And we're going to be looking at a somewhat
familiar portion of Scripture to anyone who is a student of the Bible. Romans chapter 1, beginning in verse 18 and
running through the end of this chapter. I'm going to read just the first verse to
set the stage for the unfolding of this profound truth. Romans 1:18, "For the wrath of God is revealed
from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness." This section is about the wrath of God. Admittedly not a popular subject, certainly
not a popular subject in the world and not even a popular subject in the church. But an absolutely critical and central subject
to any understanding of the gospel, the wrath of God. Now there are a number of different aspects
to the wrath of God. There is what we could call eternal wrath
because it is the punishment that God brings upon unbelieving sinners forever in hell...that's
eternal wrath. And the Bible speaks often of that. There is also eschatological wrath, that is
the wrath of God that is released at the end of the world described by some of the Old
Testament prophets, described by Jesus Christ Himself in the Olivet Discourse and clearly
laid out for us in the book of Revelation. Eschatological wrath, that aspect of God's
wrath that is released at the end of the world. There is also what we could call cataclysmic
wrath, like a tsunami, a volcano, a hurricane, an earthquake, a plane flying in to the Twin
Towers resulting in thousands of death...cataclysms happen in this world. And they are a reflection of the judgment
of God. There is also what you could call consequential
wrath. Consequential wrath is the sowing and reaping
wrath, you live a certain kind of life and you set in motion certain forces that will
produce judgment. But there is one other kind of wrath and that
is the wrath that is presented in this passage and it is the wrath of abandonment. It is the wrath of abandonment. It is that wrath exhibited by God when He
turns His back on a society. One of the most tragic scenes on the pages
of Scripture would provide a good illustration of it. It is a scene that involves the strongest
man who ever lived, the mighty Samson. He is the original Superman, and a real one. According to Judges 16 verses 18 to 21 we
read this, "When Delilah saw that he had told her all that was in his heart, she sent and
called the lords of the Philistines saying, "Come up once more for he has told me all
that was in his heart." Then the lords of the Philistines came up
to her and brought the money in their hands and she made him sleep on her knees and looked
for a man and had him shave off the seven locks of his hair. Then she began to inflict him and his strength
left him and she said, "The Philistines are upon you, Samson." And he awoke from his sleep and said, "I will
go out as at other times and shake myself free." And then this, "But he did not know that the
Lord had departed from him. And then the Philistines seized him and gouged
out his eyes and they brought him down to Gaza and bound him with bronze chains and
he was a grinder in the prison, a job for a mule." Because of his sin, the Lord left him. The judgment of abandonment. To the sons of Israel, God said in Judges
10, "You have forsaken me and served other gods, therefore I will deliver you no more. Go and cry out to the gods which you have
chosen, let them deliver you in the time of your distress." God is saying I'm done with you. In Proverbs chapter 1 verses 24 to 31 we find
a similar sentiment. "Because I called and you refused, I stretched
out My hand and no one paid attention and you neglected all My counsel and did not want
My reproof, I will even laugh at your calamity. I will mock when your dread comes, when your
dread comes like a storm and your calamity comes on like a whirlwind, when distress and
anguish come on you, then they will call on Me but I will not answer. They will seek Me diligently but they shall
not find Me. Because they hated knowledge and did not choose
the fear of the Lord. They would not accept My counsel, they spurned
all My reproof. So they shall eat of the fruit of their own
way and be satiated with their own devices." In Hosea 4:17 it is recorded that God said,
"Ephraim is joined unto idols, let him alone." There comes a time when God abandons men. God comes to a point where He lets a people
go, lets them go to the consequences of their own sinful choices. They will not accept His counsel, they spurn
all His reproof, as Proverbs says, so they eat the fruit of their own choices and they
have to be satisfied with the devices they have chosen. Of the Pharisees Jesus said, "Let them alone,
they are blind leaders of the blind," Matthew 15:14, the most terrifying words, "Let them
alone." It's a frightening thing to think about that. Frightening thing to think that you might
be abandoned by God, that the opportunity for salvation is past, that the day of grace
is over. The passages that I read to you relate to
an individual in the case of Samson. But for the most part, they relate to a group
such as the Pharisees or to a nation, such as Israel. And I think it's very relevant to talk about
this because I'm going to try to show you from this passage tonight that it's pretty
convincing that God has abandoned our nation. God has abandoned America to the effects of
its sinful choices. Oh, this isn't the first nation that it's
happened to, this is the story of history. Acts 14:16, the Apostle Paul said, "In the
generations gone by, He...God...permitted all the nations to go their own way." This is the story of history. All the nations of history go their own way. So like the nations of old, like the nations
past, we follow the same cycle of having the truth, rejecting the truth and being abandoned
by God. C.S. Lewis was writing in his book, The Problem
of Painand he wrote this, "The lost enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded
and are therefore self-enslaved." God will abandon sinners to their own choices
and the consequences of those choices. And just what is this abandoning act on God's
part, it is the removal of restraining grace. It is when God lets go and turns a society
over to its own sinful freedoms and the results of those freedoms. No Scripture more directly confronts this
abandonment and its consequences than Romans 1 does. Here is the most graphic and the most comprehensive
discussion of what it means to be abandoned by God and it is the best passage that I know
of to explain the moral chaos and the confusion that we experience in our own nation at this
very time. God's wrath is already at work in our culture. We're not waiting for it, we are currently
experiencing it. Drop down to verse 24 and here is the defining
section on what it means to be abandoned by God. Verse 24, "God gave them over." Verse 26, "God gave them over." Verse 28, the middle of the verse, "God gave
them over." Three times you have the statement, "God gave
them over." This term paradidomi in the Greek can have
a judicial sense. It can be used of a judgment made on a criminal
who was then handed over for punishment. Each of these phrases expresses the fact that
the wrath of God has acted judicially to sentence sinners. It is God officially giving them over. It is God letting them go to the uninterrupted
cause and effect their sinful choices produce. When this judgment falls, there is a depriving
of restraining grace and sin runs rampant through a society. Sin is both the cause of this and the effect
and the next cause and the next effect as it goes on and on and on. Sin is the reason and sin is the result. Sin is the cause and sin is the consequence. Now I want you to notice the wrath of abandonment
in its progression. This will help you to understand why I say
we're experiencing it not only in America but in the world, and particularly in the
western world today. Look at verse 24, "When the wrath of abandonment
goes into action, this wrath which is defined for us as God giving them over follows three
steps. It follows three sequential steps. You notice therefore, and that, of course,
connects it to the prior passage, the prior passage has as its leading statement, "The
wrath of God is revealed from heaven." And then there are a number of statements
about why the wrath of God is revealed, because the truth us suppressed, because that which
is known of God is rejected, etc., etc. and then in verse 24 you come back to what that
wrath is, "Therefore God gave them over." "And first of all, God gave them over in the
lusts of their hearts to impurity that their bodies might be dishonored among them." The first indication in a society of the wrath
of abandonment is sexual immorality...sexual immorality. When a society becomes pornographic, when
the general character of a society can be seen to be immoral, this wrath is in effect. When man is abandoned by God, when a society
is abandoned by God, it operates only out of the passions of its own impure heart. It operates in the lusts of the heart, leading
to impurity. The heart is wretched, the heart is immoral
and the body follows. So you see that in verse 24. First the lusts dominate the heart, leading
to impurity and the bodies follow in most dishonorable ways. The heart is wicked and unrestrained and the
body follows and you have a pornographic culture. We can go back pretty readily in our own country
to the sexual revolution connected to the hippie movement, connected to the Playboy
empire beginning and since then this society has become increasingly pornographic until
even the Internet is dominated by millions and millions of immoral pornographic websites
to feed the insatiable lusts that dominate our culture. This leads to the smashing and crushing of
marriage. This leads to horrific and horrendous abuse
of children, pedophilia, all kinds of child abuse, all kinds of pornography involving
children that continues to run rampant a wild pace because restraining grace has been removed. And sex runs rampant, marriage becomes a minor
option as people engage in immoral behavior readily and constantly without commitment. That's just step one. So you look at a society and ask, is it driven
by sexual immorality? Is it filled with lust in the heart leading
to impurity and the body follows in dishonorable behavior? The answer for our own world and our own society
is yes. And it would be very hard to imagine one nation
in this media saturated western world in which we live, it would be hard to understand one
nation going this way without dragging all of the world exposed to its culture through
the media with it. And so, it's not just a national issue, it's
a world issue. But that's just step one. Step two is in verse 26. "For this reason God gave them over...here's
the second step...to degrading passions." Now we're not just talking about passions,
we've added degrading. We're going down. There is a greater debauchery here. The degrading passions can be defined as gross
affections, vile desires, perversion, or even inversion. And here it is to find. "Their women exchanged the natural function
for that which is unnatural." Plain and simple, Lesbianism, homosexuality. And the Holy Spirit first in this passage
refers to the degradation of women because they are usually the last to be affected in
the decay of morals because they have a mothering instinct and a protective instinct over their
own children but when the wrath of abandonment is in force, even the women fall to the degrading
passions. And in our culture the Lesbian movement has
been vocal and relentless and passionate and fierce and even violent. Proof that absolutely all virtue is gone when
motherhood, the highest, normal human virtuous relationship is abandoned and the people who
do it are elevated as cultural icons. All virtue is gone when homosexuality invades
the female gender. And verse 27 adds, "In the same way, also
the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward
one another...men with men, committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the
due penalty of their error." And there's a little slip in of the consequential
wrath. What is the due penalty of their error? That they receive venereal disease, AIDS. That's going to escalate, too, in this wrath
of abandonment. There is also going to be the consequential
wrath of sinful choices leading to deadly diseases. Homosexuality is the second step. So look at a society. When you see a society that is pornographic,
that is in to sexual immorality, fornication, adultery as a way of life, as a dominant way
of life, which is not only in existence but approved and exalted in every way in the media,
you know the wrath of abandonment is in operation. And then when a society also exalts homosexuality,
lesbianism and male homosexuality, or sodomy, you know that it is even sinking deeper. But there's a third step and the third step
is in verse 28. "Just as they did not see fit to acknowledge
God any longer...here's the third step...God gave them over to a depraved mind." First the heart is rotten and the body follows,
and then the mind goes. What is a depraved mind? Well the word literally means tested and found
useless, disqualified for its intended purpose, a non-functioning mind. Reasoning is so corrupted that it is crippled. The faculty, the intellectual faculty can
no longer function. The moral law of God written in the heart
has been literally stomped and replaced with cultural immorality. The conscience cannot function. And so, says verse 28, they do the things
which are not proper, not moral. So immorality goes in every direction and
now you can't find your way back because the mind is so corrupt. People don't think right. People's brains don't follow the paths that
they should. They advocate all the wretched things and
depreciate all the virtuous things. And what flows out of this pornographic, homosexual,
depraved culture? All evil...verse 29, "All unrighteousness,
wickedness, greed, evil, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice, gossips, slanderers,
haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful inventors of evil." They even come up with new forms of evil. "Disobedience to parents." You wonder how in the world did that get in
there? That was a capital offense in the Old Testament. Disobey your parents, you lose your life. "Without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving,
unmerciful." And that's just a partial list. It's like somebody opened the sewer of sin
and let it run through society. And although they know the ordinance of God,
it's written on the heart, Romans 2, it's written on the pages of Scripture, and they
also know that those who practice such things are worthy of death. They not only do the same, but also give hardy
approval to those who practice them. They know it's wrong. They know the consequences. They do it anyway and they give hardy approval
to others who do it. I always think about the impeached President
Clinton was caught in his scandalous immorality, his approval ratings went up. That's Romans 1, of course they went up because
all the rest of the sinners feel comfortable with a leader that's like them. This is just any day in the newspaper, any
day on the cable news network. This is just life in the world in all its
sinful forms, without conscience, without reason, without restraint a society becomes
like lustful, immoral beasts, running wild. It gets to the Jerry Springer level where
it's just so bizarre and so corrupt that we laugh at the unconventional corruption. You look at the society in this country and
you ask yourself, is this a pornographic, homosexual, depraved society manifesting all
these characteristics or not? The answer is unmistakably clear. The media, television, the music industry,
radio, magazines features the people who are the purveyors of this filth as the cultural
heroes and icons...movie people, television people, music people, etc. This stuff is even advocated across this country
in educational institutions, particularly universities are literal hot beds for the
advocacy of all of this kind of iniquity. This is what happens when God abandons a society. I look at our society and I say, "This is
it." And that then brings us to the question of
the text...why does God do it? Why does God abandon a society? Let's go back to verse 18. Now we know what it looks like when He does,
but why does He do it? "he wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness
and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness." The wrath of God is already operating in our
culture. And God has abandoned our society on a wide
scale and let our society go the way it chooses to go without restraint. But God has abandoned our society because
our society has first abandoned God. There is no surer and no sadder evidence of
a corrupted, wicked abandoned society than when that society will not tolerate anger
against sin. Our society won't tolerate anger against sin. Our society feeds on sin and wants no one
to deny it its iniquities. And so, here we are under the wrath of God's
abandonment. It isn't like it once was. Restraining grace has been pulled back and
this society gets more immoral, more homosexual and more depraved every day. And why? I'm going to show you a sequence starting
in verse 18 that has led us to this. The major reason is summed up in one statement. "We suppress the truth." Any society that suppresses the truth, literally
in the original, who are constantly attempting to suppress the truth and they suppress it
in unrighteousness, or better, by their ungodliness. We crush the truth, we silence the truth speakers,
clinging to our sin. We see the light, we hate the light, we run
to the darkness, despising the light, condemning the light. Suppressing the truth must imply that we have
the truth. God does exist and He has made His existence
known to us. He's divinely authored our minds to work on
a cause and effect basis and to go back to the fact that the effect, the world, must
have a cause, namely the Creator. And we would be able to understand there was
a God just by reason. Also in Romans 2, He has divinely placed within
us a law written in our hearts which is a moral ethical standard that must be obeyed
or it activates a conscience that is a warning device in every human being that threatens
that human being a loss of well being and fear and danger if violated. Then there is the revelation of God in Scripture. In the western world we've had the Word of
God for centuries. In America we've had it for centuries. But this nation and the world has suppressed
the truth in unrighteousness, crushed it under the preferences for sin. Now let me just kind of unpack these verses,
verse 18 down through verse 23, by giving you four specific sequential reasons for the
wrath of God. Number one, revelation. Number one, revelation. Men have been given the truth. Verse 18 says, "We suppress the truth." Verse 19 then describes the source of that,
"That which is known about God is evident within them, for God made it evident to them
through reason and the moral law written in the heart, for since the creation of the world
His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen,
being understood through what has been made so that they are without excuse." They are without excuse because it is so obvious
that a creation has to have a Creator, a design has to have a designer. God has inlaid the evidence of spiritual and
moral truth and of His own existence and His greatness and His power in the very fabric
of man's being. We talk about our five senses, but we have
more working in us than just five physical senses. We have two spiritual senses. Reason is one and morality is another. These are so strong within us that they would
lead us to God as a Creator, a powerful Creator, they would lead us to God as a law giver and
therefore a judge if we just followed what is implanted in our hearts. In fact, it is so imbedded in us, the end
of verse 20, that all of us are without excuse. You cannot plead ignorance and in our country
and the west we have additionally the Bible and churches and Christian institutions, all
the colleges, ivy league colleges originally founded were all founded as Christian institutions
to train pastors. Throughout the history of this nation we have
had the truth. God has made Himself known through general
revelation, in creation, perceived by reason and in the law written in the heart, perceived
by conscience. That which may be known of God. God is knowable. Christ is the light that lights all men. "Everyone has some knowledge of God evident...I
love this important statement...evident in them...or within them." In the mind, in the soul, in the reason, in
the conscience, in the fabric of what it is to be human. Then you add to that the special revelation
of Scripture and we have heard the truth since the beginning of this nation's existence...we
have heard the truth. The truth is always attacked, it's always
attacked. We live in a modern world. Evolution has carried out a massive assault
on the truth by denying that there needs to be a cause for the effect of the universe. What kind of idiocy is that? Whenever Gentiles were evangelized in the
book of Acts, whenever Gentiles needed to hear about God, the preachers would tell them
about the God who created everything, Acts 14, Acts 17. They would take them back to creation because
everyone knew there had to be a creator, He had to be powerful, He had to be a designer. He had to be moral because there was morality
in the heart shown up in the laws that men made and in the structures of relationships. This God also was a God who had personality
because personality can't come out of non-personality. And so when evangelizing Gentiles, you started
with the Creator as Paul did on Mars Hill. When evangelizing Jews, you started with the
Old Testament. For the Gentiles it was the general revelation
of God, for the Jews it was the special revelation of God. And now our society has succeeded in eliminating
the need for a Creator with the theory of evolution and in disparaging the authenticity
of Scripture. And even in the church today there is a mad
dash to remove the Scripture because people don't want to hear it. But the truth is there. It's in the conscience, it's in the reason
that takes you to God and it's in the revelation of Scripture. Sinners are without excuse because that which
is known about God is evident within them for God made it evident to them in creating
them the way He did. And so, looking at the creation you see His
invisible attributes, eternal power, divine nature clearly and you have no excuse. Revelation, that's the first thing. God has revealed Himself to man. Men have received the truth. In this country, even the biblical truth. Second word in this progression, rejection. Men have turned from the truth. Verse 21, "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." And though man finds God in reason, he rejects
Him. He finds God in the moral law and conscience,
he rejects Him. Is exposed to the truth of God in Scripture,
he rejects. He suppresses the truth under his iniquities
because he loves darkness rather than light. And he plunges downward believing that he
can live his life any way he wants without any consequence at all. And leaving himself therefore under divine
judgment of the severest kind. And so we look at a society today, in particularly
here in America and in the western world so amazingly influenced by the gospel and we
see a people who do not honor God. Go back to verse 21. They do not honor Him as God, they do not
give thanks." That is to say they do not thank Him for being
the source of everything they have. Man's problem is not that he can't find God,
man's problem is not that he can't recognize God. Man's problem is not that he can't find the
truth, or recognize the truth. It is that he will not...and it's back to
John 3 again...they love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil. They don't want to honor God. To honor God would then cause them to be accountable
to Him and to His law and therefore under His judgment. Man would rather live without God in view
at all. I was thinking this through some couple of
years ago and thought that man likes to live with five dominant lies. These are very comfortable to the sinner. One, life is random...life is random. We're all products of evolutionary chance,
no purpose, no creator, no accountability. We basically live in a universe where a bottom
line formula is nobody times nothing equals everything. Nobody is in charge, nobody put us here. We're accountable to nobody. A rock is a rat is a dog is a boy...was the
mantra of one organization. No one made us, we have no reason and that's
why we are free in this random world to do what we want. The second dominating lie, truth is relative. No absolutes, no standard, you just kind of
have to flow around public opinion but you can change public opinion, as we well know. Ethics can be changed if you have enough clout
and enough power and enough persistence, but there is no absolute truth. We're all free to possess our own truth and
demand the freedom to live our lives according to our own truth which is of our own invention. A third dominating lie is that people are
basically good, oh if they go bad, somebody abused them. Somebody else is to blame, they lack self-esteem,
they have psychological problems based on environmental failures. But people are basically good. I'm basically good, I'm a good person...you
hear them say that all the time. A fourth lie that dominates our culture is
that everyone can change his own life, get control, take charge, become the person you
want to be. You have the power to be whatever you want
to be. That's the biggest lie ever. You can be everything you want to be. People tell their kids, "You can be anything
you want to be." Let me tell you, if you're slow, you'll die
slow. If you're dumb, you'll die dumb. If you can't carry a tune in a bucket, you'll
die not carrying a tune in a bucket. There are certain things you can't ever change. You cannot do anything you want to do, that's
ridiculous. But that fits the mantra of this maniacal
kind of freedom in a sin-saturated culture. And the fifth and dominating lie is the goal
of life is self-satisfaction. The goal of life is self-satisfaction. You're really after feeling good about yourself,
being satisfied with who you are. You hear people say, "This is who I am, take
it or leave it and I'm happy who I am. This is me and I'm just out there." And you want to say, "Well we wish you weren't,
just go somewhere else." It's this blatant kind of brash self illusion. Life is random, truth is relative, people
are basically good, everybody can change his own life if he chooses to, and the goal of
life is self-satisfaction. The truth is opposite that. The truth is opposite that. God is sovereign and nothing is random. The Bible is absolute truth. All people are basically sinful. Only Christ can change your life. And selfless submission to Jesus Christ is
the goal of life. They've got it completely wrong. And so, why would they honor a God they deny? Why would they give Him thanks? They think they've achieved everything on
their own. They can look at the beauty of this world
with all the good things that God has placed in it by His common grace and they can't thank
Him for a sunset, for love, for children, for a baby, for a good meal, for a vacation,
for rest, for sleep, for a comfortable chair. They can't thank Him because then they would
be acknowledging that He's the source. It's like Isaiah, he wrote of his own time,
"You felt secure in your wickedness and you said no one sees me. Your wisdom and your knowledge have deluded
you for you have said in your heart, I am and there is no one besides me." That is the modern American mantra...I am
the invictus(?), I am the captain of my soul, empty, useless self-centeredness. And into this vacuous self-centeredness is
sucked deeper darkness. Go back to verse 21, "Because though they
knew God they didn't honor Him as God, or give thanks," and we're talking collectively
about a society here. "But they became empty in their speculations,"
futile, empty, human ideas, useless. And as I said, into that vacuum is sucked
darkness and the end of verse 21 says, "Their foolish heart was darkened." They wouldn't know and now they couldn't know. The darkness dominated. The light went out. Intellectual darkness and moral darkness turn
to spiritual darkness...deadly darkness. Wrath came because of revelation and it comes
again and again and again and again to societies throughout all of human history because they
will not acknowledge God who has revealed Himself and so you have revelation followed
by rejection. And when there comes rejection, the light
goes out, the darkness comes. And a third step follows, rationalization...rationalization. This if it weren't so sad would be funny,
verse 22, "Professing to be wise they became fools." The idiocy of verse 21 is exacerbated in verse
22. Their darkness is so profound that they can't
assess their true condition. So they profess to be wise. It reminds me of the lady who went to the
psychiatrist, she had a duck on a leash. And the doctor said, "How can I help you,
Ma'am?" She said, "It's not me, my husband, he's the
one, he thinks he's a duck." This would call into question her perception
of reality, would it not? It's like the guy lying in the mental hospital
in the bed, kept saying, "I'm Napoleon, I'm Napoleon, I'm Napoleon." And the guy in the next bed said, "No you're
not...no you're not." "How do you know?" "I'm God." You say, this is ridiculous. This is no more ridiculous, no more absurd,
no more bizarre than giving yourself a Ph.D. when you're a fool, congratulating yourself
for your wisdom and knowledge and insight and achievement when your heart is black and
shut out completely of true knowledge. Professing to be wise they're proud to stand
up and declare how really wise they are. And it always reminds me of the emperor's
new clothes. The story about the emperor who was convinced
that he was wearing the most beautiful clothing when he was stark naked and went out parading
the glory of his new garments and everybody laughed. Fools, morino (?) from which we get moron. We have a society of proud morons flaunting
themselves as if they're significant, as if they're wise, they're on endless talk shows,
endlessly driveling out their folly. That leads to a fourth element, the downward
spiral goes from revelation to rejection to rationalization. They tell themselves they're wise when the
truth is they're morons. But the fourth cause of God's wrath is the
worst. Revelation, rejected, darkness rationalized
and the fourth, religion...religion. This is so interesting. Verse 23, "They exchanged the glory of the
incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed
animals and crawling creatures." How ridiculous. Religion..men create their own gods to accommodate
their own useless ideas. You might think that religion is man at his
highest. Let me tell you, religion is man at his lowest. False religion is man at the bottom...at the
bottom. It's man who has gone away from the truth
of God and the further he goes, the more he descends into satanic false religion. Religion is not man at his highest. It is man at his absolute lowest. This is the final straw. As verse 25 indicates, we didn't read it earlier
because I wanted to save it till now, they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and they
worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever, amen. They kept worshiping, they developed the religion
but they worshiped something of their own creation, or a creation of God, an animal,
a fish, a star, a constellation, or an idol rather than the Creator. Verse 28 says it again, "They did not see
fit to acknowledge God any longer." It doesn't mean they're not religious, ah
the whole world is religion, fanatically religious. You see, man does not ascend from the muck
of paganism and ignorance up to the truth of God. That's not how it works. Man is not evolving up, he is not ascending
to God. He is descending. He falls from the truth of God into the slime
of religion, false religion, satanic counterfeit. Religion is not man at his best, religion
is man at his worst. Religion is not man at his highest, it is
man at his lowest. It is not man ascending, it is man descending. It is not man finding God, it is man finding
Satan and being content with him. The ultimate insanity...the ultimate insanity
is to reject God and create a non-God that doesn't exist and worship that. How insane is that? A false God, a false Jesus, and you do that
and call yourself wise and erudite and you pontificate about your religion and you have
all kinds of complexities in your satanic system, all kinds of people going around with
titles and robes and authority and influence and power. This is moronic. The idols come in all kinds of forms, from
primitive statues of the lowest cultures to the more elevated gods of self and sex and
mother nature, from the Roman eagle to the spotted owl, to the golden bulls of Egypt
to the dolphin gods of environmentalists, from the worship of a stick to the worship
of the earth, from Aborigines to environmentalists, from pantheistic worship of the world to eco-feminism,
from eco-feminism to Islam and every other religion. I'm not surprised is terrorism is associated
with religion, it's man at his lowest. Is it any wonder that as a society then we
are struggling with our ethics? Is it any wonder we are struggling with our
morals? We've rejected God. He gave us revelation, we rejected it. We rationalize it and call ourselves an elite
educated advanced culture and we invent religion as if it's an indicator of how high we have
ascended when the fact of the matter is we're going down at warp speed. We have abandoned God and God has returned
the favor. And so, we are under His wrath. That brings the question...is there any hope? Is there any hope for this country, for any
society in this condition? Well, I will take you to a passage of Scripture
that gives us hope. Turn in your Bible to the Psalms, and I want
you to look at this, Psalm 81...Psalm 81 because this cycle is a constantly visible cycle in
history, going on all the time. It has happened before in Israel. It is happening even now in Israel. Many generations of the Jewish people, God's
chosen people for a future redemption, many generations have gone through this cycle,
rejecting the true God, rationalizing about their condition, inventing complex religion,
descending. Is there any hope for them in the future? Is there any hope for the western world? For any nation in the world? For us? Well all I can say is there is a word of hope
in Psalm 81. Let's look at verse 11. "But My people did not listen to My voice
and Israel did not obey Me, so...and here's the same language...I gave them over to the
stubbornness of their heart to walk in their own devices." That's Romans 1. This happened to Israel. As I said, the history of the world is the
judgment of the world. God has allowed all the nations to go their
own way, Acts 14. Nothing new. I gave them over. But verse 13, here is a plaintive cry from
the heart of God. "O that My people would listen to Me, that
Israel would walk in My ways. I would quickly subdue their enemies and turn
My hand against their adversaries. Those who hate the Lord would pretend obedience
to Him." In other words, they would be so good to be
under the protection of the Lord that people would even pretend to be believers. And the time of their punishment would be
forever, punishing their enemies. And I love verse 16, "And I would feed you
with the finest of the wheat and from honey from the rock I would satisfy you." This is a plaintive cry from God who says,
"O that My people would listen to Me, that Israel would walk in My ways. I would turn from abandoning them, from giving
them over to their own sinful choices to defending them and protecting them and punishing their
enemies and I would feed them with the finest of the wheat and with honey from the rock
I would satisfy them." The key, listen to Me. Walk in My ways. The only hope for this or any other society
is to hear the Word of the Lord and obey it...to hear the Word of the Lord and obey it. And I would suggest that this is not a good
time for weak men preaching weak messages in weak churches. This is a time for bold and powerful, strong
biblical ministry that calls people to hear the Word of the Lord and respond. This is the only hope for any people for any
individual. Our Father, the Word comes to us with such
clarity and power. Thank You for warning us. Thank You for the grace of confronting us
with the truth. Help us, Lord, to be proclaimers of Your Word,
the Word of the gospel that saves. It's not too late until Jesus comes we can
keep preaching this Word, to the ends of the earth, across this nation and all the nations
may Your people proclaim nothing but Your Word so that those under this wrath, this
current wrath may be saved and escape the final and eternal wrath. May there be a great revival of Your Word
and may people listen to it and obey it, to Your glory we ask these things. Amen.
