Effects of Suppressed Truth – Idolatry Romans 1: 21-23
The root problem with the human race has to do with what we make of the glory of God. “Even though they knew God, they did not honor him [literally: glorify him] as God.” That is the fundamental problem with the human race. We do not acknowledge, value, treasure, savor, honor, or make much of the greatest value in the universe: the glory of God. That is our wickedness and our disease and our great mutiny against God. When Paul reaches to describe the depths of man’s sinful condition under the wrath of God, he does not first deal with the sexual sins of verses 24–27 or the list of 21 sins in verses 29–31. He deals first with the fundamental problem: What do we make of the glory of God? Do we magnify it by treasuring it above all things? Or do we belittle it by preferring other things and exchanging it for created things? (Piper)
The knowledge of God is unacceptable to man and as a result man does his best to blot it out or at least camouflage it in such a way that it’s threatening character can be concealed or dulled. But the truth about God, although suppressed is not obliterated of destroyed. It remains intact though deeply submerged in the unconscious. (Sproul)
There are two exchanges that occur when people suppress the truth of the knowledge of God: 1) An exchange in who we worship- Idolatry (Rom 1: 21-13), and 2) an exchange in how we walk –Immorality (Rom 1: 24-27). The dark exchange is the exchange of the glory of God for the glory of images of man and animals. Call it idolatry. The other dark exchange is sexual relations with the opposite sex for sexual relations with the same sex. We call that homosexuality. (Piper) There is a rejection and replacement of both the Sovereign God and the Standard of God. Those who suppress the truth reject God as the Sovereign ruler and master of their life. They reject God as God. They replace God with one of their own fabrication. They also reject God’s standard in his Word as the standard which regulates all God’s creatures and the standard by which they choose to live. They reject God’s standard as the standard that guides and directs their life. They replace God’s standard with one they formulate. The text shows that turning away from God’s truth launches the human race upon a downward path, leading inevitably to great moral depravity. (Boice) The process which is stated in this verse is, (1)That people had the knowledge of God. (2) that they refused to honor him when they knew him, and were opposed to his character and government. (3) that they were ungrateful. (4) that they then began to doubt, to reason, to speculate, and wandered far into darkness. (Barnes)
The Exchange effects who we worship- Idolatry vs 21 they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him v 23 exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
People behold and know the glory of God offered them for their joy and their trust, and they exchange it for images. This response is the same suppressing and the same failure to glorify and thank God (Piper)
They ascribed a deity to the most contemptible creatures, and by them represented God. It was the greatest honor God did to man that he made man in the image of God; but it is the greatest dishonor man has done to God that he has made God in the image of man.(Henry) The essence of idolatry is that it substitutes the majesty of God for the corruption of the world. The glory of God is traded in for the glory of the created thing. (Sproul).
Three consequences of suppressing the true knowledge of God:.
Detachment but they became futile in their thinking. Gk dialogismois – It means speculations, thinking, rationalization doubtful reasoning, practical inferences, meaningless musings, meaningless thoughts, useless human dialogue. It is imaginations, human dialoguing, human debate, human discussion, human information, empty words. (Mac Arthur) When truth is forsaken, errors multiply in infinitum —infinitely. (Henry) Futile here means empty, vain, useless. God gave human beings minds with the capacity to reason and imagine and speculate and think and ponder and meditate. Why? So that we might use them to know God and to think about him and speak of him and praise him and devise things in the world which would honor him. (Dan 4 30-34) Futility means vain, empty, useless and that is what the mind becomes when it is no longer used to know God and love God and treasure and honor God. It doesn’t matter if you are the most brilliant scientist or artist or engineer. Everything you do with your mind, minus God, is futile and empty and vain. (Piper) We get the word dialogue from this word. Having rejected the truth about God that God has revealed . . . human beings have been left to their own mental devices, which are inadequate for working out or discovering reality. So not having God and the truth that he offers man can only use their minds to rearrange error. (Boice) Once man falls from his true relation with God, he is no longer capable of truly rational thought about him (CK Barrett). They were unwilling to honor God, and being unwilling to honor him, they commenced those speculations which resulted in all their vain and foolish opinions about idols, and the various rites of idolatrous worship. (Barnes) They had various opinions and vain conceptions of the Godhead. Some of them denied that there was a God, others doubted whether there was a God or no; some affirmed there was but one God, others owned a plurality, yea, a multiplicity of gods. Some acknowledge God's being, but denied his providence; others owned his providence, but confined it, in its exercise to secondary causes. Thus vain in their imaginations, thus absorbed in their notions, and thus sottish in their reasonings (Burkitt) The thoughts of the heathen concerning God were perverted and corrupt thoughts. The whole clause therefore means, that the heathen, in refusing to recognize the true God, entertained foolish and wicked thoughts of the Divine Being; that is, they sank into the folly and sin of idolatry. (Hodge).
Darkness their foolish hearts were darkened. Their hearts become more obscured from the truth. The heart stands for the whole of the inner life. It is the inner core of our being. "the heart is the center of the inner life, from it, the person’s direction is determined, his whole course is shaped, his basic commitments formed." (Leon Morris) In the very core of their being they become more impervious to truth. Truth is often pictured in the Scriptures as light. He says their hearts become darkened. That is, it gets harder for their dark hearts to accept truth when they do run into it. By suppressing the truth, their heart becomes more obstinate against the truth.(Duncan). Their heart is darkened, because the only light in the universe that can fill the heart with light is the glory of God. There is no light-producing element in the heart. Matt 6:22 All light comes from outside; namely, from the glory of God. Jesus is the spiritual light of the world (John 8:12) The only light in the universe that can bring light to the heart is the glory of God. If we exchange it for other things, we will live in darkness, no matter how brilliant we are or how many fires we may build or candles we may light. (Piper) Darkness refers to intellectual ignorance, the absence of truth and the absence of righteousness, moral perversion. 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. (Mac Arthur) Darkened means to be rendered obscure, so that they did not perceive and comprehend the truth (Barnes) Many people whose hearts are darkened will claim that they are seeking to be enlighten. They will go to great lengths to be enlightened apart from a relationship with God. But, since God is the sole source of light (John 1: , any ideas of enlightenment apart from him that we may think we have are illusions (Boice).
Deception Claiming to be wise, they became fools. (Gen 3:1-23) To the natural man, apart from grace and darkened in heart, nothing seems more obvious than that it is more wise to design your own god than to take what you are given. What could be more obviously wise, he says, than to make your own god? The advantages abound: It shows that you are resourceful and that you are creative and intelligent. All of that clearly makes your ego feel good. But best of all, making your own god makes you independent and keeps you in control. You pull the strings. In other words, making your own god lets you be god. And what could be wiser than the choice to be god? It is foolish to create your own god or be your own god. (Piper). When we refuse to worship the one true God, it is not that we worship anything; it is that we will worship anything. If you refuse the one true God, who has revealed Himself in you, and around you, you will worship anything. Idolatry is the central religious problem. Not theoretical atheism, not agnosticism, but idolatry. God has made us to be religious people. If we won't worship Him, we’ll find something else to worship. There is a God we want and there is a God who is, and the two are not the same. And if we don’t want the God who is, we will invent the god we want, and we will worship him (Duncan)
Two reasons the exchange is foolish 1) The glory of God is of infinite value and what you get in the exchange is infinitesimally small by comparison. v, 23 Man himself is already an image of God and not God. (Gen 1:27) The point of an image is to image. Images are erected to display the original — the person they are images of. They point to some famous person so that we will think of that person and honor that person. Images glorify the original. God made humans in his image so that we would be images of God. God has put seven billion statues of God in the world. He has filled the world with images of himself in every country, every tribe, every ethnicity, every language. So that nobody would miss the point of creation. Nobody — unless they were stone blind — could miss the point of humanity, namely, God. God is the point of the world. Seeing God, knowing God, admiring God — that is the point of the world. But that is not what the exchange of God gets. No, not even that. Rather it is for an image of man. No, not even that. It is for “for images resembling mortal man” who is himself an image. When you make this exchange — even for the best thing you can think of; namely, man — yourself (not to mention animals!), you are bartering God for the image of an image of an image. You sell the original masterpiece for a copy of a copy of a copy. The glory of God is everything, and to exchange him for anything is to lose the greatest treasure in the world for an image of an image of an image. That is futile and dark and foolish
2) Observe that the glory of God is incorruptible and man is corruptible.
Corruptible means perishable. God lasts forever. (Is 40:7–8). If you value other things more than God, if your life is really driven by another value, then you exchange the imperishable for the perishable. You trade the diamond for a peach forgotten at the back of the refrigerator. You trade the ruby for a banana sitting in the sun. You trade a bar of gold for a bolt rusting in the rain. (Piper)
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. (Mac Arthur) (2 Kings 17:14-18)
So, man descends from knowing God, rejecting God, failing to glorify and thank God. He then is left with his own human reasoning, and it plunges him into utter blackness, and he is totally unable to discern what is right, what is wrong, what is true, what is a lie. He’s lost. First God is revealed, and he knows God through the created world. But he rejects that, and into the emptiness that he’s left with rushes the blackness of intellectual ignorance and moral perversion. And in the midst of his blackness, he cannot deal with the fact that he is wrong, so he rationalizes that he is right. But still in his heart there is an empty feeling because something in him demands a god, so he makes up one. All worship apart from the Worship of the God of the Bible is satanic in its origin. All other gods are demonic false gods. (John 17:3; Deut. 32:17; 1 Cor. 10:20) Idolatry has its source in Satan: This is the great satanic deception. To say they exist is rhetorical –they exist because they are worshipped and named, but they do not truly exist (Chester, Delighting in the Trinity) 1 Kings 8:60, Ps 64:4-5, 1 Sam 5:1-5