“For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.” Romans 1:21-23
Ah, the plain truth. The Bible says right here that everyone knows God. Let’s get that right out there in the open because upon this truth all evangelism and apologetics rest. We can go so far as to say that all of Christianity hinges upon it too because if mankind is right, then God is wrong, and if God is wrong then the whole of Christianity is wrong and there’s no resurrection, and no rescue from the certainty of death.
What mankind likes to think is that all religions are the same. He believes, without evidence, that he’s a moral free-agent “doing the best he can”, living a good life and the absolute truth, if there is one, isn’t clear and plain to all. In other words, he has an excuse. Mankind, starting with children and all the way through life, is a living excuse factory. The Bible calls out the lie. It says clearly and plainly that everyone knows God. Humanity has the basic knowledge about God provided through nature (general revelation) and their inner conscience. Humanity’s sin is that it refuses this knowledge, rejects it, and suppresses it. The consequence of this is that our mind’s grow dark and warped.
What of the “innocent” native that’s never heard of Jesus Christ?
First, there is none who’s righteous. The very definition of innocent, put forward in the question, is based upon an unargued bias. How do we know good/innocent in the first place without reference to a fixed standard? Everyone, literally everyone, has an ultimate standard to which they appeal. No one escapes this responsibility in life. Watch for it in your own thinking and you’ll see it. To what standard do you appeal? The thing is, the Christian is called to be “self-aware” of their moral/philosophical standard. Others either suppress theirs outright, never wanting to talk about their standard directly lest they be found out, or apply a hopelessly contradictory one.
The greatest means of evangelism, as well as defense of the faith, is to simply ask “by what standard do you say/believe that?” Or, “according to what standard?” This seemingly innocuous query will cut right to the chase and call out the elephant in the room. Not only that but it will help us train our minds to think biblically. We will never achieve personal holiness and defeat sin in our lives if we continue to neglect the responsibility of learning to live/think biblically. Oh, the blessings that come from a mind saturated with the systems of thought of holy Scripture!
And this question, heard the world over in opposition to the gospel, implies unfairness on God’s part. But where does the notion of fairness exist in nature if everything is an accident? So, you see, the atheist can’t even open their mouth without presupposing God’s existence in back of everything they say.
We become futile in our thinking when we accept the myth of neutrality. When we say that the Bible isn’t the word of God we must suppress the obvious that something else must be ultimately authoritative in life and then presuppose that thing in everything else we do. Watch for this, Christian! This is no idle philosophical speculation but the very heart of Christ, in whom all the riches and wisdom of God reside. Do you presuppose God’s authority, goodness and truth at the bottom of everything – literally everything – or do you “keep your options open”? If you do then, assuredly, you are making a most serious blunder of which you must repent.
The con today is increasing in temperature. Stay in it and you’ll be boiled alive. The con starts with the appeal to neutrality, which is to say that man has an excuse for unbelief. To believe this means we must think of nature as having come out of nowhere. It just exists. Atheists bristle at the self-existence of God, claiming it’s illogical when, in fact, no laws of logic are violated by God’s aseity. Material matter, on the other hand, they posit, with mumbles and whispers so that no one talks about it too much lest the irrationality be exposed, is eternal. Did the universe create itself? Did it exist before it existed in order to cause itself to exist? And were you in existence somehow before you were born or did you not exist and now you do? How does that work?
God’s self-existence is mysterious to us but not contradictory. There are no contradictions in the Christian philosophy. But for life to exist eternally would mean that matter is eternal. That’s contradictory because anything that comes into existence can’t be eternal. You see, this is the foolishness we run into when we play make-believe with God’s reality.
Lest we think this is high-minded nonsense that doesn’t impact our personal lives, let’s understand what the Scripture means when it says “and their foolish hearts were darkened.”
What’s the meaning of life? What are you supposed to do? What’s right and wrong? All of these questions (and more) jump right out at us the minute we start thinking. We exist in the world the Lord made and since He’s righteous, the world – and especially us who were made in His image – reflect His moral order. To deny this is to cast ourselves into darkness. To deny the obvious creator God of life is to cut ourselves off from rationality, meaning and truth. It starts a chain reaction of degradation and foolishness that is only limited by God’s grace.
The minute someone says, “there are no absolutes” they’ve disproven their theory. That statement is an absolute. This is foolishness.
When we say, “it’s not fair to say there’s only one way…” it’s to assume an authoritative and transcendent moral fairness that exists “out there” and applies to all of humanity. This, obviously, contradicts the objection. Yes, more foolishness.
The foolishness is so bad and deep that the minute we open our mouths and say “yes” or “no” to something, we’ve just proven that we live in a world where truth matters. To object to the truth of Christianity we must assume the truth of Christianity – that the personal God of Scripture created the world. If the world is a cosmic accident, everything is mere material matter so truth and falsehood, being immaterial, are of no consequence. Such subjects as these wouldn’t even occur to us. Furthermore, we wouldn’t matter either since our personhood is cosmically insignificant. Only if God is both ultimate and personal can we make sense of anything at all! We need to hear it again: unless we presuppose God and His word at the bottom of everything, we can’t ultimately make sense of anything in the sense of being logically consistent.
What of Eastern religions and philosophies? The fact that they have many sayings of some wisdom isn’t the point. The question is are they ultimately true? Once again, watch the foolishness and look for the self-destruct button at the heart of them.
What unites eastern thoughts is the idea that all is one. But if all is ultimately one, to disagree with something is to prove that there’s truth and falsehood. Obviously, falsehood and truth can’t be one. If they are then why even make the objection? To claim that all is one is so self-evidently preposterous as to prove the truth of today’s passage. Does the pantheist (who believes that all is one) look both ways before he pulls out into traffic? Does the professor who says that ethics are relative demand that you not cheat on your test?
And what, pray tell, is the “one”? Is it personal? If it’s not personal then why do we care? Is that which is ultimate and transcendent an impersonal force somewhere in the universe? If so, I don’t matter, you don’t matter and nothing ultimately matters. Love, meaning and truth are simply helpful illusions. Unless the authoritative and transcendent personal God of Scripture is God, nothing makes sense.
Into this moral foolishness we have things like “karma.” Atheists and pantheists like to speak of karma instead of God’s moral law. But what is karma if not a moral judge? You see, they’ve simply exchanged the truth for a lie – and a ridiculous lie at that. Is karma personal? By what standard is karma judging if not by a transcendent and authoritative moral one? You see, things like karma and god-less ethics are merely man’s way of suppressing the truth.
The madness that ensues from the basic lie of sin leads us into all sorts of false worship, bad philosophy and vain self-deceit. This lie is how we rationalize the “great exchange” of the truth about God for what’s false. As you’ll see in the next few studies, this exchange, based on the myth of neutrality, is what leads to the horrific descent into the moral madness that’s sin. All Christians should use this basic text as a mirror as it describes all of us without Christ. The mind that’s hostile to God is in the flesh; it’s the Adamic nature, not the new man in the Spirit. Thankfully, we’re called to a new life in the Spirit, more and more loving the truth of God and the manifold beauties of His word and will.
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