Last Thursday, we looked at the second part of Romans 1, which paints a bleak picture of mankind without God. His wrath is coming (Rom 1:18) and will not be avoided. “God’s angry displeasure erupts as acts of human mistrust and wrongdoing and lying accumulate, as people try to put a shroud over truth.”
Truth is being suppressed in so many different ways. The propaganda of the world tells us that this life is all there is; that we’re all good really; that we’re all equal and that money is all we need. These lies can so easily influence us.
We looked at the difficult questions of our actions and the consequences of these actions and how without God there is no steady improvement (as evolution declares) but a downward path. Sinful desires, sexual impurity, shameful lusts and depraved minds are all the consequences of abandoning right thinking and an acknowledgment of God. Man is without excuse, however, for God has revealed Himself; He has shown us enough to give us the opportunity to find Him (see Ps 19:1-2, Ps 111:6-7)
We all have a need for righteousness that we cannot meet in ourselves. The rest of Romans goes on to point us to a righteousness through Christ by faith. If we don’t really understand the severity of our position, however, there will always be a temptation to think we don’t really need a Saviour. We need to see how bad things are before we can appreciate the wonders God has done in rescuing us from this ‘body of death’.