Reasons for the Wrath of God, Part 3 B

The biggest fool of all is the one who has rejected the light, gone into the darkness, and now rationalizes that this darkness is light, and the light is darkness. He thinks he is a super mind and he is a moron.

It's that simple. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur. I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Imagine a large lecture hall filled with 200 students. At the podium stands a philosophy professor claiming that God is nothing more than a myth. Would you challenge him? What would you say if that teacher called on you to debate him in front of the whole class on the existence of God? Any one of us might feel daunted by that challenge. You might even feel that you let God down if you couldn't brilliantly counter every point.

But if you couldn't change that professor's mind, is that failure? John MacArthur helps you weigh that question today as he continues a compelling look at a frightening passage of scripture, the first chapter of Romans. It's part of John's study, Wicked World, Angry God. So if you have your Bible with you, turn to Romans 1 as John begins the lesson. How do men glorify God? How do you and I glorify God?

First, confessing Jesus as Lord. Secondly, aiming our life at that goal no matter what it costs us. Thirdly, we glorify God by confessing our sin. Fourthly, we glorify God by trusting in Him. We glorify God by praising Him.

That's another one. Psalm 50 23 says, who so offerth praise glorifieth me. We glorify God when we praise Him.

Unbelievers won't do that. Another one, we glorify God when we pray. John 14, if you ask anything in my name, I will do it that the Father may be glorified in the Son. John 14 13 and 14.

Prayer gives God an opportunity to be glorified and men do not pray because they do not seek God's glory. In 1 Peter 4 10 and 11, it says, minister your gift to the glory of God. And what it's talking about is gifts of service and gifts of speaking. Serve the body to God's glory. Serve the church selflessly.

Men aren't interested in that. They're not interested in serving one another, let alone the church. In 2 Thessalonians 3 1, it says, Paul says that when he proclaims the Word, it gives glory to God. The unbelievers don't do that. In 1 Corinthians chapter 6, it says that we are not to be joined to a prostitute or a harlot. That we are to care for our body with holiness, for our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.

What know ye not that you are bought with a price? Therefore glorify God in your body and your spirit which are God's. And that means we glorify God by moral purity. You see, the Bible is very clear about how to glorify God. You glorify God by confessing Christ as Lord, by aiming your life at that purpose. You glorify God by confessing your sin, by trusting Him, by praising Him, by praying to Him, by ministering to His people, by proclaiming His Word, by being morally pure. And also in 2 Corinthians 4 15, Paul tells us we glorify God by winning people to Jesus Christ.

The world isn't interested in that, they don't even know how to do it. And we find in John 15 8 that we glorify God by bearing much fruit, the fruit of righteousness. You see, that's the positive side. That's what it means to glorify God. But the rejecters of this world are not interested in that. They will not believe in Jesus Christ. They will not confess Him as Lord. They will not aim their lives at God's glory. They will not confess the guilt of their sin. They will not trust. They will not bear spiritual fruit. They will not praise. They will not pray. They will not minister to God's people. They have no concern for the lost and utterly no moral purity. And so they live in violent and direct opposition to that which glorifies God.

They will not do that. And that is the characterization of all of the human race apart from regeneration. For all have sinned and fallen short of what? Glorifying God. They just don't do that. And neither are they thankful. Paul says in chapter 1, verse 21, they're not thankful. Why would they be thankful? They don't see God as the source of anything. And lack of thanksgiving is a terrifying desecration and blasphemy against the name of God who gives us all good things.

But men are not thankful. I think about Luke 17 so often about the lepers that came and Jesus cleansed them all and how many came back? There were ten. How many came back and said thanks? One. And Jesus said to him, you're saved.

The other nine were just physically whole. Only one was thankful. Men refused to glorify God. And the real issue is they seek to glorify themselves.

Let me give you an illustration now. Daniel chapter 4. This guy that I want you to meet in Daniel 4 is Nebuchadnezzar, the greatest monarch in the history of the world as far as the world is concerned, apart from God's dominion. Nebuchadnezzar, the king of the kingdom of gold, Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar who was the superior to any other king and he refused to glorify God, was not interested in it. In fact, he was so caught up in his own glory that verse 30 says, he spoke and said, Daniel 4, is not this great Babylon that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power and for the honor of my majesty. Now he didn't restrain his ego at all.

I mean, he just lets it all fly. And he's wandering through his palace yelling at the top of his voice, look what I have done for my own majesty. While the word was in the king's mouth, there fell a voice from heaven saying, O king Nebuchadnezzar. And whenever you hear that coming out of heaven, you're in deep trouble. To thee it is spoken, the kingdom is departed from thee, that is enough.

You know, there comes a time in the patience of God when the door goes slammed shut and he can only take so much. And they shall drive thee from men and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field. They shall make thee to eat grass like oxen and seven times shall pass over thee until thou know that the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men and giveth it to whomsoever He will.

Until you get it straight who God is, you're going to be a wild maniac. You're going to eat grass like an oxen. And the very same hour was the thing fulfilled on Nebuchadnezzar. Instantaneously, this greatest monarch of the world lost his mind, became a raving maniac, was driven from men because they couldn't handle him. He ate grass like oxen. His body was wet with the dew of heaven until his hairs were grown like eagle's feathers and his nails like birds' claws.

Seven years of insanity. And at the end of the days, I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted up mine eyes unto heaven and mine understanding returned to me and I blessed the Most High and I praised and honored Him who liveth forever, whose dominion is an everlasting dominion and His kingdom is from generation to generation. It's my guess that you'll see Nebuchadnezzar in heaven, but he sure learned the hard way that God is to be glorified because men don't do that.

Now what happens? Is it always so to be? Yes, always. Even as you go to the end of the New Testament into the book of Revelation, you find the same basic attitude. In Revelation 14 verse 6, an angel flies in the midst of heaven, has the everlasting gospel. Now the everlasting gospel is a very interesting term. I believe it is simply the news from God that God judges sin and rewards righteousness. That is the permanent message and this angel is preaching it. And what does he say in verse 7? Fear God and give what? Glory to Him.

Why? For the hour of His judgment has come and worship Him that made heaven and earth and the sea and the fountains of waters. And God calls on the world to worship, to give Him glory. But as you know, if you know anything about the book of Revelation, they don't respond. Over in chapter 15 verse 4 it says, Who shall not fear Thee, O Lord, and glorify Thy name? For Thou only art holy.

And this is the message all through the Bible, that men refuse to glorify God. Now what happens? Back to verse 21. What happens? Well, they became vain in their imaginations. Literally empty, useless human dialogue resulted. They went from truth to emptiness. And then from emptiness, as we saw last time, their foolish heart was darkened. Emptiness created a vacuum and it sucked in darkness. Now what is darkness?

What kind of darkness? What do we mean? Well, the empty imaginations, just to remind you of last time, simply means meaningless musings, meaningless thoughts, useless human dialogue.

In fact, the word is dia la gizmos for imaginations. Human dialoguing, human debate, human discussion, human information, empty words. And into the emptiness and the vacuum comes rushing the darkness. And darkness in the Bible is seen in two ways.

First is intellectual and second is moral. You will find throughout Scripture darkness picturing intellectual ignorance. And you will find it also picturing moral perversity. And you find it all over the Old Testament and all over the New Testament as well. Darkness refers to intellectual ignorance, the absence of truth, and the absence of righteousness, moral perversion.

That is precisely what happens. Man says no to God. He will not glorify God. He decides that he's going to spin off his own musings and in his big empty nothingness that comes out of his own mind, he creates a vacuum that sucks in intellectual blackness and moral perversion. And so man is forfeited understanding. He's forfeited virtue. That is why the philosophies of this world tend toward immorality.

They have no restraint power. They're basically intertwined with immorality. The worldly philosophies accommodate immorality because they both come out of the darkness of hell itself. Now all the vain imaginations of man will give you is a legacy of darkness, darkness intellectually and darkness morally.

All the philosophies of the world will leave you with nothing but that. Look with me very rapidly at Colossians chapter 2 and I'll show you why. Colossians chapter 2 verse 8. Now this is right straight from the Holy Spirit through Paul. Beware lest any man spoil you...and the verb for spoil is a very rare verb used of kidnapping someone, plundering a house, or seducing and ravaging a young girl. Don't let anybody kidnap you, seduce you, plunder you through philosophy.

That's fairly clear, isn't it? Human wisdom. The theories of God and man, the theories of truth spun out of the empty imaginations of a darkened heart. When anyone comes to me and says, well, I'm going to take philosophy, all I ever think about is this passage. Colossians 2.8.

You're going to come out kidnapped, plundered and ravaged because you've given yourself over to the useless musings of blackened hearts who do not know truth and do not know morality. It is vain deceit, and I believe that phrase describes philosophy. It is an empty illusion. It purports to be something. It is nothing but that which can ravage the soul.

It is after the tradition of men. That is, it is human. It is from the level of inadequate human thinking. And it embodies the rudiments of the world.

And those are...that is a phrase used several times. It means the basic elements of human wisdom, the infantile, poverty-stricken opinions of a world full of fools. Philosophy doesn't advance you. Philosophy doesn't give you something deep, profound.

Philosophy doesn't give you something new. It is a regression to the basic perversions of the human mind devoid of God and lost in the blackness of sin. So man will reject revelation and he'll be left with a legacy of darkness. And that will lead him to step three, rationalization.

This is fascinating. You can see right here the fall of man. The third reason God has a right to judge them is rationalization. Verse 22, professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.

Here they are. They have said no to revelation. They have utterly rejected the truth. They are left with empty, meaningless human philosophy. Their dark hearts are filled with deceit. And they announce that they are wise. Now that is rationalization. The futility building in the loss of touch with reality. They don't even know what wisdom is anymore.

They've obviated the standard. Man doesn't think right about anything. Why should he think right about how he thinks? He doesn't think right about anything else. He refuses to accept truth. So in effect, he destroys the power to discriminate.

You understand that now? You know, sometimes when I listen to the philosophers and I read all the garbage and I hear all these people talking about what they believe and what is right and what is wrong, it's very frustrating to me. And you say to yourself, how could they ever think that way?

They have no power to discriminate. They cannot perceive truth. They cannot perceive error. You know, years ago Christians decided they had to believe in evolution because they were intimidated by the philosophers who taught evolution. And so immediately they looked for places in the Christian system where you could put evolution and we still believe in creation and God started it and then evolution took over and they came up with what is known as quote unquote theistic evolution or progressive creationism. And it was an accommodation because people were intimidated by the rationalization of a whole lot of fools who didn't know the truth anyway. What about liberal theology?

More schools and churches have been ruined by the theology of liberals because people have been intimidated by their supposed intellectualism when they don't know anything. They are fools. They live in the ultimate insanity believing their wise. And then today it's psychology. People think that psychologists have all the answers. They don't have the answers.

Don't be intimidated by them. Men think they're smart when they're utter fools. By the way, you might be interested to know that the word here they became fools is morino, from which we get moron. Men are morons, but they think they're wise.

What an incredible deception. You know what they are? They're wise all right, but their wisdom is limited to one sphere. They are wise in their own conceits. You know what that means? They are wise only in their own conceited self-styled perception.

That's all. Martin Lloyd-Jones, great saint of God who is now with the Lord, wrote this. The whole drift toward modernism that has blighted the church of God and nearly destroyed its living gospel may be traced to an hour when men began to turn from revelation to philosophy.

End quote. Simply stated, when they stopped listening to God's Word and decided they wanted to listen to men. And so nowadays you can take a good Christian institution and you start feeling intimidated by the academic community, so you start pumping people into it who are educated and trained in the philosophies of the world, and pretty soon they undermine everything it ever stood for. And they intimidate the people who don't have their supposed credentials. Look with me at 1 Corinthians 1.

Now mark this, people, carefully. Philosophy is always set against the gospel. It's always set against the gospel, the wisdom of man versus the wisdom of God. So in 1 Corinthians 1, Paul says, verse 18, well verse 17, he says, Christ didn't send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, not with the wisdom of words.

In other words, not just verbiage. For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish, what? Foolishness.

Now here you see is this insanity again. While men are saying their foolishness is wisdom, their saying true wisdom is foolishness. That's where they are.

That's where humankind exists in that sphere. But unto us who are saved, the preaching of the cross is what? The power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise...so-called wisdom, by the way, this is quoted from Isaiah...and bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Then where is the wise?

Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? It's foolish.

Don't you be intimidated. What did worldly wisdom ever do to transform lives? Has all the philosophy of men throughout its generation saved man from the constant decline?

No, it has no power. Verse 21 says in 1 Corinthians 1, For since in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. What man's wisdom couldn't do, God's foolishness did. Verse 25, Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, the weakness of God is stronger than men. The blunt, clear message delivered by uneducated Christians with transformed lives infinitely exceeds the tangled, confused complications of human philosophy.

That's what it's saying. Fools, fools. The biggest fool of all is the one who has rejected the light, gone into the darkness, and now rationalizes that this darkness is light. And the light is darkness. He thinks he is a super mind and he is a moron.

It's that simple. Now you see the decline and fall of man. Revelation, God gave him the truth. Rejection, he refused to believe the truth. Rationalization, he affirms then that the error he has invented is the truth and he has to do that to convince himself that he's right. But it's insanity because it is an empty deception.

Let's pray. Lord, we feel that we are grappling with some rich, deep, profound, eternal truths and this is not man's wisdom, this is your wisdom. How exciting to be able to get a grasp on why the world is the way it is.

We know sometimes the rationalization is very sophisticated at the university level. Sometimes it's very simplistic as every little individual man and woman who rejects you has to rationalize in their own mind that they're right at their own level. God help us to break through this world of fools. We who once were fools as well, may we be not so quick to condemn knowing that we too would be fools but for your grace as we are to reach out to them to give them the truth. God help us to shine a little light into their darkness so that the glorious light of Jesus Christ may burst upon them. May we not come to the place where we simply isolate ourselves as those who are the know-it-alls but may we in humility know that were it not for your tender grace and mercy we would be as ignorant as the rest. And in deep gratitude and adoration and thanksgiving, may we go to this darkened world as Jesus came to bring the light that the darkness may flee away and out of the complexities of their rationalizations they may enter into the simplicity of Christ and the light of the glorious gospel which is so basic, so easy to understand that even a child can know. For Jesus' sake we pray.

Amen. You're listening to Grace to You with John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, and he calls his current study from Romans chapter 1, Wicked World, Angry God. John, you talked about not being saved apart from faith in Christ. There was a time when that exclusive kind of statement would have been controversial only in non-Christian circles, but I know you'd say the controversy now reaches even further.

Well, yes, now it's controversial among evangelicals. There are evangelicals who will say, you know, the people all around the world who never hear the gospel, they just have to live up to whatever light they have. They just have to believe in the God that they know. They just have to affirm whatever information they have that is accurate or nearly accurate. Nothing could be further from the truth.

That is the death of missions. That is anti-biblical. There is no salvation in any other name than the name of Jesus Christ. The Bible is crystal clear on that. I am the way, the truth, and the life, Jesus said himself. No man comes to the Father but by me. We hear all the time how wide the mercy of God is.

In fact, this is often called the wider mercy view that wants to embrace people who have good intentions and are somewhat moral and religious no matter what they believe or don't believe. That's not what the Bible teaches. There's only one way, exclusively through Christ. That prompted me to write a little book, a little hardback book, a great read, quick read, but very, very important called Why One Way.

Why One Way. The church can no longer be embarrassed by the idea of an exclusive gospel. This is the true gospel.

The path is narrow. Few there be that find it. This little book, Why One Way, is an argument for the distinctiveness of the gospel. It's a handsome hardcover edition, as I said. You need to order a little supply of these to give away, again, the title Why One Way.

That's right. A little supply is a good suggestion. This is a great little book. It's bigger than a tract, but be great to hand to your non-Christian friends. You know, sometimes little gifts like this book can help lead into more opportunities for gospel conversations.

It might be a great gift for a friend or a family member that you've been evangelizing. Order copies of John's book, Why One Way, when you contact us today. To place your order, call 800-55-GRACE or visit our website, gty.org.

Why One Way costs $10 per book and shipping is free. Again, pick up a copy or a few copies when you call us at 800-55-GRACE or go to the website, gty.org. And by the way, while you're at our website, gty.org, be sure you take advantage of the thousands of free study tools you'll find there. They're there to increase your knowledge and application of God's Word, and you can download more than 3,500 sermons free of charge in audio and transcript format. And you can search by topic, specific verse, book of the Bible, and if you're not sure where to jump in, log on to Grace Stream. That's a continual broadcast of John's teaching that goes straight through the New Testament, starting in Matthew, going through Revelation, and then we start it all over. So when you have a few minutes or a few hours, you'll find encouragement from God's Word.

All of that is available for you at gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and our entire staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Be sure to watch Grace to You television on Sunday, check your local listings, and be here tomorrow to learn why the payment for man's sin must be death. It's another half hour of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time, on Grace to You.