If God Gave Up on Us Entirely

Romans 1:24-32 – Therefore, God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and served created things rather than the Creator – who is forever praised. Amen. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these

What if God got so fed up with us that He gave up entirely and left us to our own devices? That is the natural next step to Paul's tracking of human history from the divine perspective. He shows us what has already happened as a result of the bogus exchange we have made, namely substituting truth with error, dvinity with humanity, and what is eternal and enduring with what is temporal and decaying.

That will be the subject of our next posting.

The Bogus Exchange - Romans 1:21-23

21 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. 22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, 23 And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.

When men, knowing God, refused to glorify God and be grateful, they made an exchange. There was something not-so-glamorous about the truth. Either it was too simple or too difficult. It was what it was and Adam and Eve were enticed by the possibility of knowing as much as God, being as wise as God, and usurping the place of God as the last word in everything. They wanted to be wise and professed themselves to be wise. As a result, they became fools.

The fool hath said in his heart there is no God. - Psalm 14:1a

It is not an intellectual decision to say, "There is no God," but a moral decision and a heart choice. The "fool" may actually know there is a God, but at the core of his being, he has made the choice to exclude God.

The result of this process is a bogus exchange. It is a decision to abandon the incorruptible, invisible, unchanging God of the universe for one of our own making. We can control gods we manufacture and theologies that we conjure up. We can tame them, rename them, sanitize them and compartmentalize them into manageable units.

And Heaven sees it as a tragic comedy.

"Look at the birds and four legged beasts they are calling gods," the angels must be saying ... and the God of glory weeps for He, devoid of all ego, simply desires to be known for who He is and afforded the His rightful place in the loving worship of the sons and daughters of man who He loves so much.

Our sophistication is mere sophism and folly.

There are three reasons why this exchange is bogus drawing from verses 21-23.

• It is DECEITFUL. It comes from futile thinking as verse 21 say..We dealt with that some in the last lesson. Futile thinking is circular at times and dead end thinking at others. It goes nowhere and accomplishes nothing because it simply isn't true.

• The fear of the Lord is the begininng of knowledge. To reject Him is to reject truth.
• We make the exchange knowingly and deliberately. We buy into a lie because we want what we want.
• When we get what we want we find that we haven't really gotten anything.
  

• It is DARK. Darkness exists where light is excluded. Paul says in verse 21 that our hearts have been darkened. Jesus explained it this way to Nicodemus:

And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. - John 3:19

• We really need to see darkness for what it is - dark.
• The only way to expose the darkness is to turn on the light.
• Jesus is the light of the world.

• It is DECAYING. The things we have chosen to worship in place of God are either mortal or are already dead. They have no life and give no life. we have been lulled into a stupor of self-pride, deliberate ignorance, ingratitude, and dark deception. It has produced all manner of emotional, intellectual, and relational repercussions that have damaged us spiritually and in every way imaginable. We are adrift in a sea of ambiguity because we have refused to worship God as God. That is our bottom-line problem.

What do we do?

• First we Wake Up. Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light. - Ephesians 5:14
• Then we Rise Up to worship Him as God and acknoweldge Him as Lord.
• Then we Give Up the praise and gratitude that is due Him which we have foolishly withheld.

To do this will require a measure of grace which Paul is yet to explain in Romans. But we know it. It has been revealed to us in the life and death of Jesus Christ. It has been made available by His resurrection and glorification. It is presented to us by the Holy Spirit. We receive it when we receive Him by faith. That grace will restore what was lost to us by willful disobedience and arrogant pride.

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.