Audio Transcript
We probably all know someone completely unwilling to listen to us when we talk to them about God and about sin and of Christ, his cross, and how to be right with God. They’re closed off to that whole conversation about very important, eternal things, hardened to even entertaining serious thoughts about who God is. We may be eager to share; they don’t want to hear it. But it’s not like they’re avoiding something they don’t know anything about. It’s not like they are rejecting some curiosity. No. And it’s not because they’re dumb either. It’s something else. It’s like they know something they have long tried to forget. Today on Ask Pastor John: why smart people reject God.
We have just entered Romans month in the Navigators Bible Reading Plan, and it is always a great place to return. Chloe in London asks about the first chapter: “Pastor John, hi to you from a weekly listener from across the pond! In Romans 1:19–20 in our reading today, Paul writes,
What can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.
“If God’s existence is said to be clearly revealed through creation, then why do so many people, including perhaps ourselves, still feel that God is silent or hidden? Why doesn’t God give us a more personal and unmistakable sign? Could the issue lie not with God’s clarity but with our capacity or willingness to see? How does sin, distraction, or spiritual blindness affect our perception of God’s self-revelation?”
Everyone Knows God
Those really are astonishing words from Paul in Romans 1:19. He’s talking about all human beings and explaining why every human being on the planet is guilty and without excuse before God, even those who have never heard the gospel. He says,
What can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him. (Romans 1:19–21)
So, what’s astonishing is that he says everyone knows God — not just that everyone could know God but that everyone does know God. And in Romans 2:15, he says the law of God is written on every human heart. And in Romans 1:32, he says people know that the sins they commit deserve death. So, Paul is making this astonishing claim that every person you meet on the street knows God, knows there’s such a thing as right and wrong, and knows that he’s falling short of God’s will. That’s just amazing. What a starting place for evangelism!
On the one hand, this is a dreadful reality because something has happened to submerge all this knowledge into the subconscious. But on the other hand, it’s hopeful because something we say or do might be used by God to tap into a person’s deep, buried awareness of God.
“In a profound sense, we know God, and we don’t know God.”
So, the question is this: What has happened to bury all this knowledge so that it doesn’t become fruitful? The main answer of the New Testament is that we all — apart from the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit and new birth — suppress the truth that we have. I’ll mention five ways that the truth gets suppressed because of what is inside of us, and I’ll mention two other ways it gets suppressed from outside of us.
Five Internal Truth Suppressants
The most basic statement is right here in Romans 1:18, “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.” So, the most basic statement is humans suppress the truth. In a profound sense, we know God, and we don’t know God. We have found ways to simply suppress the knowledge of God in our souls such that this knowledge becomes practically useless.
The first cause of this suppression, according to Paul, is unrighteousness. They “suppress the truth” in “their unrighteousness.” So, ignorance is not our first problem. Our first problem is moral. What does that mean? What does suppressing the truth in unrighteousness, in immorality, mean?
I think Paul illumines or explains in Ephesians 4:18 what’s lying beneath ignorance — that is, the seeming lack of knowledge that really is under there. Here’s what he says in Ephesians 4:18: “They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them” — then, beneath it, he says, “due to their hardness of heart.” So, the root of our practical ignorance of God is hardness of heart. The suppression is a suppression by the hardness of the heart.
Now, what does that mean? What does that image of hardness refer to? I think Paul clarifies in Romans 8:7 like this: “The mind that is set on the flesh” — now, that’s the human heart (or the human soul or the human mind) apart from God and his work and his grace, just the natural mind. “The mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God” — there’s the key word: hostile, enemy. “For it does not submit to God’s law” — that’s the result of hostility: It’s insubordinate; it resists God’s authority — “indeed, it cannot.” That’s how bad it is. This is not a physical cannot. This is an “I don’t want to so much” cannot. This is a moral cannot. “Those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Romans 8:8).
So, beneath our practical ignorance of God is hostility to God and our deep resistance to submission to his will. In other words, the unrighteousness and the hardness of our heart that suppresses the knowledge of God is that we want to be our own God. That’s our deep, deep hardness. We don’t want anything above us. We don’t want anything having authority over us. We want to define for ourselves what is true, good, and beautiful. So, this knowledge of God that lies buried deep in our souls is deeply offensive. We can’t let it rise up. It’s so offensive to us. It stirs up hostile resistance, and the main way of handling that knowledge is to suppress it. You say, “No, it’s not there. It’s really not there.” That’s what suppression does.
Jesus talked about the suppression in words like these. He talked in terms of love and hate for the light and the dark in John 3:19–20: “This is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness.” That was their condition — our condition — as Christ came into the world. We “loved the darkness rather than the light because [our] works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest [our] works should be exposed.” It’s a moral issue, not a knowledge issue.
Two External Truth Suppressants
Our problem is not that we don’t have light but that we hate the light, which means we are sitting ducks for the god of this present darkness, Satan. Satan is the first of two external realities that join forces with our inner unrighteousness to suppress the knowledge of God. And I get that from 2 Corinthians 4:4: “The god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” So, Satan joins forces with human unrighteousness to keep us in the dark.
The second external force that suppresses the truth is that we and Satan together create whole etiologies and worldviews that are anti-God. Paul describes it like this in 2 Corinthians 10:4–5: “The weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God.”
God Takes Away Blindness
So, (1) unrighteousness, (2) hardness of heart, (3) hostility to God, (4) insubordination, (5) love of darkness — those are the inner things that suppress the truth. And they team up now with (1) the blinding effects of Satan and (2) the ideological fortresses in human culture.
The result is that the knowledge of God that is in every human heart is suppressed until the declaration of the gospel. God says, “Let there be light” (see 2 Corinthians 4:6). That’s the way we pray. We pray that for the world, for the unreached peoples, for our church, for our family, for our neighborhoods. God causes people to be born again “through the living and abiding word” (1 Peter 1:23). So, we should never say, “Well, don’t speak, because people are deaf and blind.” No, we should say, “Always speak, because that’s how God takes away the blindness.”
