Sunday sermon: "No Excuses!"

There are few apologetic questions that are more perplexing than "What about those who never heard?" We wonder how God could condemn those who never had the opportunity to hear about Him, or understand their condition, or hear the message of the gospel. This strikes us as unfair, and has been used as an excuse by many to refuse to consider the claims of Christ.

Paul deals with that question in Romans 1:18-20. He addresses the issue of what we call in theology "general revelation," This is the way God reveals Himself outside of the Bible. There are two major ways God does this: conscience and nature.

In our conscience, we hear a voice, not our own, that tells us we don't always do the right thing. We may not have a full-fledged law code internalized, but we do know that we engage in wrong actions and thoughts. While many psychologists tell us we need to look out for #1, we know that we somehow we owe consideration to others. There also is a nagging sense that we have a responsibility to someone or something beyond that. Read attempts by self-proclaimed "atheists" to come up with an ethical framework that is based solely on human thought and you rather quickly find them smuggling in as "natural" ideas those that are conditioned by the religious background of our culture.

We also can know God through nature. The immensity of the universe, the precision of physical laws, the complexity of sub-atomic interactions- these all show us a design that boggles our mind, even as many attempt to avoid that conclusion. The odds of all this being a cosmic accident are so small that some modern evolutionary thinkers have proposed some sort of guiding "life force" which guided the process (in a totally impersonal and natural way, of course).

General revelation only goes so far, however. Paul says that it shows us the power and divinity of God. We can know He is there, He is in control, and we are responsible before Him. God gives us enough knowledge outside of His special revelation in Jesus and in His Word that we can know we are in trouble. Paul sums it up like this: "As a result, people are without excuse." (Rom. 1:20, HCSB)


General revelation gives us the bad news. At the same time, Paul also tells us here the deeper problem with humanity: we "suppress the truth" about God. Humanity's problem is not one of knowledge, but of will. We choose not to believe in God. We create ever more elaborate schemes to have the world as we want it without reference to a "higher power," much less the God of the Bible. Perhaps this is the answer to the question we posed at the beginning: People who have not heard about God don't want to hear about God. An active ignorance keeps us content with our sinful, selfish nature.


This is a hard message, and not one we like to share. But until people understand the "bad news" about themselves, they can't respond to the "good news" of Jesus Christ. For those who believe, this gives us the responsibility to take that good news out to those who may have a vague sense of God but who seek to avoid thinking about Him. We need to let them know that the bad news they see in themselves and in nature has an answer in the good news of the cross.