Jesus said if you love anybody, anybody more than me, Luke chapter 14, you've got a big problem with me. Let's be clear that we're not helping any unbeliever by siding with them against Christ. If you want to help the unbelievers stand your ground in your faith, give them the love of Christ and the truth of Christ and reveal the lies of the world.
Give it time, give it prayer, and keep working in the meantime because there are also other souls. There are many people that are responding to what God is doing. Well, Jesus said, I came for the sick. The physician came to deal with the sick, which is all of us, but some don't want to admit that they are sick.
And so they cannot be helped by the physician. They will not benefit from the gospel. And so part of our evangelism involves pointing out to an individual, you are not all that. There are things about you that from a holy God's perspective are detestable, contemptible. Why should he let you in heaven? And I don't know how anybody can honestly say, well, you know, actually God should let me in heaven because I am all that. That would be laughable and that would be easy to pick apart because you could say to that person, well, by your answer that you just gave me, if I don't like you and I don't by your answer, don't expect God to like you.
Did I make that clear? There are things that we do as people that God does not like and he addresses all of it in his word. But the unbeliever tends not to read the word of God, but they can read us. We can become that letter written to them, that agent of God through our time and understanding of the word.
And if you get nothing else out of this morning's consideration, may you get this part. Paul is dealing with those who object to the gospel and have all of these clever arguments. And he's holding them accountable and saying with all of your arguments you cannot get away from accountability to a holy God. And he'll go on and as he goes through this chapter, we won't get it this morning, he'll go on to point out your sinners. And the only way to deal with that sin is through a savior and that is according to God's plan and definition of a savior, Christ.
So here he says, as it is written, he goes to the scripture, certainly not, let me quote the Bible to you. And he happens to go to a man who wrote this psalm on the heels of a terrible sin that he committed. But David knew God forgave him.
We can struggle with that. How could God forgive David for what he did? The murder and the adultery, how could God forgive? And so David received the forgiveness, a man after God's own heart. This is in Psalm 51. And what David is saying when David says, Paul says as it is written and David says that you may be justified in your words, it may overcome when you are judged. And so David is saying God, his wrath is justified.
He always gets it right. His words are just and his judgment overcomes those who accuse him of anything. God is innocent all the time. And so David, his psalm shows a surrender and a commitment to stand condemned before God went guilty, demonstrating in that psalm that yeah, I sinned and God is right with whatever judgment he puts on me, he is right. But his mercy overcame the judgment. Where sin abounded, grace did much more as Paul will write in chapter 3.
Man's unrighteousness, it might highlight the goodness of God, and this is what their argument was. But it carries a heavy price sometimes, as it did for David. His sin, David's sin highlighted the mercy and grace of God. David was forgiven, but the consequences of his actions were bloody.
Absalom came against the kingdom, I mean it was just a terrible thing. And so God lets man know, I can forgive you, but you better understand sin is not a toy. You cannot take fire to your heart and not be burned.
Can a man take fire to his bosom and not be burned? It's a serious business. This should take away any notion of lawless behavior in Jesus' name. It's somehow doable. It is not.
It's not worth it. And so when men look at the cross of Christ, they should hear the judgment of Christ, that they're dead in their sin if they don't receive him. Or they will hear, I have taken away your sin, if they have received him.
The choice again falls to the individual. This is where Paul is going. This is a condensed overview of where he is going. He's doing this throughout all of the Roman letter. He's dealing with salvation. He's dealing with sin. He's dealing with faithfulness throughout this letter. He is addressing the anticipated objections that will come from men who are otherwise intelligent.
I cannot emphasize that enough. They are otherwise intelligent. But when it comes to God, because of their dishonesty with God, they are spiritual fools.
And that is again what he's bringing up. Verse 5. But if our unrighteousness demonstrates the righteousness of God, what shall we say then?
Is God unjust who inflicts wrath? I speak as a man. Well, let's take the bottom of that verse first. I speak as a man. He's indicating that he is making a point and not declaring a doctrine.
He's saying, hear me out. I'm speaking in the role of someone who is being dishonest and faithless. They would come up with some scenario like this.
Let's read the scenario again. Verse 5. But if our unrighteousness demonstrates the righteousness of God, what shall we say then? Is God unjust who inflicts wrath? In other words, if I sin and God shows me mercy and that makes God look great, why is he angry with me for sinning?
I just helped him look good. You would say, who would say such a dumb thing? Those guys up in Athens. They do it to this day. To this day, we have people that come up with all sorts of hypothetical situations that will never happen. And they present them as though you're faced with this, you better come up with an answer. And it's silly and I want to zero in on that. If my sin shows God's grace, then sin is not bad. That's the illogic. A sinister attempt to get rid of logic actually, is punishment fair if God is glorified because of it?
Yes, that's where Paul is going. Some try to corner us with silly, complex, hypothetical situations, as I mentioned, that will never happen. These are usually pseudo-intelligent, sophisticated arguments that entangle and engross anybody who messes with them.
You say, where's this happen? What do you think this whole woke thing is? Can you tell me what a woman is? You answer me. No, not out loud. Is that person up to no good? Does that even merit an answer? If a people smasher just came out of the sky and squashed that person when they asked that question, I bet nobody else would ask that question ever again. Yeah, that was pretty dumb. Let's move on.
But that's not what happened. The geniuses in the universities, and again, not all people in universities are up to no good or sinister, but there is a large party of them that are in control, that they have influence, and they are up to no good. And they help these things along. They do all the hauling for Satan they can do because they refuse Christ in an existential way. And they think that it's a compliment to be an existentialist, trying to get to the bottom of the existence of man with all of these philosophical ideas that have no bearing on life, do nothing for anyone else, help no one anywhere. You won't find the existentialist working in a soup kitchen or scrubbing floors. They're too busy out coming up with questions and reasons to not believe God.
And you say, well, who's doing that today? Well, you're familiar with AI, artificial intelligence, which we do not have here. All the intelligence here is real.
Artificial intelligence is man taking all the information he can get from anywhere he can get it and putting it into one spot and then having you be able to activate that accumulation of knowledge. Many of you are reading articles online that are artificially generated. They're not written by someone.
They have a name. They may even put a face there, but many of those articles are fake. It's artificial intelligence. Why are they doing this? Well, according to one, one who I actually admire, who is quite a remarkable person, but is in the world of this artificial intelligence, he's saying we want to find our origins and we want artificial intelligence to give us this answer. Just go to the first page.
It's on the first page. But this is not complicated enough for them. They need more sophistication.
Well, I'd like to take one of them and say, listen, if you can turn the way you think about complex things into defending truth, instead of trying to pursue truths that are already revealed, you would serve humanity a lot better. But that's not what's going on. They are spending billions of dollars to search for the origins of the universe. When we have it right here, you can get it free online. I'm not overplaying this.
This is taking place. You can watch them on the internet, debate these things, and you want to scream and throw a brick at the television. You morons, what are you talking about? Just go to the scripture.
Oh no, we can't do that. If you look up things on the Bible versus existentialism, you just shake your head and say, why do they believe the complex falsities when the simple truth is right there? Is God supposed to excuse this? This is on the Oxford level, that these things are happening, speaking gibberish, but thinking themselves genius. Okay, all right. Has that happened in Paul's day, other than there in Rome?
Yeah. When he's in Greece, he writes to Corinth. He's in Corinth now writing to the Romans.
But at an earlier point, he was in Greece writing to the Corinthians. And he says, God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise. God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty. God has chosen the foolish things of the world, not of God, not of truth, not of science, but the foolish things of people who will not receive the simple truths of God's revelation. So in the clash of classes, the underdogs of Christ defeat the overlords of human esteem. You know, this is a complicated section of scripture.
Until you see that he's dealing with people who will not receive the simplicity of truth, he's trying to speak to them in a way, question and answer, that maybe would trigger a response, you know what, he's right. And so the supposed overlords of intelligence scoffed themselves into eternal death. Where are they now? The earlier ones that came up with all of these complex arguments. Where's Sigmund Freud now? Where's Carl Jung now? Where are all these men who did not want people to go to God's word to learn how to fight off the things in life that hound us in our minds? Where are they now? And then where are your Charles Finney's, your Dwight Moody's, your Charles Spurgeon's, men who preached Christ and Savior and the goodness of God and holiness, his holiness and eternity.
Where are they now? There are real consequences to what's going on here. There are real consequences to their real lives. We must defy their evil without celebrating their doom.
We're not happy people are going to hell, but they're going to go to hell and it'd be on them. And this is what he is saying. Human philosophers tinkering with reason and chasing their tails. And again, the example is we're trying to find the origins of man. Turn to Genesis 1.
Why won't you believe that? What about Genesis 1 is so repulsive that you must do anything you can to suppress that information in unrighteousness? What is it about Jesus Christ that makes you not want to receive him? Did he steal something from you? Did he try to hurt you?
Why are you rejecting him? It makes no sense. You say, well, you can say that about other religions. No, I can't because other religions have told me things that are flat out lies. Salvation belongs to the Jews. We have an unbroken witness from the book of Genesis to this present day.
No one else has got this. Well, anyway, I digress. What shall we say then? Is God unjust?
Who inflicts wrath? And again, he's putting himself in their position with these questions that are from his, I'm sure they're from the files of the apostle. He said, you know, I've had to deal with these types before.
Up in Athens, there are plenty of them. They have all these existential arguments, all of these sophisticated, convoluted positions that are all dumb. But because they come from otherwise intelligent people, we're supposed to believe them. Well, if you live through COVID, you should know better. You should understand there are A students out there who are pretty stupid and evil. Not all of them, not all of them, but enough of them. So when Christ says, I'm no respecter of persons.
I don't care about your credentials. What can you do that's consistent with God? That's what he's interested in. And that's what Paul is trying to express. You know, that woke twaddle, it is all gibberish, every bit of it. And anybody who thinks that, wait a minute, I don't have to tell you what a woman is, dingbat.
You know, you know it. And you want to try to somehow twist up society with questions that make no sense. Anyway, verse six, he says, certainly not. You know, don't go coming back to the original question that was in verse five, began in verse four. Our unrighteousness is that somehow, since it makes God look good, shouldn't we be excused from being judged? And you would say, who would even think that way?
Well, who would think about the woke thing? Certainly not. Verse six, for then how will God judge the world? Let that sit for a minute.
Certainly not. False hopes of men evading accountability is what he has been dealing with. This silences the gripe that God is too loving to send anyone to hell. He's too loving to let rebels into heaven.
That's closer to what's going on. Why should God let people into heaven who hated him here in this life, who ignored him here in this life, because they're going to do the same thing in the next life as who they are. And so he filters them out and he has every right to do that. And so if you are saved, you want, look, I have loved ones who aren't saved and I still love them. But I'm not giving an inch against my faith for them or anybody else. Jesus said, if you love anybody, anybody more than me, Luke chapter 14, you got a big problem with me. Let's be clear that we're not helping any unbeliever by siding with them against Christ. If you want to help the unbelievers stand your ground in your faith, give them the love of Christ and the truth of Christ and reveal the lies of the world.
Give it time, give it prayer, and keep working in the meantime because there are also other souls to be saved. I don't know, does the New Testament church, does this present-day church have a heart for lost souls? Do we have a heart for evangelism? Or are we too busy wanting to know about the future? Are we too busy wanting to just feel good and worship?
All those things are good. But do we have a burden for lost souls? Jesus did. He says, the Son of Man came to seek and save that which was lost.
And to prove how serious He was about it, He let them kill Him in public. We should have that attitude. It's really not that difficult to have. It's just that I want for my neighbor what I want for myself. And what I want for myself is heaven. Well, coming back to this, verse 7, who if the truth of God has increased through my lie to His glory, why am I also still judged a sinner? So this is the end justifies the means approach. Why am I still a sinner if I've been helping God out? As long as we get Him to the glory, isn't that the objective?
It's the kind of stuff He had to deal with, the kind of stuff we have to deal with also. It is a fatal and false assumption that man's sin somehow benefits God or anybody else. We'll open that up a little bit more in a minute, verse 8. And why not say, let us do evil that good may come?
There's the antidote to that argument because where does that end anyway? And why not say, let us do evil that good may come as we are slanderously reported and as some affirm that we say their condemnation is just? So He's saying, you know, people are saying, I'm teaching this stuff. And if I am teaching this stuff, then I am condemned.
But I'm not teaching this. I'm not saying that we can do evil so that God can be glorified and everybody's happy after that. Perpetrators want to cancel accountability. They want to find another way to paradise than Jesus Christ. And as long as evil is done to somebody else, sure, let's do evil that good may come. Well, who are you doing evil to? So you can steal from somebody else so that you can glorify God?
But you don't want them to steal from you. Anyway, situational ethics, it undermines virtue, it undermines truth. Where do we have it in Scripture? We have it in Rebekah. Rebekah was a hard-working woman. When the servant of Abraham came, she watered all his camels. I mean, she was a hard worker. But when it came to something she really wanted for her precious Jacob, I won't say he was a mommy's boy because he's a tough guy too. But from her perspective, he was a mommy's boy. Well, she wanted that blessing for her favorite son. Well, one of her mistakes is she shouldn't have a favorite child.
You love them equally. And we see the problems that that creates. Anyway, what does she do? She creates this scheme using her favorite son to lie to her husband to steal a blessing from God.
And it was all problems after that. Sarah did a similar thing, and Abraham allowed it with Hagar. And there we have Ishmael. You take Ishmael, you take Esau, the brother of Jacob, you have the Arab people.
There are some other contributors, but essentially that's it. There are no Philistines. There's no such thing. There are no Palestinians.
They're gone. And they never had all the land anyway. What you're seeing are Arabs pretending to be Philistine descendants and getting away with it because of the hatred towards the Jews that Satan is inflaming. Where did this twisted logic come from to say, Paul, you're teaching that we can live like sinners and still go to heaven? Well, if you take a verse from Galatians where Paul said, for I through the law died to the law that I might live to God. They twisted that verse into saying, see, he died to the law. Thou shall not kill.
Thou shall not steal. And somehow that's going to get him grace. This is what Paul is teaching. He was not teaching that. And he says, if I were teaching that, I'd be evil, but I'm not teaching that. And so he's answering these objections.
He knows they're coming. And just to review this, what advantage has the Jew? The scripture, the Bible, with its instructions, its warnings, its prophetic confirmations, which are critical because those prophetic confirmations are not found anywhere else, certainly not to this degree.
And they verify that it doesn't have a human origin. That's what prophetic prophecy is. Will unbelief interfere with God? No. It would interfere with your destination, but not with God. Does the end justify the means?
No. Sin is sin. And to think that you can sin, to somehow bring good out of that, where does that end?
Who gets to call? Who gets to suffer? And will the wicked be judged?
Absolutely. That's what he's dealing with in these first eight verses. And then he's going to continue and deal with sin. Well, I've got to tell you, when I was preparing for this, I was saying, Lord, I sure would like to be doing the life of David. This is, to me, it's very, on one hand, it's challenging and it's fun because you read this as a Christian and say, Who is he talking to? Who even has this kind of conversation? And then you begin to look and say, Well, wait, we're having that today, are we not? We have people coming up with outrageous arguments under the guise of intelligence in our universities on why Israel should be pushed into the Mediterranean, on why we can't define gender. I mean, you look at these things and say, Who comes up with this?
Well, the one that smells like sulfur. Satan comes up with this. That alone is a platform for you to begin sharing the gospel and ask a person, Now, come on, seriously think about this.
It would take a spiritual wicked being to try to spread this on humanity. 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.
