Living in a Perverse World
(Sermon by John MacArthur; 5/20/22)
Well, all good things must end. So we come to the final time tonight, and I feel like I want to see if I can’t maybe pull everything together for us as we talk about a Christian worldview. I don’t really need to rehearse what’s going on in the world; you know that, it’s inescapable. You don’t need information about the disappointments in our culture, the disappointments in our world. You don’t need to know that everything is upside down, as in Isaiah chapter 5. Bitter has been swapped with sweet, and good has been swapped with bad, and we’re living in an inverted and upside-down world.
But I want to give you a perspective biblically so that you can understand what’s going on, and the first thing I want to say is you have to understand this: What is happening in our country, and largely in our world, is a divine judgment. I just want you to mark that in your mind. It is a divine judgment. Joe Biden is not in charge of this; God is. And our Congress and our Senate and the people who run this nation—whoever’s behind the Wizard of Oz, pulling the strings—does not have the final, sovereign say over this nation or over any nation in the world.
So we are experiencing the judgment of God on our nation. It’s not as if we’re waiting for it; it’s not as if it’s nearby. we’re in the middle of this judgment, and I want to show you that by having you open your Bible to Romans chapter 1. And this is just an introduction for you. "But how do you know when a nation is under judgment? How do you know? Can you be sure? And the answer to that is you can know, and you can be certain, and I’ll show you how. Romans chapter 1, verse 18 says, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” Any nation, any association of human beings that constitute a culture, if they turn away from the truth in unrighteousness, will receive the wrath of God.
Now the wrath of God comes in many forms. There is eternal wrath; that’s hell. There’s eschatological wrath; that would be all of the expressions of wrath in the book of Revelation, all the judgments that fall on the earth that you know of in time of the Tribulation. That’s eschatological wrath; our Lord talked about that in His sermon on the Second Coming in Matthew 24 and 25. So there is eternal wrath, eschatological wrath; there’s a kind of a cataclysmic wrath—massive earthquakes, massive floods, the most massive being the Genesis flood, where God literally drowned the entire human race with the exception of one family. There is sowing and reaping wrath: Whatever you sow, you reap. There are consequences to sinful behavior that are built into that sinful behavior. So there are many aspects of the wrath of God, and it works inexorably, it works inevitably, and it works justly.
But there’s another kind of wrath, and that’s what is being talked about in Romans 1. This is the wrath of abandonment. This is the wrath of abandonment. This is historical. In Acts 14, the Bible says God allowed all the nations to go their own way. The history of the world is the history of nations going their own way and consequently experiencing the wrath of divine abandonment. And that is in view in
Romans 1:18: “The wrath of God . . . revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth and unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” This is the perfect place on the planet to connect with that, right? God, by His creation, has put Himself on display to the degree that His eternal power and divine nature are manifest, and anyone who rejects Him is without excuse. And men do, and nations do, and cultures do—and that’s the cycle of human history.
“Even though they knew God,” verse 21, “they did not honor Him as God or give thanks,” because “they became empty in their speculations, their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling things.” They’ll substitute anything for the true God, including animals—idols of all kinds.
So what you have here is the wrath of God unleashed all the time through human history upon every people that suppressed the truth in unrighteousness, the truth concerning God which may be known by the creation. And chapter 2 of Romans says by “the Law [of God] written in the heart,” so they’re also without excuse. They reject what is revealed. They know there must be a God; they don’t honor Him, they don’t give thanks. They become empty in their understanding, and their foolish heart is darkened. They profess to be wise, but they are actually fools, and they exchange the incorruptible God for some other deity of their own making.
Then verse 24 is the key: “Therefore”—what happens when a nation abandons God? “Therefore, God gave them over.” This spells out what this wrath is: “God gave them over.” Now remember, this is historic. This is not looking at the future; this is looking at history. “God gave them”—past tense—“over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them.” When this wrath goes into place, the first thing you will see is a sexual revolution. When God abandons a culture, you will see them sink to a low level of lust and impurity and the dishonoring of their bodies. The first thing that happens when a nation is under judgment is a sexual revolution. Verse 25 says, reminding us why it happened, “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.” So look back to 1970, 1980, and remember when the sexual revolution began. That was step one in the abandonment of this society by God Himself.
Step two comes in verse 26: “For this reason”—again, looking back at verse 25; because of their rejection of God, “for this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural,” verse 27, “and in the same way also the men abandoned their natural function of the woman, burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own person the due penalty of their error.”
When God abandons a society, the first thing that happens is a sexual revolution, inevitably followed by a homosexual revolution—and you have it described in verses 26 and 27. And interestingly enough, it starts with the female side of that in lesbianism because when God abandons a nation, the instinct—the strongest human instinct there is—the instinct of women mothering their children, is perverted. This is that severe of a blow, this level of judgment on human culture and human society. And then you have the male homosexuals in verse 27, “committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.” There’s an immediate penalty, and you would remember it as the AIDS epidemic. It’s built in. It’s a venereal disease that is built in because that kind of behavior will have built in its own punishment, as well as being evidence of the abandonment of God.
And why does this happen? Because “they didn’t see fit to acknowledge God any longer,” verse 28. They keep going back, these verses, to the reason: They rejected God. They rejected God. They rejected God.
First there’s a sexual revolution, followed by a homosexual revolution, verses 26 and 27. Then look at the middle of verse 28; here’s step three: “God gave them over to a depraved mind.” A depraved mind is a mind that doesn’t function. Sometimes it’s translated “reprobate mind.” The Greek word means “nonfunctioning.” That’s when you’re a man, and you think you’re a woman. It’s a kind of insanity, and it’s an insanity that is such an insanity, it begs the issue of reason; to even think people would do this. The reason people are doing it is because they are under divine judgment. God has let them have a reprobate mind.
So when you see all of this transgender activity, and when you see them want to make laws to protect transgender identity, and you know it is absolute and total and utter insanity, you know we’ve reached the reprobate mind. People can’t think reasonably, which means there’s no way back to sanity; there’s no way back. And because it is a divine judgment on them, God doesn’t interrupt the course of their thinking down this path of sexual revolution, homosexual revolution, to the kind of insanity that we see with transgenderism. I used to wonder what in the world the reprobate mind could be, but we’re living in the middle of it. It is insane, it is irrational, it is ridiculous, and yet it is so strongly in our culture that the society and its leaders are making laws to protect the people who are absolutely insane. That’s the reprobate mind. So this is judgment, this is judgment.
And out of that depraved mind what are you going to get? Well you’re going to get verse 29, “All [kinds of] unrighteousness, [all kinds of] wickedness, [all kinds of] greed, evil; . . . envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice”—that’s a Greek word,
kakia which means generic, general evil—“gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventers of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, [and] unmerciful.” So what is that? That’s what you see every day on the news. That’s just the way people are; that’s the way they live.
And verse 32 says, “They know the ordinance of God.” Look at our nation. There’s not a dearth of reality or truth. This nation was really founded with knowledge of the Word of God, the Bible. It’s had it its entire 200-plus years. “They know the ordinance of God”; they also know that in the ordinance of God, “Those who practice such things are worthy of death, [but] they not only do the same, but they give hearty approval of those who practice them.”
You have a president who is a Roman Catholic and who is advocating the insanity at the third level of divine judgment as if this is normal. What you see in our country is the unfolding of the judgment of God in Romans 1. So mark it down: There is no group of senators or congressmen or anybody else who is going to reverse this. This is not reversible; this is divine judgment.
Now in the middle of that you might be saying to yourself, “I hope the Lord remembers His people in the midst of this. I hope He doesn’t get so carried away with judgment that He misses us.” And that reminds me of the end of the very last book in the Old Testament, the book of Malachi. This is a word of comfort. God is promising judgment from the prophet Malachi, and in verse 16 of Malachi 3 we read this: “Then those that feared the Lord spoke to one another”—here we are in the middle of this, talking to each other and saying, “What’s going to happen? What’s going to happen in the future?” And that was exactly what the people of Malachi’s time were saying: “What’s going to happen?”—“And the Lord gave attention and heard it”—I love this—“a book of remembrance was written before Him for those who fear the Lord and who esteem His name. ‘They will be Mine,’ says the Lord of hosts, ‘on the day that I prepare My own possession, and I will spare them as a man spares his own son who serves him. So you will again distinguish between the righteous and the wicked, between one who serves God and one who does not serve Him.’”
Continued below.
Well, all good things must end. So we come to the final time tonight, and I feel like I want to see if I can’t maybe pull everything together for us as we talk about a Christian worldview. I don’t r
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