Request your free, three-month trial to Tabletalk magazine. You’ll receive the print issue monthly and gain immediate digital access to decades of archives. This trial is risk-free. No credit card required.
Try Tabletalk NowAlready receive Tabletalk magazine every month?
Verify your email address to gain unlimited access.
Romans 1:18–32
“Although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened” (v. 21).
God has spoken clearly to all people in the book of nature, in what theologians call general or natural revelation. Such revelation consists of what our Creator has made. Men and women can look at the created world and discern something of the character and moral requirements of its Maker (Ps. 19:1–6; Rom. 1:20; 2:15). The book of nature means that ultimately, there is no true atheist and that Christians can appeal to the evidence for the one true God in nature as they seek to reach lost people with the gospel (Acts 17:1–29).
For all that general revelation tells us, however, there are limits to what the book of nature can give us. Paul tells us as much in today’s passage. As the Apostle explains how the Lord has spoken in nature, he also tells us that fallen human beings suppress the truth that they see in creation. Unredeemed sinners do not honor God or give Him thanks even though they know from the book of nature that they should. Instead, they become idolaters who exchange “the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things” (Rom. 1:23).
Looking at the world around us, we cannot deny Paul’s teaching. Human beings have chosen to worship a vast number of beings that they call “God” or “the gods.” Some of these so-called deities in certain of their attributes bear a superficial resemblance to the God of the Bible, while others do not look like Him at all. All these idols, however, have one thing in common: they are not the one true God revealed to us in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Since the fall into sin, John Calvin says in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, “the human mind is . . . a perpetual forge of idols.” At times, people even create pictorial representations of these deities, but one can be an idolater without bowing down to a statue or image. The sin of idolatry occurs whenever we conceive of God in ways that He has not revealed. Any of us can fall into the trap of making God in our own image, of serving the Lord as we would like Him to be instead of who He actually is. Calvin warns us that “the human mind, stuffed as it is with presumptuous rashness, dares to imagine a god suited to its own capacity; as it labors under dullness, nay, is sunk in the grossest ignorance, it substitutes vanity and an empty phantom in the place of God.” The book of nature can tell us something about who God is, but it cannot keep us from descending into idolatry.
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
The book of nature shows all people truths about God, but it cannot prevent the descent into idolatry or show us the way out of it through God’s plan of salvation in Jesus Christ. Thus, we cannot be saved by reading the book of nature alone. We take the gospel to the ends of the earth because people can be saved not by general revelation but only by knowing the Lord Jesus Christ.
For further study
- Psalm 53:2–6
- Jeremiah 10:1–16
- Romans 3:9–20
- 1 John 5:21
The bible in a year
- Genesis 18–19
- Matthew 6