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 homosexual