Kathy's Bible StudyCourtesy Of Firequill Publications email: FireQuill@cox.net

This is the final episode in this series. I hope you will take this seriously and pray for our nation. As some has said: “It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of an angry God”. And God is angry with our nation. No nation has been blessed more than America but we have forgotten.

That leads to a fourth element, the downward spiral goes from revelation to rejection to rationalization.  They tell themselves they’re wise when the truth is they’re morons.  But the fourth cause of God’s wrath is the worst.

Revelation, rejected, darkness rationalized and the fourth, religion…religion.  This is so interesting.  Verse 23, “They exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.”  How ridiculous. Religion….men create their own gods to accommodate their own useless ideas.  You might think that religion is man at his highest.  Let me tell you, religion is man at his lowest.  False religion is man at the bottom…at the bottom.

It’s man who has gone away from the truth of God and the further he goes, the more he descends into satanic false religion.  Religion is not man at his highest.  It is man at his absolute lowest.  This is the final straw.  As verse 25 indicates, we didn’t read it earlier because I wanted to save it till now, they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and they worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever, amen.  They kept worshiping, they developed the religion but they worshiped something of their own creation, or a creation of God, an animal, a fish, a star, a constellation, or an idol rather than the Creator. Verse 28 says it again, “They did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer.” It doesn’t mean they’re not religious, ah the whole world is religion, fanatically religious.

You see, man does not ascend from the muck of paganism and ignorance up to the truth of God.  That’s not how it works.  Man is not evolving up; he is not ascending to God.  He is descending.

He falls from the truth of God into the slime of religion, false religion, satanic counterfeit.  Religion is not man at his best, religion is man at his worst.  Religion is not man at his highest, it is man at his lowest.  It is not man ascending, it is man descending.  It is not man finding God, it is man finding Satan and being content with him.  The ultimate insanity…the ultimate insanity is to reject God and create a non-God that doesn’t exist and worship that.  How insane is that?

A false God, a false Jesus, and you do that and call yourself wise and erudite and you pontificate about your religion and you have all kinds of complexities in your satanic system, all kinds of people going around with titles and robes and authority and influence and power. This is moronic.

The idols come in all kinds of forms, from primitive statues of the lowest cultures to the more elevated gods of self and sex and mother nature, from the Roman eagle to the spotted owl, to the golden bulls of Egypt to the dolphin gods of environmentalists, from the worship of a stick to the worship of the earth, from Aborigines to environmentalists, from pantheistic worship of the world to eco-feminism, from eco-feminism to Islam and every other religion.  I’m not surprised is terrorism is associated with religion; it’s man at his lowest. Is it any wonder that as a society then we are struggling with our ethics?  Is it any wonder we are struggling with our morals?  We’ve rejected God.  He gave us revelation, we rejected it.  We rationalize it and call ourselves an elite educated advanced culture and we invent religion as if it’s an indicator of how high we have ascended when the fact of the matter is we’re going down at warp speed. We have abandoned God and God has returned the favor.
And so, we are under His wrath.  That brings the question…is there any hope? Is there any hope for this country, for any society in this condition?  Well, I will take you to a passage of Scripture that gives us hope.  Turn in your Bible to the Psalms, and I want you to look at this, Psalm 81…Psalm 81 because this cycle is a constantly visible cycle in history, going on all the time.  It has happened before in Israel.  It is happening even now in Israel.  Many generations of the Jewish people, God’s chosen people for a future redemption, many generations have gone through this cycle, rejecting the true God, rationalizing about their condition, inventing complex religion, descending.  Is there any hope for them in the future?  Is there any hope for the western world?  For any nation in the world?  For us?

Well all I can say is there is a word of hope in Psalm 81.  Let’s look at verse 11.  “But My people did not listen to My voice and Israel did not obey Me, so…and here’s the same language…I gave them over to the stubbornness of their heart to walk in their own devices.”   — That’s Romans 1.

This happened to Israel.  As I said, the history of the world is the judgment of the world.  God has allowed all the nations to go their own way, Acts 14.  Nothing new.  I gave them over.  But verse 13, here is a plaintive cry from the heart of God.  “O that My people would listen to Me, that Israel would walk in My ways.  I would quickly subdue their enemies and turn My hand against their adversaries.  Those who hate the Lord would pretend obedience to Him.”

In other words, they would be so good to be under the protection of the Lord that people would even pretend to be believers.  And the time of their punishment would be forever, punishing their enemies.  And I love verse 16, “And I would feed you with the finest of the wheat and from honey from the rock I would satisfy you.”  This is a plaintive cry from God who says, “O that My people would listen to Me, that Israel would walk in My ways.  I would turn from abandoning them, from giving them over to their own sinful choices to defending them and protecting them and punishing their enemies and I would feed them with the finest of the wheat and with honey from the rock I would satisfy them.”

The key, listen to Me.  Walk in My ways.  The only hope for this or any other society is to hear the Word of the Lord and obey it…to hear the Word of the Lord and obey it.  And I would suggest that this is not a good time for weak men preaching weak messages in weak churches. This is a time for bold and powerful, strong biblical ministry that calls people to hear the Word of the Lord and respond.  This is the only hope for any people for any individual.

Whenever Gentiles were evangelized in the book of Acts, whenever Gentiles needed to hear about God, the preachers would tell them about the God who created everything, Acts 14, Acts 17.  They would take them back to creation because everyone knew there had to be a creator, He had to be powerful, He had to be a designer.  He had to be moral because there was morality in the heart shown up in the laws that men made and in the structures of relationships.  This God also was a God who had personality because personality can’t come out of non-personality.  And so when evangelizing Gentiles, you started with the Creator as Paul did on Mars Hill.

When evangelizing Jews, you started with the Old Testament. For the Gentiles it was the general revelation of God, for the Jews it was the special revelation of God.  And now our society has succeeded in eliminating the need for a Creator with the theory of evolution and in disparaging the authenticity of Scripture.  And even in the church today there is a mad dash to remove the Scripture because people don’t want to hear it.  But the truth is there.  It’s in the conscience, it’s in the reason that takes you to God and it’s in the revelation of Scripture.  Sinners are without excuse because that which is known about God is evident within them for God made it evident to them in creating them the way He did.  And so, looking at the creation you see His invisible attributes, eternal power, divine nature clearly and you have no excuse.

Revelation, that’s the first thing.  God has revealed Himself to man.  Men have received the truth.  In this country, even the biblical truth.  Second word in this progression, rejection.  Men have turned from the truth.  Verse 21, “Even though they knew God they did not honor Him as God or give thanks but they became futile in their speculations and their foolish heart was darkened.” And though man finds God in reason, he rejects Him.  He finds God in the moral law and conscience, he rejects Him. He is exposed to the truth of God in Scripture, he rejects.  He suppresses the truth under his iniquities because he loves darkness rather than light.  And he plunges downward believing that he can live his life any way he wants without any consequence at all.  And leaving himself therefore under divine judgment of the severest kind.

And so we look at a society today, in particularly here in America and in the western world so amazingly influenced by the gospel and we see a people who do not honor God.  Go back to verse 21.  They do not honor Him as God, they do not give thanks.”   That is to say they do not thank Him for being the source of everything they have.  Man’s problem is not that he can’t find God, man’s problem is not that he can’t recognize God.  Man’s problem is not that he can’t find the truth, or recognize the truth.  It is that he will not…and it’s back to John 3 again…they love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil. They don’t want to honor God.  To honor God would then cause them to be accountable to Him and to His law and therefore under His judgment.  Man would rather live without God in view at all.

I was thinking this through some couple of years ago and thought that man likes to live with five dominant lies. These are very comfortable to the sinner.

1. Life is random. We’re all products of evolutionary chance, no purpose, no creator, no accountability.  We basically live in a universe where a bottom line formula is nobody times nothing equals everything.  Nobody is in charge, nobody put us here.  We’re accountable to nobody.  A rock is a rat is a dog is a boy…was the mantra of one organization.  No one made us, we have no reason and that’s why we are free in this random world to do what we want.
2. The second dominating lie, truth is relative.  No absolutes, no standard, you just kind of have to flow around public opinion but you can change public opinion, as we well know.  Ethics can be changed if you have enough clout and enough power and enough persistence, but there is no absolute truth.  We’re all free to possess our own truth and demand the freedom to live our lives according to our own truth which is of our own invention.
3. A third dominating lie is that people are basically good, oh if they go bad, somebody abused them.  Somebody else is to blame, they lack self-esteem, they have psychological problems based on environmental failures.  But people are basically good.  I’m basically good, I’m a good person…you hear them say that all the time.
4. A fourth lie that dominates our culture is that everyone can change his own life, get control, take charge, become the person you want to be.  You have the power to be whatever you want to be.  That’s the biggest lie ever.  You can be everything you want to be.  People tell their kids, “You can be anything you want to be.”  Let me tell you, if you’re slow, you’ll die slow.  If you’re dumb, you’ll die dumb.  If you can’t carry a tune in a bucket, you’ll die not carrying a tune in a bucket.  There are certain things you can’t ever change.  You cannot do anything you want to do, that’s ridiculous.  But that fits the mantra of this maniacal kind of freedom in a sin-saturated culture.
5. And the fifth and dominating lie is the goal of life is self-satisfaction.  The goal of life is self-satisfaction.  You’re really after feeling good about yourself, being satisfied with who you are.  You hear people say, “This is who I am, take it or leave it and I’m happy who I am.  This is me and I’m just out there.”  And you want to say, “Well we wish you weren’t, just go somewhere else.”  It’s this blatant kind of brash self illusion.  Life is random, truth is relative, people are basically good, everybody can change his own life if he chooses to, and the goal of life is self-satisfaction.  The truth is opposite that. God is sovereign and nothing is random.  The Bible is absolute truth.  All people are basically sinful. Only Christ can change your life.  And selfless submission to Jesus Christ is the goal of life.  They’ve got it completely wrong.

And so, why would they honor a God they deny?  Why would they give Him thanks?  They think they’ve achieved everything on their own.  They can look at the beauty of this world with all the good things that God has placed in it by His common grace and they can’t thank Him for a sunset, for love, for children, for a baby, for a good meal, for a vacation, for rest, for sleep, for a comfortable chair.  They can’t thank Him because then they would be acknowledging that He’s the source. It’s like Isaiah, he wrote of his own time, “You felt secure in your wickedness and you said no one sees me.  Your wisdom and your knowledge have deluded you for you have said in your heart, I am and there is no one besides me.” That is the modern American mantra…I am the Invictus, I am the captain of my soul, empty, useless self-centeredness. And into this vacuous self-centeredness is sucked deeper darkness. Go back to verse 21, “Because though they knew God they didn’t honor Him as God, or give thanks,” and we’re talking collectively about a society here.  “But they became empty in their speculations,” futile, empty, human ideas, useless. And as I said, into that vacuum is sucked darkness and the end of verse 21 says, “Their foolish heart was darkened.”  They wouldn’t know and now they couldn’t know.  The darkness dominated.  The light went out.  Intellectual darkness and moral darkness turn to spiritual darkness…deadly darkness.

Wrath came because of revelation and it comes again and again and again and again to societies throughout all of human history because they will not acknowledge God who has revealed Himself and so you have revelation followed by rejection.  And when there comes rejection, the light goes out, the darkness comes.  And a third step follows, rationalization…rationalization.  This if it weren’t so sad would be funny, verse 22, “Professing to be wise they became fools.”  The idiocy of verse 21 is exacerbated in verse 22.  Their darkness is so profound that they can’t assess their true condition.  So they profess to be wise.

It reminds me of the lady who went to the psychiatrist, she had a duck on a leash.  And the doctor said, “How can I help you, Ma’am?”  She said, “It’s not me, my husband, he’s the one, he thinks he’s a duck.”  This would call into question her perception of reality, would it not?  It’s like the guy lying in the mental hospital in the bed, kept saying, “I’m Napoleon, I’m Napoleon, I’m Napoleon.” And the guy in the next bed said, “No you’re not…no you’re not.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m God.”

You say, this is ridiculous.  This is no more ridiculous, no more absurd, no more bizarre than giving yourself a Ph.D. when you’re a fool, congratulating yourself for your wisdom and knowledge and insight and achievement when your heart is black and shut out completely of true knowledge.  Professing to be wise they’re proud to stand up and declare how really wise they are. And it always reminds me of the emperor’s new clothes.  The story about the emperor who was convinced that he was wearing the most beautiful clothing when he was stark naked and went out parading the glory of his new garments and everybody laughed.  Fools, morino(?)  from which we get moron.  We have a society of proud morons flaunting themselves as if they’re significant, as if they’re wise, they’re on endless talk shows, endlessly driveling out their folly.

Tomorrow the final part – part 5 — Don’t miss it!