I remember when I was a freshman in college
that I heard one of the professors make this comment. He said, "A man with an experience is never
at the mercy of a man with an argument." And I was impressed by that, although I really
didn't think deeply about it. And I thought back on that statement many,
many times thereafter and gradually came to the realization that the statement really
isn't all that sound, because even if we have an experience that is powerful and life transforming,
that experience is still open to interpretation and to evaluation and to analysis. And it's possible for anyone of us to have
a profound experience that we misunderstand profoundly. And, of course, the most significant experience
that I ever had in my life was the personal experience of my conversion to Christianity. My conversion to Christianity was one of those
Damascus Road affairs where it was sudden, it was dramatic, and in a sense catastrophic;
not catastrophic in the negative sense, but catastrophic in the sense that it created
a massive upheaval in my life. And I was so excited about my conversion to
Christ that I went immediately and told every friend of mine, in fact, every person that
I met. If I was riding a bus, I would talk to the
person who was sitting next to me because I couldn't imagine why anybody in the world
wouldn't be thrilled to hear about this exciting thing that I had discovered in my life. I really felt like a person who had discovered
the pearl of great price and thought that everyone had an equal admiration for that
sort of jewelry as I had recently acquired. But I soon discovered that in fact that was
not the case, and people in many cases simply didn't believe what I was saying, and others
found it necessary to explain for me my experience. They would criticize it. They would analyze it. They would deny it. And the argument that I heard, I think, more
often than any argument was this. They said, "R.C., don't you see what has happened
to you? What has happened to you is that you have
come to religion because you needed some kind of crutch to assist you through life. You needed what Karl Marx had called "the
opiate for the masses," some kind of bromide that would make the difficulties of your existence
more bearable. And so, out of some deep rooted psychological
need of one kind or another, you have entered into this religious experience." And they said, "Don't you realize that what
you've done is that you've allowed fantasy to replace reality, that you have experienced
a common error of the creative imagination of human intelligence that the psychologists
call 'wish projection,' because you want to believe in God, because you want to believe
that there's someone out there who will cleanse you of your sense of guilt that has tormented
you, who will deliver you from the fear of death, who will promise you significance and
meaning in your life and all of these things, that you have projected that wish into a reality
and have now therefore taken up the crutch of religion." I found that one of the most disturbing and
troubling questions that I had to grapple with as a young Christian. Because I knew that there was an element of
truth contained to a point, at least, in the enquiry. I couldn't deny that I wanted my faith to
be true. I couldn't deny that it would've been personally
devastating for me to discover the next week or the next day that I had put my faith in
Christ in vain. I could not deny that I wanted it to be true. I certainly wanted to know that I was forgiven
of my sins. I certainly wanted to know that there was
a heaven, I certainly wanted to believe that there was a God who said that my life was
meaningful and significant, and I couldn't deny those things. But there were plenty of friends of mine in
the academic world, particularly who had no problem denying those things. And I became a philosophy major and spent
most of my time reading the writings of skeptics, rather than of believers. And then later on when I was teaching at Temple
University in Philadelphia at the Conwell School of Theology, one of the elective courses
that I taught there was for upper level students, for graduating seniors. And I taught an elective in the philosophy
of atheism. And what I did in that course was I required
that the students read the primary sources, the primary documents of what are usually
considered to be the most formidable critics of historic theism and Christianity. I made them read, for example, the writings
of David Hume, of Ludwig Feuerbach, of Karl Marx, of Sigmund Freud, of Walter Kaufmann,
of Albert Camus, of Jean-Paul Sartre, of Bertrand Russell, and so on. And that it was a requirement of this course
that we would read the arguments of the atheists and then try to grapple with their particular
assertions. Now one of the things came through very loudly
and very clearly in that analysis. And that is that in virtually all of those
philosophers whom I have mentioned, at one point or another they came to the conclusion
that the reason why people believe in God is fundamentally driven by some psychological
need. That is, psychological need is the mother
of all religion. And I was interested particularly in nineteenth
century philosophical thought. The eighteenth century had witnessed what
was called in Germany the Aufklärung, "the Enlightenment," and one of the main precepts
of the European Enlightenment was the principle espoused by the French encyclopedias who said
that now with our advances in modern science, the God hypothesis is no longer a necessary
hypothesis to explain the origin of the cosmos or the beginnings of human life. Now we can look to other natural causes to
explain the universe without appealing to primitive forms of religion as a basis for
reality. By the middle of the 19th century, the climate
of philosophical skepticism was such that in the main, philosophers were not debating
the question, "Does God exist?" It was tacitly assumed by most of them as
a foregone conclusion that God does not exist. And so the question most of the able atheists
of the 19th century were addressing was this question, "Since there is no God, why is it
that man seems to be incurably homo religiosus?" Everywhere we go, whatever culture we examine,
we find evidence and manifestation of some form of religious expression and religious
belief that is deeply rooted in the culture. And it's not something that is limited to
or contained within the confines of primitive ignorant people. We find people profoundly intelligent who
are as vehement in their affirmation of the existence of God as the atheists were in their
denial. And they said, "How can we account for that?" Now let me pause for a second and see what
was already appearing is the beginning of a philosophy of phenomenology. Τhe question was not one of metaphysics,
"Is there a God?" We can't get up and climb up, up and beyond
the realm of physics and penetrate those questions. What we need to know is in the arena we can
investigate, this world. Not only can we investigate the forces of
physics in this world and of chemistry and of biology, we can also examine anthropology. We can examine people. And one of the things we can do is that we
can see that people here, one of the phenomenon that we see is that they tend to be religious. So we ask, "Why?" We need to account for it. Just as a scientist in his laboratory has
to give some kind of sufficient or efficient causal explanation for the data that he examines,
so these historians of thought were trying to come up with a causal explanation for the
advent of religion. And ladies and gentleman, virtually every
one of these people came up with some explanation rooted and grounded in psychology. Feuerbach, you know, he noticed, for example
that no matter what culture he examined the cultural expressions of their religion tended
to depict gods that looked like mirror images of the people themselves. That if they went to an aborigine native in
Australia, their deity looked like an Australian aborigine who rode around in a canoe. If they went to an outpost in Alaska, they
would find that their deity was described to look like an Eskimo. And it seems that the people began to create
God in their own image, rather than understand themselves being created in God's image. And so Feuerbach said all that God is in our
concept is a projection of human characteristics elevated to the super or to nth degree, sort
of as a cosmic superman. We understand power as a human trait. We just absolutize that and we say, "God is
omnipotent, all-powerful." We understand that human beings are capable
of knowledge. They have science. We raise that to the nth degree and say, "God
is a being who is omniscient. He has all knowledge," and so on. Karl Marx, as you well know, sought an economic
explanation for the advent of religion. He said that the history of mankind is basically
the history of the conflict of economic clashes between economic groups and so on. And he says in any world, in any society,
those who control the wealth will always be in a minority and the poor will always be
in a majority. And the problem that the wealthy have is simple,
"How are we going to control the masses? How are going to stop the masses from rising
up in rebellion, attacking us and taking the wealth and distributing it equally among themselves?" And Marx says the way, the twofold way that
the wealthy control the masses are these. On the one hand, the wealthy control the legislation
so that Lady Justice removes her blindfold, according to Marx, and the law begins to reflect
the vested interest of the ruling classes. The law will discriminate against certain
groups who are not empowered. He said that will happen. He said but the most important tool that the
owner has to control the slave, that the rich have to control the poor, is the tool of religion. Because what religion does is that it promises
to the poor a better life in heaven, on the other side of the Jordan. If they'd be good slaves now and behave themselves
on the plantation, then someday by and by, you know, "Swing down, sweet chariot," you
know how that goes. And they're going to get carried away home
to the other side of Jordan and everything's going to be great. But in the meantime, they have to be humble
and they have to work and they have to mind their own business and they have to behave
themselves, while the rich man enjoys all of the wealth here and now. You put them to sleep with drugs of religion. That's the theory. Freud, of course, had more than one explanation,
but his basic explanation was that man is afraid of nature because we're vulnerable
to nature. We can be harmed or killed by the tornado,
by the fire, by the flood, by disease, and you can't negotiate with these forces, and
so what we do is that we begin to personalize impersonal forces and begin to believe that
there's a God that resides in the fire and a God resides in the flood. And we have a God for this and a God for that,
and if we pray to those gods, appease those gods, give homage to those gods, maybe they
will treat us kindly and remove the threat of nature from us. Now, again, I don't have time in this brief
period to canvas the basic theses here of these different philosophers. But the rudimentary principle is religion
is the invention that comes out of some deep rooted psychological need. I don't need to labor that anymore, do I? I think we've all heard it enough. And I want to say this in response. When somebody is accused of a crime in our
criminal justice system, it is the task of the prosecution to prove the charges against
the accused. And part of the procedure in police work and
so on is to discover motive, means, and opportunity. If a person can establish that they had no
possible opportunity or no possible means to commit the crime, it's very difficult to
prove the crime against them, isn't it? But just because we prove that somebody has
the motive, the means, and the opportunity to commit a crime does not mean that the person
is guilty. We may be able to show, for example, if one
person is murdered, we may be able to find fifty different people that had a motive to
kill that person, had the opportunity to kill that person, and had the wherewithal to do
it. You need more than that to convict of the
crime. I hope we understand that. Now, I have no quarrel with Freud or Marx
or Feuerbach or Sartre or Kaufmann or any of this in terms of their making it very clear
that human beings indeed do have the capacity to invent religion. I think we have to admit that freely. We have brains. We have the ability to project ideas. We have the ability to project wishes. We have the ability to be engaged in fantasy. We know that. And I think that it's theoretically possible,
if there is no God, I think it's possible that people could invent one. We have the motive. We have the means. We have the opportunity. I don't think we'd invent the God of Scripture. I don't think we'd invent a God who is holy. I don't think we'd invent a God who demands
perfect obedience to Him with the threat of everlasting torment if we fail in that, but
that's another story. But I'm saying, I'm granting at the outset
that we do have a psychological motive to invent God. But when I'm pleading for in this brief message
this evening is to understand two things. That just because man has the ability to invent
God does not mean that that's how the idea of God came about. It's also more than possible that the reason
why the world is incurably religious is because there is a God who has so clearly and manifestly
demonstrated His existence to mankind that knowledge of Him is virtually inescapable. That's another alternative explanation. But more important to the point right now
is that we have to say to our atheist friends, "Hold the phone a minute. I'm willing to grant to you that I have a
vested interest in believing in God. Are you willing to grant to me that there
are also powerful psychological motives that many people have to deny the existence of
God?" But the worst news that some people I know
could ever discover is that there's a God who will hold them accountable for their lives,
because if there is a bias, the bias can be in any other direction. There's a strong reason why I wouldn't want
God to exist, namely that if I have sinned. If God exists, then I understand that I am
guilty before Him and that I am going to be held ultimately accountable. And if that's the way, if I am in a relationship
to God, that is one of alienation and estrangement and disobedience, then I hope with all of
my heart and soul that He doesn't exist. Do we understand that? And now, what I am trying to say is the question
of the existence of God can never be resolved on the basis of our psychology. That's a question that we have to deal with
on other grounds, on grounds of objective philosophical argument, not on a basis of
what my psychological disposition is or what your psychological disposition is. I have to say at the outset, "Yes, I want
there to be a God, and if you're going to be honest with me, tell me. And maybe you're saying to me, "Well, I do
too, R.C. Boy, I really want to believe it. Please persuade me of it." You know, and if that's your disposition,
put it on the table. If your disposition is, "Why, that's the last
thing I hope is true." But the point is nobody is neutral about this
question. I've never met somebody that was neutral,
because there is no neutrality when it comes to moral responsibility ultimately. And you know what I've noticed in my debates
with atheists is that I almost never meet somebody who said, "Oh! How I wish that were true!" And that surprises me because I can't imagine
why any human being wouldn't want it to be true that there's a God who was willing to
forgive them of every sin that they've ever committed, a God that will give them life
that will go forever, a God that will guarantee to them that everything that takes place in
their existence is significant and there's no such thing as futility in your labor. Maybe what it is people have is that they're
afraid to believe it because it's too good to be true. I mean they have been disappointed so many
times in their lives by believing things that didn't come to pass as they had hoped, but
they're almost saying, "Hey, you know I don't dare believe that." But usually what I'm engaged with in discussions
with atheists is with a spirit of hostility and people seem to be saying, "Man, that's
bad news. Don't talk to me about the existence of God." Now, long before Freud and Marx and Feuerbach
and these people ever speculated on the question of the psychology of theism, the Apostle Paul
centuries ago set forth in his philosophical framework a psychology of atheism. The New Testament gives a rational explanation
for why there might be, in fact, is a negative bias deeply rooted in the human heart against
the existence of God. And again I would like to take a few minutes
to look at that treatment, which is well known as it is found in the first chapter of Paul's
letter to the Romans. Beginning in chapter 1 verse 18 we read this
report. "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven
against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness." Now, let me just quickly comment on this introductory
verse to this segment of the epistle. First of all, the word that the Apostle uses
here that is translated "wrath" is the word orgē. It's one of the words in the Greek language
that can be translated "anger," or "wrath." We get a different English word from it. You might be able to guess what word that
is. It's the word "orgy." Now, we don't think of orgies in terms of
anger, do we? We use the term "orgy" to describe an unrestrained,
unrestricted, unbridled involvement or manifestation of sensuality and sex and partying and all
the rest, an orgy. A liberation of human passion without restraint. The point of contact linguistically between
the English word "orgy and the Greek word orgē, that is the word for "wrath" has to
do with the expression of passion, unbridled passion. The link is this. What the Apostle is saying here is not only
that God's experiencing wrath about something. He's not saying that God is merely irritated
or annoyed or is simply angry, but really the force of this teaching is that God is
furious, that God in heaven is enraged about something. And I know that's difficult for us to conceive
of because we've been brainwashed, if you will, for a couple of hundred years about
the character of God, so much so that in twentieth century American culture that we think that
it's unthinkable that that the deity would even be capable of being mildly displeased
about anything. We have so defanged God and turned Him into
a cosmic Mr. Rogers, you know. "What a wonderful day in the neighborhood,"
you know, "I love you just exactly and precisely as you are." But the God of Scripture is a God who's capable
of being angry when human beings violate other human beings, and when human beings trample
truth, and when human beings desecrate that which is holy, God is angry. And so Paul begins this, and incidentally,
Paul is beginning this epistle, which is his monumental work, his magnum opus on the grace
of God if you read the rest of the epistle. But basically, what the Apostle was trying
to do is show here that you can't understand grace as grace until you understand first
of all the reality of God's wrath. And so he says the wrath of God is revealed
from heaven against what? I remember early on in the twentieth century,
some of the existential theologians reacted against the maudlin sentimentality of nineteenth
century theology that had stripped God of any capacity for anger and thence got so intoxicated
with their rediscovery of the wrath of God that they said not only is God's wrath real,
but at times it's irrational, that there's a demonic element to God Himself. There's a shadow side to God's personality,
almost a Jekyll and Hyde thing, yin and yang, good and evil within God Himself, and He has
these temper tantrums. Now the idea of an irrational eruption of
anger in God Himself would indicate God's becoming violently angry with no just cause,
arbitrary wrath, flying off the handle for no good reason. But that's not what Paul is talking about. He says the wrath of God is revealed from
heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. There is a reason for his anger. It's a twofold reason. This is really a hendiadys, a Greek structure
here in a language which simply means that two different words are used to point to one
particular problem. What Paul is saying, get this, think carefully,
is that God is because of a particular sin that God regards as both being unjust and
irreligious. It's unrighteous and ungodly. It's not only unethical, but it is irreverent
and blasphemous. There's one sin that Paul has in view here. Listen to what it is, "who suppress the truth
in unrighteousness." If you want to know what ignites the fury
of God, it is the suppression of His revealed truth. My translation at least uses the term "suppress." Some of you have different translations and
other translations that I've read of that text in Romans say, "that some who hold the
truth in unrighteousness," I've read, "repress the truth." I've read, "hinder the truth." I've read, "stifle the truth." The verb is the verb that comes from the Greek
word katakein, which means "to hold down against resistance." It's the term that is used in the New Testament
when the Apostles are held against their will in prison. They're incarcerated. The image that the verb suggests is this,
if there were a giant spring with a heavy thick coil, and for me to compress that spring,
I would have to press down upon it on all my might. But the only way I can keep the spring down
is if I kept pressing down on it, because the moment I release the pressure, the spring
would come back up, katakein. It has a has a positive meaning. When Paul admonishes his disciple Timothy
and says to him, "Hold fast that which you received." It's the same verb. "Hang on to it. Don't let it go. Exert all the power you can to keep it in
your grasp." That's the force of this verb katakein. But again, Paul says that God is angry because
people are suppressing unrighteously, immorally, unethically some kind of truth. What kind of truth? Is it some kind of political conspiracy that's
being covered up? Is this Watergate that we're talking about
in the first century? No, if you excuse the pun, it's Heavengate
that is being covered up because Paul goes on and specifies what he's just spoken of
in general terms previously to this. He says, "because that which is known about
God is evident within them, for God made it evident to them." He's talking about the knowledge of God. What the Apostle is saying is that God is
angry because human beings are suppressing a knowledge of God, a knowledge that God Himself
has revealed to the world. And what he says here again in verse 19, "because
that which is known about God is evident within them for God made it evident to them." And I want us to understand here that the
word that is translated in my version by the English word "evident" is the word phoneros,
which in Latin is the word manifestum. That is, this knowledge of God of which the
Apostle is speaking is not some vague, esoteric, arcane, secret, hidden knowledge that only
some Gnostic elitist with a super intelligent capacity could ever discern, but rather it
is the knowledge of God Himself that is manifest, that is clear and that it is clear to the
whole world. It's that same knowledge that Scripture elsewhere
says that "The heavens declare the glory of God. The firmament shows forth His handiwork." I was listening to a talk show one night,
radio talk show, where they had an atheist philosopher, they had a Roman Catholic Jesuit
theologian and a Protestant theologian. And they were debating arguments for the existence
of God. And they were getting into all kinds of sophisticated
debates about the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, and so on. And then they started receiving phone calls. And they got a call from a woman who was obviously
uneducated and unsophisticated, and she used broken grammar and poor grammar to express
her protest, "I don't know what's wrong with you'uns people. Why don't you just go outside and open your
eyes?" You know, she was saying, "It's clear. It's manifest. How can you miss it?" People say to me, they say, "Sproul, do you
think you can prove the existence of God?" I say, "What's the greatest of ease." They say, "Give me some evidence." I take my shoe off. I say, "Look at that! That proves conclusively, compellingly, demonstratively
the eternal existence of Almighty God. "Oh," they say, "you mean you're giving probable
evidence." "No! I'm giving certainty." They say, "Why?" I said, "If it exists. If you see your shoe here, if there's anything
here that's a shoe, then something exists necessarily." Something has the power of existence in and
of itself eternally or the simplest child can understand nothing could possibly exist
now, because if there was ever a time when there was nothing this is a manifest impossibility. And if anything exists, something has to have
the power of being in it, what could be more simple than have the power of being in itself
then nothing could be. See? You don't even need the heavens to declare
that. Just look at your shoe. But then that's another story. But in any case, verse 20 makes the indictment
all the more the severe. "For since the creation of the world his invisible
attributes, his eternal power," that's just what I was talking about, "his eternal power,
his divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made. So that they are without excuse." Now, there's a couple of things that I want
you to notice about this text. Since the Kantian watershed in philosophy,
those who are students of Western thought know that Immanuel Kant said we can no longer
be persuaded by the traditional arguments for the existence of God because ultimately
they rest on reasoning somehow from this world to the metaphysical realm. And Kant said you can't reason from the seen
to the unseen. If Kant's right, Paul's obviously wrong. If Paul's right, then Kant is obviously wrong,
because what Paul is saying here is that the invisible things of God, things you can't
see, are made known by means of, through the medium of, those things that are made, those
things that are seen. There's a fundamental dispute there. You're going to have to check for yourself
to see who's more cogent, Paul or Kant. And I beg my Christian fellow philosophers
to stop defending Kant and start defending Paul on this point. But in any case, Paul says that the invisible
attriibutes of God, namely His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen and
understood through, by means of, what has been made so that they are without excuse. See, this is not simply an amoral, intellectual
question. The question of your affirmation or denial
of the existence of God is a matter of consummate moral culpability. What excuse is the Apostle pulling away from
the atheist here? The one excuse that every atheist, that every
agnostic will want to use on the final day of judgment is the excuse of ignorance. "God, I didn't know You were there. If I just would've known I would've believed
You. I would've followed you. I would've obeyed you. What's worse than hardcore atheism is allegedly
softcore atheism, which goes under the guise of agnosticism. The agnostic says, "I'm not going to say,
'There is no God. I just simply don't know whether there's a
God because I don't think that there's sufficient evidence to come to a conclusion one way or
the other.'" That terrifies me when I hear somebody say
that. I say, "Because what you're saying now is
not only you're not willing to affirm the existence of God, but you are pinning the
blame of that unwillingness on God Himself for not giving you sufficient information." Be careful here. You are adding insult to injury. If this is true then what it is saying here
is that God has so clearly, clearly manifested Himself ever since the creation of the world
through everything that is made that you can never use ignorance as an excuse before God. What Paul is saying is that people claim ignorance
as an excuse, but it is a fraudulent claim. I've seen real hostility emerge when with,
in discussions with people who are hostile to Christianity and we discuss these matters. I say, "You're not responsible to me to believe
this. You may be responsible to God to believe this,
but you're not responsible to me to believe it. You don't have anything to fear from me. I'm not going to persecute you or prosecute
you or try to bring any harm or injury to you about these things. But what I'm reading here is that in the final
analysis, the affirmation of the existence of God is not an intellectual question; it's
a moral one. And if you refuse to affirm the existence
of God, you are in moral difficulty with the God you refuse to affirm if Paul is telling
the truth." Now here's the crowning crushing indictment,
verse 21. "For even though they knew God, they did not
honor him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations and their
foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools." Now notice what he says here, that the fundamental
sin of the human race, the most basic crime that all of us have committed against God,
that at the very time we knew of His existence, we refused to honor Him as God. We refused to give proper gratitude to our
Creator. You see, the problem with the atheist, according
to Paul, is that it's not that the atheist doesn't know God. The problem is he refuses to acknowledge what
he knows to be true, and that is dishonest. And I'll say this to people when I'm debating
the question of the existence of God, I say, "Look, I'll debate this with you as long as
you want to debate, and I'll try to answer as many questions I possibly can, but I want
to be honest with you. I want you to know I don't trust you. I think you're lying to me. You're telling me you don't believe that there's
a God. I don't believe that. I think you know very well there's a God. And you're trying as hard as you can to escape
that knowledge." That's what I say to them. And it makes them furious in most cases. But I have to say that because that's what
the New Testament declares. Paul's not pulling any punches here. He goes on to say, and here's where the psychology
comes in. "Professing themselves to be wise, they became
fools, and they exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form
of corruptible man, of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures." Let me just say this, in verse 25, "they exchanged
the truth of God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator,
who is blessed forever." Ladies and gentlemen, what man usually does
with the revelation of God is not turn it into atheism. Our normal reaction to God's divine revelation
in nature is to turn it into religion, but a religion of idolatry, where we worship a
creature rather than the Creator, and we can do it in the Christian church. When we talk about the sovereignty of God
and we talk about the holiness of God, and people respond say to me, "I don't believe
that stuff, my God's a loving God" and all that stuff, I say, "Are you sure your God
isn't an idol?" Your religion, we all have a basic propensity
towards idolatry. That's where we all are coming from. In many views of psychoanalysis, psychiatrists
and psychologists are interested in traumatic experiences. If we would take these categories that Paul
has used here in Romans and translate them into modern psychological nomenclature, here
is what it would look like. In many views of psychoanalysis, psychiatrists
and psychologists are interested in traumatic experiences and that the damage they do to
us unconsciously to our psyche. There's constant probing into the secrets
of our past to see where we experienced trauma as children and how that baggage can be carried
through our entire lives. For example, I may go to, I may go to see
a psychiatrist or a psychologist and I'm greatly distressed about something. And he begins to take my family history, and
he, he not only listens to the words that I say, ladies and gentlemen, he pays attention
to my nonverbal communication. He may ask me about my dreams. He may ask me to take some Rorschach inkblot
test, you know, like the guy that went to the psychiatrist and he gave him all these
inkblot tests and every time the guy saw an inkblot, he gave some erotic sexual explanation
and finally when it was all done, you know, the psychiatrist said, "I can see you're really
hung up on sexual imagery." And he said, "Why do you say that?" He said, "Because every one of these things
you interpreted in a sexual manner." And the guy said, "Well, you're the one who
showed me all the dirty pictures." [Laughter from audience with speaker] But, we understand that we can communicate
in other ways besides words. And if that psychiatrist was taking my history
and he says, "How do you get along with your mother?" And I say, "Mother? I always got along great with mother. My mother and I were terrific. I love mother with all of my heart." And every time I say, "Mother," I do that,
he's reading my body language is saying something exactly the opposite from my words. And the idea with repression is this, that
I have a tendency as a human being, if I have a scary experience, an unpleasant experience,
a traumatic experience, to try to take the memory of that and bury it as deep as possible
into my subconscious. But what modern psychiatry understands is
that no matter how much I seek to hold it down, to hinder it, to incarcerate it, to
suppress it or to repress it, that repressed knowledge does not annihilate the memory. It may not be in the conscious mind, but it's
there. And like Freud used to say, it's like if you've
expelled a boy from class, from school, and once you send him out of the classroom, he
runs around out in the playground. He picks up pebbles and he comes out and starts
throwing little stones at the window to let everybody know he's still out there. Well, those traumatic memories that we have
are like the little boy. They keep throwing stones up, and we start
getting, you know, we get these uncomfortable symptoms from the past that we're not aware
why. So because repressed knowledge seeks to come
back to the surface, but when it comes up, ladies and gentlemen, it comes up disguised. It will come out in a dream, in a strange
symbol, in a strange tic or gesture because it is too scary to come out in the form it
went in. And so what we do is that we bring it back
out, according to modern psychiatry, in a substituted form that is less threatening. We exchange the original idea for a counterfeit. This is exactly what the Apostle Paul is saying
is the fundamental psychology of the human race with respect to God, that the scariest
thing to a sinful person in all of the world is the holiness of God. And when God reveals His righteousness and
His holiness to us that is so scary to us that what we do is that we bury it as deeply
as we possibly can in the depths of our psyche, but it cannot be destroyed. And there's a relationship between katakein
in verse 18 and in the word metallassō in verse 25, which means "exchange." We repress, then we exchange. We exchange the truth of God for a lie. We exchange the majesty of God for an idol. We exchange the law of God for human religion
or for the denial of God, because we have a deep psychological bias against a God who
is holy. I remember reading a sermon by Jonathan Edwards
where he had titled it Man, Naturally God's Enemy. He said there were certain things about God
that men don't like. God is holy. He is all powerful, and we don't like someone
who is so holy, but also be more powerful than we are. And he goes on to some other reasons for that,
and then he says the thing we also hate is that God is immutable. And I thought, "Why? Why does that bother us that God is immutable?" Because, Edwards says, you know, if I find
a holy man, I may be able to bribe him and corrupt him and make him just like me. If I find a powerful man, a holy man who is
powerful, he can get old and die, but God doesn't get old and die. And God is incorruptible. Not only is He holy now, but He's holy forever. He's never going to negotiate it. We have no hope that He'll ever negotiate
it and that terrifies us. So the bottom line is if we're going to debate
the existence of God, I think it would be wise to do it on grounds other than the psychological
desirability or undesirability of Him because if we’re talking about Yahweh, the God of
Israel, we're talking about a God that people have every driving passion to deny.
