Sermon Transcript
The following is a lightly edited transcript generated from the audio; it may contain small errors.
- Opening Scripture
- Pluralism and Rival Gods
- Three Kinds of Idolatry
- Idolatry Is Willful
- What Idolatry Does
- The Chief Rival
- Closing Prayer
Opening Scripture
On Romans 1, we’re going to continue our study. We’re talking about the character of God. Starting in Romans 1, we’re going to read 18 through 23, which we looked at last week. Paul is unfolding the gospel, the good news of the gospel. And of course, Paul begins the gospel in a way that is very uncharacteristic of the way we give the gospel. Because we give the gospel and we say, do you know that God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life? Isn’t that how we do it? Right? Here’s how Paul does it. God is angry at your sin. Holy cow. Verse 18:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. 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 1:18–23)
Now, the reason Paul begins this way is because—I don’t know if you’ve ever shared the gospel with anybody. Have you ever shared the gospel with anybody? I hope so. And when you talk to people about the Lord, you get this blank stare. And the reason is, one of the reasons is, it’s not just because the god of this age has blinded those who are lost, but one of the reasons is because the gospel doesn’t make sense. Because at the heart of the gospel is God, through Christ, coming to save us from sin. And this is good news. That’s what gospel means. And you get a blank stare. Huh? What’s sin?
A survey was done recently, and in this survey, over 90% of the people said they believed in God. Yet in the same survey, only 17% said that sin was an offense against God. How do you put those things together? So what has happened in our society is, while we retain a vague notion of God, there’s no solid content to what we mean by this word God. And so God becomes many things to many different people. And so when we talk about something like sin, people look at you funny, because sin can only be understood in its relationship to God. Now if I do something evil, people might say that’s bad, meaning that’s harmful. But a crime is a sin against the state, or maybe a sin against my neighbor. A sin is a violation against God’s law. And unless we understand who God is, we don’t understand sin. And so because we have sucked the meaning out of the word God, we don’t understand concepts like sin, and hence we don’t understand the need for the gospel. In our day and age the gospel is quickly becoming a therapeutic program. It’s becoming a self-help program is what it’s becoming. It’s not becoming deliverance from the judgment of a righteous God, because we don’t believe in the righteous God. We just believe in God. Now one of the reasons the word God in our society is so vapid, it’s so empty, is because we’re trying to accommodate all of these different religious views.
Pluralism and Rival Gods
And so we want everybody to get along, we call it pluralism, right? And so because we live in a pluralistic society in which the vast majority believe in “God,” in order for all of these people to really get along, we have to reduce our notion of God to the barest minimum, to the barest common denominator. But in fact, there was a recent book that came out, a New York Times bestseller, called God Is Not One. And the author talks, he analyzes the major religions, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, et cetera. And what he shows is that they are fundamentally at odds, meaning they disagree with one another on major points of doctrine, not the least of which is who God is or what God is like. But we don’t want to talk about the differences because that will generate conflict. So what we say is, you believe in God and I believe in God and he believes in God and she believes in God. And we all believe in God so we can all get along together in our pluralistic society, right? But if you took the time not to strip away, but to fill in what somebody really means by the term God, what you find out is that their God and your God are actually rival gods. They’re not the same God. We just use the same term, right?
So it’s been said, many authors, that the church in America is now, perhaps for the first time, in a situation that most resembles the position of the church in the first century. Don’t you think about that? We decry the decay of our culture and we decry all of these various things and we lose hope in the power of the gospel because we see the disarray of our culture. But American society, and I would say the West in general, is probably more like Greco-Roman culture in the first and second century than it has ever been. We have pluralism, which really is another word for polytheism. We have moral decadence. They had moral decadence. In many ways, the official doctrine of our country is to be neutral regarding religion, and therefore to tolerate all various beliefs. Now that’s exactly what happened in Rome. There were temples to the gods, plural, and you could go into the temple and you could worship, you could choose any of the gods in the pantheon, which is what the pantheon means, pan means all, theos means God. You have all the gods in the temple and you could go in and you could worship whichever god you wanted to worship. Take your pick. That’s America today.
The offense of the church wasn’t that they worshiped God, because in Greco-Roman society, as Paul said in Acts 17, he says on Mars Hill, I perceive that you’re all very religious. The problem was they were worshiping the unknown God. They were worshiping God. So why did the church get persecuted? Because the church said, our God is not one among many, our God is the only God. Our Lord Jesus Christ is not one Lord among many lords, but our Lord Jesus Christ is the King of kings, and He is the Lord of lords. And that was the offense of the early church, because Greco-Roman society was tolerant. Familiar, tolerance, right? So we are to be tolerant of all different faiths. And so as we tolerate various religious beliefs, the problem is the Scripture says that Yahweh, Jehovah of the Old Testament, is a jealous God and He doesn’t permit rivals. He’s not one God among many, He’s the only true God. Jesus is not one Lord among many, He’s the only Lord. That is what offends people in a pluralistic or polytheistic society. It is the claim, not that you worship God, or not that you worship Jesus. The offense here is that we claim that we worship the true God and that other gods are false. And that is offensive in our pluralistic, tolerant society. So, we are in a situation today very much like the situation of the early church.
Now that may depress some of you, but to me it gives me great hope. Because the early church conquered Rome with the power of the gospel and the blood of the martyrs, and we can do the same. Amen. Because the gospel hasn’t changed. So here in Romans 1 Paul talks about men rejecting the knowledge of God, and the reason he starts this way is because we need to understand the fundamental problem. You can say the fundamental problem is sin. True. But the fundamental problem is a distorted view of God, and that view of God is rooted of course in sin, as we will see. So what Paul is addressing here is the problem of idolatry. So let’s talk about this briefly this morning.
Three Kinds of Idolatry
When we talk about idolatry there’s really many different kinds. I mean, there’s different ways of thinking about the problem of idolatry. The most obvious kind of idolatry is a literal physical idolatry. It’s called idolatry proper. This is when someone has an idol of a false god and they use that idol as a means of worship. This was common in pagan cultures, where they would use stones or they would carve trees, and they would set up shrines, and they would worship the object, the physical object, and they worshiped the object. So we can call this material idolatry.
A second kind, much more dangerous, is mental or spiritual idolatry. This is when we have false ideas about God. This is when our ideas of God are erroneous. That is to say, we see Him as He is not. We see Him other than He is. We see Him for less than He is. Because you can’t think of God greater than He is, right? Because there is no being greater. Hence no thought greater than the true God. So what we do is we think of Him less in some way. So these are false ideas about God. We’re going to come back to Romans, but look at Psalm 50. If you turn there quickly with me. In Psalm 50, the Lord is reproving His people for this very problem. In verse 21 of Psalm 50, the Lord says, “These things you have done, and I kept silent.” Now, when you read that and say, well, what things have they done? Well, you go back a little bit in the psalm, in verse 16, it says:
But to the wicked God says: “What right have you to declare My statutes, or take My covenant in your mouth, seeing you hate instruction and cast My words behind you? When you saw a thief, you consented with him, and have been a partaker with adulterers. You give your mouth to evil, and your tongue frames deceit. You sit and speak against your brother; you slander your own mother’s son. These things you have done, and I kept silent; you thought that I was altogether like you; but I will rebuke you, and set them in order before your eyes.”
(Psalm 50:16–21)
Those are the things He’s talking about. Theft, robbery, adultery, slander. “You thought that I was like you.” In other words, you framed a mental image of Me based upon yourself. You framed a mental image of Me, God says, which made these offenses acceptable to you. And this is mental idolatry or spiritual idolatry. And when we look at the history of Israel, we see this cycle where they are serving the Lord, then they fall into idolatry, then they fall into some kind of captivity or bondage or distress, they cry out to God, He delivers them and they’re restored. But then the cycle starts over. So we see all throughout the Old Testament, this cycle. Well, it wasn’t [audio unclear] is in the heart and the mind of God, which are not true.
And then the third kind of idolatry is emotional idolatry. This is inordinate affection. This is loving the creature more than the Creator. And in some ways, I think this may be the most subtle form of idolatry. Because in this form of idolatry, it is possible to have the right notion in the head of God, and yet no love in the heart for God. You see, we have to understand that there’s a grave difference between knowing the truth and loving the truth. They’re not the same thing. We think that people don’t know God or they don’t know truth, and that’s why they’re rejecting Him. I thought, well if they really knew Him, they wouldn’t reject Him. That’s not true. The problem is not a lack of knowledge. The problem is not ignorance. In Romans 1, it wasn’t an ignorance. It says, Paul says they knew God. They knew Him. What was the problem? They didn’t want to know Him. They didn’t want the true knowledge, because true knowledge of God, or should I say, knowledge of the true God, brings accountability before Him. What happened in Paul’s day and in our day is although men may plead ignorance, that’s not the real problem. It’s where the heart is. It’s where the affections are.
And let me just say a word quickly in passing to parents. This is one of the great mistakes that Christian parents make, myself included. We think that if we fill our children’s heads with right notions, everything will take care of itself. But it’s not true. Because you can have a child who is full of the Bible. They can have books of the Bible memorized, and I’ve seen it. And yet, although they know the truth, they don’t love the truth. They don’t embrace the truth and walk in the truth. They’re not the same thing. So we have material idolatry, mental idolatry, and then what we could call emotional idolatry. Total idolatry is where somebody is worshiping a completely different God than the true God. That’s obvious, that’s simple. Partial idolatry is a little more tricky, because in partial idolatry someone may be worshiping the true God but falsely. Or they may have a jumbled image of God and a lot of it is true but some of it is false. Or they may be worshiping the true God sometimes, but loving the world at other times. And so they’re double-minded, which is what James warns about, right? So idolatry isn’t always a simple either-or proposition.
Idolatry Is Willful
Second thing, idolatry is always willful. Always willful. And some of you may take issue with this, and I understand because I didn’t believe this for many years. And in other passages it is that the ignorance of God was not born out of the fact that men did not have knowledge. It is born out of the fact that men, having knowledge, rejected that knowledge because they loved their sin more than they loved God. Ignorance is not an excuse. Listen, ignorance is not an excuse because ignorance is self-imposed. In other words, what the Bible teaches is not simply that we are in darkness. The Bible teaches that we choose darkness if the light is contrary to our desire. In John 3, turn there if you will. I want you [audio unclear] of joy. God loves fallen humanity. God loves men even though they are in rebellion. God loves men even though they are His enemies. It’s good news. So you think, how in the world, why in the world would anybody reject that God? Well it’s not because they don’t know. That’s what Paul tells us. I’ve given the gospel to thousands and thousands of people over the years and it’s amazing how many reject the gospel. Well, it’s not because we’re presenting an image of a mean, vindictive God. On the contrary, we’re telling people that God loves them so much that He Himself became a man. He Himself bore the punishment of sin in His own body. He Himself saves them. Everything He demands, He supplies. And they still reject Him. How can this be? What’s the problem? Verse 18 of John 3:
He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God.
(John 3:18–21)
Now, catch what John’s saying. John’s saying the problem isn’t that God doesn’t love men. The problem isn’t that God hasn’t provided a solution for men’s sin. The problem isn’t that God did not come in the person of His Son. The problem isn’t that His sacrifice was not made. That’s not the problem. This is the condemnation, verse 19, that light has come into the world and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. That is to say that ignorance of divine things is rooted in men’s inordinate love for sin. That is to say that idolatry is not a problem of a lack of information, it is a problem of a lack of sanctification. It is that men love the sin more than God, they love darkness more than light. So we must understand we are not victims of ignorance. We are perpetrators of blindness. It’s not so much that we do not see or cannot see, rather we close our eyes and we refuse to see. So idolatry is willful.
What Idolatry Does
Third proposition, idolatry always leads to immorality. I won’t spend a lot of time on this, but this is clear from Romans 1, because when we see the men who are in the knowledge of God and they frame false gods, we see them in this terrible catalog of human depravity listed as a result of that. To sum it up simply, a dark mind leads to a hard heart. And so men, Paul says, are given over to lasciviousness because of the blindness of their minds, which leads then to a hardness of their heart. We optimistic Americans think that we can jettison the God of the Bible and maintain a civil society. But as we’re seeing, it’s not working. Things are breaking down, terribly breaking down in our society. And it is because once you reject the true knowledge of God, inevitably various moral consequences follow.
Fourth proposition, idolatry, which is ignorance regarding God, leads to further ignorance of God. In other words, it is a vicious downward spiral that is entered into. And here in Romans 1 we see this where Paul talks about these various Roman gods. He says in verse 23, they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man, and birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things. So we have this downward spiral, if you will, in the level of worship. And so when we enter into the void, when you enter into the darkness, there’s no guarantee that you will ever come out. Very scary. There’s no guarantee you will ever come out. And so men reject the knowledge they have. And then thus they take a farther step into darkness, and it increases their ignorance, and thus they make other choices based upon the ignorance which lead into further darkness. And what the Bible says, it says, the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn. What it means is when the sun comes up, you see a little light over the horizon, then as it comes up more, it gets brighter, and then at high noon, it is the brightest of all. That’s the path of the righteous. But see, the path of the wicked is just the opposite. It gets darker and darker and darker.
Fifth proposition. Idolatry in the church grieves the Spirit of God. We are told in several places in the New Testament to flee idols, flee idolatry. Christians are told to flee idolatry. Now many of you would never bow down to a tree or to a stone, although you might bow down to a car, or you might bow down to a house, or you might bow down to some kind of thing, a material object. So we can commit idolatry because we can frame ideas of God which are just not according to Scripture. John Calvin said that the human heart is an idol factory. And I think he’s right. The problem here is our fallenness. And the problem is that when we were born again, we’ve received the true knowledge of God, but we’re told we have to grow in grace and knowledge. Grace and knowledge. And if we don’t, then our ideas of God can become shaped by the world and not by God’s revelation. And we can have erroneous notions about God. I mean, I don’t know if you read contemporary Christian books, but some of the stuff that’s being said is frightening to me. There’s one of the emergent guys who says that to think of the death of Jesus as a vicarious atonement, that is, Jesus dying in our place to pay for our sins, [audio unclear] So the church is not immune to this problem. In other words, idolatry isn’t just something out there. It’s something that we must beware of in here. Or should I say, in here. Right here. And when the church lets idolatry in, then what happens is it grieves God’s Spirit. And when we grieve His Spirit, it stays His hand. And it limits His power because we’re resisting His teaching ministry. We’re resisting light. You see, what we have to understand, we can’t reject light while receiving His power. It doesn’t go that way. It doesn’t work that way. We don’t say, well, okay God, I don’t want to know everything. I just want to know a little bit, but give me victory. It doesn’t work that way. Light and power go together. And so if we resist Him, if we resist the light that God is giving us through His Word and His Spirit, what is happening is we’re resisting the Spirit in all of His offices, in all of His functions, in all of His ministries. And so it’s no wonder that we constantly hear this complaint that the church is powerless today. It’s powerless. And it’s no wonder if we are rejecting light, likewise we are losing power.
The Chief Rival
Last proposition about idolatry. The chief [audio unclear] chief rival is ourself. That’s the chief rival. And fallen man, matter of fact, when the fall is described in the early chapters of Genesis, the fall was man choosing his way versus God’s way. His knowledge, his will versus God’s will. Has anything really changed? Is that not the struggle? As true worshipers of the true God, we must take self off the throne and put the true God in Jesus Christ in glory on that throne. And in the throne of our heart, He must reign. Because if He doesn’t, then we’re dabbling with idolatry. What then is the solution? The solution is really very simple, but at times it can be very painful. And the solution is this, total surrender and submission. That’s the solution. As I shared last week, the great sin of Israel wasn’t their outright rejection of Jehovah. The great sin of Israel was their syncretism. Their attempt to worship Jehovah and other gods at the same time. Their attempt to worship Jehovah and live in sin at the same time. That was the problem and that is idolatry. Our God is a jealous God, the Bible says. He will brook no rivals. He will not accept partial worship. He is after not part of your heart, He is after your total heart. He is calling His people to complete and absolute surrender and submission to His will as revealed in the Word of God. A complete renunciation of self-rule and self-love must occur, because it is self that is the great rival.
What does this mean? It means we must surrender our mind, our heart, and our will to God. We surrender our mind, meaning we have right conceptions of God framed by the Word [audio unclear] above all things, amen. And then we must surrender our will. We must have right intentions. Right intentions. This is why Jesus—well let’s turn there, go to Matthew 10, and there are many passages like this, we’ll look at this and then we’ll close. This is why Jesus, when He’s calling people to discipleship, He lays it out. In verse 37:
He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake will find it.
(Matthew 10:37–39)
If you put yourself first before God, you lose it. Jesus repeatedly says that the call of the Christian life is to take up the cross, deny ourselves, and follow Him. Why does He put it that way? Because the great rival is in your heart. The thing that is holding you back from growing is in your heart. You know, I was thinking about this the other day. A lot of people come to me for counseling, and it’s interesting to me how often people come to me and say, I have a problem. You know where this is going. He’s smart. They say they have a problem. And it’s very rare that anybody ever comes to me and says, I have a sin. Very rare. I have a problem. Well, as you begin to talk about the problem, you work through the problem, what you find the problem is very often is related to a sin. But they don’t come and say, I have a sin. They say, I have a problem. That is how subtle the self is. You see, we want our problems removed. The question we have to ask ourselves is, do we want our sins removed? Because until that’s done, our problems don’t go away. Right? So, we must be willing to surrender ourselves fully to the Lord, and let Him do His work in us. And I can reassure you, friends, the more you learn about the true God, the more you see light, the more you will see darkness in your own heart. And if you’re not willing to accept that, then it’s going to distort your vision of the true God. David said, talking to the Lord, “In Your light we see light.” In Thy light, well then everything is exposed. In Thy light, oh, I can see what’s in my heart. And this is why the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self go together. They always do and they always will.
So I’m sure none of us who are professing Christians would ever want to be guilty of idolatry, but I can assure you all of us have at some time, including myself. And thus we are called to grow in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. That is a lifelong process, a lifelong process of growing in our understanding, growing in our submission, growing in our renunciation of the world and self. As I said not too long ago, you ought to be different today than a year ago. And if you’re not, there’s a problem. You ought to be different a year from now than you are today. And if you’re not, there’s a problem. I believe this is one of the greatest tragedies of Christianity that I’ve seen over the years, is that Christians grow to a certain point and they stop. They level off and they stay there the rest of their Christian life. They’re good churchgoers, they might even be givers, they might run a ministry, but they really never go on. They never go on. They’ve negotiated a truce with the Amorites. They haven’t conquered the land. They’ve got a lot of it, but they’ve left some of the enemies in the land. They’re not truly going on. And so what happens is we can go on like that for years and years and years. But God in His great love, you know what He does? He doesn’t let us. And so He shakes up our life. And we say, oh my gosh, I’ve got a problem. I’ve got a problem. Indeed you do. We all do. The problem is our heart, right? It wants to set itself up as a rival god. That’s the real problem. It’s not the financial problem, the physical problem, the relational problem. That’s not the real problem. Those might be symptoms of problems, the real problem abides in us. And so what we must do is surrender our hearts to God, and then He, through the power of His Spirit, He can sanctify our hearts. Amen.
The irony is, as much as He demands that we love Him supremely, we’ll never do that if we don’t surrender. It’s not in us by nature to do that, but it’s in us by grace. It is in us by grace to do that. We can love Him supremely. We can know Him as He is. And that’s the beauty of the gospel. Because the gospel isn’t just fire insurance for when you die. The gospel is that here and now, in this life, at this moment, you can know the true God. You can know Him. And knowing Him is the source of everything the human heart needs. I didn’t say what it wants, because often what we want is sinful—what it needs. I remember when I first got saved, I had this weird feeling. I walked around with this weird feeling. And the feeling was this. Everything was right. It was just right. I had found my place in the universe. I knew now why I existed, to know Him. It was right. Everything your heart craves that is legitimate is found in God. He’s not just the answer to your problems, He’s the answer to all of your longings. And all the false gods we develop, whether they’re material things or sexual things or substance things, all the various things that people devise to satisfy their needs, they’re found only in Him. Knowing Him, knowing Him, this is eternal life.
Closing Prayer
Let’s stand and pray. Father, I want to thank You that You have revealed Yourself to us in Your Word. We thank You that You have revealed Yourself through the Lord Jesus Christ, and that by knowing Jesus we know You. We thank You, Lord, that the Son knows the Father and the Father knows the Son, and that by knowing the Son we know the Father. Lord, I pray if there’s anybody here that doesn’t know You, and I mean know You, Father, in a real way, I pray that You remove the scales from their eyes. Lord, that all the things of the world that they’re seeking, they’re empty. They will never bring peace and true joy and contentment. The world is empty. And I pray that for all of us, Lord, all of us who’ve known You for years, some of us who maybe are coasting too much on past knowledge and past service and past Bible reading, and Lord, today is the day of salvation for every one of us. I ask, Lord, through the ministry of Your Spirit and Your Word, You would create in us a hunger for You, a hunger to know You, to love You, and to serve You and bring You glory on the earth. I pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.