The Wrath of God Revealed

The Wrath of God Revealed

Romans 1:18-32

Men Are without Excuse

In verses 18-20 of Chapter 1, Paul says that men are without excuse. I think he is wrong in this. The men and women that I deal with on a day today basis have many excuses. There is an excuse for why my car is not ready when it was promised, for why I was given soup when I ordered salad, why the contracted task was not completed even though the money was spent, and so on. I never want to hear them, because they are never helpful, and they often insinuate that the whole thing was my fault in the fist place. But Paul was wrong; men (and women) have plenty of excuses.

What he meant, of course, was that we have no legitimate excuse, and I would be with him there, because I have certainly not heard one lately, but what he says is astounding. He says that the divine nature of God is revealed through creation; the invisible nature of God is revealed through the visible nature. This kind of talk must have upset Paul’s traditional Jewish friends, who believed that God revealed himself through the prophets, and were just getting used to the idea that he had revealed himself through a son. We too think we have a handle on God’s revelation. We tend to think that it is a thing of the past, all completely recorded for us in the Bible. In fact, the last book of the Bible is called “Revelation” and that seems to help neatly sum it up for us. Paul tells us that God uses every means to reveal himself, and his revelation is his choosing, not ours.

The Truth and the Lie

In verses 21-25, Paul continues with his claim that the Truth of God was available to men, but goes further to say that they exchanged it for a lie; they claimed to be wise, but they became fools. Among men, Westerners in particular, the Greeks had just cause to call themselves wise. They were not all great philosophers, but they valued thought, and the value they placed on it gave rise to great thinkers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

But two things happened. The first is common, sordid tale of the failure of society. It is distressing to think about, but we can look throughout history and see how easily society fails under stress. It fails when times are hard and people become scared, angry savages. It fails when things go too well and people become too lazy to care. Greco-Roman society expanded at an amazing rate, and the rich people became amazingly rich. They began to believe that acquiring and having were what life was all about, and they were very good at it, so they would be fine. But it was a lie, and it did not last very long.

The second thing that happened was that the great thinkers quickly discovered what fools we all are, although maybe they did not quite see it that way. Plato is credited with the first description of our limits of understanding. Is the table I see before me real, or is it an example of “tableness”, the true reality? Do you and I experience the table in the same way? How can we know? In our own time we have had Heisenberg, who has explored the limits of what we can know about the physical world, and Gödel, who has demonstrated the limits of logical and philosophical systems.

If these philosophers found limits to what they could explore, did they abandon them and look elsewhere for answers? No, they were proud of their findings; and I suppose justifiably so. As a tool, science is powerful, it makes crops grow where there were none, it brings clean water into peoples homes, and it saves lives. But as a belief system, it is a lie.

Like the Greeks, we think we are smart, we think we are rich, and we think we are strong. In the ways of the world, these words are just lies. You are never smart enough, or rich enough, or strong enough.

God Gave Them Over

The final verses of the chapter, verses 26-32, contain a laundry-list of sin and wickedness. Paul begins (even in verses 24) with sexual immorality, possibly because it was a class of sin for which the Greeks were well known, and which the Romans had assimilated along with the rest of Greek culture, but the rest of the list seems to be everything Paul can think of off the top of his head. In fact, he says “they have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity.”

Paul says this happens to us as a direct result of exchanging the Truth of God for our own lies. Further, Paul says of these unnamed men “God gave them over.” What does that mean? Why would God give anyone over?

The single word used here is used in many other places in the New Testament. Whenever the King James uses the word “betray” in reference to the Son of Man, it is translating this same word. The one who would betray him would “give him over” to those who had him crucified. It is also used, for example, in the parable of the unmerciful servant, when the master gives him over to the jailer (Matthew 18:32-34).

Paul says that man rejected God to pursue our own pathetic, unhealthy desires and in judgment, God has given us over to those desires.

The Wrath of God Revealed

In the first verse of this section (verses 18) Paul says the wrath of God is being revealed. Right away, there are problems. How can a loving God even have wrath? How can an all-powerful, loving God take out his wrath on his helpless creation?

We know from science that cold is not a force. There is energy in heat, but not in cold; cold is the absence of heat. But, if we were to switch off the sun, it would get very cold; the cold seem like a terrible, unconquerable force. If we switched off the sun by choice, we would be choosing our own death.

Paul has already established (in verses 16-17) the life-giving power of the gospel of God’s love. In these verses, Paul says we have control of the switch.