“…because God has shown it to them.” Romans 1:19
There is in this world, indubitably, a great amount of despair. We’ve experienced a pandemic in the last year that has only exasperated the problems of isolation, depression and fear. Oh, how the church can reach the lost with the truth of the human condition. The church has that thing most needed by all people and that is the gospel of God concerning Jesus Christ.
Henry David Thoreau once wrote that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Interestingly, he wrote this in his masterpiece, Walden, where he extolled the virtues of, in today’s vernacular, going back to nature. And, despite the great writer’s theological shortcomings, he was quite right about the soothing balm of nature for the human soul. But why is this? Our passage today tells us.
God speaks personally to us through nature.
The problems of aloneness and depression are the problems of abandonment.
As Jesus, our wonderful Savior, was dying on the cross for us, He cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken Me (Matthew 27:46)?” This heart-wrenching cry was a fulfillment of Psalm 22:1 – it was foretold, preordained, and fulfilled. Until that point in His life, Jesus had enjoyed perfect fellowship with the Father. Joy and peace were His because He was sinless. But at that moment in time God the Father poured out His wrath upon the Son, because of sin, for us and for our redemption. The price was that the fellowship, that perfect unity, was torn.
The lessons of this are many. Let’s focus on a few lest we be overwhelmed.
It shows that true love is righteousness, not sin. Our culture preaches that love is an emotion. Some even conflate it with an act of sex. Oh, the colossal deception that is. Instead, perfect love is the Lord and obedience to Him. The penalty of sin that was placed upon Him caused a separation between Father and Son and that caused Jesus to cry out! Notice that in His life He experienced sorrows. Sorrow isn’t sin. Melancholy over the rottenness of this fallen world is, indeed, a logical thing. To witness the desultory consequences of sin around us and experience sorrow is part of the Christian life. But the great apprehensions of life come because of our rejection of the Lord. Jesus never experienced this – the separation from the Father and the trauma that sin brings – until our sins were poured onto Him.
Think on this. Jesus Christ experienced all the things we have in life except for the horrific and diverse traumas of sin.
There is pain in this world – emotional, spiritual and physical – because of sin. That’s the truth of the matter. All attempts to eradicate these on our own terms, therefore, will fail. Only by reconciling ourselves to God through repentance of sin and faith in Christ can we be restored. The world won’t tell us this. The world sells the bill of goods that our problems are social or political or psychological, not spiritual. This is all wrong because they suppress the obvious about mankind – that he/she is God’s image bearer.
If the diagnosis is wrong, the treatment, invariably will be flawed too. Trying to fix mankind’s struggles without the cross is like a doctor giving a patient aspirin when he has a brain tumor. How many millions of dollars do Americans spend on counseling, drugs and all sorts of things only to find itself still unwell? This isn’t evidence that we actually want a fix to what ails us, but that we don’t. We won’t come to Jesus Christ. We reject the diagnosis of the Divine physiatrist who tells us that all have gone astray. He beckons us to come to Him for redemption but we hate His righteousness and want to keep our petty and carnal sins. We want to keep the facade of self-rule. We’re unwilling to recognize that self-rule (autonomy) is a sham. Sin rules us like a tyrant.
Here’s an interesting thing to note: if we followed the principle of sin logically then we’d be anarchists. But the vast majority of those who believe in sexual anarchy vote for greater and greater government. What they seek isn’t freedom. No, it’s to overrule God, to push Him out.
So, when we hear of the cross we hate the message because it reminds us of our responsibility to God.
We scoff. We ridicule. We mock.
Humanity works to master one great skill: repression of the holiness of God and our responsibly to Him. Indeed, God’s holiness scares the bejabbers out of us and we hate Him for it. We bristle when we hear that “there’s none righteous, no, not one…” and say, “surely, we’re not that bad.” But that’s not the point. The point isn’t to compare us to others but to God. It’s that which we fear.
So, there’s trauma to the whole thing. The Christian is saved by the grace of God through faith alone. In this way he/she has peace with the Lord. This leads to a path of holy living and progressive sanctification – which is to say the increasing maturity of one’s character in faith. Sin is seen as the counterfeit that it is. It’s seen as the poison pill. Mankind is spiritually sick the same way a man is who eats poison. But that poison dish is exactly what he keeps going back to, eating and growing ever more ill.
Sin is fatal the same way that poison is. And we know this because God has written it on our hearts. He’s shown it to us in every little detail in life. And, per our passage today, He’s shown it to us in nature.
The heavens declare the glory of God (Psalm 19). When we go for a walk or a drive and see the wonders of nature, we’re seeing the “general” revelation of the Almighty God. This revelation shows that He’s awesome. It shows that everything that obeys Him is beautiful in its time and place, which should quiet us as we wonder what will become of us if we follow Him. We’ll be as we should be only when we delight ourselves in Him (Psalm 37:4).
We toil and save and plan for our vacations at the beach or in the mountains. We see the enormity of it all and it speaks to us. “Day to day pours out speech…” (Psalm 19:2) and we hear the testimony from God’s great evangelist. We don’t vacation next to a landfill. We don’t clamor for a view of a construction site. We want to see nature, which is why beachfront property is always more expensive than a lot next to a water treatment plant. What does this show us? That we want the blessings of God without God.
Where did it all come from? Why is it all so heartbreakingly beautiful? Why are we pulled to it? Why do the clouds and the trees and the meadows touch us?
Because God is showing something of Himself to us!
To reject this requires mental gymnastics the are worthy of an Olympic medal. Nature is God’s temple. That’s what the Garden of Eden was in the first place, before sin fractured our communion with God and ushered in the judgment of sin, which is death. After the fall, Adam and Eve were scared of God and ashamed. They began to argue with one another (“…the woman you gave me…”). Do you see it? All of life’s problems, the death, the shame, the conflicts…all of it stem from our rebellion against God.
To go “back to nature” isn’t to go camping but to the Bible! It’s to go back to what we’re made for, which is to know, worship and obey the Lord. What is the purpose of your life? To fear God (regard Him with reverent awe) and keep His commandments (believe on Jesus Christ). Nature shows us the ineffable beauty and power of the Lord. Christians should go to the mountains, the woods, and the beach. Christians should seek to pray and worship Him under the stars. Jesus often went to the mountains to pray and so should we. We shouldn’t let the pantheists define “nature” for us. We should love his creation more than anyone else precisely because it is His and reveals wonderful things about Him. And we should go because He loves us and has richly provided for us. We’re forgiven our sins in Christ. Fear of death and judgment are gone forever and now we can see the world and nature for what it truly is – the Lord’s. It’s all His and now, by grace, so are we. In faith, we return to Eden and look forward to the great Day of ultimate redemption (Romans 8:22-25) where there will be no more sorrow or crying or hurt in all His holy mountain (Isaiah 65:25).
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