The Unchanging Truth

Narrator: Welcome to the Unchanging Truth, the verse-by-verse Bible teaching ministry of Dr. Jerod Gilcher, lead pastor of Christ Community Bible Church in Arlington, Texas. Through the living and active Word of God, the Unchanging Truth exists to encourage your soul, transform your life, and help you trust and treasure Christ as Redeemer, Savior, and King. Now, opening the Scriptures and proclaiming the truth that never changes, here is Dr. Jerod Gilcher.

Dr. Jerod Gilcher: Paul reveals something haunting in the text about the nature of sin and depravity. Look at verse 21. "Although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or give thanks, but," here it is, "they were made futile in their speculations and their foolish heart was darkened." Do you see it? The two effects of rejecting God. What did he say they are?

They became futile in their speculations, and number two, their foolish heart was darkened. Let's take these one at a time. What does that mean that man became futile in his speculations? And all you have to do is walk through the religion section at Barnes and Noble and you know exactly what it means. And then you wander over to the philosophy section. And then you meander over to the self-help section.

And then the psychology section, and then the sociology section, and the new age and alternative beliefs, and the women's studies and queer studies, and you wander by the section on astrology, and you know exactly what Paul means. It means sinful man apart from God doesn't have a clue. Do you understand? You lose God, you lose the gravitational center of what makes everything make sense.

All things only find their deepest meaning and significance in relation to God. And when he is gone, the planets of our lives fly into chaos and confusion. Nothing makes sense. You cut the rope to the anchor of God, you drift away in an ocean of confusion and speculation. No wonder Solomon says in Ecclesiastes 9:3, "The heart of the sons of men are full of evil, and insanity is in their hearts throughout their lives and afterwards they go to the dead."

That's a cheery verse. He's right. There's a second effect. A second effect of rejecting God. Number two, Paul says, "Their foolish heart was darkened." Our foolish heart was darkened. And we didn't know. And I hope you see the implication. The heart, if you look carefully at the text, the heart was already foolish. It was already in a state of folly, but listen carefully, the conscious rejection of God brought the foolish heart deeper into darkness. Do you see?

And darkness means no light. And light is a metaphor for truth, which means when God is gone, the only guide you have to decide what's right and true and beautiful is a foolish heart, void of the truth. Truth is subjective. Discernment is gone. Truth is what you feel. The culture as a whole plummets into madness. And I think more than ever you and I see the madness, don't we? We see the madness.

Pride Month, pronoun insanity, the drag queen craze, transgender obsession, wokeness, CRT, civil unrest, the targeting of children, anarchy, chaos, abortion, and like a thousand other things are nothing less than futile speculations and hearts submerged in spiritual darkness. That is it. And yet it's worse than that. It's even worse than that. Because it would be one thing if you had a culture saying, "We don't know what to do. We can't figure it out."

But you don't have that. Instead, look at verse 22. These people, futile in mind and darkened in heart, Paul says, "They profess to be wise," but literally, they were made fools. And they exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God with the likeness of the image of corruptible man, and birds, and four-footed animals, and crawling creatures. There it is in verse 22. They were fools. We were fools, beloved. And yet we thought we were so wise, didn't we?

That's what unbelievers do. That's what we did. We thought we were wise and clever and brilliant and insightful. And that's really easy to do when you build a fake reality, right? When you build an alternative world, when everything is rigged to your advantage. Like making a fake Hollywood set. They make a fake reality in which they make the rules. They ask the questions. They give the answers. They decide what's right. They decide what's true. They decide what reality is. And every time they hit the bullseye.

They win every argument every time. They refute all of our objections every time. Or so they think they do in their delusion. They profess to be wise, but they became fools. And they literally became morons. Emoranthēsan is the Greek word from which we get our word moron. Because without a sovereign God at the center of reality, you can only be moronic. You can only be a fool. And here's the thing: we totally get it. Because we were there. We lived that. We were that.

And until gospel light pierced into the darkness, we too were morons living in a dream world. We were deluded and deranged, slaves to sin, suppressing the truth under the wrath of God. And the only reason why we're not there now is because someone loved us enough to intervene. Not just Christ, but someone he sent with the preaching of the gospel, right? Long our imprisoned spirit lay, fast bound in sin and nature's night. His eye diffused a quickening ray. We woke. The dungeon flamed with light.

Our chains fell off. Our heart was free. We rose, went forth, and followed the king. But until that happened, we were empty and futile and foolish and obsessed with the idols that had captured our affections. Look at verse 23. Here is the revelation, beloved. Professing to be wise, they were made fools. Here it is. "And they exchanged, they exchanged, they traded the glory of the incorruptible God with the likeness of an image of corruptible man and birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures and all the animals on Old MacDonald's farm."

That is the theological revolution: trading God for idols. And this, beloved, is where it all begins. When a culture comes unraveled and sinks into madness, it all began way, way, way back here with the theological revolution and the rejection of God. And you look at the exchange. There's the glory of the incorruptible God, and then there's the image in the likeness of man and birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. What is he saying?

What he's saying is, listen very carefully, when faced with a choice, when people are faced with a choice between a sovereign God matchless and supreme and a hand-carved man-made action figure teetering on the shelf, man chooses the idol every time. This is just astonishing. We with the poison of the serpent coursing through our souls, we emerged on the planet as rebels in rebellion. And the way Paul puts it, it seems ridiculous, right? The way Paul puts it, why would you choose an idol over God?

That doesn't make sense. And yet that's just the point. The point is not the beauty of the statue. The point is the beauty of the self. Do you know what I mean by that? What I mean is, idols, what are idols but servants of the lusts of those who worship them? What I mean is, what are idols but puppets that must give their silent approval to those who fashioned them? Does that make sense? What are idols but a way to allow the worshiper to be their own God and to worship themselves?

That's the point of idolatry. Worship of self is the root of every sin. You understand, sin is evil and ugly not merely for the effects or how it appears on the surface, or it's not even evil and ugly for the damage that it causes to other people. No, sin is evil and ugly because at its root, it takes something that's not God and loves it and worships it and tries to be satisfied in it as if it were God. And that is the reason God is angry.

And even more than that, that is the reason, verse 16, all people need the gospel. That is the reason, verse 17, all people need the saving righteousness of God found in the gospel. We live in a world of zombies, beloved. Spiritually dead, roaming the earth, blinded by the devil, feasting on the rotted flesh made corrupt by sin. But the gospel is the power to save them. And think about your own conversion for a second. Think about that.

To slay our sins at the deepest possible level, what did God have to do? He had to break us, right? He had to intervene and capture our worshiping gaze, to ravish our souls and free us from our idols by an unmatched beauty. That right there is how people get saved. That is how we got saved. And my point is, Paul's point is, the gospel is the power that delivers from idols and the worship of the self. A couple of questions to consider.

I know you know this, but did you know that what the culture needs is not just to alter their behavior, or get their act together, or turn over a new leaf, or change the way they vote, but rather what they need is the idol-extracting power of the gospel of Jesus Christ? Another question. Did you know, did you know that that is still the way that idols in our lives are killed today? Did you know that? In the life of a believer, that idols in our lives are vanquished by the gospel? Did you know that?

Which makes a lot of sense when you remember that the gospel is not a distilled few minimal truths that you boil down in the most simplest way to get three-year-olds to ask Jesus into their heart. No, the gospel is the unlimited riches, salvation riches, purchased by Jesus Christ with his sin-bearing death in our place. And what that means, if you listen carefully, is that captivity to idolatry is broken by the power of a superior pleasure, by a stronger attraction, by a joy more compelling than that which is found in the idol that tempts us.

Does that make sense? You see, you can try to kill idolatry in your life in a couple different ways. You can try to do it with mere rigor and self-control, or you can put before your eyes something vastly more worthy of your heart's affection, namely the worth and beauty of Christ in the gospel. Right? I mean, it's Philippians 2, isn't it? Who, although he existed in the form of man, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave and being found in appearance as a man.

And he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God highly exalted him and gave to him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. Do you see? The harlotry of idolatry is conquered by the beauty of supremacy. Revolution number two. Revolution number two is a sexual revolution.

Is a sexual revolution. Because the fact of the matter is, when the cat is gone, the mice come out to play. And when God is gone, the outcome is inevitable. Sin comes out to play. And in particular, sexual sin. And very specifically, a sexual revolution, which is what we see in verses 24 and 25. Look at the text. Paul says, "Therefore," therefore, stop right there. Don't even look at the next word. Whatever it is that Paul is about to say is crucial to the logic and the message of the text.

Remember, he just said in verse 18 that man suppresses the truth in unrighteousness. That the anger of God is upon the sons of men, right? Verse 23 says that the reason why it is, is because they traded God for idols. Here in verse 24, Paul is going to show us what the anger of God looks like. You ready? Here it is. "Therefore, God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, that their bodies would be dishonored among them, who exchanged the truth of God with a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed forever. Amen."

And there it is. Do you see it? Do you see the sexual revolution? A mass of people plunging into lust, indulging in uncleanness, living in open shame, dishonoring their bodies, violating one another with sexual sin. That is exactly what Paul's describing here. And yet the text is chilling, isn't it? It's even prophetic in a sense, because once the rope to the anchor of God is cut, the ship of society drifts inevitably into an ocean of sexual immorality. And when you look at American history, that is exactly what you see.

Take a walk with me down the historical lane. I said some of this last week. You remember that with the Renaissance, with the Enlightenment, with the Age of Reason in the 17th and 18th centuries, man became enamored with man, right? What man could do. What man could achieve. Reason replaced revelation as the arbiter of truth. Why on earth do we need the Bible when we have the mind of man? And it was man, not God, who became the center of the universe.

Liberal theology from Europe crashed on the shores of America. Seminaries were corrupted. Churches were poisoned. And then, and then, here's the thing, with modernism and humanism and secularism and liberalism came Darwinism. Came Darwinism, which made God logically unnecessary. Oh, we believe in science now. We don't need God anymore. And here's the thing: almost overnight, the morals and ethics that generally governed behavior and marriage and sex and family, all of a sudden, almost in a moment, became irrelevant and arbitrary.

And then, beginning in the twenties and then exploding in the sixties, was this culture-wide, universal rejection of every single moral imperative there is. Ethics were no longer a matter of theology. They were a function of the feelings. Free love became a kind of battle cry, which meant you could do what you want, with whom you want, without the constraints of marriage, even with multiple partners if that's what you prefer. Marriage was slammed as patriarchal and slavery.

Gender roles were rejected and redefined. Sexual activities which had some kind of bounds and restraints and moral compass were then given free reign to be whatever the heart desires. And then with that arose public nudity and pornography and premarital sex. I'm not saying those things didn't exist before; they totally did. I'm just saying that these things just exploded onto the scene. And my point is, that kind of culture-wide, unanimous embrace of rampant sexual immorality is exactly what Paul described. That's here.

And since that day it has only progressed, or should we say, digressed. And here's the thing about the sexual revolution. Here's the thing about that. As tragic though it is, because the bodies from the sexual revolution have been washing up on shore ever since, but tragic and sad though it is, it raises the question: how did that happen? And how did that happen so fast? Do you see? I mean, how was it that there is an entire cultural, ideological shift where a massive part of society united together in a sex-crazed solidarity, abandoned and rejected all previous moral constraints? How did that happen so fast? What's the explanation?

And Paul gives the explanation in verse 24. God. God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to uncleanness, that their bodies would be dishonored among them. Do you see it? God did it. God did that. God gave them what they wanted. Don't you see? The revolution is his wrath. The rebellion is his punishment. That's what Paul means when he says God gave them over. No, no, he didn't allow them to go. He didn't merely permit them to go. He didn't hands-off walk away, passively let themselves plunge into lust.

No, Paul is clear. God actively handed them over to the very sins that would lead to their destruction. It's the active verb. God did that. One writer said this: that word "gave" or "gave them over," he says it demands that we give God a more active role as the initiator of a process. God does not simply let the boat go, he says; he gives it a push downstream. Like a judge who hands a prisoner to the punishment his crime has earned, God hands the sinner over to a terrible cycle of ever-increasing ruin and sin.

And this, Paul says, is the wrath of God revealed, where God removes his gracious restraints that keeps a society intact and then he hardens the heart corporately, sears the conscience, cauterizes the soul, gives people over to the very deeds that will destroy them, which means it wasn't freedom that they felt, it was God's fury. It wasn't progress that they made, it was God's punishment. It wasn't liberation that they experienced, it was God's vindication of his justice. That's what that was.

And I'll just be honest, if the advocates of the sexual revolution were honest, if the people who marched in those sexual liberation parades in the sixties were honest, they could admit that the progress they wanted was not the paradise they expected. That the great utopia and new world order that they guaranteed would come never came and instead only left the wreckage of mangled lives and people in despair, didn't it? Which is interesting because that's exactly what Paul said was going to happen.

Look at verse 24. God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to uncleanness or to impurity. Here it is. That, this is the result of that, that their bodies would be dishonored among them. Do you see it? Lust had a very grim and devastating result. What did he say it is? The dishonoring of their bodies. What does he mean? I think he means the ruin and the pain and the devastation that comes from unrestrained sexual sin, right? I mean, you take the gift of sex that God has given, you remove it from the context in which it's blessed, you use it as a weapon for selfish personal pleasure, and the only possible end is broken hearts and mutilated lives.

Narrator: Thanks for joining us for the Unchanging Truth, the verse-by-verse Bible teaching ministry of Dr. Jerod Gilcher and Christ Community Bible Church in Arlington, Texas. At Christ Community Bible Church, we exist to prize, portray, and proclaim the supremacy of Christ as we trust in his word and wait for his return. We hope today's teaching has encouraged your soul and helped you trust and treasure Christ as your Redeemer, Savior, and King. If you're in the DFW area and looking for a church home, join us for worship Sunday mornings at 10:30. To learn more about the mission of the church, meet the pastoral staff, or plan a visit, go to ccbiblechurch.com. You'll find ministry services and additional teachings there as well. Just click on the resources tab to get started. That's ccbiblechurch.com. Join us again next time as we open the Scriptures together and proclaim the truth that never changes. This has been the Unchanging Truth.