Transcript
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Welcome to Gospel and Life. During January, we're inviting our listeners to consider becoming a Gospel and Life Monthly partner. Monthly partners are an important part in helping us to plan for how we can be the most effective in reaching people all over the world with the gospel. If you'd like to become a monthly Partner, just visit gospelinlife.com partner that's gospelandlife.com partner what comes to mind when you hear about the Ten Commandments? For many people, they bring up feelings of guilt and shame, or they seem like a list of rules that are impossible to follow. In today's sermon, Tim Keller shows us how God didn't give us the Ten Commandments to crush us with unattainable moral standards, but to point us to Jesus Christ, the only one who perfectly fulfills God's law.
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The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood from what has been made so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him. But their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful nature desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. The truth. And suppressing the truth is not admitting there's a God there. And the reason that people are suppressing the truth is because what's it say in verse 21? They won't thank him. The thing that gets this God angry. A God as great as this, a creator God who sifts the stars through his fingers like sand, to whom the Milky Way is a piece of lint. What gets this great and good being angry? Ingratitude. Now a question comes up. Is God being petty? Why would God get angry about ingratitude? It seems like a petty thing. The answer is we ourselves take it quite seriously. Listen, for example, what happens if you take. If you're a musician and you take something that was written by somebody else, if you're an author and you take something that was written by somebody else, you're a scholar or you're a student and you take Something that was written by somebody else, and you publish it as if you were the author. And therefore you act as an authority. Because the word authority comes from the word author. You say, I'm the author of it, and therefore I'm an authority. When you publish it as if you're the author, that is illegal. Why? It's plagiarism. You can be sued into the ground for it, and rightly so. And what it is, it's ingratitude. Because all in plagiarism is, is ingratitude. What it is, is saying. Instead of saying, I am in debt to someone else, I acknowledge that I am a dependent person at this point. I am dependent on the work of someone else. Instead, you set yourself up as the authority and say, no, I'm an independent person and I needed no one's help to write this thing. That's ingratitude. It's plagiarism. It's illegal. It's serious. Let me go up to another level. During World War I, when the Germans were fighting against the Americans, if you caught a German prisoner trying to bring down the United States government because he was a soldier out there and he was fighting on the lines, you see, if you capture him, what did you do with him? You weren't allowed to torture him. You weren't allowed to execute him. No. According to the international laws, what you had to do was treat him with respect, put him in a prisoner of war camp. However, if you caught an American fighting against you, if you caught an American trying to bring down the United States government, that person could be executed. Why? Because that's treason. Well, why? What's the difference if an American does it and a German does it? The difference is the American's a citizen. The American owes a debt of gratitude to the country, and therefore he should be executed. Why? That's how all the international laws go. Why he should be executed for ingratitude. You can be sued for ingratitude. You can be executed for ingratitude. Now, let's take it up one more level. What is Romans, Chapter one talking about? Don't you. Are you beginning to get the drift of this? Though you may believe in God in a general way, do you go through life as your own authority, even though God created you, Even though the Bible says Hebrews 1:3, he holds the universe together with the word of his power. Even though he keeps you together every moment, he keeps your heart pumping. He keeps your molecules from going out in about 10 billion different directions and you vaporizing. Here's this. God upholding you every single minute. He is your author. And yet do you, though in a general way, you acknowledge him, that he exists. But do you give him the mastery of your life? Do you give him authority? Or do you live as your own authority? Do you submit every part of your life to his will and his word, your heart, your life? Or do you go about making your own decisions, legislating your own standards? Do you go about saying, I'm an independent person. I am my own authority? That is cosmic plagiarism. You can be sued for that. You are being sued for that. When the prophets come in the Bible and they say, thus saith the Lord, they are bringing a lawsuit. Let's take it up one more step. If there's a God who created you, and therefore, since that God gave you everything, you owe that God an eternal debt, an absolute debt. The only due that you can give to a person who's given you everything is everything. Do you work for his agenda? Do you work for his goals? Do you work for his business? Or do you take all the things he's given you? Your mind, your body, your abilities? Do you take all those things? In a sense, he's given you the business charge card and you're going off to the Bahamas with her. In other words, are you basically living for your own interests? Are you basically living for your own goals? Are you basically doing your own business? My friends, that is treason. You're saying, I want to be governor of my own life. What's wrong with that? That's treason. It's cosmic treason. It's ingratitude of the highest order. And this passage says it's secret treason. Because the passage says something very, very, very profound. And that is that the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against the wickedness of men who suppress the truth since they can see in nature. It says, since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities have been clearly seen in what is created. Though they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks, but suppressed the truth. The reason this is a secret treason is because you keep it secret from yourself. It says that even though you know there is a God, no matter who you are, who created you, that owns you to whom you owe a debt. We all press that truth down to some degree. We suppress it. We know we're committing treason, but we keep it secret, even from ourselves. And yet we know it. That's what's so weird about this passage. It says they knew God, and yet it says they suppress that. They know God. So you know it, and you don't know it. You know that there's a debt of absolute seriousness and joy that you owe to a creator God, and yet you don't know it. And I think any, any psychologist will tell you things that you. You sort of know that you hold down, but you don't know, but you do know are unhealthy and they can run your life. And this profound passage is actually doing a deep kind of therapy on us. This passage is saying, come to grips with what you know to be true about yourself, or it's going to always, always keep you bound in shallows and misery and confusion. And so the passage says, let's look at the structure of this repression. Let's look at the structure of this secret treason that's operating in every person's life. And the structure is right here. Let me just outline it for you, then we'll go through it. The outline is very interesting. First of all, it says ingratitude leads to repression. See, it says they suppress the truth because they're ungrateful. Ingratitude leads to repression, let's say. And then we're told repression leads to darkness. It says in verse 29, 21. Because they refuse to thank him, it says their thinking becomes futile and their minds become darkened. Ingratitude leads to repression. Repression leads to darkness. And then darkness leads to every one of this. This darkness leads to all of the problems in your life, all your behavioral problems, all your bad habits, all of your sins. Ingratitude leads to repression, repression leads to darkness. And darkness leads to all the sin problems that we've got. And the only answer, this passage tells us, is to exchange the lie for the truth of who God is to us and the debt we owe him. Exchange the lie for the truth of gratitude. And when you take that truth and put it back in the center of your life, joy explodes again. Now, that's. That's what the passage says, but let's break it down. Let's go back to each of those steps. Number one. All right. Number one, it says here, ingratitude leads to repression. You see this word for at the beginning of verse 21, it says, for the reason they repress and suppress the truth, even though they look out into nature and there's a creator God. Obvious, Paul says, because they don't want to glorify him as God or give thanks to him, they hold down the truth. That's very important. It's one thing to say, I agree that there's a God. It's Another thing, to let him be glorified as God. Let him be God in your life. You see, to glorify in the Bible literally means to give weight to something. What Paul says is not that people want to deny that there is a God, but they want to deny who that God really is to them. They want to. They want to deny God. They want to deny God's being God. They don't want to take him without complete seriousness. They don't. They want. They want to be their own masters. They want to call their own shots. And when they look out and they see there's a God behind the universe, they don't draw the logical implication of that. If there's a God behind the universe, then I shouldn't be my own authority. I should give him the mastery. Now, Paul, by the way, here in verse 20, when Paul says, for since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen being understood from what has been made so that men are without excuse, he's using an old and very unanswerable argument for the existence of God. He says, look out there. Look at the design. Look at nature, look at the design. What he's really. He's using this old argument. He says, imagine, in a sense, he says, imagine an explosion in a paint factory creating the Mona Lisa by accident, of course. But, you know, everything goes up and down it comes, and it just happens to fall on the canvas in such a way that it paints this lovely picture. And what are the chances of that? Well, you say there's no chance of that. And of course, any mathematician will tell you that's not true. You could never say there's no chance of that. Of course, there's an infinitesimal chance of that sort of thing happening. But Paul is saying there's a far less, you know, there's a far greater chance of that happening than the idea of all of this order and all of this design and all of this beauty happening by accident. And yet he says, what's amazing is that there's many people who will bet their whole lives on that chance. Whenever I've used the argument on people, whenever I've said, what are the chances of all this happening by accident? They say, well, that doesn't prove God. No, it doesn't. It doesn't prove that the Mona Lisa couldn't be painted by an explosion in a paint factory. But what kind of fool would bet your life on that? And what Paul is saying is anybody who does shows a bias Paul says if you really are that, if you're that willing to suppress the truth, it shows a bias. You know, Freud, Marx, Feuerbach and Nietzsche all said that Christians need God. They've got psychological needs for God. You see this? And they all had different approaches, of course, to it. The Marx said the rich needed God to keep the poor down. And of course, Sigmund Freud said people needed God because they. They need to have a deity to whom they can atone for their rebellion against authority figures. And Nietzsche had his own view in Ludwig Feuerbach. And they all said there's psychological reasons why people need to believe in God. And by the way, that's true. What Paul's pointing out here is there's far greater and deeper psychological reasons for people to disbelieve in God. Because you see, even though we look out there and we say, yeah, obviously there must be a God, but if there is a personal God who created all this design, then we would owe him authority. There's no in between. Either there's no God and all this is an accident, or there is a God and we owe him everything. We don't want that. And so you see, Paul says there's very deep psychological reasons to deny God. And that makes sense to me because over the years when I've talked to folks, when you just share in a nutshell what the Christian message is, it goes like this. The Christian message goes like this. God created you. And even though you lived your whole life as your own authority, making your own decisions, you see, legislating your own morality, setting your own goals, God loves you still. And he's entered into your situation and he's come down into history in the person of Jesus Christ. And he took the punishment that our ingratitude deserved so that we can enter into an unending love relationship with our Creator and have a life dominated by joy and grateful love. That's the message. And you know, the rational approach, if you were going to reject that would be to say, I can't accept that because it's too good to be true. Oh, how great it would be if it was. That's not what the response has been to me over the years. The response has been, there you go, trying to tell me what to do with my life. And that shows, I say, a deep bias. That's what Paul says. Here's people who are willing to bet their lives on a fairly slim chance. Ingratitude leads to repression. But then it goes further. Repression leads to darkness. Since it says here, verse 21, since they would not give thanks to him. Their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Now the word futile means pointless. It means not being able to see the purpose in something. And that is the truth. What Paul is saying here is if you reject the personal God because you don't want to give him mastery of your life, you're put in this terrible position. If there's no personal God, there's no right and wrong. There's no moral structure to things, no moral structure to things. And you, you are left with darkness.