Welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the book of Romans. Tonight is study 37 of Romans, chapter 1, and we are going to read Romans 1:19-21:

Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

I will stop reading there. Last time, we were looking at the wrath of God, and it said in Romans 1:18:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who holdthe truth in unrighteousness;

We looked at the word “hold,” which had the idea of holding back. We saw in 2Thessalonians 2 that the Holy Spirit was holding back the sinful heart of man until the time of the end, and then He was taken out of the way. We are living in that time, and it is the reason we see the tremendous increase of sin and iniquity everywhere in the world. God the Holy Spirit was doing that good work, we would have to say. It was certainly good for the people of the world over the course of the world’s history, which allowed them to live basically good lives, in general, and to live without the chaos that sin causes, and which we see all around us today. So God held back sin (to a degree), until the time was right in the proper “time and season,” after 13,000 years of history, and then He lifted the hand of restraint that the Holy Spirit had upon man’s true nature.

And now, at the time of the end, we are seeing the true nature of people. This is what man is really like, and it will get worse. It can only go down, but there is no “total depravity,” that doctrine which some theologians have put forth using the acronym of “TULIP,” with the “T” standing for “total depravity.” Man is totally depraved, which is the Reformed theology’s position, and has been for centuries. But we have been corrected on that. Man is not totally depraved, although he is depraved, as there seems to be boundless depths of depravity into which men can sink and go ever further down into, and we are seeing that. But who would say, “We have seen every dirty, rotten, sinful thing there is to see, and we cannot be surprised by any evil that anyone might do”? Would anyone dare say that? No way, because we know that today, tomorrow, or next week, we are going to hear about something that is even dirtier, filthier, lower and more disgusting than we have ever heard before, and that is because depravity is something that we cannot reach the end of, and “total depravity” gives that incorrect idea.

Also, we know that even though man is boundless as to how far down into sin he can go, the Bible teaches us that he is not totally depraved because God has written the Law upon their hearts, which is a “second witness.” We talked about the witness of creation in our last Bible study, and how the very world and universe, and the celestial bodies, as well as the creatures that inhabit the world, as well as man himself (who is also a created creature) testify to the reality of a Creator. There is a God who made these things. If you see the beautiful mountains, the blue sky above, the clouds floating by, and the birds flying through the air, then you are being “spoken to,” according to Psalm 19. There is a testimony of creation that is likened unto speech that is speaking to all peoples of the earth every day, no matter what their language. It is a testimony to them that God made this creation.

Then there is the order of the creation and the design of the creatures, like the two eyes of the cats or dog that are so well placed, or the snout of a pig, or the tail of a horse, and so on. There are all these things with millions and millions of fine-tuned details of these creatures. And there are the wings of the butterfly that artists would have a hard time duplicating and making the colors knit so neatly and beautifully and, yet, it is a seemingly insignificant creature. And it flies from us, and for a second we can get a glimpse of the design of its wings that we have never seen before. Is it not amazing with the spectrum of colors and the neatness of the design with one wing matching the other wing? It is a testimony that is “speaking” to us everywhere we look, from the grasshopper to the bee, or whatever else you might see. They are declaring with one voice that these intricate complex designs that we see everywhere are a result of a Designer. God made it. God did it.

You know, deep down, man knows there is a God, and we will look at why he knows that. And anyone that is able to reason to any degree knows the chaos and disorder of explosions such as the “Big Bang,” or just throwing something together and waiting for something to happen. They always say, “Give it enough time…give it billions and billions of years, and everything is possible.” But you know that when you let things sit and stagnate, with no mind to form and develop and process, it gets worse. That is what we see all around us. If you leave a field, it does not turn into a beautiful garden. It just gets weeds and all kinds of overgrowth, and it goes in the opposite direction and gets less and less beautiful. But if someone knows what they are doing and he plants the right flowers in the right sequence and cuts back the overgrowth and neatly trims the grounds, we see beauty emerge. And that is how it is with creation. We see beauty and neat and orderly things that were put together. They did not just form. Typically, we do not see creatures with an eye on top of its head or an ear on the bottom of its foot. No – there are two eyes where they should be; the ears where they should be; and the nose where it should be, and so forth.

Of course, since there is a curse on the creation and on the creatures, there can be deformities from time to time, but, overall, we see an orderly creation and things come forth “after their kind.”

Well, that is the outer testimony to man. And we are not talking about the Bible; the Bible is its own category. It is divine revelation where God has given detailed instructions and incredible information. He has given an abundant amount of information about creation, about Himself and about man, and it is just amazing how much information God did impart to the creature. But right now, we are talking about the testimony to mankind in general, apart from the Bible. You know, the Bible was not around for thousands of years after the world was first created, and nothing was written down until after the time of Moses, many thousands of years after creation. But there was always the testimony of the creation itself, and there was the Law of God written on their hearts, as it says here in Romans 1:19:

Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.

Literally, this verse reads: “Because the known of God is showed forth into them.” The word “manifest” and the word “shewed” are the same Greek word that we have come across regarding the Lord Jesus and His demonstration. So God has “showed forth,” and I think that is more descriptive than “manifest,” at least to me. Again, literally, it says, “Because the known of God is showed forth into them.” The word that is second to the end in that verse is that Greek word “eis,” and it is in the dative state – instrumental – “going in.” So God has shewed it “into them,” and that is significant because of what we read in the next chapter in Romans 2, where there is a discussion of the Law and of sin, which is the transgression of the Law. So God has to address the problem where many would say, “Yes, the Jews had the Law of God, but all those people out in the world that were not the caretakers of the oracles of God cannot be held accountable,” and God addresses that point. It says in Romans 2:11-12:

For there is no respect of persons with God. For as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law: and as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law;

So this touches upon the idea that God holds people who have a relationship with His Word, the Bible, more accountable. And, therefore, judgment began at the house of God, and they will receive more stripes (these are the one that never truly became saved and remained in their sins). They not only had the witness of creation and the witness of the Law written on their hearts, but they had the detailed witness of the Scriptures, the Bible.

So there are those that sin “without law” and they shall perish without law, “and as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law.” It goes on to explain in Romans 2:13-14:

(For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified. For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves:

This is telling us that the Gentiles (or the nations) that did not have the Law or the Bible, but they do by nature the things contained in the Law. And this is a proven fact. Missionaries have gone to places were tribes have been discovered and they learn about these tribes that had been cut off from civilization and knew nothing about the religions of the world or about Christianity and the Bible. So the researchers tried to learn everything they could about the tribe, and they found in almost every case that the tribe had laws, and the members of the tribe were expected to abide by the law of the tribe. Often the laws of the tribe would reflect – or even mirror – some of the laws we see in the Bible, like not stealing another man’s wife or possessions or not murdering. These things were considered wrong, and people would be punished for doing them. How can that be? They did not have the Law of God. They had a “testimony.”

And, of course, many of these tribes would have some kind of a belief in a god. Why is that? Why does man have a natural tendency to worship and to worship a god of some kind? Of course, it is because he can see the testimony of the creation, as he looks around and realizes that this had to come from somewhere. What was the beginning of things? What was the origin of the world and of their island? Who created these animals that they hunt and live off of? Of course, they would end up worshipping an idol, but they had the basic understanding that there is a god, and that this god was displeased with them. It is a fact that when they analyzed these tribes, there were offerings to appease an angry god. They might offer up their own children, a virgin or animal sacrifices.

You see, it is almost a part of man, and that is because it is a part of man. Man is a creature, created in the image of God, and he intuitively senses that God is displeased with him. Actually, it is more than intuitive. It has to do with what God has done in men’s hearts, as it says in Romans 2:14-15:

For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;)

This is really an incredible statement that God is making as He moved the Apostle Paul to write as it came from the mouth of God. He is saying that these Gentiles that did not have the Law (and they may have been cut off from other people for their entire existence) live by the law because they have the law written in their hearts. First, we must ask: “Who does the writing in the hearts of men?” The Bible says that the Law is written in the hearts of men. It is not literal – you are not going to find the Ten Commandments in any language scribbled on anyone’s heart. When someone dies of heart disease and they remove the heart to try to find the cause, you can look at that heart, and you will not find any physical writing on the heart, because God is not talking about the physical heart of man. But He is using the “heart” as a synonym for the soul or spirit, the soul essence of man who was created in the beginning in the image of God: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” No matter how the human being tries to run from that truth and tries to avoid truth…he tries to hide from the God that formed him from the dust of the ground and wrote in his soul His Law. God wrote the Law: “Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” God wrote the basic Laws of morality with “the finger of God,” as it were, in the very heart of His creature man, and for a very short while, man kept those Laws. He obeyed God. There was that one outward Law: “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” That was the single, outward Law that the Bible records, but inwardly, God had written His Law on their hearts. It was not the full volume of the Bible. We can see that the Bible is a huge book – one book made up of sixty-six books – and it is just full of Laws. God did not write all the details that we find in His divine revelation, the Bible, but He wrote the basic morality that would govern man’s behavior even if man did not have the divine revelation given to the prophets during the time the Bible was being compiled; or if a people group did not have the Bible itself after it was completed. And it is true that many generations of people in the South Pacific and other places lived their whole lives apart from any divine revelation, but they had the revelation of the creation as a testimony and they had the revelation of God written upon their hearts, _“their conscience also bearing witness”_ to what God had written there. They could then intuitively know, “I am not to kill my neighbor. I am not to steal from my neighbor. I do not want to take the animal that he gathered hunting. I will not sneak into his tent while he is out, take it and run. No – that is wrong.” He had a conscience about these things. If he did not sneak into his neighbor’s tent, his conscience was clear.

But, sometimes, even though a man had a feeling it was wrong, he saw an opportunity, and he would really like that kind of meat for dinner. He saw his friend leave and his friend seems to have gone to the other side of the camp. He looks around and he did not see anyone, so he went into the tent, grabbed the meat and fled. He hid it somewhere and he had a plan to cook it and eat it, so nobody will see it. But since he has done that, now his conscience begins to disturb him. Before, he was a peace, but now he has the nagging thought, “I should not have done that. What I did was wrong.” So his conscience is accusing him. That is what the last part of the verse says: “…and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another.” So his own conscience is accusing, not someone else. Nobody saw him, but his conscience is making the accusation, based on the Law written in his soul. And now he is troubled. He may still go eat that animal and never tell anybody.

Or, maybe the friend comes back and sees his animal is missing, but he turns to a different neighbor and says, “You stole my meat. Give it back to me, you thief!” And this other man gets indignant and angry in return because he did not take it. His conscience is excusing him.

We will have to continue to look at this in our next Bible study.