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: When a culture as a whole pushes all bounds and rejects God in every conceivable way possible, Paul says God delivers them over to a depraved mind, meaning what? When they don't have the ability to think right about anything. You see, 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 judges 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. And a culture like that, Paul says, does what is not proper.

Then he lists the things that that culture does, starting in verse 29. Look what he says: filled with all unrighteousness, immorality, impurity, evil, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice, gossip, 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 heartily approval to those who practice them.

And so you see what Paul has done in Romans 1. He describes in the text exactly what happens and what has happened again and 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. You understand that, right? 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. That's exactly what Paul says in verse 18. And yet, before we look at this revolution in-depth, we just need to pause here for a second. Pause and get a little perspective. This is heavy, this is weighty, this feels grim. And I'm going to say more about this at the end, but it's also insanely clarifying, isn't it?

You see, 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. And with compassion comes courage. Courage because we frankly care too much to be silent or afraid. Paul said in 2 Corinthians 3:12, he says, "Because we have such great hope, we use great boldness."

And yet, part of that includes—and again, that's 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. What you have to understand is that 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 why knowing why it is good news is knowing the news that is bad.

The bad news is God is angry, which is revolution number one, which comes in two parts. We're just going to cover part one of part one, and you can see it in your notes if you've got them. I call it the wrath of God revealed. Look at verses 18 through 20. 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."

And there it is. You see it. God is angry. And according to Psalm 7, verse 11, God is angry with the wicked every single day. And yet, not only is he angry, but notice what it says. It says the anger of God is being revealed. It's revealed as in you can see it. It's displayed. It's poured out. It is being unleashed upon the world at this very moment in some pretty shocking and particular ways, and we'll see what those are. But 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. And 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." And you see the parallels, don't you? 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." And Paul says that the anger and wrath of God is being revealed from heaven. It's being revealed, meaning you can see it. It is displayed. It is visible. It is tangible. It is evident and has been displayed in every culture and every age since our first parents fell in the garden.

And yet you notice he says the anger of God is being revealed, notice, from heaven. From heaven. Those are terrifying words. Why? Because heaven doesn't so much describe God's distance from us as much as it describes his supremacy over us. This is not the anger of an equal—man to man, peer to peer, face to face—but the anger of a God lofty and exalted and matchless and supreme, who rules from heaven over the earth and before whose eyes not one sin is ignored, missed, or overlooked. Hebrews 4:13: "There is no creature hidden from his sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of him with whom we have to do."

And yet you see the object of his fury. Look at verse 18. The anger of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. Details matter, don't they? All, not some. All ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. God sees it all. He knows it all. Every form and kind and type and species and manifestation of evil of man is seen by God, is hated by God, and is the object of the anger of God at this very moment. This is real.

One writer says, "The wrath of God is not a fiction or some figure of speech, but a terrible fact of reality and the great constant of God's holy response to the sin and rebellion of man. Despite man's denial of the hatred of sin or his wrath for sin or even God's very existence at all, his wrath is nevertheless very real and always against the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men." He's right. Those two things—ungodliness and unrighteousness—do you know what those are? Those are the ingredients of every sin. That's the root of every sin.

Think about it. To be ungodly is an attack on the majesty of God himself. It is to be as unlike God as possible, to pursue whatever it is most opposed to his holy nature. But then unrighteousness, what is that? That doesn't merely mean immoral; it means irreverent. To be unrighteous is to be profane, to be outrageous. It's a failure and refusal to value God supremely. Does that make sense? It's taking something that's not God and loving it and treasuring it and trying to be satisfied in it as if it were God. That is unrighteous. And that's the DNA of every sin. Those two things, and they are the object of the wrath and anger of God.

The question is, isn't it, how? In what way? In what way is the anger of God revealed upon these things? Can you see it? Is it visible? Is it tangible? Absolutely it is. Three times Paul says in verse 24 and 26 and 28 that God gives people over to the sin that they desire. He gives them what they want. That is the wrath. The very sins they crave and they desire that will lead to their destruction is the wrath of God. Do you see? That's what I mean when I say the world is not falling apart; God is tearing it apart in the fury of his wrath. Do I need to list the things? Do I need to list the things again that we see? I don't think I do. There are a thousand things we see before our eyes every day that are nothing less than the anger of God revealed from heaven. He gives them what they want.

Which means we need to alter the way we view the world. Don't get me wrong. We do see the love of God. Absolutely. The love of God in common grace. We see the love of God in him keeping a church here, imperfect though we are, but keeping a church here to be witnesses. We see the beauty of God in creation, the kindness of God, the generosity of God, the mercy of God, the patience of God. Ten thousand gifts of grace on the evil and the righteous that none of us deserve. And yet we can never forget that the wrath of God is also revealed.

He gives them what they want. And we used to be among them. We used to be among them until God intervened and saved us by his grace. We too were the target of anger and wrath. But thanks alone, thanks alone to sovereign grace, we are forgiven and cleansed and redeemed and awakened from the dead. And thus we do not exalt ourselves over them, but we grieve in holy compassion for them. Because look how bad it really is, end of verse 18. It would be one thing if sinners didn't know, right? If they were oblivious, merely uninformed, uneducated, unaware, unconscious. But they're not. No one is ignorant. No one is innocent. No one is uninformed.

Look what Paul says. The anger of God is upon the sins of men. Here it is. What do they do? He says they suppress the truth in unrighteousness. The truth, he says. Sinners know the truth and they suppress the truth. The truth about what? The truth about who? Verse 19: the truth about God. Because that which is known about God is evident within them, for God made it evident to them. Do you see that? All people know deep down in their soul the truth that God exists, that God is real, and that he deserves our highest allegiance. But you see the tragedy of verse 18. The knee-jerk default response of every man because of sin is not to believe or worship or bow to God's authority, but instead, Paul says, to suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

That is what man does. That is what we did apart from God's awakening grace. You understand we all emerged out of the womb spiritually dead, slaves to sin, suppressing the truth. The word "suppress" there literally means to hold down, to bury underneath, to muffle, to stifle, to smother, to strangle. Like taking a beach ball to the ocean, holding the beach ball underwater, trying to keep it from coming to the surface. That's what man does. They try to keep the beach ball of divinity from breaking through the surface and reminding them that God is real, that God is watching, that God exists, and that to this God they are held accountable.

This is the attempt of man to obliterate the truth. And notice the agent with which man suppresses the truth. What does Paul say? They suppress the truth in unrighteousness. What does that mean? That means sin piled on top of sin. Just sin piled on top of sin, all to silence the siren that screams in the soul. And man has come up with countless ways to do this, hasn't he? Arguments, denials, cults, false religions, sexual immorality, psychedelic drugs, and anything else that will blare out the noise, the truth of God that cannot be denied.

And this really dawned on me with this recent push to deny that there is such a thing as a man and a woman. You know what I'm talking about. This whole movement that's emerged where there is no man, there is no woman. And it just became clear to me that this whole movement is just one giant suppression of the truth. Because think about it. If you can have a man and a woman, you have distinctions that cannot be denied, right? You have something that is and something that is not. You have a yes and you have a no. Yes, that is a man. No, that is not a woman.

But even that's too much truth to tolerate. That's a very dangerous concession to make, to say that there is a man and a woman, because if you have a man and a woman, well then there is the freedom there to say you have a yes and a no. And that leads to right and wrong and truth and error. And it's not long before those implications lead to God himself. And him we cannot have. And so we must deny men and women altogether. And that is the suppression of the truth. We see it.

And yet the question about the truth about what? What is the truth that mankind desperately wants to bury underneath? Paul explains. Look at verse 19. The anger of God is against the unrighteousness and ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. What truth? Verse 19: because that which is known about God is evident within them, for God made it evident to them. There it is. It doesn't surprise us at all. The truth that man desperately wants to bury and hide and obliterate from memory is the truth about God himself.

And that's very interesting. Paul says what is known about God. Do you feel the implications of that? That means God is undeniable. The truth about God is clear. It is known. It is able to be understood, which is why Paul says that which is known about God is evident within them. Evident, he says. Phaneros is the Greek word, which is built on a word the root of which is light. It's the word for light, which means the truth about God is glowing and radiant and luminous, meaning it's really, really obvious and cannot be denied.

And yet notice however, look at the text. Notice where Paul says the truth about God is evident. He says it is evident in them. It's in them. It's internal. It's inherent. It's instinctive. It's intuitive. And I remember this. I remember these days as a non-Christian, having not heard the gospel, knowing nothing about the Bible, and being absolutely certain without question, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that God is real.

And that sounds crazy, but it makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? You can't be made by God, in the image of God, living in the universe that God created and not have some kind of awareness of the reality of God. It's too close. It's too ingrained. It's too digital. It's too encoded in the soul, which means very bluntly, and I'll just say it, atheists do not exist. Neither do agnostics. It's just not true. Now, they might believe their own delusions to the degree that they are willing to believe that they think they don't believe in God. But in the end, it's just the suppression of the truth that Paul just described in verse 18.

And I'm going to be nice about this, but I don't care what the atheist says. I'm not going to take the word of someone blinded by sin and blinded by the devil over the apostle Paul. Because in the soul of every man, even if buried under an ocean of sin and lies, is the suppression of the truth and that way deep down in the caverns of the soul is the inescapable reality that God is real. We don't have to prove to anyone that God exists. They already believe it.

And it's evident within them, and the reason it is, verse 19, because God made it evident to them. Do you see that? It's internal and it is external. God is evident within man because God made it evident to man, not in an audible voice, not in a vision and a dream, but physically, tangibly through the creation God has made. Look at verse 20. The anger of God is against 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. And yet how did he do that exactly?

For since the creation of the world, there it is, his invisible attributes have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made. Do you see? God has revealed himself to all people in and through creation, which is wild and profound, isn't it? The God who is unmade and invisible is clearly seen through what is made and is visible. And yet it's what theologians call general revelation. General revelation reveals God's glory. It samples his beauty. You think about the order and the splendor and the diversity and the variety and the wonders of creation, all give a glimpse of the God who made it.

You didn't know that when you read National Geographic, you were reading a theological journal. Augustine said this: "Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book in which God is seen, namely the book of creation and the things that are made. Look above you, there it is. Look below you, and there it lies. And now read the book. For God, whom you want to discover, didn't write that book with ink. Instead, he set it before your eyes in the things he has made. And can you ask for a voice that's louder than that?"

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.