme weightiness of a matter. In this case, it is to take God so seriously that we stand in awe, are struck down by the sheer magnitude of His power and are overwhelmed with the right kind of fear as we behold Him.

The right kind of fear is the stuff that makes our jaws drop, that leaves us speechless, that causes us to tremble, that turns on the lights and lets us know that if we get this part right, we don't really have to worry about anything else.

Paul says folks who knew God failed to be thankful. The folks in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday were certainly excited. But were they thankful? I don't know. Were they consistent? Maybe not. When Friday came, they were nowhere to be found.

They weren't the same folks that showed up to heckle Jesus at His trial. Those were a different sort of belief-avoiders. But the nominal believers were not there to support Him either. Where were the folks He had healed and given hope? Where were those He had fed. Certainly 5000 supporters would have made an impression on Pilate.

What does God want?

He wants us to take Him seriously. He wants us to glorify Him and be thankful to Him.

Only when we take God seriously, can we take ourselves seriously - or anything else for that matter. Paul says that without the cornerstone of acknowledgement of God as God, man became and we become futile thinkers, vain imaginers.

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding. (Proverbs 9:10)

Those who will not acknowledge what they already believe have no starting place for their thinking, no basis for understanding, and no hope of getting on the truth train. They have this big missing piece to the puzzle in their hands and because of their own stubborn refusal to employ it, nothing else connects.

Maybe it is pride - the kind that wants to do it all oneself and take all the credit for it.

Maybe it is boredom coupled with laziness. Unwilling to plumb the depths of God's reliable truth, they become restless, wanting the stimulation that comes from philosophical "innovation." There is enough newness buried in the depths of divine reality to keep us busy forever, but it requires going deeper and most of us are too lazy for that.

And gratitude require humility and that dethrones us from the seat of power over our own destinies. Mostly, we just don't want to bother with God.

Most people believe, at the very least, in a higher power, but they want that higher power to serve their own interests. They do not lay the foundation stone for their thinking and so, their thinking wanders off into a wilderness of ambiguity and abstraction.

First comes REFUSAL to worship and give thanks.

Second comes the FUTILITY of foolish thinking and vain imaginations. Having set genuine truth aside, we start making up our own. Relativism doesn't even begin to define what is going on.

We jump from the crowd of “welcomers” to the crowd of scoffers and finally sit in the seat of Pontius Pilate and snort, "What is truth," with only a hint of a question mark and a great bif exclamation as if to declare, "You and I both know that it does not exist."

That is futile, foolish thinking and it creates a vacuum into which we must pour our imaginations. We are not getting less religious in the world. We are getting more so. It is natural. we were made with a sensitivity to and longing for the spiritual dimension of life. when we don't find it at the center of the universe in the self-disclosure of God to humankind, we invent the wildest concocted scenarios to satisfy our hunger for more.

And we sink deeper and deeper into the abyss.

Finally comes DARKNESS. Our foolish hearts are darkened by the emptiness that comes through the absence of real truth. We were made to worship God. When that is missing, futile thinking will only titillate temporarily. When we've fabricated all that we can and nothing works, we delve into deep darkness and despair.

Paul spends the next page or so describing this darkness but we know what it is already. We need God and nothing else will satisfy. Not only do we need God, but we know that we need God.

Today, our challenge is not to create belief where there is none. If that is a problem, God can handle that. If we are willing, God will make Himself known to each of us. Our challenge is to take what we already know and believe and really believe it, to embrace what we have avoided and to follow the admonition of Proverbs 3:5-6:

"Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths."

When we stop trusting our foolishness and start trusting God as revealed in Jesus Christ, we will stop trying to invent obscure realities and will discover the basis for truth - a truth upon which we can build our lives.

As Jesus rode the donkey into Jerusalem that Sunday many centuries ago, He came as light so that the darkened souls of foolish men and women might see again the truth of God and acknowledge Him as God. It would take more than a ride to convince the hardened hearts of the people; it would take a cross, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection, and a living body of believers He would leave behind who one by one defy the downward spiral of futility by living out the gospel of grace and truth visibly and joyfully.

Come to Jesus. You are know different than anyone else in this respect: You like me, have rejected the truth you already know. Now is the time to return.