Jonny Heart: Bible Study

Friday, June 1, 2007

Bible Study - 001

Today’s study comes from Romans 1:18-23. Romans is becoming one of my favorite books in the Bible, much of it people like to forget because of its bluntness.

The Righteous will live by faith. (Thesis of the book of Romans)
The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of this 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.
For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as god nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

This paints a powerful picture. Every one and their brother who claim to be Christians only have this picture of a God that won’t send anyone to Hell and only does good for the good people in the world, and if you believe in that God then it is enough. I would like to call this “Yankee Christianity.” The only place that you find this kind of Christian belief is in the wonderful world of America. Not country, but world. People in America are in their own little world and no one outside of its borders can hurt them.

The very first part of this section says “the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness.” This doesn’t sound like the God I learned about in Sunday School. My question is whom is this section talking about, who are the men who suppress the truth?

While eating dinner in the Cafeteria I had a conversation with a friend, this friend said that he could not believe in a God that would send people to hell who haven’t heard the gospel, he would hate God. I recalled the passage and explained to him. It seems to me that all people have a way of coming to the Lord, whether the arrogant church shows them the way or not. Every one has a reason because God has poured himself into his creation. “God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of this world God’s invisible qualities and his eternal power have been clearly seen. So man is without excuse. All men are held accountable because God has revealed himself to them without the help of the church. And this is were the answer to that question comes; “will God send people who never herd of God or Jesus to hell.” I am sorry to say that I believe he will. They chose to ignore the natural signs that are there, the conscience that God gave to all men as a natural Law of things. “They exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man. Verse 25 says; “they exchanged the truth for a lie” The people of the world have exchanged the truth for a lie to fulfill their twisted desires. So what can we learn from this?

God is just and must distribute his justice, whether that is wrath or grace, God gives accordingly. I ask you, do you give the gospel up for a lie, who do you follow? I assure you that some of you may think you are following God yet you may be living a lie. Give all of yourself to God for his glory, and listen to the natural law that God has given to you. Flee from the corruption that conspires in a human heart and remember above all to live by faith.

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Quotes from my Senior Patron

-Clive Staples Lewis-

"The Love of knowledge is a kind of madness."

The Problem of Pain

"We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which he will not be satisfied until it has a certain character."

Mere Christianity - (Pg. 31)

"This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies."

The Problem of Pain - C.S. Lewis (Pg. 31)

"What would really satisfy us would be a God who said anything we happened to like doing, what does it matter so long as they are contented? We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven - a senile benevolence who, as they say, liked to see young people enjoying themselves, and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, a good time was had by all."

"If we wish to be rational, not now and then, but constantly, we must pray for the fit of faith, for the power to go on believing not in the teeth of reason but in the teeth of lust and terror and jealousy and boredom and indifference that which reason, authority, or experience, or all three, have once delivered to us for truth."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 139-140)

"It is not reason that takes away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other... Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your ganging moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know by experience..."

A Grief Observed - (P.g. 9-10)

"I once read the sentence 'I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.' That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 7)

"It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 32)

"In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth-only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. Most of us have got over the pre-war wishful thinking about international politics. It is time we did the same about religion."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 56-57)

"Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something mush harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person-and he would not need it."