No Excuse!

The evolutionist says that man evolved from an animal and over time he developed and progressed until finally he had the impulse intellectually to worship something.

And so he grabbed a stick and he formed out of it some sort of idol and he worshipped it. But man has continued to progress beyond that so much so that man today in his enlightenment has discovered that he is God. He began as an animal, now he lives as God. The record of scripture given to us in Romans chapter 1 says the exact opposite.

Man was created in the image of God and he is digressing to live like an animal. We don't have a shortage of religions in our culture. There are plenty of religions and millions of people devoted to them. But being devoted to a religion is not the same thing as being devoted to Christ. In fact, as Stephen just pointed out, people follow the world's religions to avoid the worship of the one true God, not to pursue the worship of the one true God. Even though God has made some truths about himself self-evident, men willfully find ways to suppress the truth and pursue the worship of self or the worship of man-made gods. In the message you're going to hear today, Stephen Davey lays out some of the common excuses people use to reject God.

Here's today's lesson. American leaders crafted a document that they called the Declaration of Independence. It includes words that are more and more profound to me the further and further our society decays. Those profound words are these, we hold these truths to be self-evident. That is, we believe certain things are truths. That is, we believe certain things are absolutes. We believe in absolute truth, that is, certain truth that is recognizable to everybody. We hold these truths to be self-evident.

In other words, you don't have to have an outside reason or some proof to reveal to you that these things are indeed true because everybody knows these truths intuitively. Well, what did our forefathers consider to be absolutely obvious to all of humanity, not just to Americans, by the way, because truth here is truth anywhere, right? Truth, that is truth, is truth no matter what country you're in or what culture you're in.

Bring it into the sciences. Two plus two is not four for Americans, and five for Chinese, and six for Spaniards. Indians don't just believe the world is round, but for Frenchmen it is flat. No, truth is truth anywhere and everywhere you go. Now, the shape of the earth and the ability to add numbers together isn't necessarily self-evident truth. You had to be taught that.

You had to learn that. But what are truths that are self-evident, that are obvious to everyone, they reside within as it were, they go on to say, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. So in one sentence you have belief in absolute truth, you have the dignity of humanity, and you have belief in a creator. In fact, their next phrase says something like that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. And everybody says, oh, there's the word rights.

And we run there and we dissect and parse and interpret and do all sorts of things with that, just skipping over the preceding words, endowed by their creator. By the way, that's one of the reasons you can't teach American history and expound the virtues of our heritage and at the same time teach evolution. Because you can't have the same kid quoting that we have been endowed by our creator and at the same time we evolved from animals. Some fifth grader is going to catch on and say, hey, wait a second, which is it?

Which one's right? When you have a self-evident creator and self-evident value to human life and self-evident absolute truths, then you also would have self-evident morality, the ability to discern between that which is right and that which is wrong and how human beings are to treat one another. And it's interesting that the framers of our country believed that it was important that everyone had an understanding based on morals and even true religion. Listen to what President John Adams wrote in 1798. We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. You compare that with the thinking of our day that you cannot legislate morality. In fact, you need to take religion and morals outside of any governmental institution. The framers of our nation, however, believed that morality was not only something that we were to legislate as a country, but something we were to personally hold ourselves accountable to and personally legislate in our own lives based on absolute truth that they believed once you heard it, you would say, I knew that all along. James Madison, the architect of the U.S. Constitution, wrote along that line, we have staked the whole future of American civilization upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God. Can you imagine a political leader, especially in our culture, saying, look, what we need to do is go back and obey the Ten Commandments of God?

There would be one word for that kind of politician in our generation, unemployed. We hold these truths to be self-evident. There is a creator, there is within his creation dignity, and that dignity demands integrity.

And they were not the first ones to come up with it. If you go back hundreds of years earlier and you look at a letter written by a man named Paul to a believing group of people in Rome, he says virtually the same thing, and you discover his argument includes the idea of self-evident, self-evidencing truth, truth that you don't have to get out of school, truth that you know intuitively to be truth. Look at Romans 1. For the wrath of God, verse 18, is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth and unrighteousness because that which is known about God is evident within them.

This is self-evidencing truth. And then God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes like his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood through what has been made. Paul says in effect, here is the evidence. Number one, the truth of conscience.

We have talked about this. We call this the inner light or the inner evidence. You might want to turn to a passage of scripture back just a few pages to the last part of chapter 28 of Acts, and you'll discover there a wonderful illustration of self-evidencing justice and a self-evidencing truth of morality in a group of people who were unbelievers who didn't even have the gospel. Paul is shipwrecked. Perhaps you remember the story with other prisoners.

He's on his way to Rome. And they swim to shore and they land on this island, this island called Malta, verse one. Verse two, the natives, these primitive people, showed us extraordinary kindness for because of the rain that had set in and because of the cold, they kindled a fire and received us all.

But when Dr. Luke writes, Paul had gathered a bundle of sticks and laid them on the fire, a venomous snake, a viper came out because of the heat and fastened itself on his hand, just bit and hung on. When the natives saw the creature hanging from his hand, they began saying to one another, undoubtedly, this man is a murderer. And though he has been saved from the sea, justice has not allowed him to live.

See, here are superstitious unbelievers without any record of scripture, without any record of the Ten Commandments in written form, revealing their intuitive belief that murder is wrong and murderers ought to pay and this guy is going to get what he deserves. He might have escaped the sea. Justice was after him and he got away from that. Ah, but the serpent will get him yet.

Watch him pay. Evidence, this inner sense of justice, of right or wrong. It's self-evident truth. Just to finish the story a little bit, it's so interesting. Verse 5, however, Paul shook the creature off into the fire and suffered no harm, but they were expecting that he was about to swell up or suddenly fall down dead. But after they had waited a long time and had seen nothing unusual happen to him, that is, they're just standing there watching him, waiting for him to keel over, they changed their minds and began to say he was a god.

You think, poor Paul, first he's a condemned murderer, now he's a god. They don't know whether it's handcuffs or red carpet. What I find interesting for our study, though, is that these people knew right from wrong. In fact, they knew that wrongdoers should be what? Should be punished. They and everybody else on planet Earth has this self-evident truth that lying is wrong and murder is wrong and cheating is wrong and you ought to pay.

In fact, watch the most liberal thinker in our culture who denies the existence of absolute moral truth go into action when he is deceived by a financial advisor. When somebody hits his car in the parking lot and then gets away with it, it's their fault. When the neighbor's dog roots through his flower bed, then, oh, I can't believe you did that. I can't believe I was treated that way. I deserve respect. They shouldn't get away with that.

Why not? Because I made it wrong. This intuitive sense of justice that I was cheated and being cheated is wrong and the cheater ought to be punished. They prove Romans 2.15 where it says the unbeliever shows the work of the law written in their hearts. So conscience, we've already said, is that inner evidence or light. There's an outer evidence, an outer light. The second evidence of God's existence is nature or creation. The birds, the trees, the seasons, the orbits of planets, the sun and its light, the complexity of creation and the immensity of creation. It drives a person to say there must be behind this incredible design a designer. What's really fascinating, ladies and gentlemen, is that secular scientists and microbiologists and astrophysicists in the last five to ten years are beginning to say the word design. Now they don't want to come full circle, but they're starting to use that.

In fact, I pulled together several quotes that are recent. One secular, unbelieving scientist said, imagine a machine with thousands of dials representing everything that gives life or allows life to be sustained on this planet. Everything from the gravitational constant, the charge of the electron, the mass of the proton, and so on and so on. Each dial has many possible settings and even the slightest change would make a universe where life was impossible, yet each dial is set to the exact value needed to sustain life. Another one writes, we have no idea why the strengths of the forces are fine-tuned to support life. Another writes, I'm not a religious person, but I could say this universe seems designed very well for the existence of life. Maybe it's simply because, as Freeman Dyson, who is this year's Templeton Award winner, said, maybe it's because, quote, the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.

Now, wait a second. In a way, it did. Because it had all been created to use his vernacular, it knew.

Obviously, the universe doesn't have consciousness. But it was all created. It was all prepared.

It was all mature. God created the tree, full-grown, bearing seed, bearing fruit, ready to eat. The light of the sun already reaching Earth. The light of the stars already reaching Earth. All of it mature, not a process, but the word of a person, the Son of God. And it was ready. And God did it all in six days.

It's amazing. By the way, the Hebrew word day, when accompanied by a numerical adjective, is never figurative, but literal. The word week is often used figuratively, but not day. Never in Old Testament Hebrew are the terms evening and morning used figuratively, but literally. In fact, Exodus 20 uses that as the illustration when he says, man is to labor six days and rest on the seventh because in six days the Lord created the heavens, Earth, and sea. So unless days of equal length are in the mind of the writer, the illustration in command will be absolutely meaningless. Does this mean we're to work six billion days and then rest? No, no, no.

Fortunately, just six 24-hour cycles. The record of Scripture tells us that God created it all. Exodus 20 11. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the Earth, the sea, and all that is in them, David wrote, by the word of the Lord the heavens were made. He spoke and it was done. The evidence, even an unbelieving astrophysicist said recently, the universe just seems tailor made to support life.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, it seems tailor made because it is tailor made. We hold these truths to be self-evident, Paul said. There is a creator. But what does man naturally do with his self-evidencing truth? We looked briefly at Romans 1 18, the part of suppressing the truth.

They hold it down. They silence it so they can keep their sin. Look at verse 21. They're not progressing in understanding, Paul says, their hearts are darkened by their assault against the truth. So man is not becoming more enlightened. He's becoming more and more darkened in his speculations against what is self-evident truth of a creator. The evolutionist says that man evolved from an animal and over time he developed and progressed until finally he had the impulse intellectually to worship something. And so he grabbed a stick and he formed out of it some sort of idol and he worshiped it. But man has continued to progress beyond that so much so that man today in his enlightenment has discovered that he is God. He began as an animal. Now he lives as God. The record of scripture given to us in Romans chapter one says the exact opposite is occurring. Man was created in the image of God and he is digressing to live like an animal, but he doesn't want to admit it. And Romans 1, as we'll get into it, the latter part of the chapter will simply catalog for us the results of men and societies that suppress the truth, that ignore the creator, that silence their conscience. These will be the results. You know, two of the most profound truths that we wish kids could learn in school and every mom and dad knew as well, two very profound truths that become more and more profound in our culture than ever before.

They are these. Truth number one, there is a God. Number two, I am not him. That's profound. There is a God and I am not him.

Someone in our church family sent me this deposited it in my email box and a legend, of course, an apocryphal story but interesting. Legend has it that one day a group of academians got together and decided that man had progressed such a long way they no longer needed their primitive God. So they picked one to go and tell him that they were done with him. This particular scientist walked up to God and said, we've decided that we no longer need you. We're to the point now that we can even clone people and do so many other miraculous marvels.

Why don't you just leave? God listened very patiently and kindly to the man and after he was done talking, God said, How about this? Let's say we have a man making contest to which the scientists replied. Great. Sure. But God added, Now we're gonna do it just like I did it back in the old days with Adam. The scientists said, Yeah, no problem.

That'll be fine with me. And he bent down and grabbed a handful of dirt. And God looked at him and said, No, no, no, you go get your own dirt.

What does enlightened man do with obvious self evident truth? Paul tells us he holds it down. He keeps it under wraps.

He puts it behind lock and key. He doesn't want anybody to hear about it. Keep it out of books. Keep it out of our public arena.

Silence it. By imprisoning the truth, he reveals a couple of things. Number one, he reveals his hatred for God's sovereignty, his natural hatred for God's sovereignty. Why can't man just look around at creation and say, Yeah, there's a designer out there because that would make him accountable. That would mean somebody's bigger than he is.

Somebody he might have to answer to. And man does not want any limitations. Go all the way back to the garden. Adam and Eve. They were told they could eat of every tree in the garden.

Who knows how many there were. Look around you, Adam. Look around you, Eve.

I've created these wonderful trees are already bearing fruit and you can eat from any of them. But this one tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you can't eat from this tree. And did that ever bother them?

God has put a limitation on them, and he is imposed upon them accountability. And he says, If you do, you will die. So what do they begin focusing on? All the trees they could eat from?

No, this one tree. And why not? Like a little child, honey, you know, it's kind of raining outside. So you play in your room. You got all those toys up there in your room and you just go out of. But you can't go outside. What does she say? My child yours do, but I want to go outside. Of course. What do you mean? This is the one thing I can't do.

So this is the one thing now that I must do. So Adam and he had had, I believe many conversations about this one tree. I believe the words of James Montgomery boys who said this tree became an offense to them. It stood for a limitation on their personal desire and represented something they were not allowed to do. So here they are with a million things to do, 1000 things to eat.

And this one thing they could not do. And the snake slithered in, capitalized on conversations I have no doubt he overheard and said, Listen, let God know he's met his match. Go ahead and eat. He's intimidated.

He's insecure. Eat it and you will be like him. No limitations, no chains.

You're free. They ate it and began to die. Today, man hates God's rule because he wants to be unaccountable and unlimited and unfettered in his sin. He wants a lesser, more submissive God until he creates one that he can manage. And he does the bidding and God does the obeying. Secondly, there is within man's heart a natural rebellion against God's holiness. Not only does he hate God's sovereignty, but his holiness. Holiness is a word that simply means set apartness, uniqueness. You have a book in your lap that says Holy Bible. It means that it is set apart.

It is unique. Now when we say that God is holy, we are in effect saying we are what? Unholy.

If God is holy and set apart, then we are unholy and sinful and nothing, nothing offends a sinful man any more than saying to him, You're sinful. When Habakkuk, the sinner, saw God revealed, saw his glory and heard his voice, he said, I heard and my heart pounded. My lips quivered at the sound. Decay crept into my bones and my legs trembled. Habakkuk 3.16.

Our response to this sovereign, set apart, holy God is awe and worship and deference and respect. You see, after Adam and Eve sinned by disobeying God, what did they do? They hid themselves.

Why? They didn't want a relationship. They were shamed and they were guilty, and so they didn't run to God. They ran from God. And you say, Oh, but mankind ever since then has been so incurably religious. Look around you and see the thousands of shrines and the millions of gods and all of the ritual and the ceremony and the confessional and the Mecca and all of those myriads of things.

Ladies and gentlemen, the religions of the world that are false religions are not attempts to pursue a holy God. They are attempts to get around God. They are created by men who are not running to God. They are created by men who are running from God. They must have something to save their conscience. So they come up with some form of religion which ignores a holy, sovereign God.

Because man rejects the evidence of creation and rejects and silences the voice of conscience, Paul goes on to say in verse 20, For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, like his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, that is perceived like sovereignty, like holiness, being understood through what has been made. Here is the verdict. They are without excuse. They are guilty.

You could literally translate this. They are without legal defense. The millions in Africa who have never heard are guilty and without excuse. The millions in India who have never heard are guilty and without excuse. Those in our country who have never heard the true gospel of faith in Christ alone are still without excuse.

How? Paul has explained self-evident truth that is denied the world over. So mankind worships sticks because he chooses that instead. He worships stumps and trees.

He worships religion itself, and he would embrace religion, then embrace the Creator. And even the Pharisees who were incurably religious, they had their system down. God came in the form of a man, walked among them, and they said, Please, you're messing it all up.

Leave. The Bible makes it clear, listen carefully, that God will judge people by what they did with what they knew. They had creation. They had conscience. F. F. Bruce says it this way, God will judge non-Christians by the light that was available, not by the light that was unavailable. And what was available according to the Bible of all men, the inner light of conscience that they suppressed and silenced and the outer light of creation, which should have brought all, but instead caused them, as we will see later, to worship creation rather than the Creator.

John gave his revelation from God, recorded in Revelation chapter 21. He said, I saw a new heaven and a new what? A new earth, a new garden, a new paradise created by the word of God. So if you have trouble with him creating this one, what about the next one?

And what about that next one? Oh, in that city, in that new earth, there will be no more tears, no more suffering, no more crying, no more morning, no more pain. For those who've received the lamb today will one day inhabit the new garden, whereby redemption's purpose is we will be confirmed in holiness, unable to sin, and we will dwell forever in that new earth, in that new heaven. No more sun.

Why? Because we will be in the presence of that glorious, wonderful, majestic, sovereign, holy, redeeming, forgiving lamb forever and ever. What a great promise and comfort that is for those of us who are Christians.

If you're anything like me, you like to make excuses for your behavior. And today's lesson is a practical reminder that when it comes to our sin, there are no excuses before God. That's actually the name of today's lesson, No Excuse, and it's part of our current series called The Banquet Table of Consequences.

This is Wisdom for the Heart with Stephen Davey. If you'd like information about how you can get a copy of today's lesson for yourself, call us at 866-48-BIBLE. When you call, let us know if you're on our mailing list. If you're not, we want to add you and send you a new resource we have called Heart to Heart magazine. That number once again is 866-48-BIBLE. Call today and be sure and join us again tomorrow right here on Wisdom for the Heart.