Sermon Transcript
The following is a lightly edited transcript generated from the audio; it may contain small errors.
- Opening Scripture
- What Do We Mean by God?
- They Did Not Glorify Him as God
- How Do We Know God?
- Knowing the Person, Not Just the Data
- In Spirit and in Truth
- Closing Prayer
Opening Scripture
[audio unclear]
For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things.
(Romans 1:20–23)
And then Paul goes on and he explains the result of this rejection of the knowledge of God, which we will talk about later.
What Do We Mean by God?
But as we think about the truths that we play with in the church, the most important truth is the truth of God Himself. When we say the word God, what comes to our mind? What is God really like? Is God transcendent? Is God sovereign? Is God holy? Is God just? Is God loving? Is God kind? What is God really like? Now, you can go out on Main Street and bump into somebody and say, hey, do you believe in God? And they say, yeah, I believe in God. But you have no idea, based upon the word God, that they mean the same thing that you do by the word God. You can even bump into Christians who say, I believe in God. But you don’t really know if what they mean by God is what you mean by God. Because the word God is just a word. It’s a word, God. The important thing is what do we pack into that word? What does the word mean when we say God? And I think that we in the church must be very careful of [audio unclear] violating not only the first and second commandment, which have to do with worship proper, but even the third commandment, which talks about using the Lord’s name. You see, many of us think that that means we shouldn’t curse with God’s name. But that’s only one aspect. When we use God’s name lightly, we’re using it in vain. Because that’s what vanity means. It means emptiness, lightness, frivolity, triviality. There was a book written a number of years ago called The Trivialization of God. And I think the title captures one of the main problems I have in our evangelical churches today. And that is that we’ve made God trivial. God is my buddy. God’s my homeboy. And God is not glorious in our eyes. He’s not majestic. He’s not consuming fire. He’s not the jealous God of the Bible. And so what we do, and this is human nature, men have done it from the beginning, is what we do is we tame God and we cage God. And so when we say the word God, that word is comfortable to me. And the word God doesn’t threaten me. It doesn’t trouble me. It doesn’t disturb me.
You know what James says? We studied the book of James. James says, the demons believe. The demons believe. The demons believe. And what do they do? They tremble. And when you called on God this morning, did you tremble? Because if not, the demons believe more than you. The reality is many of us are bored with God. And that’s evident in our neglect of His Word, in our neglect of prayer, in our endurance of worship. We look around, we fidget, we text. Oh, if we only understood whom we are addressing. If we only understood the meaning of the word God. But we have tamed Him, we’ve caged Him, we’ve cut off the sharp edges, we’ve made Him our comforter and not our disturber.
They Did Not Glorify Him as God
You see the problem here in Romans 1. I want you to see this is very important. I want you to see what the natural mind does to God. Look at this. Verse 20: “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes”—His, God, the true God—“are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead,” or perfections, “so that they are without excuse.” Now, when he says they are without excuse, without excuse, what does that mean? Without excuse for what? What did they do wrong? Verse 21, because although they knew God, they did not glorify Him. Now notice that this is the key to understanding this passage. He doesn’t say, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him, because they did, quote, glorify Him, but they glorified Him in their own way. You see, he says they did not glorify Him as God, but they did glorify Him in their own way. That is, they glorified and praised Him and served Him, because pagan man wasn’t less religious than modern man. He was more religious than modern man. It wasn’t their irreligion. It wasn’t their failure to worship God per se. It was the failure to worship God as God. So what did they do? They worshiped God as an image that they created of God. They did not glorify Him, verse 21, as God. Nor were they thankful, meaning they weren’t thankful that God had given them the knowledge of what He was really like. And they became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like a corruptible man, and birds and animals and creeping things. They worshiped God, but not as God. They worshiped God as a man. They worshiped God as birds. They worshiped God as animals. They worshiped God as reptiles.
And we see this in the case of Israel, God’s own people. God’s own people. What do they do? They come out of Egypt, right? God sends ten plagues. Now you know why God sent those plagues? He could have gotten them out with one plague. He could have gotten them out with no plagues. He sent the plagues to demonstrate who He was. The miracles were revelations of God, particularly revelations of His power. So He reveals His power and His judgment and He brings His people through the Red Sea. They walk through the Red Sea. What an unbelievable miracle, amen? And God delivers His people. He brings them into the wilderness. Then He calls Moses up into the mount to give them the law, to give them His Word, to give them more knowledge about Himself and His ways. This is what knowing God is about, to know more about Him and His ways, right? So God is going to bless His people with knowledge of Him. So He calls Moses up and he goes up to the mountain, and Moses had to wait. He waited in the cloud. While Moses is in the mount, we learned that the people begin a church service and they begin to worship. But the problem is they weren’t worshiping God. They made a golden calf. They begin to worship the golden calf, and as they worship the golden calf, the most striking feature isn’t that they worshiped an idol, because these were people who had been trained in idolatry. They lived in Egypt. They were surrounded by idolatry. It’s understandable that that was their worldview. This was their mindset. So they worship the calf, but the striking thing is they’re worshiping the calf and they call the calf Jehovah. And this is what theologians call syncretism. It’s a big word, simple concept. You take two things that don’t really go together and you put them together.
You see, the danger that lurks at all times is not the outright denial of God. Do you know that I think the lowest figure I’ve read recently of belief in God in America is 86 percent, and it’s probably higher. But you see, you think, wow, how does that—wow, 86% of Americans believe in God, half of the marriages end in divorce, and all the social indicators. It’s deplorable. How do I put that with that? Well, it’s because what is the data you put in when you say God? What God? Who’s God? What’s your God like? So you see the problem, the perennial problem, mankind’s problem, is not the outright denial of God. It’s not the refusal to worship God per se. It’s rather that we twist the knowledge of God that He’s revealed, and God becomes something that He is not. This is the danger. The pagans here in Romans 1, they worshiped God, but not as God. The Israelites worshiped God after they came through the Red Sea, but not as God. So they used the word God, but they weren’t worshiping God. So subtle is the human heart, so devious, so deceitful it is, that while we are worshiping God we can be worshiping something other than God.
How Do We Know God?
How do we know Him? How do we know God? We know God two ways. We know God through the revelation of nature. This is what Paul is talking about. The astounding thing about this passage to me is Paul is addressing the Gentile world and he’s saying they who didn’t even have Scripture, they are without excuse. Oh my gosh. Draw the deduction. Think it through. If they are without excuse, you and I—I don’t even want to say it. In other words, nature, the creation, was enough. Was enough to show the true God. And so there’s this thing that theologians call natural revelation, God through nature. And that includes not only the created order, it includes the creation of man. It includes conscience. If you go to Romans 2, he says in verse 11, there’s no partiality with God,
for as many as have sinned without law will also perish without law, and as many as have sinned in the law will be judged by the law (for not the hearers of the law are just in the sight of God, but the doers of the law will be justified; for when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do the things in the law, these, although not having the law, are a law to themselves, who show the work of the law written in their hearts).
(Romans 2:12–15)
That is to say that nature reveals God, not only in the created order. Nature reveals God in what God has designed man to be. He’s made us in such a way that we have not only the external witness of creation, we have the internal witness of conscience. And these things reveal to us God and God’s will. But we Christians, we have supernatural revelation, amen? We have the Bible. We have the Word of God. Because you see, the revelation of nature wasn’t enough. Man had this knowledge, he perverted this knowledge because his mind and his heart are darkened by sin. Turn to Ephesians 4 quickly. We have a description here of the fallen man in Ephesians 4:17. “This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk.” Okay, don’t live like a pagan. That’s what he’s saying. Don’t live like a pagan, “in the futility of their mind.” I’m reading the New King James. King James says vanity, emptiness of their mind, “having their understanding darkened.” Their understanding is darkened. The unregenerate mind is darkened. The most intelligent, wise person who is not born of God’s Spirit, their understanding is darkened, “being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart.” So this is man’s natural condition. So God gives him creation, He gives him conscience, but man perverts that knowledge because his heart is darkened. So God in His goodness and His mercy gives us a further revelation: His Word. His Word. Because of His goodness and His grace, He provided an absolute and certain revelation of Himself in the form of Scripture. And of course, the ultimate revelation of God that we see through Scripture is the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. The Lord Jesus Christ who was the living Word, the embodiment of the written Word. Colossians 1, Paul says this. We’ll start at verse 13:
He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. And He is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He may have the preeminence. For it pleased the Father that in Him all the fullness should dwell.
(Colossians 1:13–19)
Or it could be translated, all the fullness, meaning all the fullness of the Godhead, was pleased to dwell in Him. Wow. This is the ultimate revelation in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ. So God has revealed Himself through nature. God has through supernature, that is the Scripture, and of course Christ Himself, in order that we might know Him, that we might know the true God and that we might worship Him, listen, as God. Not just worship Him, but as God.
How then do we know Him? How is it that we come about this knowledge? You’re going to learn it from the TV? Learn it from the magazines? Where are we going to get this knowledge of God? We know God both with our mind, if you will, but we know God also with our soul or our spirit. In order to know God, to know Him by our reason, we have to use our intellect, which is a God-given gift. We are to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength, right? That is to say we are to meditate upon God. We are to meditate upon His Word. We are to study His Word to gain proper knowledge of God. Now in a room this size with this many people here, if I would ask each of you to write an essay for me on what God is like, I can assure you that there would be conflicting answers. Because we’re all at different stages of our spiritual growth, we’re all at different stages of our knowledge of what God is like. But the source of that knowledge is in the supernatural revelation that God has given us, His Word. So we must be people of the book, people that read the book, meditate on the book, study the book, love the book, memorize the book, because the book is the means by which we gain the knowledge of God whom we are to worship. We don’t worship the book, amen? We worship the God who gave us the book, the God who speaks to us through the book, the God who reveals Himself through the book.
There’s no doubt that the deplorable ignorance of God in our society, even though we use the word, there’s no doubt that that is tied to the lack of knowledge of God’s Word. They go hand in hand because this is the source by which we know God as God, the true God. This is the book that tells us what God is like. Have you ever witnessed to somebody and you try to explain to them things like sin, and that if they die in their sins they might go to a place like hell? Do you ever try to talk to somebody in our culture about things like that? Oh no, no, no. How do they know that? How do they know to say no, no, no? How do they know that? Because they know, if they know anything, that God is loving. And He’ll never do that. Don’t they know that? Aren’t they certain about that? Aren’t they dogmatic about that? They know that. Which means they’ve convinced themselves of that to reassure themselves that they might not go there.
Now when I stand here and say God is such and such, or God does such and such, I don’t do that on any authority that I have in myself. I don’t do that because I know more than you by some natural gift. Anything that I say about God must be confirmed by the Word of God. And if it’s not in the Word of God, it is not true. I could give a sermon on God’s love, and I probably will soon. But what we have done in our culture is we’ve taken one attribute of God and we have inflated it, and thereby we have pushed all of His other attributes out to the edges. And in some cases we’ve inflated God’s love so big we can’t see holiness or justice. We can only see love. It’s not just love. It’s love the way we define love. Not love the way God defines love. And it’s all very comforting. And we can fill our churches that way. But I would submit to you that if we never tremble, something is wrong with that love. Because God says, the God of the Bible says, I will dwell with those who tremble at My word.
This is called the fear of God. Meaning a proper reverence for who He is. Now we all know, it’s no mystery, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, if there’s anything lacking from our churches today, it is the quality of reverence. This has been commented on for over a generation. As a matter of fact, I just happened to pick this book up last night. I wasn’t even looking for something for my sermon. I just was browsing. I picked this book up. This is J. Sidlow Baxter. He’s from Scotland. He came to America to be a pastor. He’s giving his observations about the American church. Now this—well, let me just read it. He says, let me first refer to public worship. Brethren, we must all agree that in public Christian worship, the first essential is reverence. Do we all agree on that? I don’t know about all the pastors agree on that. Not anymore. “My own conviction is that we preachers never get far with a man and never get deeply into his soul for God unless he has first been made God-conscious and correspondingly reverent. True reverence is vital to our sanctuary services if there is to be persuasive soul-winning, rich spiritual life in our church members, and a moving of God’s Spirit among us. Yet my length of years of travel all over America have shown me that if there is [audio unclear] churches, it is reverence.” This was written in 1970, and the situation, of course, as you know, is much, much, much worse today. That lack of reverence is a symptom. You see, it’s a symptom. And it’s a symptom of not having a proper knowledge of God. Because if we saw God as He is, if we understood who we are addressing when we say Lord and God, we would be reverent.
Now, I know some of you hear the word reverent and you think boring. You think, reverent is what you are at a funeral. No, that’s not reverence. Reverence can be joyful. Reverence can be happy. But it’s never glib. It’s never trivial. It’s never bored. Reverence is a holy awe that settles upon the spirit. It can have a calming effect. It can have a discomforting effect. It can make you laugh. It can make you weep. It can make you tremble, in the presence of God. So we need to know God as He is. [audio unclear] what we mean by it, and I won’t get into that. But the point is that we talk so much about relationship with God that again I think we’ve trivialized it. I’m not sure if we’re not just slapping a label on things and not really understanding what we are talking about when we say things like that. But we know God, not just the doctrine of God, we know God.
Knowing the Person, Not Just the Data
You know, now, let me give you an example. Let’s say you gave me a piece of paper and it had on that piece of paper the name of my wife, date of her birth, where she went to school, what kind of job she did when she was a young adult, what color eyes, hair, everything about her, and you handed me that piece of paper. And I read it. Would I know that person? Would I know the person by reading all the data? No, I would know about that person. And maybe when I met that person, all that data would come into play in how I interacted with that person. Do you get what I’m saying? But knowing all the data isn’t the same as knowing. So when we talk about knowing God through the book, we’re talking about, yes, we’re talking about the data. We’re talking about knowing what the Word says about God’s character, about His attributes, what He is really like according to the Word of God. But the danger is that we know the data, but don’t know the person the data represents. And they’re not the same. They’re not the same. So we know God intellectually through the book, through study and meditation, but we need to know God spiritually and experientially. Look at Ephesians 1. We’re going to have to wrap it up. Ephesians 1. I was reading Ephesians last night. It is so powerful. Ephesians chapter 1, verse 15:
Therefore I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, do not cease to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers: that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your understanding being enlightened.
(Ephesians 1:15–18)
Or it could be translated heart. You see, knowing the true God requires this intellectual knowledge. It requires truth, if you will, but it requires also that that truth be quickened, if you will, to the soul or the spirit, that is, that the soul or the spirit be illuminated. Do you know who’s responsible for destroying confidence in the Bible? Do you know who it is, or should I say was? It was Christian—hold on—Christian theologians. It was Christian critics of the Scripture. That is to say, it was men who handled the Word of God, but they handled it in unbelief. And the problem was they had tons of knowledge, so much knowledge I couldn’t even begin to approach the knowledge they had of archaeology and ancient history and Hebrew and Aramaic and Chaldean and all of these. These guys were just geniuses when it came to human knowledge. The problem was that knowledge was not mixed with faith. And therefore, that knowledge was never quickened and illuminated to them.
And if you walk with Christ for any length of time, you know what I mean. Because one day you can read the Bible, and it’s like reading the Yellow Pages. And the next day you can read it and every word is alive. You know what I mean? Well, what’s that about? And sometimes it’s the same passage. What’s that about? Well, that’s about the Spirit of God, the spirit of wisdom and revelation, the quickening of the Word to the soul. So it’s not just true. It’s truth. It is real to you. And you see, when we talk about God, and God is just an idea, and God is just a doctrine, and God is just an intellectual construct, that’s when God gets trivialized. That’s when God gets tamed and caged. But when the Spirit of God quickens the Word of God and this knowledge of God becomes experiential and real to you, then you have reverence. Because it’s not just a notion. It’s not just an idea. It is a majestic and holy person.
In Spirit and in Truth
God is a spirit, Jesus said. Let’s look at John 4, and we’re going to close with this. John 4, Jesus is talking to the woman at the well, you’ve all read this I’m sure many times. She was a God-worshiper. This is important to understand. She was not an unbeliever, she’s not an atheist, she’s a God-worshiper. Not only was she a God-worshiper, she claimed to be a Jehovah-worshiper. This makes it even better. Yet Jesus critiques her worship. She’s a God-worshiper and a Jehovah-worshiper, and yet Jesus said, your worship isn’t right. And in her case, she was localizing God. And this is one of the ways that we tame Him. This is what the Jews did. They said God is in the temple as if God wasn’t everywhere else. So the Samaritan says, no, on Mount Gerizim, this is where God’s presence is, this is where you worship. And they localized God, making Him like one of the local pagan deities, if you will. And Jesus says in verse 22, “You worship what you do not know.” You worship what you do not know. “We know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews,” which is to say we Jews know because we have the true revelation of the true God. “But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father”—how?—“in spirit and truth.” He doesn’t just say in truth, because then we can fall into the error of an [audio unclear] through the Holy Spirit which illuminates the knowledge given in the Bible. And it takes the truth of the Bible and makes it a living reality. And He does this through the ministry of His Holy Spirit. Which is why Paul prays for God’s people that they would have a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of our understanding being enlightened, quickened, opened, so that we can see Him as He is. This is what we need. Amen. Not just more data, not just more knowledge intellectually, although this is important, very important. But we need that knowledge to be quickened by God’s Spirit. We need our hearts to be illuminated so that what God says is true, we know it’s true. It’s real in our lives. Amen.
Closing Prayer
Let’s stand together. As we come before You, I ask that You would forgive us for belittling You, making You small, making You after our own image. And I ask, Father, because You are our Father, because we’re Your children, I ask, Lord, that You would grant to us this spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of You. I pray, Lord, that we would be a people that truly do know Your book, that meditate in Your Word, read Your Word, are transformed by Your Word, but Lord we don’t worship Your Word, we worship You. We love Your Word because we love You. And it’s through Your Word, Lord, that we come to know You and we commune with You. I pray, Lord, for all of us, myself included, for a deeper knowledge, a broader knowledge, a sweeter knowledge, a more reverent knowledge of who You are. We ask, Lord, that You would remove the idols that we’ve constructed, break us out of the cages that we have built. I ask it in Your name. Amen.