Damage Report (Part A)

It is part of the good news that there is bad news and it can be avoided. So let's make lost souls aware, not only of God's power and righteousness, but God's wrath also. Don't think you're going to get away with it if you're outside of Christ. When God says that he will judge sinners, he's not bearing false witness. He's not lying.

He's telling it just like it is. This is Cross-Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Mechanicsville, Virginia. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the book of Romans, so please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross-Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. And now here's Pastor Rick with a brand new message called Damage Report in Romans chapter 1. Romans chapter 1 beginning in 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. Damage Report, that's the title.

How bad is it? After man fell into sin, how bad was the damage? Well, Paul's going to talk about that. Man at his best is not good enough for God. Fallen man, sinful man, does not deserve a place in heaven, which is the meaning of grace.

Grace is kindness that's not deserved, and it comes from God. It is the nature of fallen man to think otherwise, to think that, well, I'm not so bad, and on and on goes the lines, and they're wrong. It's not what the Bible teaches. This is made clear by Isaiah, but we are all like an unclean thing, and all our righteousness are like filthy rags.

We all fade as a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away. But there's more to the story than just how awful man is compared to a holy and righteous God. How pure he is also includes how loving he is. In Romans chapter 3, when we get there, we'll talk about this verse, of course. For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But we read in the Gospels, those who are well, Jesus said, have no need of a physician. Those who are sick, I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. Now, baked into that is we're all sick, and the only ones that think they're too righteous for a physician, a savior, are the ones who are duped, who are not willing to see things from God's perspective. Again, Romans 10 verse 13, whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.

I mean, that just opens the gates wide, the gates of heaven. But, Jesus said, let's be realistic about this. You're born a sinner, and the damage is so extensive, you must be born again. Spiritually speaking, John 3 verse 7, do not be amazed that I said to you, that singles out all of us, you must be born again. And so here, Paul, writing to these Christians, starting out with just, hey, it's me, Paul, can't wait to see you. And then he starts moving into verse 16, where he just, it ramps up, for I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation. And then he says, for in it the righteousness of God is revealed.

The just shall live by faith. That's old school theology, that's why he's quoting the Old Testament. Now, he moves into the 18th verse, and from this verse on, he just lets it fly. That's sort of verses 16 and 17, as he's writing them, they're stoking him. They're motivating him in his righteousness, and it doesn't stop.

Until he runs out of ink. Verse 18 now, looking at Romans chapter 1, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. When he begins here, he said, there's no happy ending for those without Christ. There's no happy ending for the one that is opposed to God's Son, or the Son of God, or God the Son.

However you want to phrase it, it's the same thing. God's wrath is not baseless, it's not random, it's not excessive, it is not an outburst of anger, it is justice applied for those who did not want the grace. You don't want the grace, you will get the justice. And what should we expect from God when you have people thumbing their nose at him or trying to create God in their image instead of receiving God for who he is? And so it is a settled and just and determined response of a good and righteous God towards obnoxious sinners, which I once was, and so were probably most of you. Give a little space there because some people are raised in Christian homes and they just love God from the beginning and they just keep going.

And that's rare but it does happen and it makes me envious of them. But God's wrath is the final judgment against impenitence, those who refuse to own who they are according to God's Word. Now God dispatched his prophet Jonah to ancient Nineveh, a city in what is modern day Iraq. And we read simple things from that profound prophet's word and Jonah began to enter the city on the first day's walk.

It is said it took three days to walk through the city of Nineveh at that time, it was so large. Then he cried out and said, Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown. Shortest sermon in the scripture.

You wish you got sermons like that today. Of course they repented, that's all it took. He just held up before them the wrath of God. Luke's Gospel chapter 11. The men of Nineveh will rise up in judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah and indeed a greater than Jonah is here. That applies to every single generation from the time Jesus said that. If the Ninevites, the Gentile Ninevites, can receive a short sermon from a Hebrew prophet and repent because of their sin, then what is your excuse?

When you have one greater than Jonah, you have the Christ. Damage report, how bad is it? We've just been torpedoed by sin. How bad is the damage?

Can it be repaired? Will there be survivors? What's going to happen to this torpedoed human race? Well again, looking back at verse 16, the power of God to salvation. God is interested in saving people.

So interested, death was involved on his part. In verse 17, the righteousness of God is revealed. And then here in verse 18, the wrath of God is revealed too.

And it's justified. To God's allies, divine care. To his enemies, divine wrath.

It is part of the good news that there is bad news and it can be avoided. And so let's make lost souls aware, not only of God's power and righteousness, but God's wrath also. Don't think you're going to get away with it if you're outside of Christ. When God says that he will judge sinners, he's not bearing false witness. He's not lying.

He's telling it just like it is. When we get to the second chapter of Rome, Paul will say, in the day when God will judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ, according to my gospel. Because there's nothing hidden from him. It's not sane to try to hide something from an omnipotent God. And by definition, God should mean to the individual, someone who is all powerful, all knowing, everywhere at the same time. He is eternal from eternity past and he will be eternal into eternity future. The world may have other definitions of God, their own self-made definitions, and we reject them and hopefully we'll be given a chance to correct them.

This section gives us all that Paul saw in Corinth, outside his window or in the marketplace. When he gets to talking about the behavior of depraved humanity, it's like he's, again, looking out the window. But it applies to anywhere on earth, in some form, you're going to find these behaviors. Granted, in some it's going to be worse than others. If God's instructions are ignored, then Hell's instructions will be embraced by default. You don't have to approve of this. You don't have to sign off. You don't have to say, I reject the scripture. What does Hell have to say?

I'll take that. No one in their right mind would take that approach. But still, that's where they end up. Just ask Adam and Eve. Adam, what was the alternative to just simply following the instructions to keep your hands off that tree?

What was the outcome? I don't think they had a clue. All they had to do was obey.

But when their son Cain killed their son Abel, they understood. Against all ungodliness. Not most of it.

All of it. The ungodly are those who live and behave outside of God's influence. Today we have this silly little title, I am an influencer. Whatever that means. Well, I'm under the influence of God.

And I prefer that. It takes all I have to try to make it work, to be useful to God. But I think it's worth it. And that's where our word worship comes from. Worship means worthiness. God is worth it.

And it also has a little asterisk with a footnote or an end note. And no one else is. God is worthy. He's on another level. Now of course we have various levels of worth, you know, but God is on the highest level.

The zenith, the pinnacle, the utmost. He says here, revealed from heaven. Well, men claim they want to hear from God.

Do you really? Would you really want to hear from God? Before I was a Christian, I'd be afraid if God appeared before me. Well, now I wouldn't. I would embrace him. I'd be like Mary Magdalene.

I'd lock onto him. So, you know, love casts out fear like that. Decent citizens of the world can still be indecent to God.

It's not enough to say, I'm nice enough to my neighbor. Well, how do you treat your creator? Do you even believe he's there? You believe what he has to say. The Bible makes no attempt to prove that God exists.

It would be a silly exercise. It begins with that declaration in the big, or almost said, in the big inning. In the beginning, God created. It's self-evident and therefore a settled deal. I'm not going to try to prove to you I'm standing right here in front of you.

If you can't admit that to yourself, then, you know, you've got other issues. You know, I like to say, what do you say to a person that will not admit that water is wet? The end of the argument.

There's no further discussion on that topic. I mean, you have someone that's delusional, or up to no good, trying to sell you something. A person who says that they don't believe that God exists, to that God bluntly replies, you are a fool.

Psalm 14 and Psalm 53, you get it again in case you missed it the first time. The person who says that God does not exist, the Bible bluntly says is a fool. You know, the root cause of atheism, I believe, is dissatisfaction and dishonesty about God. Not that, you know, they're so intelligent they can't make up their mind. They're not innocent. Those who say, I don't believe that God exists, there's not innocence there, nor is there an abuse of intelligence with that. There's a lie about it. It's not that man cannot believe God, it's those who don't, will not believe in God. And largely, you know, because they're offended by life, they hate life, or they think they're, whatever, there are other little, there are tentacles that reach out from such a position, and they're all false. I stand by the statement, and I think you should say to an atheist, if someone boasts to you about their atheism, tell them, I don't believe you exist as an atheist. I believe you exist, but I think your atheism, you're lying to yourself, and you're lying to me, and you know it. I always add, you know, the old saying, no atheists in foxholes, because that sort of, that, you know, to face artillery is to cry out to God.

You might remember the Gulf War, where they dropped so many bombs on the Iraqis entrenched in the desert that they couldn't wait to surrender. They were traumatized. So, yeah, so much for atheism. And the unrighteousness of men. Well, as a result of being outside God's influence, ergo ungodly, these continue, they're not right. Because they're outside of his influence, they're not right with other people. Ungodliness disregards God, unrighteousness disregards people.

Sometimes they're very select, you know, it's form nepotism. I can be very nice to my family members. You know, take mobsters, you know, they can love their own family while they're out killing everybody else. So, you know, God sees through all these things. So, just to review it very quickly, ungodliness chiefly is sinfulness, or a sinful disregard for God. Unrighteousness consequently is sinful disregard against man. Man's first sin separated him from God. The second recorded sin, you get into little pockets here because Adam lied right away, you know.

You know, it was that woman you gave me. You know, just threw Eve right under the bus. And many men have continued to do that since that time. So, the first sin was separation from God. But the second one was man from man when Cain killed his brother Abel. And there you have the Ten Commandments, actually. The first table of the Ten Commandments deals with sin against God directly. No graven images, no other gods, remember the Sabbath.

But then the second table comes along and says, don't murder, don't steal, don't lie, and now it's dealing with people. And so there you have ungodliness and unrighteousness together. He continues here in verse 18, who suppressed the truth in unrighteousness. Now, unrighteous suppression of truth is ungodly, of course.

Proverbs 14, 34, Righteousness exalts a nation, Sin is a reproach to any people. Why would someone suppress the truth? Because they have other ambitions. This is the news media. Main Street news media always suppresses truth because truth interferes with what they are trying to get, which is the evil that they want to do. In the days of the prophet Jeremiah, there he was trying to save the northern kingdom by simply preaching God's word to the people who were supposed to be the people of God.

Well, it didn't work out well for anyone. And there, amidst the ruins of Solomon's temple in the city of Jerusalem, he writes the Lamentation. He says, God speaking through him, Your prophets have seen for you false and deceptive visions. They have not uncovered your iniquity, but have envisioned for you false prophecies and delusions. They have suppressed the truth intentionally. They didn't like the truth Jeremiah was preaching. And so they tried to kill him, arrest him, get rid of him any kind of way they could. This helps explain dirty politicians, dirty lawyers, dirty journalists, dirty pastors, people who are keeping down, don't want to tell you that there is a wrath of God and you need to avoid it.

They're afraid you may not like that. So I'm talking about the pastors in the pulpit that suppress the truth of God. The church is supposed to be the pillar and the ground of truth. Anyway, there are times, however, when kindness is wiser than truth, when truth can be suppressed, but not unrighteously.

There are times, for example, someone, maybe someone's on their deathbed and there's been a tragedy in the family. Well, do you want to go in there and say, hey, by the way? You just, we're not going to tell that. There's no need. It's not going to help anything.

It's going to make matters worse. That is not suppressing it in unrighteousness. That is a righteous and wise usage of facts and truth and things that go on. You're not trying to deceive.

You're looking to shield. There are things that children, questions that children may ask and it's not time for them to learn these things. You're not suppressing it in unrighteousness.

It's just not, they're not ready for this. So anyway, coming now back to this, I love that segment though before we move to verse 19 that there are those who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. They're up to no good. And the mainstream media is, they practice this as though it was one of the Ten Commandments. Thou says, you know, thus says the Lord, don't tell the truth, lie to people. Their God may say that. Verse 19, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. Paul is taking away excuses. He says, I've dealt with these guys before.

I know who these boys are. I tried to preach the gospel to people and they come up with all these, well how do we know God is any, I've heard it all. And they're guilty. They have no excuse. They cannot answer the questions that they are faced when the righteous begin to lay it out to them. Yes, nature is a revelation of God's existence and his creativity.

But not much more than that. And nature, incidentally, is damaged. I mean, when you look at, you know, a beautiful landscape or whatever you're looking at, we're living in a fallen world. It's not what God created it to be.

It has suffered injury. It's the same thing with other people. When you engage other people, you're not looking at what God created and put there in Eden.

You're looking at what survived the train wreck in Eden. And thus, God encounters us. Be kind to one another. Tender hearted.

Forgiving one another, even as God in Christ has forgiven you. You're all messed up. But there's more to the story. There is still work to do. I can still use you. I can still love you.

I can still bring you into the heaven where I am. And it says here in verse 19, Because what may be known of God says to us, God can be known. Now, not with exhaustive knowledge. There will always be things about God to discover. But He is knowable.

Evidence of the Creator is inescapable, though widely denied. Well, I can't force people to stop being dumb. And I don't appreciate it when they try to stop me from being dumb either. That is a joke. And if you weren't dumb, you would have got it.

No, I'm kidding. It's an insult to congregation. Well, the prophets did all the time. They would have guilty congregations. Anyway, I don't believe someone can look at creation and be that dumb, to say there is no God, or just kind of just fit all together. But I do believe they can be that dishonest.

I have no doubt that they can lie to themselves and smugly boast about it, because we've encountered these types. The wrath of God is upon them. It's not free. To mock God is pricey.

It's a price you can't pay. And you think about the invention of the electron microscope and all that that has revealed to us about just the complexities, the molecular complexities, just taking a single cell. You understand that Darwin was a dupe. He was fooled.

He's wrong. And Darwinism, it's a fancy word for evolution, is dishonest. And we shouldn't stand for it.

You know, I think when someone says, well, I believe in evolution, we should be fine to say to that person, I'm not going to stand for that. All creation points to a creator. There's nothing in creation that says, well, these things just happen by chance. Well, then I should be able to reach in my pocket and pull out a little moon. See, it just happened.

Hey, 50 bucks, look at that. It's a law that is defied by reality, and yet you have otherwise intelligent people embrace it because the alternative to them is to believe in the God of the Bible, and they'll have none of that. Well, the wrath of God is upon you for that. Don't let them get away without understanding. There is a judgment to come, and the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. And that type of fear that Solomon is pointing to is not mere reverence.

It's the understanding that he holds the keys to your eternity, and he gives you a chance to choose which key to use to unlock the kingdom of heaven or the gates of hell up to you. Thanks for joining us for today's teaching on Cross-Reference Radio. This is the daily radio ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia.

We're currently going through the book of Romans. If you're in need of hearing this message again or want to listen to others like it, head over to crossreferenceradio.com. We encourage you to subscribe to our podcast too so you'll never miss another edition. Just go to your favorite podcast app to subscribe. On our website, you'll be able to learn a little more about the ministry of Cross-Reference Radio, so make a note of it, crossreferenceradio.com. That's all we have time for today, but thanks so much for listening. Pastor Rick will be back next time in the book of Romans here on Cross-Reference Radio.