Rom. 1:18-20 Don’t Expect Anything Good From Your Human Nature

SPEAKER 01 : 0:05

So we’re considering this phenomenon of pushing God away, of suppressing him. According to Romans 1, the ungodliness and righteousness of men is to suppress the truth in unrighteousness. We’re in that state as a result of Adam’s sin. You remember we went back to Genesis chapter 3 to explore what the dynamics of that suppression were. First of all, God had said you shall not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but Satan comes along and misinterprets what God says to imply that God is mean and restrictive. Has God said you shall not eat any of the trees of the garden? Well, of course, he had not said that. But the first implication is to make God appear to be what Satan is, restrictive. That’s Satan’s aim. Satan’s aim is to make God to be restrictive and mean and to make Lucifer to be generous. The very opposite, the inversion of truth. And we learned that at least Eve at that point could resist Satan and And she says, no, we can eat of any of the trees of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we may not eat lest we die. But then Satan comes along and says, well, you will not surely die. So there is not only the—first off, there’s the questioning of truth, but then comes the denial of truth. Rather, there is, first of all, the questioning of what God says, and then the denial of what God says, and then the introduction of something completely opposite from what God said. You shall not surely die, for God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened. and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. And so Satan not only misquotes God and then denies what God says, but then introduces a completely opposite reality to the one that God says will happen if you take the fruit. You will actually become wiser. You will be like God. You will know good and evil. Oh, this sounds exciting, something new about the development of personality. Lucifer is introducing a new development of personality which is completely contrary to the one that God outlined. And so when the woman considered the fruit and thought it looked good for food, pleasant to the eyes, a tree desirable to make one wise, she took it. She therefore completely misinterpreted the value and the effect of that fruit. That is what led to guilt and shame and fear, for once they knew, what they had done. They felt naked, they hid themselves from God, and they were ashamed. They tried to create a new righteousness, a new godliness, a new goodness by those fig leaves, you remember. So, what is suppression? It is not simply doing wrong. It is blocking God out of life which results in doing wrong, and then we do more wrong in order to keep blocking him out. And that dynamic we have all inherited from Adam, from the word go. It’s vital to understand it, because it helps us to understand what our human nature is now all about. Our human nature is contaminated. Our human nature is actually more than contaminated, it’s ruined by the contamination. Our human nature is in inversion towards the truth. It looks at things exactly opposite from what they really are. And so that leads me to say this to you today. Don’t expect anything good from your human nature. Now, look, you and I have various addictions of one kind or another. To be human is to be addicted, because since we have suppressed God, we have suppressed the deep and profound fulfilling satisfaction of our soul. For God is joy. God is light. God is all that is beautiful. Having suppressed that then, the soul has nowhere to go, for in relationship to God, in God’s image, the soul naturally gravitates towards God and has joy in him. But we have departed from that, and the result of that departure is that our souls are void, they are empty, they are dark, they are missing something profound, and that is the joy and comfort and pleasure of God. And so we do things to get some kind of pleasure back. But it’s a crooked pleasure. It’s a broken pleasure. It may be drugs. It may be alcohol. It may be gambling. It may be sex. It may be work even. Work can become an addiction, just endlessly working to forget home life and to forget the needs of our souls. When that kind of thing happens, then what we are doing is feeding our human nature with junk food, spiritual junk food. And the result of that is that there is never any satisfaction. For the moment we eat the food, it gives us a high for a moment. And then it drops us down like a low blood sugar, speaking of the literal to illustrate the spiritual. And the effect of it all is that then we want more of the same thing, but more spiritual. and more of the same thing. In other words, an increased tolerance. We gain an increased tolerance for the escapes we use, drugs, alcohol, food issues, overweight, sexual issues. We gain an increased tolerance for our escape of choice, and therefore we need more the next time. This is what human nature is all about. Human nature is an escape from pain. What pain? The pain of having separated from God that leaves us in darkness and shame. And that separation leads us to go to alternatives to get comfort. And those alternatives become idols and subjects, alternatives to what God is, but they never satisfy. This, then, is why we are not to expect anything good from our human nature. Now, when you have faith in Jesus Christ, who gives you new access to the Father and shows you his love and his mercy and forgiveness and his reconciliation of his heart towards you and you towards him, when you receive Jesus Christ, you are actually… doing the opposite of suppression. We say that the opposite of suppression of God is obedience, but actually that’s not quite right. The opposite of suppression is faith, for suppression closes the heart against God. It pushes him away. That is what suppression does, and faith opens the heart up to God, and by faith in Jesus believes that he is drawing near to us. And so if you want to know the real core of your spiritual issue, it is the failure of faith, the absence of faith. For the presence of faith will bring you to God. The presence of faith will end the suppression. Now, we don’t get it very well, do we? So what does God do? Well, before we go there, let’s look at verse 19. Because, well, let’s get the connection in verse 18. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. And remember that the wrath of God is God’s love. which acts against the destruction that we are bringing upon ourselves, God in his love exercises his wrath, and we’ll see how in a minute. He exercises his wrath in order to bring us back to him. His wrath is motivated by love. His wrath is not hatred of you. It is not a desire to crush you and destroy you. It is a desire to bring you back in a very tough loving way, but he will bring you back. So then, men suppress the truth by their actions. Men and women suppress the truth by our lifestyles that are full of various sins that block us from God. And we use that sin to continue the blocking. Now, because what, verse 19, because what may be known of God is manifest to 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. Now I’m going to say something here that is categorical because it’s right there in the verse, but it may offend you if you happen to be an atheist. There is no such thing as an atheist. An atheist is in denial. An atheist, according to this verse, knows about God. What may be known about God is clear in creation. There is obviously an intelligent and personable and devoted loving Creator who has made this beautiful world of ours. And yet we refuse to believe in him. And so atheism is willful unbelief. Somebody says to me, oh, I don’t believe in God. And I say, oh, yes, well, what hurt? Who hurt you? That seems to make no sense to them. Somebody hurt you. Something hurt you to make you believe that God is bad. And if it wasn’t anything in this world, it was your inheritance of the sin of Adam, where Adam had come to believe that God was evil and Satan was good, where he had come to believe that if God came in the garden and saw their sinfulness, he would kill them. Adam and Eve came to believe that God was a killer. But God had not said, in the day that you eat of the fruit, I will kill you. He said, in the day that you eat of the fruit, you will die. Because separating from God, who is the source of life, is death. Proverbs says, all who hate me love death. That is what we’re facing with our human nature. So don’t expect anything good from your human nature. because your human nature will always lie to you. It will always tell you that God is not in your best interest, that God doesn’t love you, or God is mean, or God is very, very restrictive, doesn’t give you all the blessings of life. All of these things are an inversion of good and evil. Now, the moment you have faith, which is given to you by God for you to exercise, but it’s given by God, the moment you have faith, That moment is the moment that you reverse the inversion, that you say, now, Lord, I know how good you are. Now, Lord, having seen what you have done for me in Jesus Christ, offering your Son, I end my suppression. That’s how it is. We end our suppression and we start talking to God. Prayer is conversation with God. It is a return to God. Now you may say, but I can’t talk to God when I’m in the midst of sin. Yes, you can. You can talk to him and you can say, Lord, this is my human nature and it’s lying to me and it’s not me anymore and it’s not telling me the truth and the truth I believe that you love me and you have mercy upon me. You know, I had a dream the other night, and it wasn’t a very pleasant one. It was a revelation to me that I was not really trusting in God, but worrying in relation to the finances of this ministry. I need your support, but I truly doubt that you’ll come through, and I’m sorry for that. But I pray that God will give me a new faith, that will enable me to believe that you will support the program when it’s needed, and believe me, it is needed at this present time. So if you would like to support the program, you can send your donation to FaithQuest, P.O. Box 366, Littleton, Colorado, 80160, or you can make your donation online at faithquestradio.com. Thank you very much. Pray for me that I may have more faith to have joy instead of worry. See you next time. Cheerio and God bless.