The Unchanging Truth

Guest (Male): 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: Every culture comes unraveled in four progressive and increasingly destructive stages. That's my claim this morning. Every culture, every society, every people, every nation goes insane and comes unraveled in four progressive and increasingly destructive stages, or even better, let's call them revolutions. I think you and I would agree that the world is falling apart. It is going from bad to worse. We are living in the death throes of a culture that is coming apart in slow motion.

This morning, my claim is that every culture collapses, crumbles, and unravels into self-destruction in four tragic and progressive revolutions, with number four, of course, being the worst. Here are the revolutions by which a culture comes unraveled and crumbles into self-destruction. Number one, every culture starts with a theological revolution. That is the denial of God and the worship of idols, which leads to number two, a sexual revolution. Once you suck God out of the picture, people feel free to do as they please. As Dostoevsky said, "Once God is gone, anything is permissible."

This leads to number three, a homosexual revolution. Sexual sin festers and grows, and when that becomes accepted, celebrated, and legally sanctioned and endorsed, you know that is exactly where you are. This leads to number four, worst of all, a cultural revolution, meaning when everything in the culture is upside down and turned on its head. A culture has gone insane and lost its mind. People plunge into madness. What is good they call evil, what is evil they call good. When they call women men and men they call women. When criminals are the victims, truth is what you feel, and words have no meaning. When killing babies is a right or, as they call it, healthcare. When 2+2 is 5, and if you say it is 4, that makes you a white supremacist. That's how you know when a culture has gone insane.

When a culture pursues its rejection of God to the furthest logical extreme, after this you can go no further. This is where a culture eats itself to death and dies in obscurity. Those are the four revolutions by which a culture comes unraveled: a theological revolution, a sexual revolution, a homosexual revolution, and then a cultural revolution. The reason why we know that's true is because that is exactly what we see in the text of Romans chapter 1.

In Romans 1, Paul displays not just the sinfulness of man and the evils of humanity, but what he portrays is the stages in which humans plunge themselves into ruin and destruction. Paul displays what happens to people and societies and cultures when they pursue their rejection of God to the furthest logical implication. I think the text is really clear that rejection of God unfolds in four stages or revolutions that progress until you can go no further. I really believe, based on what the text says, that we here in America are in the fourth and final stage. We are in a stage four culture war headed toward oblivion, just like at the flood, the tower of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, and the book of Judges.

That's exactly where we are, and yet that's not even the most appalling thing about the text. The most appalling thing about the text is that these four revolutions leading to chaos and ruin are unleashed by God himself. When a culture goes insane and pursues its sin with ravenous fury, that is not a world out of control. That is a world under the wrath of God. The world is not falling apart; God is tearing it apart in the fury of his wrath.

He is not only angry, but he is angry, which is why the title of the sermon is "The Wrath of God Unleashed upon a Culture." All the chaos and burning and destruction we see is nothing less than the wrath of God himself. The wrath of God is future, but it is not only future. It is present, right now, happening as we speak. This is exactly why the proclamation of the gospel is so badly needed. That's why we have our own revolution, our own counter-revolution, our own gospel revolution pleading with ruined sinners to be saved through the preaching of the gospel. Things are bad, probably worse than ever, but now is not the time for panicking; now is the time for preaching. Now is not the time to escape from the world; now is the time to engage the world. We are Christians for such a time as this.

Martin Luther said that if we fight the battle where it doesn't rage the hottest, we are for that very reason considered unfaithful. Well, it is the hottest it's ever been. Oh, to be Christians for such a time as this. We're not the underdogs. We're not the losers in this fight. The darker it gets, the brighter the gospel shines. The next three sermons or so will be heavy and weighty and sober to be sure, but they will also be compelling, urgent calls to look lost people right in the eyes and declare to them that there is a King who has conquered death. There is a King who has defeated the devil, and there is a King who will return and rule all things in the splendor of his glory.

Over the next few weeks from this text, I want you to see four revolutions that reveal the wrath of God and display the urgent need for the gospel. This morning we're only going to get to the first of these revolutions—in fact, just half of the first revolution, which I'm sorry to say in America we have already passed—but revolution number one is a theological revolution.

As a culture comes unraveled, this is where it begins. Not just a tiny little shift in the view of God, but a rejection and denial of God himself. God has got to go. God is not welcome here. Like the tower of Babel, man wants the planet for himself. We can totally see this playing out in history. Think about the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason in the 17th and 18th centuries. Man became enamored with man: what man could do and what man could achieve. Reason replaced revelation as the arbiter of truth. Why do we need the Bible if we have the mind of man and what it can do?

It was man, not God, who became the center of the universe. This gave birth to modernism, which at its core is a belief in human progress and human goodness. Technology and science are the answer to everything. With modernism, the question no longer became "What is true?" but "What is useful?" We've got telegraphs, trains, cars, and the Industrial Revolution. Why do we need the virgin birth and the deity of Christ?

Suddenly, the personal, imminent, sovereign God was viewed as distant and faraway and unnecessary. Everything could be explained in modern terms. We don't need God anymore, which is what we call deism. This perfectly set the stage for Darwinian evolution, which is nothing but a creation myth without a creator. Without a creator, you don't have people in the image of God. If you don't have people in the image of God, then life doesn't matter and you can kill who you please. Without a creator, there's no basis for morality, because without a sovereign Lawgiver, who can say what right and wrong actually is? This is the essence of what postmodernism is, which says there's no truth at all.

There's no meaning, no truth, no purpose, and not even ultimate reality. God is dead, truth is what you feel, and what does that unleash but absolute moral insanity? It is like the sexual revolution that began in the '20s and exploded in the '60s, which denied every single moral imperative there is. This led to the open embrace and legally sanctioned practice of homosexuality, which at its core is a fundamental rejection of biological reality and family and marriage. Once you open that door, you're free from any moral constraint and you can live and believe any way your desires determine.

There is no man and there is no woman, unless you are a man who wants to become a woman or a woman who wants to become a man. Pedophilia is fine, criminals are the victims, Dr. Seuss is racist, Mr. Potato Head is sexist, and we should mutilate our children's genitals to alter their gender—or excuse us, we call that gender-affirming care now. All of that is proof that a culture has lost the ability to reason. They've lost their minds and gone insane, which is exactly what happens when God is removed. One writer says the death of God may sanction our independence, but it also ensures our meaninglessness.

This gluttonous frenzy that we see before us, when a culture eats itself to death and comes unraveled at the seams, began all the way back here with a fundamental rejection and denial of God. It was a theological revolution, which led to a sexual revolution, which led to a homosexual revolution, which led to nothing less than a full-on cultural revolution filled with chaos and madness where there is no truth and everybody does what is right in their own eyes.

That's where we're at this very moment. This tragic spiral of insanity, observable in American history, is exactly what Paul unfolds in the text of Romans chapter 1. They mirror each other hauntingly and terrifyingly and eerily and prophetically. What we see historically unfolding in America is what Paul unfolds in the text. Look at verse 18. Unrighteous men suppress the truth in unrighteousness. The truth about what? The truth about who? Verse 19: the truth about God. Verse 21: sinful man does not glorify God. He doesn't give thanks to God, but instead, verse 23: he trades God and replaces God and exchanges God for idols. That's a theological revolution.

Notice verse 24: "Therefore, God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to uncleanness, that their bodies would be dishonored among them, who exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator." That's a sexual revolution. When God is gone, you do what you want, but lust can't stay put. It festers and grows. Once the gravity of God is gone, then everything else flies into confusion. It brings about yet another revolution, which Paul describes in verses 26 and 27.

"For this reason, God gave them over to dishonorable passions. For both their females exchanged the natural function for that which is against nature, and likewise also the men, after abandoning the natural function of the female, were inflamed in their lust for one another, men with men working what is shameful, receiving in themselves the due penalty of their error." That's a homosexual revolution. The point is not that Paul is ranking homosexuality as the worst sin ever, but what he is doing is saying this is where people are willing to go in their rejection of God. They are willing to do the anatomically unthinkable to find satisfaction in and apart from the living God.

This leads to number four: a cultural revolution, the last and the worst, when people pursue their rejection of God to the furthest logical implication. Look at verse 28: "And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind to do those things which are not proper." There it is, a depraved mind. This is not just the weirdos on the fringe. This is the collective mass of society. When a culture as a whole pushes all boundaries and rejects God in every conceivable way, Paul says God delivers them over to a depraved mind, meaning when they don't have the ability to think right about anything.

When what before was forbidden and punished is now legislated and celebrated, you're there and you know what it's like because you live there. Evil is good, good is evil. Pride month, drag queens, cancel culture, gender fluid, the woke mobs of social justice, Supreme Court justices who can't even define what a woman is and get elected anyway—that's exactly what a depraved mind is, and that is exactly where we are. A culture like that, Paul says, does what is not proper. Then he lists the things that that culture does, starting in verse 29.

Filled with all unrighteousness, immorality, impurity, evil, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice, gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving—just read people's tweets and comment threads—unmerciful, who although they know the righteous ordinance of God that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do them, but they give hearty approval to those who practice them. You see what Paul has done in Romans 1.

He describes in the text exactly what happens and what has happened again and again in cultures and societies and nations and peoples, namely that they come unraveled in four progressive and destructive stages, and all of it Paul calls the wrath of God. You have to understand that when a culture implodes and burns to the ground, it is God himself who lit the fuse. That's what Paul means when he says three times, "God gave them over" to the very sins they wanted, which would lead to their destruction. He did that. It isn't freedom that they feel; it is God's fury. It isn't progress that they've made; it is God's punishment. It isn't proof that God is absent from the world; it is proof that God is angry with the world.

And yet, before we look at this revolution in depth, we just need to pause here for a second and get a little perspective. This is heavy, weighty, and grim, but it's also insanely clarifying. We know based on the authority of Scripture what's happening in the culture and we know what the solution is, which leads number two to compassion. With clarity comes compassion because we were saved from the same depravity. The only reason why we're not there now is owing nothing in ourselves but only to sovereign grace.

With compassion comes courage because we care too much to be silent or afraid. Paul said in 2 Corinthians 3:12, "Because we have such great hope, we use great boldness." That is so many reasons why Paul wrote this letter to the Romans: to make these people bold with the gospel, fluent in the gospel, familiar with the gospel, gripped with all that God has done in Christ to save sinners from despair. Part of that includes knowing what sin is and what it means to be a sinner. The gospel is good news—it is the best news in the universe—but part of knowing why it is good news is knowing the news that is bad. The bad news is God is angry. That's revolution number one, which comes in two parts, and we're just going to cover part one: the wrath of God revealed.

Paul says, "For the anger of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness because that which is known about God is evident within them, for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, both his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse." God is angry. According to Psalm 7:11, God is angry with the wicked every single day. Not only is he angry, but notice the anger of God is being revealed. It is revealed, as in you can see it. It's displayed, it's poured out, and it is being unleashed upon the world at this very moment in some pretty shocking and particular ways.

Notice carefully the logic of the text. What word does Paul begin verse 18 with? It is the word "for." "For the anger of God is revealed," which means this verse is proof. It proves the point of verses 16 and 17. What did Paul say there? "I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith." You see the parallels. There is the righteousness of God revealed in the gospel, and there is the anger of God revealed from heaven. God is righteous, man is not, and so you see the logic of the text. The reason all people need the saving righteousness of the gospel is because all people are unrighteous and under the wrath of God. Romans 3:10: "There is no one who is righteous, not even one."

Guest (Male): 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.