#25. Romans 1:20-21 - The Three Charges (Part 2) (Indignation Series, Part IV)

 Part II: The Conduct of Humanity

Part Two: The Second Charge

For His invisible attributes are descried from the creation of the world, being apprehended by His achievements, besides His imperceptible power and divinity, for them to be defenseless, because, knowing God, not as God do they glorify or thank Him, but vain were they made in their reasonings, and darkened is their unintelligent heart.

The “because” is important, here. It highlights that each of these charges are connected. The claim that God’s indignation would be revealed on irreverence and injustice required an explanation. The first “because” connected God’s first piece of evidence (that men retain the truth in injustice) with His first piece of support (“because” that which is known of God  is apparent among us, for God manifests it to us, and so on.) The first piece of support led to a consequence – that we are defenseless when we detain the truth in injustice. This led to His second “because,” which introduces our new phrase. This phrase serves two functions:

1)    It explains the consequence, and

2)    It provides the second reason that irreverence and injustice of man must be met with God’s indignation

Because we spurn God’s power and divinity, while maintaining the facts of the beautiful, orchestrated nature of the universe, we are defenseless against God’s just judgment (which will be unveiled in chapter 2.)

God has provided us with the extent of our knowledge. You can read the summation of all human understanding in Romans 1:19-20, concluded in the beginning of the 21^st verse. What we know is that God should be glorified and thanked, because it is only on this powerful God’s terms that we exist at all. It is He Himself Who gives life, and breath, and all (Acts 17:25.) No greater summation of His provisions can be given. We are alive because of Him. We are breathing because of Him. We have all that we are given (which encompasses the good, the bad, and the ugly) from Him. This God is our all, whether we like it or not, or believe it or not. Yet we all, to either some or every extent, do not credit Him with this, or glorify or thank Him for it.

It is, simply, not as God that He is glorified or thanked. What is Paul saying? Many who know God (the Christian community, first and foremost) certainly glorify and thank Him!

…Right?

Well… sure, He is glorified and thanked (and regularly so,) by billions of people every day, on both halves of the planet. But it is not as God that this praise is given. He may be glorified as their God, but He is not glorified as a God should be glorified (as in, they do not recognize the qualities of His subjection.) He is not given credit for all, and Christianity removes His role in the problem of evil – instead relegating Him to a Gentleman. Instead of willing all, He only wills some, and only with their permission.

Moreover, He is not glorified as righteous Judge Who gives proper temporary punishments with an aim to teach and build (as He says in His text – Ecc. 1:13,) but as an unrighteous demon who gives eternal punishments as an “I-told-you-so” to his naysayers with an aim to spite and forget. He is not glorified as the One willing all with the goal to right every wrong (how can He right something if He didn’t plan for the wrong?) Instead, He is presented by these Christians as a god who made this perfect world, but didn’t realize that some external force that he didn’t account for would poison his stuff, leading him to desperately retcon and maneuver his way out of accountability for the poison, while trying to save a fraction of his creation while the rest are lost.

I am speaking of the religious community – this (subconsciously) self-righteous bunch that believe they are pardoned for eternity based off their personal declarations of faith. These are the very people that will face His (relative) indignation, for seeing God as an omnipotent ally in their war against sin, as opposed to a Loving force that has already defeated sin with Christ. We’ve simply not seen a single thing in Romans so far that points to your faith pardoning you for eternity.

The word “god,” as we discussed, means “placer.” It is the Deity of scripture Who is The God, The Supreme Placer of all things – the good, the bad, and the ugly (are you tired of me using that phrase yet? Good!) This God is the Maker and Preserver, the Alpha and the Omega, the eonian God, and He is not being glorified as the Maker and Preserver, the Alpha and the Omega, the eonian God. This occurs in all religious and political institutions. The glory (the “esteem”) is instead attributed to Satan, who is, to these Christians, the source of all evil – though God Himself expresses otherwise, directly and clearly (Is. 45:7, Ecc. 1:13, Rom. 11:36.)

Man is to blame for this, in action, but not in spirit. They are slaves to this idea that, if God created evil, then God is not righteous or perfect. It’s a rather simplistic worldview, considering how much good stems from the greatest wrongs (case in point: the murder of the only righteous Human to walk the earth is the very act that eventually imposes the greatest blessings on every creature.) The mortal humans have mortal conclusions about the immortal God! Go figure!

I won’t go into too much detail on the issue with this view now, as there will be plenty of dissection throughout our Romans study. However, I will briefly point out that the Christians adhere to this idea in part because they believe that every aspect of God is eternal, when God never states this. As we’ve already considered in a previous article, Psalm 30:5 points out that His indignation will only last for a moment. Correlation is not causation – God does not lay claim to the idea that His anger burns hot forever, so neither should we. Evil is never stated to be an eternal aspect of the universe, and we should never treat it as such. Evil is temporary, and serves a means to God’s good end for all.

This irreverence and injustice will not find its conclusion in God’s indignation. God’s indignation is revealed on irreverence and injustice, yes – but it does not conclude or end irreverence and injustice! Think about it; if God’s indignation resolved irreverence and injustice, then there is no need for Christ’s work on the cross, and no need for the effectual evangel that Paul shares. God will not resolve man’s irreverence and anger with the indignation, but with the salvation laid out here in the evangel (Rom. 5:6.)

If they don’t glorify God with all the aspects of Deity, then how can they properly thank Him? The fact that they do not glorify all of these aspects of His character highlights that they do not apprehend them – and thus fundamentally cannot thank Him as God. They must instead make excuses for Him – they must reason about Him. They must create all sorts of different ideas concerning His character in order to escape the obviousness of the truth – that God is not as “gentlemanlike” as they would suppose. A leader leads, and does not need the permission of his people to do so. A subjector subjects, and a righteous Subjector should need no external input. A master commands, and does not ask his servants how to do so.

Note that God focuses on the reasonings. He isn’t focused on murder, or theft, or smoking or drinking or fist-fights or dirty-talk (according to Christians, these all make you walk the “dirty walk,” and Jesus, somewhere, explicitly tells us not to do these things.) Yet here, God doesn’t lead with… well, any of these issues. He’s concerned, first and foremost, with the disposition behind the thoughts that drive the actions. Most believe, simply, that our thoughts drive our actions. This is true, but there is an underlying motivation for the thought processes that we have. Psychologists have a name for it, called “cognitive schemas.” It is commonly known that our experiences, cultural values, and beliefs drive our thoughts, which control our actions. God, of course, knows this better than anyone, and rightly points out that if we misapprehend Him, then we can’t possibly conduct ourselves in any reasonable fashion. The root of our “sin,” our “wickedness,” in a relative sense (for the root is planted by God,) is a disrespect toward Him in sum.

These cognitive schemas may also be called implicit biases. These biases influence our reasoning, which is why God takes such issue with the reasoning, here. In fact, the term “reasoning” (which is clearly in reference to man’s explanations, theories, and interpretations used to unify their personal, core beliefs and experiences with the harder declarations from God) is never used in a positive light by God. He expresses, five times in Paul’s evangel alone, how horrendous this reasoning is (Rom. 1:21, 14:1, 1 Cor. 3:20, Phil. 2:14, 1 Tim. 2:8.)

In this passage, the reasonings are considered vain, for they deny these core truths concerning an all-powerful, all-knowing Deity. These core truths are so obvious, in fact, that many atheists (who are not indoctrinated into Christian theology) are far more understanding of the all-powerful notion of God! Yes, you are hearing me correctly – Ricky Gervais has a better understanding of God than any Christian pastor on the planet today, for, though he doubts God’s existence, at least he has enough sense to recognize the definitions of the words supreme and all!

Vanity in scripture does not mean “external,” or “outward,” as it may be commonly used today. In scripture, “vain” is without use. It serves as the foil to holiness (holy meaning “set apart.”) It is an emptiness. A lack of fulfillment. This is a perfect summation of irreverent and unrighteous reasoning about God (such as, “God is eternal, ergo all of His relative emotions are eternal.”) This vain (or hollow) reasoning ironically keeps these people from understanding God’s Son, as they fail to recognize His purpose. All philosophy, science, knowledge, and religion fall prey to this vain reasoning. Truth, in these fields, is relative, rooted only in perception. It is “from a certain angle” that the “truths,” so-called, in these fields must be viewed in order to make some sort of sense, and each reasoned “truth” is ignorant of the evangel of Paul, and as such does not consider all of the information at hand.

Many will object to the previous paragraph, I understand. Unfortunately, I’m only one guy, and can’t spend my entire life going through each and every individual example of man’s flawed reasoning (though I will be covering many throughout this letter.) My favorite example of flawed reasoning is found in the fully-naturalistic evolutionary theory, as well as the aforementioned “truth is in the eye of the beholder” theory (I can’t find a better name for it, so there you go.) Since I can’t go into great detail on each individual example here, I recommend some phenomenal books which, to my knowledge, do not yet have a reply from modern scientific scholars, which cover these topics far more extensively than I could here (Darwin on Trial by Philip E. Johnson, and Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey.) To go into every form of reasoning on man’s part would be a big pace-killer, and we would never get to the end of Romans.

I will, however, be specializing in the religious reasonings of our modern world throughout this entire series. Just as I have already linked you to the articles elsewhere on this blog concerning eternal torment, so I will continue to deconstruct other aspects of Christian dogma in favor of the only text truly worthy of the Christian title.

This vain reasoning leads to the second consequence of God’s second piece of evidence – that the heart of man is darkened by all who adhere to them (that is, all of us – yes, including myself.) “Darken,” skotizo, is the same word used in relation to the infamous Matt. 24:29 verse where Jesus states that, toward the end of the seven-year indignation period documented in Revelation, that the sun will be darkened. That this term is used here highlights the force of the word – if God’s Son is light (John 1:4,) then we are the exact opposite. The indignation and irreverence in us, which causes us to detain the truth in injustice, and not glorify and thank God as God, leads to the darkening of our unintelligent heart.

Simply put? There’s so much we don’t know. It is astounding how little we actually understand. We are defenseless – acting as if we do know the ins and outs of the universe, when we don’t. When the entire summation of our knowledge is provided in Rom. 1:19-20, well… there’s a reason God calls our hearts unintelligent.

Isn’t that an odd statement, though? “Unintelligent heart”? Why didn’t He say “Unintelligent mind?” The mind is where our intelligence is, correct?

In our modern day terminology, yes. The mind stores intelligence. Yet scripture reveals to us elsewhere (Paul merely summarizes here) that the heart is the seat of our moral consciousness, and intelligence. This ties back to the same psychological aspect of our brain that we were talking about – the underlying motivation behind our mind’s thoughts are, to God, centered in the heart. No, not your literal heart, though the literal muscle inside of our ribcage is a good representation of this concept. The heart, pumping blood through the body, filtering the blood at all times, cleansed for the body’s use, is a metaphor which is not lost on Jesus. Observe Matt. 5:8–

Happy are the clean in heart, for they shall see God.

This idea is only complemented when you see blood as a representation of the corruption in our bodies. Our blood is continually unclean – hence it continually needs cleansed. If the heart is unclean, then it cannot enact its job of cleansing the blood. Like a machine, it will inevitably “rust up” and become defective (i.e. you die.)

This happens to all of us, and it is called the death process. Not one of us is clean (Rom. 3:10.)

Jesus states this idea more directly in Matt. 9:4, where the scribes “brood wickedness in their hearts.” His own heart, in contrast, is meek and humble (Matt. 11:29.) This idea is complemented in Matt. 12:34, where Jesus says to the Pharisees,

Progeny of vipers! How can you be speaking what is good, being wicked? For out of the superabundance of the heart the mouth is speaking.

The heart’s function is further elaborated on – the words we speak are manifestations of the heart. Jesus is adamant about this, as He highlights in Matt. 15:19-20–

For out of the heart are coming wicked reasonings, murders, adulteries, prostitutions, thefts, false testimonies, calumnies. These are those which are contaminating a man.

The heart governs the conduct of the person. Mankind understands that we are typically driven by our individual worldviews, and Jesus clarifies that this is not merely a matter of personal interpretation, but a matter of the heart, which contains these individual dispositions/qualities. It follows, simply, that a wicked (or, morally corrupt) heart cannot manifest a good (or, proper) word, just as certainly as an unintelligent person cannot be wise.

...Oh, wait, that’s where we’re going with that, aren’t we??

(to be continued)

- GerudoKing