August 31, 2023

Romans 1: 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. (NIV)

The divine power serves . . . to show the folly of atheists, who see there is a heaven and yet say, “There is no God,” who see the effect and yet say, “There is no cause.”*

From the very beginning, Satan has deceived and lied, and blinded humans to the truth of God. When nature itself shouts of the majesty of the Creator, the devil offers an alternative belief. “A being who has no beginning and no end?” he scoffs. “How can you believe in that? The universe has to have been formed some other way.”

Satan’s lie is ironic on two levels. First, in order to discount the story of creation, he has offered an equally unbelievable theory: there was nothing, then there was everything. Gullible people began to believe that, given enough time, anything is possible – except God. While nature is intricate and precise, the devil would have us believe that it operates by random chance.

The second level of irony is that in our blindness to the truth of God, our inborn need to worship has been perverted. Rather than acknowledge and glorify the perfect God, mankind has chosen to deify created and inferior objects. Where God loves us unconditionally and has done everything for us, men devise gods who are amoral, capricious, and demanding. When the urge to worship has been totally subverted, we rely on self, riches, and luck – with no hope beyond life on earth.

God’s people may not have completed their mission to spread the gospel throughout the world, but those lost souls cannot claim ignorance of God - he has made himself known to them (verse 19). But their lack of excuse does not exempt us from fulfilling Jesus’ command to share the saving knowledge of Christ with them. We know what our job is and we are without excuse if we fail to perform it.

He does not say the heathen will be lost if we do not go; He simply says, “Go . . .”*