Judgment on a Reprobate Society
Romans 1:18-32
As you know, I have been concerned over the last couple of weeks - in fact, over the last month or so, of thinking in my own mind and in my own heart about some of the things that are happening in our world and our society and how it affects the church. Really the world has been pretty subtle and little by little has infiltrated the church of Jesus Christ. And from time to time I hear about things in Grace Church that just shatter me. And maybe you do, too and maybe from time to time you've even been a part of such things, I don't know. I trust not and I pray not.
But all of this has caused me to realize that we can't be smug and we can't just go on playing church, we can't have our little parlor games and our little conversations and our little programs without really realizing that this is a war. And if we're going to make any kind of a dent in our society, number one, we're going to have to keep our own ranks pure and number two, we're going to have to get a little bit confrontive about this whole thing. We're going to have to come out from our closet and we're going to have to begin to say things that are true and need to be said.
I was with a young man today by the name of Dennis Agajanian and some of you may know him, he plays the guitar, but he also likes to preach Christ and he likes to preach Christ outdoors wherever he can. So he finds all the schedules for all of the weird groups that are meeting and he goes there with a bullhorn and he preaches Jesus Christ. Recently he went to the gay fair in Hollywood and he went over to the kissing booth at the gay fair and he began to preach Jesus Christ and somebody hit him in the side of the head with a 2x4. But he was confrontive; I thank God for him, for that kind of confrontiveness. I think these two things we need to understand, people, that we're living in a world that is going to corrupt us unless we, number one, keep our own lives pure and, number two, get a little bit bold about our own testimony.
That's what I want to talk about. We live in a decadent society and I don't think we all understand it. I think that we are insulated. You know, you're born into a Christian family in many cases. You know, you have a Christian dentist and a Christian doctor and a Christian insurance man and you buy a Christian car from a Christian car dealer - a Christian car is one with a sticker on it.
(Laughter)
And you make sure you go to church and you go to Bible study and you really don't know what's going on out there, and little by little you begin to expose yourself to the world, and maybe you get a little taste of it, and maybe you get more than you ought to, and you fall into sin, and maybe you don't really understand the full impact of what the system really is and I'd like to just maybe talk about that tonight. When I say the world is decadent, Webster says "decadent" means marked by decay and decline. Believe me, the history of man is not evolution, its devolution. It's not up, it's down.
Decadence is a good word to describe human history. Human history is a decline. The society of man has been on the decline ever since the fall of Adam. Man has never ascended; he has descended progressively from the fall. Man, you see, started life in the image of God and when he sinned and that image was marred, the process of decline began, and man sinks lower and lower and lower and lower until finally he will sink into the debauchery that is described in the Book of Revelation as the time of the tribulation, and at the end of that debauchery Christ Himself will come and put an end to all of it.
The world system is vile, it is degraded, it is debauched, and it is marked by decline over a period of thousands of years further and further and further away from God's standard. Now one verse sums this up and one passage is going to be our theme for tonight. Turn in your Bible to Romans Chapter 1 and I want you to look at verse 28 just as a key and then we'll back up and look at this entire passage from 18 to 32.
Romans Chapter 1 verse 28. And here basically is a comment on the problem of human history. It says in Romans 1:28, "And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind to do those things, which are obscenities." Right? They did not like to retain God in their knowledge; God gave them over to a reprobate mind to do those things, which are obscene.
Now you'll notice that it says there that man has been given over to a reprobate mind. Now what that means is a depraved mind, depraved reasoning, a worthless mind, unable and unwilling to think right. Man cannot think right. He cannot reason properly. He will never reason himself to the truth. He will never reason himself to God. He will never reason himself to righteousness because his reason is warped, his mind is reprobate, and what that means is simply depraved, declining, unable and unwilling to think right thoughts.
And there's a play on words here. The Greek goes something like this: as they found God worthless, God gave them over to a worthless mind. Now this is a mind which cannot form right judgments. This is addocemas. Unapproved, useless, worthless, rejected by God. The human mind is rejected because the human mind has no capacity to come up with righteousness. You know its only thanks to God that we have any law at all left in our world because if we left it up purely to the judgment of men apart from some code of law based on the word of God, we'd never have anything remotely related to justice, because man's mind is so depraved.
And what a reprobate mind refers to is people who's moral sense is so perverted and who's minds are so clouded with their own evil speculations that they do obscenities, and an obscenity is something which does not fit into God's moral order, something that is not seemly. It simply means it doesn't fit into God's moral order.
Now you don't have to be a genius, you don't even have to know very much information to know that the world is full of obscenities. I received some information - I'm a chaplain for Chief Davis' office in the police department, protestant chaplain, so I have opportunity to talk to some of the people in law enforcement and get some information and I said give me some illustrations of obscenities that are going on in our world today and they gave me some, none of which I could use because I wouldn't read them in public.
Can you imagine the most bizarre kind of mutilations, the most bizarre kinds of crimes, the most bizarre kinds of activities, and you have just barely begun to scratch the surface of the obscenities that occur regularly in our society. Let me give you some illustrations. There are more murders with no apparent motive than ever before. Murders that are an afterthought. Somebody goes to commit a crime and just as an afterthought they kill everybody who happened to be around the situation.
The other night in our neighborhood somebody came into a store two blocks from us and wanted to rob the store but that wasn't enough, they had to take weapons and smash in the heads of everybody in the store. There are more gang murders of rival members and bystanders who are shot simply while they're sitting in their house watching television because they get caught in the crossfire. A young man came into that thing that happened near our house and took out a gun and killed one of those robbers and the police will not say who he is and they will give no information to anybody who he is because they feel a gang will retaliate and kill him.
More drug and prostitution-related murders; pimps killing prostitutes for non-performance. Clients killing prostitutes for sexual aberrations, drug dealers killing each other during rip-offs at the time of transaction. There are more drug-related murders; specifically several recent murders have been committed by suspects under the influence of angel dust, which is an animal tranquilizer. In confessions murderers say this: "I feel I was under the power of another force, I really didn't want to do it."
That's interesting, isn't it? There are more multiple murders in a shorter period of time than ever before. A downtown slasher some time ago killed 20 to 25 victims. The West Side Rapist, 13 victims, and you remember most of them were in their 70s and they were raped and then murdered. And The Hillside Strangler has now gotten 10 girls in five weeks. And six or seven of those by the West Side Rapist were dismembered.
There are more murders by homosexuals and of homosexuals than ever before. On January 16, 1977 Leslie Ramirez, a 14-year-old girl, was shot in the head while watching television in her home. She was the victim of gang warfare, she had nothing to do with either gang; she was just sitting there.
Recently a gruesome murder with multiple stabbings occurred while the slayer was under the influence of PCP. Gang murders have become voluminous problems. So far this year there have been 515 murders in the city; that's much faster than one a day, as opposed to 467 last year; at this time an increase of 10.27%. So far 2,170 women have been raped, that is they reported a rape. That's 11.8 percent over last year. Robberies are also on the increase. 13,852 that they know about compared to 12,000-some-odd last year, an increase of nearly 7 percent.
And so crime as far as we know is up and yet our police force is one of the most conservative, the most effective, the best in the nation. Now we hear a lot today about let's eliminate victimless crime prosecution. If there's no victim then we don't want to prosecute. If they want to have drugs, that's fine; if they want to do their thing in prostitution, if they want to be homosexuals, leave them alone, it's a victimless crime. Well, there's no such thing as a victimless crime, that's a fabrication by those who would legalize prostitution, gambling, pornography and drugs. There's no such thing as a victimless crime.
Just to give you an illustration, 50 % of all burglaries are committed by people who are on a drug habit and have to do that to feed their habit. So drugs is not victimless. Homosexuality is not victimless, either, as made obvious by the masochism, sadism, the chickhawk murders where homosexuals are killing little children, etc., etc. These are not victimless crimes. The district attorney in 1975 in San Francisco said he would not deal with prostitution unless violence was involved. Crime immediately went up 34 percent in the first three months. All crime. Because there's no such thing as an isolated crime. And later when the district attorney and the chief of police and the community moved against this decision and reversed it, crime immediately fell by 27 percent.
There's no such thing as a victimless crime and when society says they just want to tolerate all these things you see that the reason is they don't have any standard at all, so they're just bowing to majority rule and they don't know why not so they don't know why they should prevent it. I'll never forget listening to George Putnam on KIED one day and he was interviewing a state senator from California and the state senator said, "I'm against abortion" and he went into this big long tirade against abortion and I said boy that sounds like a good thing, that's terrific. And then finally George Putnam said to him, "Why are you against abortion?" And he said, "Because I took a sample, a straw vote, of my district and they're against it by majority, so if they're against it I want to be the people's perspective in the State Senate. So I'm against it." Great moral conviction.
The majority of people are against it, he's against it. Society dictates law where there is no standard. I was informed this morning that the West Coast capital for cocaine is Woodland Hills. Because cocaine is very expensive and it's mostly passed among the affluent and it soon is going to be a drug decriminalized. You know the city in the United States that has the highest crime rate per capita of any city in America? Las Vegas. You legalize gambling and you'll have the flood of every other conceivable vice there is because criminals can't stop with one crime, see? That's a mentality; it has the highest per capita bankruptcy in the nation, the highest per capita crime rate in the nation.
In Los Angeles in 1969 there were 18 places where you could get pornographic material. In 1976 there are 143; 800 percent increase. Dr. Jerome Latner, head of the State Department of Health recommended serious consideration to legalizing heroin in California. He might want to know that more than 1,000 babies are born as heroin addicts in New York alone because their mothers are addicted - they enter the world as heroin addicts. A United Nations narcotics agency said at November 1st in Geneva, Switzerland the United Fund for Drug Abuse Control said that in the United States an estimated 620,000 people are addicted to opiates such as heroin. France has 100,000 addicts; five times what they had in 1970. West Germany has 40,000 addicts as far as they know. The Netherlands 15,000 addicts. In 1976 there were 2,000 O.D. deaths, overdose.
I'll tell you another interesting thing, just to show you trends. In the past, the city attorney of Los Angeles was a God-fearing man which some of you know and love who has been a part of our church, Roger Arenburg. And to give you a difference in what's happening in our view of these kinds of things, in 1972 there were 820 obscenity cases filed by the city attorney. In 1972, 820 filed. In 1976, 40. They don't want to prosecute obscenity or drugs or homosexuality or prostitution. The decline is all around us. And when there are no absolutes, you see, then there is no way to defend these things. When you give up God and you give up the Bible, you've got no basis and so you decide everything on the majority vote and if the majority of the people want to have prostitution, homosexuality or the majority of the people can't think of a good reason why the people who want to do it should be restricted from doing it then you're going to get it by votes because there's no standards.
Where there are no absolutes, society itself becomes the absolute. And you know what happens ultimately? You get anarchy. Pretty soon in order to survive you have to be a criminal and then when everybody gets to be a criminal you've got anarchy and then to stop anarchy you get a police state. Now you say how can all of this happen? Well, let's go back to Romans Chapter 1. How can we get in such a mess?
Well, the answer is developed for us in the first chapter of Romans. And Paul opens in verse 18 with the devastating statement. Romans 1:18 says, "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who hold or literally who are guilty of suppressing the truth in unrighteousness." Now let me introduce you to several words that I want you to key on as we go through this text. The first word is "wrath." The first word is wrath. The wrath of God. Now I don't know how that hits you, but that's a fearful word. There aren't too many people who want to talk about that much more, but that's really something we ought to talk a lot more about.
When I was involved in this recent debate, I finally got to the place where I decided that I was just going to say what I thought and, I said, "You may try to tell me that this is an intellectual thing, that God blesses homosexuals and all this stuff is hearts and flowers and wonderful relationships and filial friendships, and its all very beautiful and its all very David and Jonathan and so forth and so on, but the fact of the matter is you're nothing but evil, vile, Godless, apostate perverts."
(Laughter)
You know, you can only take so much and then you get to the place where you don't need to discuss it, you just need to speak judgment. Wrath. The wrath of God is revealed. Now this is a fearful theme and I want you to understand that the wrath of God is something you need to see, so I want to take a minute to develop what it is. We see the wrath of God begin to unfold in the Old Testament. In Numbers Chapter 16, for example, it tells us of a rebellion of Korah, Dathan and Abiram who rebelled against God and at the end of this rebellion Moses asked Aaron to make a special atonement for the sins of the people, and he said this, "Because there is wrath gone out from the Lord." Numbers 16:43. There is wrath gone out from the Lord.
And you remember what happened; the ground opened up and swallowed them up. When the children of Israel were led away in the Baal worship, Numbers 25:3 says the wrath of the Lord was kindled against them. In Jeremiah Chapter 50 in verse 13 Jeremiah said that the Babylonians had mistreated Israel, and, quote, "Because of the wrath of God that place will not be inhabited."
The Old Testament prophets spoke continuously about this. Isaiah talked about it not only in the present but in the future. He said, "Behold the Day of the Lord comes cruel with wrath and fierce anger." Isaiah 13:9. Ezekiel 17:9, Ezekiel talks of the Day of the Wrath of the Lord. You know, it simply means anger. Even in the love and grace of the Old Testament, and the love and grace of the New Testament, wrath has a prominent place. But there's some interesting aspects to it in the New Testament. It's developed in a way that I think will help you to understand as we think of it.
Paul speaks frequently of the wrath, the wrath of God, but he never speaks about God getting angry. He sort of depersonalizes it. For example, he speaks of God's love and he also speaks of God loving. He speaks of God's grace, and he speaks of God graciously giving. He speaks of God's faithfulness and he speaks of God being faithful. He speaks of God's wrath but he never talks about God getting angry because he doesn't want to give you the impression that God is just up there and when He sees something He just gets really mad and He just comes and crushes it.
In fact, let me take it a step further now. Stay with me in this thinking. Only three times does Paul ever call it the wrath of God. Once here, once in Ephesians 5:6, once in Colossians 3:6. Only those three times does he even connect it with God. He never says God gets angry, so that the wrath is almost set apart from some whimsical attitude of God. It's almost a principle that's sort of just there by virtue of who God is and then further when he talks about it, only three times does he even relate it to God; all the other times, you know what he calls it? "The wrath," period. He doesn't even connect it to God. The wrath.
For example, look at Romans 3:5. No, let's look at 5:9. "Much more then, being now justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath." From wrath. Now there, that isn't necessarily connected to it, at least in the verbiage, though obviously he's connected to it. Romans 13:5, "Wherefore, He must needs be subject not only for wrath but also for conscious sake." Conscious sake. Now there again we need to be careful how we live because of wrath. In 1 Thessalonians he talks about "the wrath" to come. Now the point is that Paul does not always identify this specifically with God as if its some instant act of God, as if God sees things and just gets angry about this and angry about that and angry about this and angry about that.
Now let me bring all of this into focus. The wrath of God is, listen: a principle that operates in the universe. It is the consequence of disobedience and rebellion. It is the consequence of disobedience and rebellion. Illustration: if you jump off a ten-story building, God does not say now that guy is going to get it. He broke my law of gravity; why, I'm going to kill him! God doesn't have to kill him; you kill yourself by jumping off a ten-story building. Why? Because there's a principle in the world and it's the law of gravity. You violate it, you take the consequences, God doesn't have to come down and do it.
You go 100 miles an hour into a stone wall on your motorcycle; God does not have to kill you. The law of inertia that energized you, moving you into that immovable force is going to do the job fine. The point is simply this: God has created a world in which there is law and when you violate that law, certain consequences take place.
Same thing is true spiritually. The wrath is simply the spiritual consequence of sin, already at work in the world and when you step into sin you collide with it, that's all. God has ordained a moral order; God has ordained moral law, and the one who transgresses that moral law falls into the consequence and that is already at work in the world. Now listen to me, people, I want you to see this.
There is a fury of wrath blowing through the history of man that's been blowing ever since the fall of Adam. The wrath of God is already at work, it isn't just future. There is a future aspect. It is at work now. You know why our society is so rotten, so debased, so debauched, so declining, so depraved? Because it is subject right now, this moment, to the wrath of God which is working on it right now to destroy it. The wrath is already at work.
J.A. Froude, who is a historian said, "One lesson and one lesson alone, history may be said to repeat with distinctness that the world is built somehow on moral foundations so that in the long run it will be well with the good but it will be ill with the wicked." End quote. Now just that secular historian recognizes that there is a law, there is a principle, and that principle is what Paul calls the wrath and when you step outside of the place of obedience to God you step right into the gale of God's judgment. It's already worse.
Now that is the wrath, the moral order of God at work in the world is His wrath. And if you violate God's laws, if a society violates God's laws, if mankind violates God's laws, God doesn't have to come down and step on everybody. The very principle itself will begin to work its own retribution. The psalmists over and over again said that. Entrapping men in their own sins, catching them in their own snares. They make a net for themselves with their own sins, he said, they make a chain for themselves with their own sin by which they will be bound.
Wrath is simply the inevitable consequence of sin for the unsaved and by the way for the saved. As soon as you sin, as soon as you enter into sin, in your life, you step outside the circle of blessing and you get right into the gale of wrath and you're going to get chastened, right? You say oh, but John. I thought in 1 Thessalonians 1:10 we've been saved from the wrath? Yes, but did
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