Romans: Wrath of God: Feb. 11, 2007
No God, but God._____________ February 11, 2007
At one point in the movie Rocky Balboa (the most recent one and in all likelihood the final Rocky movie), Rocky Balboa has a grown son who seems to have lost his nerve and fire for life and one evening Rocky the boxer who’s making a come back in 50s jogs down the sidewalk and catches up with him and says
The world a is very rough, mean place… and no matter how tough you think you are, it’ll always bring you to your knees and keep you there, permanently … if you let it. Nobody ain’t never gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard you’re hit ... it’s about how hard you can get hit… and keep moving forward…
The apostle Paul was hit hard for preaching the Gospel… As we noticed last week, he was hit hard by the Jews who thought the message of God becoming a human being in Christ and being crucified as a sacrifice for our sins was outrageous. They regarded anyone crucified on a Roman cross not just as a criminal, but as one cursed by God. Paul was hit hard by the Greeks… The Greeks loved deep, abstract philosophy and the message of the cross was too simple… Paul was literally hit, beaten imprisoned and eventually put to the death by the Roman authorities for preaching Jesus Christ is Lord… in a society where everyone regarded Cesar as Lord… (it would be like your going to Cuba at the height of Fidel Castro’s power and proclaiming someone else is president of Cuba—you’re going be in trouble).
Paul gets hit for preaching the Gospel, but he keeps getting up and keeps moving forward and preaching the Gospel… why is he able to do this?
Part of the reason is that he has a deep, fire in the belly conviction that Gospel offers the greatest news ever…
In Romans 1:16-17 Paul says…
16 I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. 17 For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed…
Romans 1:17 tells us that the Gospel displays the righteousness of God, i.e. the right action God has taken to set right what has gone wrong with the world and our lives. What is the root problem of the world and our lives? It’s sin, the spiritual toxin that separates us from God, ourselves, one another and the earth itself…
The Gospel shows us how we can be restored to God and out of being restored to God, how we can be restored to ourselves, each other, and the earth…
In the later part of Romans 1 and following Paul is going to explain that this restoration is absolutely necessary in light of the fact that sin has wreaked havoc in the world.
If you have your Bibles please turn to Romans 1.
(If per chance you were not here last Sunday. You might consider picking a copy of the cd from last week called The Gospel: The Good Spell at take counter after the service as that was the lead off message where I set some of the context. Unlike say a book like Proverbs which we studying in the fall, Romans is a sequential argument so I would encourage if you’re going to miss a Sunday in this series to get the cd or go our website www.tenth.ca or the I-tunes website (hold up I pod) and down load the sermon to your MP3 player.)
Let me begin for by recapping Paul’s thesis statement in Romans 1:16-17… Paul says
16 I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. 17 For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: "The righteous will live by faith."
Now turn to vs. 18 as Paul explains why this Gospel restores us to God is necessary.
God's Wrath Against Sinful Humanity
18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of human beings who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 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 people are without excuse.
21 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. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal human beings and birds and animals and reptiles.
24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
28 Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. 32 Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.
Paul says, 16 I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes
Paul says I not ashamed of the Gospel because in the Gospel God acts in reconciling sinners to himself…
Why is this restoration with God necessary?
It is necessary because sin alienates from God…. When the text speaks of God’s wrath is being poured out on people he’s describing people becoming alienated from the one source of life in the universe…
The text tells us18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of human beings who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 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 people are without excuse.
The wrath of God is being poured out against people and the world because people possess the truth about God from creation, but they suppress that truth.
Scientists, even atheists like the well know Richard Dawkins, author of the God Delusion, acknowledges that the chances of our world coming together with the conditions that would sustain life is less likely from a perspective of mathematically probability then a storm blowing through a junkyard and creating a 747.
There’s about nature, the wonder of the intricacy of the human body….
I’ve very impressed by reading how Toyota designed the Prius the world’s first mass produced and widely use first hybrid car… When car launched it achieved twice of the fuel efficiency of other cares in its class… emitting half CO2s. Now 2007 Pruis gets an estimated amazing combined city/highway mileage of 55 miles per gallon (a liter is .2642 of a gallon).
According to Dr. John Medina at the University of Washington says if a car were this efficient with gasoline as average human body, it would get 900 miles to the gallon. .
There are signs all around us the point to a creator…
But as Paul says that though people possess the truth of God they suppress the truth of God their sin (Romans 1:18)...
Some people say a la Freud that people believe in God because they so want to believe in some kind of higher being, they believe because they so want to know they are not alone in the universe—so people project the idea that there is kind of higher power in the universe because they so want to believe that.
But as Oxford scholar C.S. Lewis points out, many people like himself have had an even stronger desire not to want to believe in God….
There a lot of people who don’t want to be held to account by some greater being…
And so they choose to suppress the truth about God…
Sin at it’s at very root according to Romans 1:21 is a failure to know and honor God.
According to Romans 1:23 instead of glorifying and worshipping the living God, people will worship idols…
Kierkegaard in Sickness unto Death defines sin as putting our identity in something other than God…
We tend to think of sin I think as something that is sort obviously wrong: like drug dealing or sexual abuse of children or insider trading… Something like Robert Pickton, or Karla Homolka have engaged in… But sin is putting our primary identity in something other than God… I spent 3 weeks in January taking graduate courses in the San Francisco Bay area… as I’ve spent time there, I’ve connected with people who by world standards are “good people” but their central identity isn’t God, but career/financial success, having beautiful houses, and 2n or 3rd homes in Vail… When I lived in Boston, I connected people who central identity was their education: Boston is surrounded by great schools like Harvard-Radcliffe, MIT , Wellesley. As we know a lot of people in a place like Vancouver… literally live for the weekend, the outdoors and work is a simply a means to spend time outdoors…that can become a person’s central identity…
Whatever becomes our central life focus and identity is our “functional God”… whether success, money, education, recreation, some other person, ourselves… this what the Bible describes as the root of sin…
To use Biblical language… the root sin of the human race is idolatry is making, something other than the living God our “god.”
In vs. 25 Paul… says people have exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator…
When we stop worshipping the living God, it’s not that we stop “worshipping”… Because we were made to worship something, we simply change the focus of our worship to some God-substitute: education, career, money, power, sex, nature itself, some person, ourselves…
Paul in this passage speaks of the wrath of God being poured on the human race as they turn their center from the living to God to “stand in” gods, idols.
When Paul speaks of the wrath of God being poured out on people because they’ve turned away from God, he’s not so much talking about zap judgment people will experience because of particular “sins” but rather he’s talking about the fact if people choose live a apart from God, God will let them and they will find themselves… inordinate focused themselves our other people or things… so they experience pride and arrogance (inordinate focus on ourself) or envy or lust (inordinate focus on others), or covetousness or greed…. (in ordinate focus on others).
The judgment of God is not so much zap judgment for particular sins of pride, or jealously, lust, or greed…. these sins are in themselves signs that they are living under the judgment of God… These signs of the “breakdown” people experience when they are living disconnected from the one source of life…
If the planets of our solar system had a will like we human beings and one said, we tired of rotating on consistently around sun (power point image of the solar system) and they started to chart of their own trajectories… without reference to sun… we’d have chaos in our solar system, we’d have absolute chaos on our planet, like nothing we’ve ever seen.
When as a culture, and Paul is talking primarily about the human family as whole, the history of the world as a whole, rather than individuals per se in Romans , when live without God as the center of our “solar system” we experience chaos, confusion, and breakdown of the created order…
If a society fails to know and honor God… the result of that sin is confusion in our personal identity, our sexual identity, confusion in our relationships, and confusion in their relationship to the earth…
Paul describes the confusion and breakdown … by various sins like arrogance, envy, slander, greed…
The sins Paul lists are examples of the personal confusion, confusion in our relationships with each other, and the earth we experience when God is not the center of our solar system…
When God is not at the center of our solar system as society, we confusion in our identity… one of the ways we experience confusion in our identity is in our sexuality.
Last year I was a party where people where people were drinking a lot of some people were become quite drunk… and as some of this were drunk started talking about some of their sexual experiences…
One young man talked how about someone at work “dares” him for a certain amount of money to walk to an attractive woman in their workplace and make a sexual pass at her. The woman was newly married.
So the man says, “I do and she responds… he describes his secret sexual experiences with newlywed woman.
Another woman at the party stared about how we she had had a sexual experience with a family member… because she curious as to what it would be like.
We live in a culture of sexual confusion… sex is not a game like football or hockey, where trying to “score” as much as possible. Sex is not intended by God to be something shared by family members.
Sexual confusion at various levels is rampant in our culture.
When Paul speaks uses the examples of homosexual relationship in Romans 1, he’s not saying that people of homosexual orientation are especially wicked or particularly worthy of condemnation…. or these kind of sexual actions are worse than other sins.
What he is saying that when as a culture we remove God from the center of our solar system, we will experience sexual confusion and this is one example…
I know sound highly offensive and insensitive if you go back to Genesis at the beginning of creation, you will God’s ideal was male/female sexual union… as male/female more fully reflect the image of God… not true in sexual relationships in all kind of contexts… if you look at staff Christmas card (hold up) you’ll see that the male female ratio is about even—we believe that having male and females better reflects the image of God than having all male or all female staff…
I can’t do justice to this big topic in what is sub-point over large message, but I really would glad to talk to any one you who would want to follow up this in a personal conversation.
When people live with God at the center of the universe… we experience confusion in our relationship with ourselves each other…
For many people in culture that “god” is the God of themselves.
The actor Hugh recently said, “I adore myself.” At least he’s honest about it…
In Dostoevsky’s powerful novel Crime and Punishment the young student Raskalvinok adores himself… and he puts at the center of his universe… he’s very intellectually bright student, but doesn’t have enough money… for school so he ends up killing an old lady who owns a pawn shop and has money…because he believes far more worthy than she is of her money than she is… and as result of putting himself at the center of his solar system he kills his neighbor and ends all kind of personal anguish and alienation…
If you place yourself at center of your solar system, you may it’s not necessary to always to tell the truth… you don’t feel account to some higher being or moral order because you’re the center of the solar system…
As we discussed in our series in Proverbs, when you lie you set up a wall between the person you’ve lied to and reality… It also sets a wall between you and the person. When you lie to someone you erect a wall that distancing yourself from someone and you manage your communication with person from a place of emotional distance…
When we place ourselves or something other than God at the center of our solar system, we experience alienation from ourselves…
Just over a week ago, the world's leading climate scientists in Paris in their most powerful language ever used on the issue, said global warming is "very likely (which means 90% certain) man-made…
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change --a group of hundreds of scientists and representatives of 113 governments said in reported is considered conservative and peer reviewed. "The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and ocean, together with ice-mass loss, support the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that global climate change of the past 50 years can be explained without external forcing, and very likely that is not due to known natural causes alone."
The panel quickly agreed: attributing global warming to man-made burning of fossil fuels and connecting it to a recent increase in stronger hurricanes.
Scientists have pointed that the increase is storms, hurricanes, flooding are connected to global warming.
With the release of more carbon emissions on our earth, it thickens the earth’s atmosphere, trapping more sun’s heat on the earth, raising the temperature of the oceans creating conditions that cause storms and hurricanes…
A lot of what insurance companies have dub natural disaster or even “acts of God” are really it seems the result of we human abusing the earth.
In the novel the Life of Pi, Pi the main grow up with a father who’s zoo keeper in India. At their zoo, there one special exhibit behind a curtain with a sign behind the curtain is the most dangerous animal in the world: People would life the curtain and there would a mirror.
When God is not at the center of our solar system… we are alienated not just from God, but ourselves, each other and the earth.
British minister John Stott God’s judgment is not so much about his intervening, but his not intervening… about God letting us go our own way. My seminary professor Scot Hafeman, says the real terror is not falling into the hands of a Holy God, but out of them…
Paul is not ashamed of the Gospel because it is the power of God that restores us to the only source of real life in the universe God… and out of being restored to God and out of that to ourselves, and the earth itself…
Paul ahs been talking about the human race, but as I come the home stretch let me make this more personal…
Is God your real God?
Could be that something or someone other than God has taken your hearts central place of trust?
How might you know?
You might ask yourself, is there something that makes me really worried?
Could it be that that thing is too important to me? Something I have to have?
If you worry about something, it’s a sign you care, but if you have debilitating anxiety and you’d have Panic Anxiety Order or some bio-chemical imbalance, could be that you have an idol?
Is there something I am really angry about?
Something I have to have? Something I have to have?
Not to not get you want can be very frustrated, if you mind become furious…
Could it be that there is something that is too important for me?
If you are despondent or hating yourself…
ask “Is there something too important to me?”
Something I have to have?
If so could it be that there is something that is too important for me.
If you Christian are you saying ok Jesus it’s good to have you, but I also need this other thing to make me happy? If you keep from me I might turn on you? If so that thing is your real God and God is simply a means to get your real God...
It’s as we believe the Gospel and make God our real God, not just our God in name that we restored to God, ourselves and each other earth…
Like a sun flower we would made to point to the sun, we made to be helio centric.
In Sistine chapel… one of the most famous image is the creation panel…
Here is Adam and his empty hand is not reaching for the sword as if power were what makes him a man, or for gold as if money makes him a man but he become a man when God touches him.
When God touches him, he become complete and when God touches woman she become complete…
Pray…
Ezekiel 36
24 " 'For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. 25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. 26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.
Beneditiction:
Psalm 135 says of idols:
16 They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see.
17 They have ears, but cannot hear, nor is there breath in their mouths.
18 Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them.
The Psalmist tells us that if we worship idols: we become like them, mute, bind, deaf lifeless… but if we worship like our maker we will become like God…. So become people who worship the living God become your true selves…
(The sermon can be heard on line at: www.tenth.ca/audio.htm)
At one point in the movie Rocky Balboa (the most recent one and in all likelihood the final Rocky movie), Rocky Balboa has a grown son who seems to have lost his nerve and fire for life and one evening Rocky the boxer who’s making a come back in 50s jogs down the sidewalk and catches up with him and says
The world a is very rough, mean place… and no matter how tough you think you are, it’ll always bring you to your knees and keep you there, permanently … if you let it. Nobody ain’t never gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard you’re hit ... it’s about how hard you can get hit… and keep moving forward…
The apostle Paul was hit hard for preaching the Gospel… As we noticed last week, he was hit hard by the Jews who thought the message of God becoming a human being in Christ and being crucified as a sacrifice for our sins was outrageous. They regarded anyone crucified on a Roman cross not just as a criminal, but as one cursed by God. Paul was hit hard by the Greeks… The Greeks loved deep, abstract philosophy and the message of the cross was too simple… Paul was literally hit, beaten imprisoned and eventually put to the death by the Roman authorities for preaching Jesus Christ is Lord… in a society where everyone regarded Cesar as Lord… (it would be like your going to Cuba at the height of Fidel Castro’s power and proclaiming someone else is president of Cuba—you’re going be in trouble).
Paul gets hit for preaching the Gospel, but he keeps getting up and keeps moving forward and preaching the Gospel… why is he able to do this?
Part of the reason is that he has a deep, fire in the belly conviction that Gospel offers the greatest news ever…
In Romans 1:16-17 Paul says…
16 I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. 17 For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed…
Romans 1:17 tells us that the Gospel displays the righteousness of God, i.e. the right action God has taken to set right what has gone wrong with the world and our lives. What is the root problem of the world and our lives? It’s sin, the spiritual toxin that separates us from God, ourselves, one another and the earth itself…
The Gospel shows us how we can be restored to God and out of being restored to God, how we can be restored to ourselves, each other, and the earth…
In the later part of Romans 1 and following Paul is going to explain that this restoration is absolutely necessary in light of the fact that sin has wreaked havoc in the world.
If you have your Bibles please turn to Romans 1.
(If per chance you were not here last Sunday. You might consider picking a copy of the cd from last week called The Gospel: The Good Spell at take counter after the service as that was the lead off message where I set some of the context. Unlike say a book like Proverbs which we studying in the fall, Romans is a sequential argument so I would encourage if you’re going to miss a Sunday in this series to get the cd or go our website www.tenth.ca or the I-tunes website (hold up I pod) and down load the sermon to your MP3 player.)
Let me begin for by recapping Paul’s thesis statement in Romans 1:16-17… Paul says
16 I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. 17 For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: "The righteous will live by faith."
Now turn to vs. 18 as Paul explains why this Gospel restores us to God is necessary.
God's Wrath Against Sinful Humanity
18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of human beings who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 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 people are without excuse.
21 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. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal human beings and birds and animals and reptiles.
24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
28 Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. 32 Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.
Paul says, 16 I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes
Paul says I not ashamed of the Gospel because in the Gospel God acts in reconciling sinners to himself…
Why is this restoration with God necessary?
It is necessary because sin alienates from God…. When the text speaks of God’s wrath is being poured out on people he’s describing people becoming alienated from the one source of life in the universe…
The text tells us18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of human beings who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 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 people are without excuse.
The wrath of God is being poured out against people and the world because people possess the truth about God from creation, but they suppress that truth.
Scientists, even atheists like the well know Richard Dawkins, author of the God Delusion, acknowledges that the chances of our world coming together with the conditions that would sustain life is less likely from a perspective of mathematically probability then a storm blowing through a junkyard and creating a 747.
There’s about nature, the wonder of the intricacy of the human body….
I’ve very impressed by reading how Toyota designed the Prius the world’s first mass produced and widely use first hybrid car… When car launched it achieved twice of the fuel efficiency of other cares in its class… emitting half CO2s. Now 2007 Pruis gets an estimated amazing combined city/highway mileage of 55 miles per gallon (a liter is .2642 of a gallon).
According to Dr. John Medina at the University of Washington says if a car were this efficient with gasoline as average human body, it would get 900 miles to the gallon. .
There are signs all around us the point to a creator…
But as Paul says that though people possess the truth of God they suppress the truth of God their sin (Romans 1:18)...
Some people say a la Freud that people believe in God because they so want to believe in some kind of higher being, they believe because they so want to know they are not alone in the universe—so people project the idea that there is kind of higher power in the universe because they so want to believe that.
But as Oxford scholar C.S. Lewis points out, many people like himself have had an even stronger desire not to want to believe in God….
There a lot of people who don’t want to be held to account by some greater being…
And so they choose to suppress the truth about God…
Sin at it’s at very root according to Romans 1:21 is a failure to know and honor God.
According to Romans 1:23 instead of glorifying and worshipping the living God, people will worship idols…
Kierkegaard in Sickness unto Death defines sin as putting our identity in something other than God…
We tend to think of sin I think as something that is sort obviously wrong: like drug dealing or sexual abuse of children or insider trading… Something like Robert Pickton, or Karla Homolka have engaged in… But sin is putting our primary identity in something other than God… I spent 3 weeks in January taking graduate courses in the San Francisco Bay area… as I’ve spent time there, I’ve connected with people who by world standards are “good people” but their central identity isn’t God, but career/financial success, having beautiful houses, and 2n or 3rd homes in Vail… When I lived in Boston, I connected people who central identity was their education: Boston is surrounded by great schools like Harvard-Radcliffe, MIT , Wellesley. As we know a lot of people in a place like Vancouver… literally live for the weekend, the outdoors and work is a simply a means to spend time outdoors…that can become a person’s central identity…
Whatever becomes our central life focus and identity is our “functional God”… whether success, money, education, recreation, some other person, ourselves… this what the Bible describes as the root of sin…
To use Biblical language… the root sin of the human race is idolatry is making, something other than the living God our “god.”
In vs. 25 Paul… says people have exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator…
When we stop worshipping the living God, it’s not that we stop “worshipping”… Because we were made to worship something, we simply change the focus of our worship to some God-substitute: education, career, money, power, sex, nature itself, some person, ourselves…
Paul in this passage speaks of the wrath of God being poured on the human race as they turn their center from the living to God to “stand in” gods, idols.
When Paul speaks of the wrath of God being poured out on people because they’ve turned away from God, he’s not so much talking about zap judgment people will experience because of particular “sins” but rather he’s talking about the fact if people choose live a apart from God, God will let them and they will find themselves… inordinate focused themselves our other people or things… so they experience pride and arrogance (inordinate focus on ourself) or envy or lust (inordinate focus on others), or covetousness or greed…. (in ordinate focus on others).
The judgment of God is not so much zap judgment for particular sins of pride, or jealously, lust, or greed…. these sins are in themselves signs that they are living under the judgment of God… These signs of the “breakdown” people experience when they are living disconnected from the one source of life…
If the planets of our solar system had a will like we human beings and one said, we tired of rotating on consistently around sun (power point image of the solar system) and they started to chart of their own trajectories… without reference to sun… we’d have chaos in our solar system, we’d have absolute chaos on our planet, like nothing we’ve ever seen.
When as a culture, and Paul is talking primarily about the human family as whole, the history of the world as a whole, rather than individuals per se in Romans , when live without God as the center of our “solar system” we experience chaos, confusion, and breakdown of the created order…
If a society fails to know and honor God… the result of that sin is confusion in our personal identity, our sexual identity, confusion in our relationships, and confusion in their relationship to the earth…
Paul describes the confusion and breakdown … by various sins like arrogance, envy, slander, greed…
The sins Paul lists are examples of the personal confusion, confusion in our relationships with each other, and the earth we experience when God is not the center of our solar system…
When God is not at the center of our solar system as society, we confusion in our identity… one of the ways we experience confusion in our identity is in our sexuality.
Last year I was a party where people where people were drinking a lot of some people were become quite drunk… and as some of this were drunk started talking about some of their sexual experiences…
One young man talked how about someone at work “dares” him for a certain amount of money to walk to an attractive woman in their workplace and make a sexual pass at her. The woman was newly married.
So the man says, “I do and she responds… he describes his secret sexual experiences with newlywed woman.
Another woman at the party stared about how we she had had a sexual experience with a family member… because she curious as to what it would be like.
We live in a culture of sexual confusion… sex is not a game like football or hockey, where trying to “score” as much as possible. Sex is not intended by God to be something shared by family members.
Sexual confusion at various levels is rampant in our culture.
When Paul speaks uses the examples of homosexual relationship in Romans 1, he’s not saying that people of homosexual orientation are especially wicked or particularly worthy of condemnation…. or these kind of sexual actions are worse than other sins.
What he is saying that when as a culture we remove God from the center of our solar system, we will experience sexual confusion and this is one example…
I know sound highly offensive and insensitive if you go back to Genesis at the beginning of creation, you will God’s ideal was male/female sexual union… as male/female more fully reflect the image of God… not true in sexual relationships in all kind of contexts… if you look at staff Christmas card (hold up) you’ll see that the male female ratio is about even—we believe that having male and females better reflects the image of God than having all male or all female staff…
I can’t do justice to this big topic in what is sub-point over large message, but I really would glad to talk to any one you who would want to follow up this in a personal conversation.
When people live with God at the center of the universe… we experience confusion in our relationship with ourselves each other…
For many people in culture that “god” is the God of themselves.
The actor Hugh recently said, “I adore myself.” At least he’s honest about it…
In Dostoevsky’s powerful novel Crime and Punishment the young student Raskalvinok adores himself… and he puts at the center of his universe… he’s very intellectually bright student, but doesn’t have enough money… for school so he ends up killing an old lady who owns a pawn shop and has money…because he believes far more worthy than she is of her money than she is… and as result of putting himself at the center of his solar system he kills his neighbor and ends all kind of personal anguish and alienation…
If you place yourself at center of your solar system, you may it’s not necessary to always to tell the truth… you don’t feel account to some higher being or moral order because you’re the center of the solar system…
As we discussed in our series in Proverbs, when you lie you set up a wall between the person you’ve lied to and reality… It also sets a wall between you and the person. When you lie to someone you erect a wall that distancing yourself from someone and you manage your communication with person from a place of emotional distance…
When we place ourselves or something other than God at the center of our solar system, we experience alienation from ourselves…
Just over a week ago, the world's leading climate scientists in Paris in their most powerful language ever used on the issue, said global warming is "very likely (which means 90% certain) man-made…
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change --a group of hundreds of scientists and representatives of 113 governments said in reported is considered conservative and peer reviewed. "The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and ocean, together with ice-mass loss, support the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that global climate change of the past 50 years can be explained without external forcing, and very likely that is not due to known natural causes alone."
The panel quickly agreed: attributing global warming to man-made burning of fossil fuels and connecting it to a recent increase in stronger hurricanes.
Scientists have pointed that the increase is storms, hurricanes, flooding are connected to global warming.
With the release of more carbon emissions on our earth, it thickens the earth’s atmosphere, trapping more sun’s heat on the earth, raising the temperature of the oceans creating conditions that cause storms and hurricanes…
A lot of what insurance companies have dub natural disaster or even “acts of God” are really it seems the result of we human abusing the earth.
In the novel the Life of Pi, Pi the main grow up with a father who’s zoo keeper in India. At their zoo, there one special exhibit behind a curtain with a sign behind the curtain is the most dangerous animal in the world: People would life the curtain and there would a mirror.
When God is not at the center of our solar system… we are alienated not just from God, but ourselves, each other and the earth.
British minister John Stott God’s judgment is not so much about his intervening, but his not intervening… about God letting us go our own way. My seminary professor Scot Hafeman, says the real terror is not falling into the hands of a Holy God, but out of them…
Paul is not ashamed of the Gospel because it is the power of God that restores us to the only source of real life in the universe God… and out of being restored to God and out of that to ourselves, and the earth itself…
Paul ahs been talking about the human race, but as I come the home stretch let me make this more personal…
Is God your real God?
Could be that something or someone other than God has taken your hearts central place of trust?
How might you know?
You might ask yourself, is there something that makes me really worried?
Could it be that that thing is too important to me? Something I have to have?
If you worry about something, it’s a sign you care, but if you have debilitating anxiety and you’d have Panic Anxiety Order or some bio-chemical imbalance, could be that you have an idol?
Is there something I am really angry about?
Something I have to have? Something I have to have?
Not to not get you want can be very frustrated, if you mind become furious…
Could it be that there is something that is too important for me?
If you are despondent or hating yourself…
ask “Is there something too important to me?”
Something I have to have?
If so could it be that there is something that is too important for me.
If you Christian are you saying ok Jesus it’s good to have you, but I also need this other thing to make me happy? If you keep from me I might turn on you? If so that thing is your real God and God is simply a means to get your real God...
It’s as we believe the Gospel and make God our real God, not just our God in name that we restored to God, ourselves and each other earth…
Like a sun flower we would made to point to the sun, we made to be helio centric.
In Sistine chapel… one of the most famous image is the creation panel…
Here is Adam and his empty hand is not reaching for the sword as if power were what makes him a man, or for gold as if money makes him a man but he become a man when God touches him.
When God touches him, he become complete and when God touches woman she become complete…
Pray…
Ezekiel 36
24 " 'For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. 25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. 26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.
Beneditiction:
Psalm 135 says of idols:
16 They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see.
17 They have ears, but cannot hear, nor is there breath in their mouths.
18 Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them.
The Psalmist tells us that if we worship idols: we become like them, mute, bind, deaf lifeless… but if we worship like our maker we will become like God…. So become people who worship the living God become your true selves…
(The sermon can be heard on line at: www.tenth.ca/audio.htm)
posted by Shigematsu at 7:27 PM
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