You'll Know It When you See It
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Hello and welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m your host today, Bryan Broome, and I’m joined by Emily Maxson and Greg Uttinger.
Today we’ll be discussing general revelation – what creation reveals about God – and other related topics. I’ll just turn it right over to you, Greg.
This is a detour sort of from our discussion of covenant and contract, and I think it’s necessary to slow down and look at this in some detail, because sooner or later as you look at a civil constitution, a marriage license, or the concept of marriage and of family law and such, you have to ask the question, “Where does the law come from?” And having said that, let’s say we all for some reason marvelously agree it’s God.
The next question has to be, “How does he communicate to us? And when he does, how do we know that it’s him?” That has to take us back to how God revealed himself from the beginning in his creation, how he still reveals himself, and to what degree we can understand that revelation.
I would like to read two sections from the book of Romans, starting in Romans 1:16 –
For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.
He’s setting up his theme for the book, which is a quote from Habbakuk – “The just shall live by his faith” – and he’s going to explain that the gospel reveals the righteousness which is in Christ, which we apprehend by faith, but in order for that to make any sense he needs to talk about sin first. He begins with unbelievers who don’t have the Bible, who’ve never heard the gospel, so can they sin? And to what degree are they responsible and accountable to God, since they don’t have the Bible? He begins like this:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness.
There is a revelation from heaven to earth, to men, and it’s directed against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who, the King James says, hold the truth in unrighteousness.
The word hold means to suppress, to have but to push down out of sight, so right there he’s given us his basic thesis about general revelation. Yes, the heavens themselves declare the glory of God, and all nature sings to us of who he is. We have this revelation. We have this truth, not only potentially, but we really do have it, and yet in having it before we come to Christ we are suppressing it. We are holding it down. We’re not looking at it, we’re not receiving it, and yet it is indelibly there, and he’s going to expand on that now.
So first of all this general revelation or natural revelation, the terms are more or less the same, is manifest within man himself. There is a revelation not only external to him, but within him. He is, after all, the image of God. That’s his definition. It’s not something added on top of his basic nature or character. It is his basic nature and character, however corrupted by sin it may be. So this knowledge – and the verb tense is present – is manifest in them.
There the emphasis seems to be, and in the next verse will clearly be, not only what’s in us but what’s around us, when we look at the world around us, and this is what he says in verse 20 –
That would be God’s attributes, things that we cannot perceive directly because God is invisible and transcendent.
So since man was created and the world was created, God has revealed himself in his work. Being the author of creation, he has left his impress upon it. We’ve all had the experience of hearing a song for the first time, or maybe seeing a painting or even in my case reading a comic book and looking at the artwork, or hearing the sound and saying, “I’ve never seen this before, but I get that’s Bach, that’s Lennon, that’s John Williams” or in comic books, “That’s George Perez. That’s John Byrne.”
Authors have a style, a signature, something that points back to themselves, and yet human authors are derivative and learn from one another and learn from those who are gone, and every human author’s style is derivative, at least now to some extent, from other humans who’ve gone before, but God made the universe by himself. There’s no one he’s borrowing from. There were no other gods besides him kibbitzing and saying, “Why don’t you say this? Oo, make it blue!” or things like that. It all came out of the heart and mind of God as sovereign creator.
It’s a passive verb, but the idea is that mankind is capable, and in fact does in some measure understand who and what God is because of the things that God has put there from the beginning, being the author of those very things, and Paul tell us in summary two of the things that he’s talking about.
He’s the sovereign Creator. He brought all this into existence. He made it in all of its detail, with all its creativity and wisdom. And the Godhead – he’s not like us. He’s not part of creation. He’s not a mind of the universe. He’s not an energy force inherent in all living things. He is a transcendent God who outside of himself made all of this by his own will. So his eternal power and Godhead – that at least men ought to see because it’s plain before them. The question becomes, will they? His last line in this argument is –
God’s revelation in nature and within man is so clear, so self-evident and even obvious, which is not the same thing as self-evident, that men ought to see this – not only the practical, “Open your eyes, it’s right there,” but the moral and legal, “You are obligated to see this.” It is not for anyone, in the way God made you, that you don’t see this. The defect exists in your own choices, in your own nature, which you in fact have chosen, you’ve inherited from Adam and yet you continue to choose your unbelief and to try to hold down this revelation.
Paul assumes that historically there were times when all humanity did know God, and we can pick out two real fast at least. When Adam and Eve were driven from the garden, the cherubim and the flames were behind them and they looked down upon the howling wilderness beyond, they both knew, and that was all humanity at the time. They knew who the God of the Bible was and they in fact did embrace his promises. And as their children came along, they taught them to believe those promises.
Later, when Noah and his family looked down from Mt Ararat into the new world God had given them, they too, everyone there, had just seen humanity destroyed by a flood, and we don’t know their hearts but they at least formally all acknowledged that this happened not by some cosmic accident or a collision of a comet or some such thing, but this was God’s judgement.
It was the God who had revealed himself to Adam and the patriarchs afterward. In fact, he had revealed himself in what was becoming the Bible, the books that Adam and Noah had written, and this God is God. So there were times in history when men knew God, and yet very quickly in each of these cases we’re told that when they knew God…
They didn’t want to treat him and regard him as God. Yes, they may acknowledge his name. They may chalk him up as one god among many. They may speak of, “Yes, there’s Jehovah and there’s Baal and there’s Jupiter and whatever,” but they did not set him apart as the transcendent God that he reveals himself to be, the only God, and one of the reasons was that they were not thankful.
They were not thankful for his Word, for his providences, for their situation, for their human limitations, for God’s judgements. They were not thankful for his salvation and his good gifts, because the basic nature of sin is that man wants to be God, and anyone who stands in that role we can’t be thankful for because, “Hey, that’s my chair. Get out. I’m not thankful that you’re taking my throne.” It manifests itself in lots of complaining, lots of failure to worship God, and to turn one’s attention and worship toward something else, some extension of one’s own being. Because of that, Paul says –
…but became vain in their imaginations and their foolish heart was darkened.
There’s a progression here and it carries on through the rest of the chapter. First, they’re not thankful for who God is. Because of that, their imaginations already being tainted by sin become darker. Their foolish heart was darkened because of this choice. By refusing to believe in God, little by little everything was eaten away. Everything turns dark.
They pursued what they said was wisdom – we can think here of the Greeks, for instance – and yet although it looks smart and has lots of fancy words and is spoken in complicated sentence structures and with abstract ideas, when all is said and done it’s a lot of hooey, as my first pastor would have said. It’s nonsense. It doesn’t hold together. It doesn’t make sense. It’s not consistent with reality.
What about “The truly wise man is the one who knows that he knows nothing.”?
The answer to that, of course, is the truly wise man is the man who knows the God who reveals himself in the man’s very act of knowing. Agnosticism is not something to brag about, whether it be agnosticism toward God or one’s own reality. Descartes was a fool when he doubted everything around him. He did not need to go back doubting all the way to himself and then find steady ground in his own autonomy.
On a superficial level, sure, you can say – in fact, Paul does say something like that – that with regard to practical matters or deep theology sometimes we do need to say, “Such thoughts are too high for me. I can’t understand them.”
Yeah. Let’s chill and bring it down to what has God actually said. Let’s start with the easy stuff and then work on it, because we may be exalting our own intellect and pretensions. The solution is not to say, “Well, I can’t know anything,” because God says you can and you ought to. So thank you, that’s a good question.
Even any person that you talk to off the street who has not darkened the door of a philosophy lecture room will be able to tell you, “Oh yeah, I know things.”
“I know that it’s safe to cross the street when I’ve looked both ways. I know that I can go when the light is green.”
“I am in a chair.” I remember reading something about how somebody went to a philosophy class and they had their final test or whatever, and I don’t remember if it was the only question but it might have been, and it was like, “Prove to me the chair doesn’t exist.” And the only person who got an A – I guess it was graded on a curve, but the only person who got an A was the one who said, “What chair?”
Unless he put the word “chair” in quotes, he’s still giving something away because by using the word ‘chair’ to deny his knowledge of the chair, he’s admitting that he at least knows what a chair is. Now we’re only open up to whether or not there’s one right here.
The only consistent response would be a complete solipsism or nihilism that actually says nothing because there’s nothing to say because there’s nothing to speak from. But the moment we make any knowledge claim, we are making claims about reality – first of all that there is such a thing, and that it is in some sense distinct from the one making the claim at the moment.
“I say there’s no chair.” Well, then there’s I and there’s at least the non-existence of a chair which is not me, because if the chair is me then I would have to say the chair does exist.
There’s also the communicability of truth. If you say something, it’s because you intend someone to understand you.
And you’re saying that you in fact understand yourself, that the words you formulate are not simply impressions or emotional experiences, but that this truth can be put into words, and this is something of what Paul is talking about.
There’s no getting away from God’s reality, but it is very much God’s reality, and if you try to posit something else than God as the starting point, even these simple assurances fall away. How do we know that we know? How do we know that these words mean anything? What are words anyway, and who am I to make any pronouncement about anything?
It’s interesting that you say that, because that’s exactly the progression that we’ve seen – our devolvement is a better word than progression. The impulse of the natural man is to deny as much as you can get away with. There was a time when you couldn’t get away with denying the truth of 2+2 = 4, but in the last few years we’ve seen, “Oh, I might be able to get away with that. Let’s try it and see what happens.”
Yeah. We learn this from the British and the Americans and the French, and they interrupted our own native way of looking at reality. It may be that 2+2 = 4…
1984 is coming back to me. Yes, 2+2 may be 4 for our purposes, but if we want it to be 5 it is how many fingers do you see? Of course, it’s one thing to teach this to kindergartners in the classroom. “2+2 is 4-ish. 5? Okay, that’s good. That’s your way of thinking about it. We can work with that.”
Yeah, he’s never going to be an engineer because engineers don’t build bridges based on 2+2 is something around the area of 4. There are absolutes of thought that have concrete consequences.
And there’s relative clarity, because you do get down to a certain decimal point and say, “Close enough,” but it has to be enough.
And we’re capable of communicating what that “close enough” is, largely by building bridges, running trains across them, and finding out, “Whoops! Well, that wasn’t close enough,” and we don’t make that mistake again.
Now we’re inserting certainties about memory and time. “That happened in the past.” Where’s the past? You can’t see it or touch it or feel it, and yet I remember it. Is that memory valid? Why is it valid? Science fiction has dealt humorously with that any number of times.
There is a great deal that the human being takes for granted, in fact cannot help taking for granted consistently. The pantheist can say 1+1 = 1 and insist upon it religiously, in both senses of the word, but when it comes to building bridges or mixing explosives, he’s going to appeal to Western science and Western counting or he’s going to blow himself up.
“You know that I really feel that three sodium atoms should come out of this equation, so that’s going to happen if I combine bleach and ammonia.”
“I feel it in my heart, and certainly, nobody has a right to overturn my sincerely-felt convictions about what I am doing.”
We’re beginning to edge toward what I would like to talk about before we’re done, and that’s ethics, because one of the things that men know or don’t know is right from wrong, and Paul is going to address that, but we need to go a little bit further, so with that in mind we go on.
So men are changing the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man. Speaking of evolution, they started by worshiping other men or images of men, often their ancestors and their dead kings, and birds. At least they’re in the heavens. Four-footed beasts that prowl the earth, and then creeping things, scarabs, dung beetles, things like that.
Men, in not being thankful to God, did not stop being worshiping creatures, but they turned their worship toward the creation, and step by step, generation by generation, century by century, what they worshiped became more and more distant from the God who is. They started with God’s image, which is man, but quickly departed from that until they were worshiping bugs. Again there’s a progression here.
– because of this, because they would not think honestly and truly about God because they would not accept the revelation within them and without them –
God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves…
So as man self-consciously turned from God, God withdrew the remnants of his grace. We can use the term common grace, if you will, his restraining grace, his Spirit striving with man to keep sin in check. God began to remove that and basically let them be them, and what happened was that they turned to immorality of all sorts, and he highlights here particularly sexual immorality.
He gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts – that is, the lust originates in their hearts, in who they really are – to dishonor their own bodies between themselves, and he’s going to come back to that. And again he reminds us why this is.
Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.
Again, it’s about worshiping the creature because you’re not thankful to the God who is, who you in fact know, but you don’t want to know.
So he’s going to echo and expand upon what he just said. For this cause, because they’re worshiping the creation…
There’s an absolute. He doesn’t say ‘unusual.’ He doesn’t even say ‘unnatural,’ although those would both be true. He says ‘vile.’ That’s a critical evaluation. These affections, these passions, these desires are vile in God’s sight. God does not approve of them, this God who made the universe. God gave them over to vile affections, and he cites two examples. They may be two, they may be one, depending on how you interpret the text.
…for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature.
That may be referring to homosexuality. I’m going to follow Schaeffer here and suggest that it refers to prostitution, because generally when society gets that bad, men are blamed before women. In fact, there’s one of the minor prophets who says, “Your women are going after lovers. I’m not going to punish them because you started it, you men. The blame is yours.”
It might be lesbianism, or prostitution possibly but, whatever they did, women were not created to be prostitutes, to surrender their bodies to men’s lusts for money. That’s not the way God made the world. It is not in that sense natural at all. It may be doing what the people involved feel is okay, but their feelings are wrong. It’s the feelings that are not natural, and therefore the vile act is not natural. It’s against nature.
And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly…
… and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.
Which was appropriate. This is because they refused to tell the difference between God and a dung beetle. God says, “Fine. I’m going to withdraw my grace from you so that you can’t tell the difference between a man from a woman.” Oh, we’re kind of there, aren’t we? Or how about you can’t tell your own gender anymore? If you will not believe in the Creator God, the most basic things that everybody seems to always have known – “I’m a man. You’re a woman” – will be gone from you. You’ll have no firm basis. You won’t know.
The consequence of this, particularly here in describing sodomy, because he’s describing not only the ideas or opinions but the actual acts, is he says they receive in themselves that recompence of their error which was appropriate. This was before AIDS or HIV.
No, it’s not. It’s talking about what you do to yourself spiritually, psychologically, emotionally, mentally, and intellectually when you go this far. It’s not a natural act and it affects everything about you and your ability to understand and discern.
We keep seeing that more and more in our age in the last 20 years, where more and more people are questioning basic realities. The last couple generations questioned whether or not the fetus in the womb is a baby or a piece of tissue. That’s not exactly something that society really has struggled with, and certainly not where the gospel has gone, but that was up for grabs. A big bang from the Creator? No. And now we’re at gender and other things.
What is fascism? Fascism is you telling me that I can’t practice my sexual perversity and use my illegal drugs any way I want. In fact, if you’re not going to pay for me you’re a fascist.
That’s not what that word means, but people will use it that way. They no longer have any sense of correct interpretation – love, mercy, justice. These words do not mean what they used to mean.
Yes, peace. Again, back to 1984, war is peace, freedom is slavery. He was a prophet. He saw where this had to go. Words become manipulation tools by the governing elite, using the media, to make people go along with the program, believing all the while that this is in some sense right and proper because they have no standard by which to critique it or to judge it. There is no absolute beyond the system, so we’re left with what we have, and no appeal except, “I don’t like this.”
“Well, you may not like it, but compared to the millions of people who seem just fine with it, your vote no longer counts.”
They didn’t like it. They did not want to think about God, talk about God, believe in God, believe in the right God, think about God in a biblical fashion, because of that –
The margin says “a mind void of judgement.” They were no longer capable of making rational judgments about reality, so they followed their immorality – freely, passionately, enthusiastically at times, sometimes sadly, realizing, “This is somehow bad. I don’t feel happy when it’s done, and yet I keep doing it,” because their mind no longer has the capability of judging between God and creation, man and woman, tissue and baby, peace and war, slavery and freedom, and that carries on through everything, between right and wrong. Even the categories begin to disappear, and the only thing that becomes evil to them is anyone telling them they ought to obey God, and he begins to list what happens.
Again, this is not God making them evil. This is God simply withdrawing his grace that kept them from their evil. In other words, the punishment for sin is being left to sin. He just pulls back the restraints and people become more fully themselves, but rather than becoming anti-Christs who rule the world, they descend into gross immorality where they can’t even rule themselves.
It kind of drives home the point that God is the source of all good, that as you withdraw from him – when you let a child do something that you know is going to hurt them a little bit so that they will learn, this is not that, because the goal is fellowship with God, so you’re not going to learn that you need to have fellowship with God by rejecting fellowship with God. The only way to be redeemed from this is to have God say, “No, I’m going to put you back in fellowship with me.”
This is in some sense a fine point of theology, although it’s actually very blatant. “But if God lets them tumble on into their sins and they do really wicked stupid things, aren’t they possibly at some point going to hurt themselves or their family bad enough that it’s going to be a wake-up call that will drive them back to God?”
And the answer is, if that’s the extent of your question, the answer’s got to be no, and we’re going to see that a little bit when we talk about the rich man in hell. No threat of punishment, no execution of punishment will drive men back to God, because God is the source of all good, as you just said.
Now if God in that moment of despair brings to you his gospel or quickens it to your heart – you having already heard it – he may indeed use that as part of a wake-up call, but it will be his Word that changes your heart, not the suffering or the fear or the torment in and of itself. You will simply explain it away.
There’s material cause and secondary cause. The material cause is God’s Spirit working, but he may use secondary means to enact it.
Yeah. God can make use of such things, but they in themselves are inadequate because that’s how bad man is. We keep hoping. “I know there’s something good in you,” quoting from my favorite movie.
Tangent – the Redwall books – I love how they deal with that. It’s like, “I believe that there is a little bit of good in this villain,” and then another character says, “Yeah, I believe he’ll be good someday – good and dead.”
So there you go. But we don’t want to do that, and often in movies and TV the one who insists on the absolute depravity of the individual and the need for his or her death, often one who does in fact have the authority to execute, will back off and say, “But there must be mercy, or there must be some good. Look, I know that all her life she’s been a mass murderer, but at this last second she saved your life.” So?
I was just thinking of something related to Batman, actually. It was Batman talking to Superman and he goes, “You know, Superman, do you think I’ve been wrong to not take out these villains permanently?” and Superman goes, “No, you’ve always been doing the right things. It’s not right. They’re suffering in their own mental hell of some sort.”
I don’t know how many TV shows I’ve seen where someone is hanging by their fingertips from a ledge of a very tall building, and the good guy is up there and has the choice, “Do I save them or not?” Sometimes you can say, “Alright, you’re going to save him so he stands trial, good enough, but if you’re going to save him and put him back on the same footing as you and start the battle again, that was dumb.” He got there by his own sins, and if someone can apprehend him and bring him before a lawful judge who can execute lawful judgement, that is the preferred method if you have the authority.
There’s a question of authority here, but the question of whether or not this man, being a mass murderer many times over and it known to be true, there’s due process but there’s also the reality that if that due process takes its course he’s going to die. It’s not going to be a question of mercy or there’s some good in you or we can rehabilitate you. We’re past that barbarism. We can remold your character either by kindness or by shock therapy or by mind wipe. That’s not it.
In passing, I recommend an episode of the late limited Babylon 5 called “Passing through Gethsemane,” where a man who is now a monk finds out that he has been mind wiped and he’s forgotten his past, in which he was a serial killer. He realizes he owes a debt to justice, and he also complains, “How can I ask God to forgive my sins when I can’t even remember what they are?”
I think that’s a good wrestling with this whole issue. Is human nature fixed and are you responsible for your past? The Bible says you are, and that outside of Christ your nature is fixed into growing sin and to a deeper self-conscious hatred of God and rejection of God, and that no external thing – force, threat, torment, accident, act of God, lightning strike – is going to change that. It takes the work of God’s Holy Spirit through the gospel.
And on the flip side, no temporal judgment is directly equated to God’s judgment. If you repent and are a Christian and find refuge in Christ, you can still submit to earthly justice and know that eternally you are safe in Christ and you are forgiven.
Yeah. Paul stands before the Roman magistrate and says, “If I’ve committed things worthy of death, I refuse not to die.”
That’s not our decision. God has told us what to do. As you say, the man will then be welcomed into glory if his repentance and his faith are true.
I remember something, and I don’t know if you said it or somebody else said it, but there was a serial killer in Japan who was arrested and, through the ministry of somebody in the jail, came to faith. And I forget their names, the big Christian movie directors, but the Christian movie ending would be, “Oh, he came to faith; therefore, he’s not going to be put to death. It’s going to be like this restoration thing.”
No, instead he said, “I did horrible things and I’m going to submit to execution, because that is what justice is for the sins I’ve committed, for the crimes I’ve done against God’s image.” He says, “I know where I’m going now. I’m going to go to heaven. I’m going to be with God, but I’ve forfeited essentially continued existence because of what I’ve done. I don’t get out of this because of my repentance,” and so he submitted to it.
There is something excellent in that, as far as personal character is concerned. You don’t do it just to get out of consequences.
I think it’s important to talk through these verses. Next, however, are a list of sins, just so we’re very clear. These are things that people do because, as Paul has said, they have a reprobate mind. They cannot discern between good and evil. That does not mean there’s no discernment at all, but in the moment these things seem perfectly fine. “Hey, it’s me. Yes, this is bad, but I was treated worse. Yes, this is bad, but you don’t understand the circumstances.” Here are some of these things –
Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness, full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity, whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: Who knowing the judgment of God…
Here’s a whole catalog of where mankind ultimately ends up in their rebellion against God. It’s not just a theological thing or epistemological thing. It’s an ethical thing. When you don’t believe in the God of the Bible, that is you refuse to believe in him, you put out your eyes, close your ears, will not listen, will not think, push everything down, this is what happens to you and this is what happens to your culture.
Now, given that, it would be easy to say, “Well, then these people actually are incapable of understanding morality at all, so if they do something good we ought to be thankful they even got that right, because they no longer do have a sense of right and wrong and that’s not their fault. It’s their culture. It’s the way they were raised. It’s their inheritance, and so on.”
Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things.
Paul’s argument is, “Wait, you’ve gone too far. I’m not saying that natural man, fallen man has no concept of right or wrong, just that it’s horribly perverse, because you…” – whoever he’s talking to, the Gentile without the Bible – “if someone steps on your toes, for instance, it matters to you whether it was an accident or they did it on purpose. You know there’s such a thing as human responsibility. You know that someone purposely hurt you, and you feel you have a right to be angry and maybe to take a swing back at them or step on their toes.
“If someone steals from you, you say, ‘Hey, that’s wrong.’ You may feel free to cheat with other men’s wives, but when they go after your wife you say, ‘That’s wrong.’ You may steal $20, but if someone steals $1 million from you, you say, ‘That’s wrong. $20, that’s nothing, that was just a joke, but $1 million, that’s wrong.’”
We do this, and Paul says anytime you condemn something in another person, anytime you say, “That’s wrong,” and make a moral and ethical judgment, you’re admitting that there is a moral and ethical standard.
Furthermore, if you look honestly at your life you will see that you have broken that standard at exactly the same point – maybe not to the same degree or in the same way, but that ethical standard, if you were allowed to flush it out a little bit, you would see you have in fact done the same thing. So every time you say, “That’s wrong,” you are acknowledging an absolute standard beyond yourself that you didn’t create, and you’re saying that you yourself have violated it.
Now, what’s important here, especially for our next week’s discussion, is that he doesn’t say that you’re interpreting the standard fully or correctly. That’s not necessary. All that’s necessary here is to understand that you’re acknowledging a standard beyond yourself that is binding on you and the person who hurt you, which means it’s not you. There is someone bigger than you who has said absolutely that some things are right and some things are wrong, and they are after this fashion.
I know a number of times when I’ve done chapel messages for the younger kids I’ll say something like, “Would you all agree that it’s wrong to steal?”
“Ever steal a Twinkie from your neighbor’s lunch?” and usually I get giggling. I say, “Which is more important to God – a million dollars or a Twinkie? Which one does he need more?”
“Oh, big things, yeah, those are bad. Little things? Well, yeah, I do that but I don’t mean anything by it. That doesn’t hurt anybody. That’s not a real sin.”
“Yeah, that’s sin. You’re a little person and you’re sinning little because that’s all you’re capable of, but where is this going as you get bigger and have more competence and power and authority? What’s the difference ultimately, since this is a heart issue?”
That’s what Paul is saying here. You have the sense that there are these big things. All the people who go to the streets and rage against social injustice – you know what they’ve admitted? That there’s such a thing as injustice. They may not understand correctly what it is. They have a vague flickering, but that vague flickering is enough to hold them accountable.
If you could sit down and talk with them you’d say, “Alright, so you think it’s wrong to take things from people, to oppress them when they’re innocent. Did you just break the shopkeeper’s window?”
“Did you just break the window? Did you take away the property of a man who worked very hard to have it, and you in a moment of your personal anger just took it away from him? How is that not oppression?” and the person starts making excuses. But it becomes very clear at that point that there is a legal guilt here, a legal responsibility before God, because he does know enough to know that he’s violating even his own standards.
For there is no respect of persons with God. For as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law…
The question is if the Gentiles don’t have the law, that is the law from Sinai, the law of the Bible, how can you hold them accountable? Well, he’s been proving that. If they don’t have the law, then they’re going to die without the law. They’re going to go to hell without the law. They lived without it and they’re going to die without it.
If you’re a Jew you have the law and you’re more accountable, more responsible, but the other person is responsible too, and he explains why.
For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified. For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel.
The words here that I think are important for us are they show the work of the law written in their hearts. It doesn’t say they show the law written in their heart, but the work, the activity, the remnants, the effect. Being the image of God, there is something left there that says God is, he ought to be obeyed, and here you have some notion of what that law looks like.
You can go into the worst parts of America and ask people, “Is it wrong to kill another human being?” and almost uniformly people will say, “Well, yes.”
“Someone is pulling a gun on you because they caught you in their liquor store trying to rob them.”
“Well, I can shoot him because he shouldn’t be killing me. I need to get out alive. I’ve got a family.” We start qualifying.
Then we’re back to, “And you broke that guy’s window. You cheated on your taxes. You didn’t pay God his tithe,” and so it goes.
“Well, yeah, I guess adultery is wrong, but she was going to leave him anyway. You don’t understand what a jerk he was. He was abusing her,” and so it goes.
We have these general categories to which we give some kind of assent, usually. But then when we get pressed at the corners and the edges, our definitions become very fuzzy, and the idea that we all agree on what’s right and wrong vanishes real quick.
This is a line I use a lot. It was originally Marcia to Jan on the Brady Bunch. “But this time it’s different!”
It changes then, and the universality evaporates in the details. This is something we have to watch.
So back to this, and we’ll have to develop this more next time, but in this context of, “Okay, we all agree that we should be men of goodwill, loving our neighbor, doing unto others as we would have others do to us,” that kind of morality. If we just all got back to that like our Founding Fathers, then that will change America.
“We did. We don’t. And yes, it’s our fault for not knowing. We have chosen the path of blindness.”
I mentioned the rich man in hell, so I should at least bring him up and we can end with this, but feel free to add. The rich man in hell looks up and does not acknowledge God ever. His prayer is directed toward a human being, a saint, toward Abraham.
He acknowledges the fact of torment, that he’s hurting. He does not acknowledge it as a just punishment, because he wants it to be alleviated. He does not want to acknowledge that he ought to be there, because he kind of tries to get out. “Send Lazarus back to my brethren so they don’t come here.”
It's easy to say, “See, he loves his brothers.” No, what he’s trying to prove is that he did not have adequate warning. Abraham says, “Let them hear Moses and the prophets.” They have the Word of God.
“No, Father Abraham, they will not believe that, but if one rose from the dead they would believe.” In other words, I didn’t have enough warning. And Abraham says, “If they have not Moses and the prophets, they will not believe, though one rose from the dead.”
We look at that and often the conclusion is, “See? Miracles do not change people’s hearts.” I think there’s something far more profound. This guy’s in hell. How much more evidence do you need that God is and that God is angry with you? And yet he will not believe. He’s still thinking ethically. “It’s not fair that I’m here.”
“Well, you have an idea of fairness. Good for you. You know what love looks like, because you’re using it to disguise your motives.”
“Oh, let him save my brothers,” and yet tries to whip Lazarus around like an errand boy from paradise to hell and to earth. The Bible says that hell is the place where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. The weeping is obvious, it hurts. Gnashing of teeth is anger. People in hell are still angry against God.
We can think here in a very mild form of Lewis’s The Great Divorce. People in hell still resent God, hate God. They still play games with his law. “If I had my rights I wouldn’t be here,” but it is not enough to move them to morality, nor is it enough to give them hard and fast definitions when difficult questions come up. It is insufficient, not because general revelation is insufficient, but because they have put out their own eyes. They’ve hardened their hearts. They have step-by-step chosen not to listen.
As the culture sinks deeper and deeper into epistemological self-consciousness and active hatred of God and Christ, where it’s not simply implied, it’s out in the open, it’s in the marketplace, “We will not have this man to rule over us, this Christianity, this tyranny,” there’s not much left there.
To say, “Can’t we all just agree to be good and get along?” is not the answer. The answer is still Jesus Christ. The answer is still the preaching of the gospel in a non-apologetic way, but to do that you have to tell people they’re sinners and that they’ve sinned against an absolute standard, against the God who has spoken and who they actually do know, and who they’re sinning against, because if they didn’t know God they wouldn’t hate him and they wouldn’t be sinners. They do know God. They are sinners and their hope is Christ.
I just want to say at the end we should also be preaching the gospel in an apologetics way.
You know what? I would like each of you to explain in your own words apologetics, because a lot of people don’t know what that means. It sounds like we’re sorry. “I’m sorry to tell you that. I’m sorry I have to tell you about Jesus.” So Bryan, to a young Christian how would you explain what apologetics is, or what you meant by saying that?
I would say in its simplest form it is argument, but not in the way that it’s normally used in English today as, “Oh, these two people had an argument with each other. They were mad.” It’s an argument, a setting forth of a case, and it’s a setting forth of a desired and commanded response.
The basic definition of the word would be ‘word against’ – the apo- is against, -logos is something you say, whether it’s a word or a piece of reasoned speech. I think the typical and appropriate scripture text is “being ready to give a defense.” You’re sharing the gospel with somebody and they have an objection because they’re a sinner and they hate God, so you show them, “Hey, this obstacle isn’t really in the way. What’s really in the way?’
Whether it’s pointing out that they don’t live according to what they’re arguing, or that that doesn’t really match up with reality that they can’t deny, it’s sort of bringing all of God’s reality to bear on your conversation about the gospel, because it’s always about Jesus. That’s the end goal, is bringing them to Jesus.
I appreciate you saying “bringing all reality to bear.” We’re not saying that you can’t point at nature. We’re saying that you have to do it in terms of their own sin and in terms of Christ. There is room for saying, “God has not left himself without witness.” Paul does that, in that he gave us fruitful seasons and food and such, “but you will not hear that because you’re not thankful to God.”
“Well, no, it’s because there is no God,” and then you continue the argument.
Great. I think that’s probably a good place to end and jump to recommendations, so do we have them?
I have one. Because I was hitting on Batman earlier, I’m going to recommend the Lego Batman movie, which is one of my favorites, but I also have a more serious recommendation and that is Cornelius Van Til’s little book, The Protestant Doctrine of Scripture.
He talks about the perspicuity of general revelation, how we can understand general revelation truly, even though we can’t understand it exhaustively and our minds are corrupt, so our understanding is corrupt; yet, nature still speaks to us. Sometimes Van Til gets an undeserved bad rep for neglecting general revelation, and he kind of actually wrote a book about it.
I also think, in that same vein, that it’s very easy to basically say, “Okay, we only use scripture, we only use special revelation. We can’t even really understand anything about God from nature. It’s only special revelation where we learn anything about him.” That’s an opposite ditch to fall into, where the atheist or the spiritualist that’s not a believer entirely relies on nature and says, “Ah yes, we believe in the Great Everything,” or something along those lines. We can use both. We’re allowed to use both.
When Paul stands on Mars Hill, he’s looking at Epicureans who put God far off, and Stoics who are basically pantheists. One emphasizes God’s transcendence, the other his immanence, and he’s able to say at least, “Okay, you both say that God is not of a nature that can be put into physical shape. In other words, you both ought to be opposed to idols. Look around the city. Where’s your opposition to idols? Your worldview should have compelled you to reject idolatry, and yet you tolerate and embrace it. So whoever or whatever God is, even by your own standards you’re guilty, let alone by the standards by the God who really is.”
In a related way, when we talk about what we know of God from special revelation as well, it’s very easy to think that theologians of the past were basically saying, “You can’t know anything about God. It’s literally incomprehensible. There’s nothing you can understand about him.” But the balancing point is that what God reveals of himself, beyond what we know of him from nature, is true. We actually know true things about God. It’s just that he is so transcendent compared to our finite minds. We cannot fully exhaustively know him the same way that we fully exhaustively know that I’m sitting in a chair.
Right. It’s a distinction. Just as the corrupt mind can know ethics and know that there is justice, they can truly sense that, but they don’t understand all the implications or faithfully interpret all the implications.
And depending on who you are and what culture you come out of, you may be clearer on some things than others. You may come from a culture that understands that marriage is one man and one woman, or you may come from a culture that scoffs at that and says, “How ridiculous. Men should have as many wives and concubines as they want.”
If it’s not originating in the gospel, both are going to be wrong to some extent, but one’s a lot more wrong than the other, and the people who get the monogamy part are understanding God and Christian ethics after a fashion better than the others.
Yeah, they may be wrong in some other area. So as you’re saying, there are true things we can know about God and about ethics, but nobody’s got it all together, so as we do apologetics we look for the weak spots. “Okay, you’re on-board with this and this and this. Wait, how about that?”
I do. I’m going to recommend an album by Bastille, a group who happens to be my wife’s favorite musical artist. I think it’s their first one. I actually don’t know the order release of any of their albums. I just know it’s called Wild World.
What’s interesting is that Bastille writes these lyrics that are really, really, really interesting and quite deep when you reflect on them. In one of his later albums he starts off like proverbs. I don’t mean that it’s inspired or even biblical, just that it has the same attitude as Proverbs like, “Look, go out and enjoy reality and do good things.” You can enjoy life, basically.
A couple albums later it’s Ecclesiastes, where he’s got this kind of viewpoint. There is logic and there’s order and these are things we should strive for, and he doesn’t have Christ so that’s all collapsing around him. It’s kind of like, “What is there under the sun? There’s nothing but to toil and eat bread and die. That’s it.” It’s very interesting.
But the first album is very good, very musically rich and incredible. There’s a song on there called Blame, which is really, really good. So if you listen through it in order and get to Blame and you don’t like it by that point, then you can just disregard all of my future musical recommendations.
I want to recommend a paperback book by one Scott McCloud. It’s called Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. It’s about comics, how they are different from other art forms, particularly comics as we would think of a comic book, not just a comic strip. He makes a distinction and shows why they’re not the same thing, but he tells it using a comic book. There are a few pages of text, but most of it is just comic panels. He shows you how panels work and how the art within them works.
Recommendation: Understanding Comics: The Invisible ArtOne thing that struck me is you go from one panel to another, and it’s not like a film where the film is constantly running and you see everything that happens between this shot and that shot. It’s more like the cutaways where something’s happening, and you cut away to the outside and see the lightning in the sky, hear a scream, and you cut back in and you see a body laying dead. You didn’t see what happened. Your imagination fills in everything between one panel and the next, and the question becomes, “And why did you imagine it that way? And what exactly did you imagine?”
Yeah. It is in essence very mysterious. Why does the human mind do what it does the way it does?
My only caveat is there is one scene where I think he’s discussing the history of comics or something, and there are a whole bunch of little pictures on it, very small, and a couple of them do have a bit of nudity, so I don’t know that you would want to hand this to a junior high student or even immature high school students, but for an adult it’s not going to be a problem. The rest of it is, as far as I remember, clean. It talks about how it works, why it works, and why it’s so powerful. It also discusses the history of comics, going all the way back to hieroglyphics and things like that.
It was recommended to me, oddly enough, by one of my former students who said, “You’ve got to add this to the reading list!” I don’t think I quite can, but I was tempted. If I could cut out a couple pages I would.
If you’ve ever read comic books even somewhat or were interested in them, especially if you read them regularly, I think this is something you should read. It gives you a better idea of how this art form affects our brains, why it works the way it does, and what it’s capable of accomplishing and how it has not yet reached its full potential. That’s Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.
I don’t know if it’s from that book or if I saw something similar sometime in the last month, but there’s an aspect of that where in this frame there’s like three bubbles of dialogue, but the action moment that you’re seeing is the end of the conversation, where the hero has decided to punch the villain in the face. They’re not talking while he’s posing like this and about to punch him, but you understand the narrative and temporal flow well enough just by the nature of how storytelling works.
That could well be this, because there is something like that there, and the conventions that we have come to adopt so that we all together understand that. Someone coming for the first time says, “How is he talking and saying all these things while he’s punching the girl?” No, read it in order.
Thank you both so much for joining me for this conversation and for giving such good recommendations as well. To all of our listeners, thank you for joining us.
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