There surely is not a more grievous evil than this audacious practice. It's not our position as Christians to try to control the world. When Paul condemns this, he didn't go out in the streets with placards and, you know, the Christian church didn't demonstrate in the streets of Rome. What the world did, the world does. They're going to answer to God. But he didn't hesitate to call a spade a spade either.
But again, Christians didn't try to change the world, but they did bring people out of that kingdom into the kingdom of God. Well, good morning, everyone. We have, well, we started, what, in December, been going through Romans. Hopefully, you can get back to it a little bit more often. I hope you haven't even—you maybe have forgotten even where we've—what we've talked about. We're still in the first chapter of Romans. We're going to finish it today, which contains Paul's introduction to the Roman Christians.
And we've talked about that the letter to the Romans, the main theme is that God saves the Gentiles without their having to come under the law. And this was a hard issue for so many Jewish Christians at that time to accept. I mean, God had given them the law. It's not something they had invented. And now it seemed like God had changed the rules, and these Gentiles were all coming in, but they weren't getting circumcised. They weren't living by the Sabbath. They weren't living by any of the things in the law.
And this was very hard for the Jews to deal with. And so Paul is—through Romans—he's going to be explaining why we can be saved without the law, why not only Gentiles are saved that way, but so are Jews, that both Gentiles and Jews are saved the same way. Anyway, he starts off—he's going to be talking about the needs of both groups of people, the Gentiles and the Christians—I mean, the Jews.
But since the letter is mainly going to be a hard blow to the Jews, he very wisely starts off by talking about the shortcomings of the Gentiles. So if you want to follow in your Bibles, just turn to the first chapter of Romans. We're going to start with verse 20 today, and then we're going to go to the end of the chapter. Now, there are five themes that we're going to be talking about this morning that covers this section that we're looking at today.
The first one, which I think is the overriding theme, is ideas have consequences. We're going to be coming back and discussing that a little bit more. But I think if you were going to find one overriding theme to this passage, it would be that. And the second one, which is, you might say, a subcategory under that, if we have a distorted view of God, it leads to distorted morality, that you can't have a wrong view of God and still live right.
You might live right in many areas, but it's going to be perverted in some sense. Number three, when people repeatedly reject God, he eventually gives them over to sin and false belief. Paul says that several times in this passage of, "Okay, God gave them over. God gave them over." In other words, he's extremely patient and long-suffering.
But if we continue to reject his outreach to us, the things that he's planted inside of all humans, messages that we've reached through his messengers, if people continue to reject God, at some point, he turns them loose, and the result is very bad. He lets them have their own way. I mean, he doesn't force himself on anybody. If salvation is a gift offered to us, if we want to reject it, we're free to reject it.
Number four, this isn't a theme of Paul, but we're going to be—as we discuss this today—there are a lot of amazing parallels between ancient Rome and modern society, particularly Western society. There are a lot of parallels. I don't know in history if you could get two eras that are as similar in so many ways. And then number five, that we are going to be talking about, it's in the last verse of this passage, approving of other sins is nearly as serious as committing those sins ourselves.
So we not only have to avoid the things that God hates, but if we approve them, you know, "Okay, I'm not going to go out and do that, but hey, that's great that these people, other people are doing it," we're not a whole lot higher in God's eyes. So those are the themes we're going to be looking at. Let me just talk just a second about this first one. Ideas have consequences. It's one of Dean Taylor's favorite quotes. As I said, it's the overarching theme of this passage.
The quote is actually—I looked it up—who first said it? And apparently, a man I'd never heard of called Richard M. Weaver. He wrote a book with that title, Ideas Have Consequences, back in 1948. Now, I've never read the book, so I'm not necessarily endorsing it. I mean, it's still around, but I've never read it. But his title, Ideas Have Consequences, is an excellent quote, and it's absolutely true.
What we believe about anything, whether it's about God, philosophy, politics, social theories, they always have real-life consequences. You can't just hold a certain idea and think, "Oh, well, those are just ideas. Ideas can't hurt anyone." No, ideas have consequences, and when it comes to eternal life, they have very serious consequences. They don't just remain in our brain. They affect how we live. They tend to affect other people around us. So ideas are something we do care about.
I know I've heard people say, "Well, yeah, why do we talk about theology? Why do we talk about some of this stuff? That's just theoretical. It's just ideas." Yeah, but ideas have consequences. What you believe about God is going to affect a lot of things. And this doesn't just apply to pagans. It applies to many groups of Christians who have distorted views of God, and it affects their Christianity and often gives a very bad witness about Christ. Okay, so with that introduction, let's just start Romans 1:20.
Paul says, "For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and deity, so that they are without excuse." Now, I explained last week I'm using the King James that I've put into more modern English. So if you're following in the King James, it may be similar to the New King James. I really haven't compared, or maybe a little bit different depending on what translation you're looking at. Let's just look at this verse.
He says, "For the invisible things of him"—him is God, okay—"we can't see the invisible attributes of God." But he says there is a way—or we can't see them with our physical eyes—but he says there is a way to see them or to discern them, okay? The invisible things. The visible things that God has done, everybody can see that. The invisible things, he says, are clearly seen, okay? So from the creation of the world, he's saying ever since there have been people on the earth, this has been clear, okay?
So it's not something that was just true in his day. It was true from all time, from the time of Adam and Eve forward, from the creation of the world, that people have been able to see the invisible attributes of God by what's around them. So his third, they are clearly seen. And I noticed he put in that adverb clearly. So he's not saying this is theoretical. If people really tried hard, they could have a concept of God from what's around them.
He says they're clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, okay? So it's the same argument that we still use today when we convince non-believers that there is a God, that there is a creator. And one of the best arguments—it's not the only one, but one of the best—is looking at the things that are around us that have been made. We can see those. We can't see God, but we can see his handiwork, okay?
He says, "Even his eternal power and deity." The King James says Godhead, which is an old English word. It meant godhood, and deity or divine nature would be a better way to say it today. Then he concludes that verse, "So that they are without excuse." In God's eyes, it's not going to be, "Well, hey, no missionary ever came to me." God understands you're not going to know about Christ unless somebody comes to bring you the gospel. And God doesn't call people accountable for something that they can't know.
But there are things we can know. People can know there is a God. They can learn a lot about God through his creation and what he's implanted. I mentioned in our last discussion from Romans, the early Christians—there's a strong belief of the early Christians—that all humans have natural law planted in them.
Today, we would call it everyone has a conscience, we might say, that everybody—doesn't matter where you were born, what era you lived in—everyone is known that stealing is wrong, that murder is wrong, adultery. I mean, there's a long list that all civilizations—I mean, there might be some strange exceptions—but practically every civilization, everything, everyone I've read about, there are these fixed constants that everyone understands. I think every civilization has practiced marriage.
I've never read of one that didn't. These are just some things God has planted in mankind. So Paul says, "They are without excuse." Not without excuse if they hadn't heard of Christ. Like I say, that's a little different. There's special revelation that we have in the scriptures. God doesn't hold people accountable for something that they have not yet had revealed to them, but he does hold them accountable for things that are part of natural law.
He holds them accountable for believing that there is a God, that it just doesn't work to say, "God, I'm sorry. I didn't know you were there because I couldn't see you." You could see the creation, and it's implanted in man that—in fact, when you go to any group of people, the more primitive they are, the more certain they are that there is a God. I mean, when they haven't been mixed up with humanistic teaching, yeah, it's something implanted in everyone.
And in centuries past—I mean, really until Darwin, I guess—yeah, I mean, it doesn't matter whether they were a very primitive civilization, very advanced like Rome and Greece; everyone believed in a creator. Psalm 19, "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night reveals knowledge." So again, this is long before Paul.
It's just stating an obvious fact that people looking up, they see God's creation, whether it's night and they saw the stars, whether it's daytime they saw life all around them, that these declare the glory of God. If the people of ancient times were without excuse, what about people today? Because today, we have a far better understanding of how complex the universe and life are. Well, I'll just give you an example.
The ancient people, when they saw the night sky, I mean, they realized, "Wow, there's a creator who put all of these stars." But they were just seeing these little dots like we see with our naked eye. I mean, it is very impressive, and it's enough that, as Paul says, you're without excuse if you think all of that's there just got there by itself. But now, I mean, that was their perspective. I mean, we've got telescopes. I mean, we see now—this is things that they couldn't even imagine.
I mean, the universe is so—when you see pictures of different galaxies and that, it's like it's overwhelming how beautiful and astounding the universe is, far beyond the naked eye. It doesn't get less interesting with telescopes. You realize, "Oh, this is far more marvelous than even people realized throughout most of human history." So if they were without excuse, when all they saw were these little dots in the sky, what excuse do we have? Or the planets.
They couldn't even see all of the planets, and the ones they did see, again, they just saw a little speck, a little bright spot. They spent so much time studying the stars, they knew they were not stars, that they were planets, that they were different. But they didn't see—I mean, this is what we see today, each of the planets, through telescopes—is like, "These are gorgeous. These are just breathtaking." The earth itself, I mean, they never knew what the earth looked like.
They knew what the ground looked like and around them. But until the 1960s, when the astronauts went around the moon, none of us knew what earth looked like from space. And I think we were all astounded. It's like, "Wow, what a gorgeous planet earth is." I mean, we already knew how wonderful it was being on it, but just from space, that this is just like a work of art. I think all of you know which one is earth there. It's the blue one with the clouds around it. But it's just marvelous.
So if they were without excuse back then, I mean, there's just no excuse today. We understand how complex life is. I mean, in ancient times, I mean, people thought, "Yeah, if you got some swamp water and it's dirty and muddy and put some moss in it and mix it around, yeah, you could get just little amoebas or whatever." I mean, yeah, they thought life was something that's just fairly simple to come up with. We know now, no, even the most a one-cell creature, it is complex.
It's a little factory that does a lot of things. The human body, we realize, "Wow, how complex, how ingenious all of these things work together." Life here on the earth, they knew about the water cycle, that water gets recycled. I don't think they understood the nitrogen cycle and many other things that God has built in that we're able to live here on the earth. We know all of this today.
We know about atoms and neutrons and a bunch of stuff that no one even knew about when I was in high school that they know about today. So again, if they were without excuse and we see how complicated it is and we deny it, as Paul says, "For although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God, nor were they thankful. But they became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened." So instead of glorifying God, that's all he expected of them back in the distant past.
He had given very little revelation, but yeah, to acknowledge him, to glorify what he had done, and to follow the natural law that was in them. Instead, no, they went the other direction. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. The more advanced some of those civilizations got, the more foolish they became because they thought they were so wise. He's probably talking here about the Greeks in particular who just put themselves above all mankind. They divided all mankind into two groups.
There's the Greeks, and there's the barbarians. If you're not a Greek, you're a barbarian, and we're higher than everyone else. And yet, they came up with these absurd, stupid myths, gods that behave worse than humans, etc. But again, what about today? How many of you have heard of Stephen Hawking? Okay. So we have a well-read group here.
Considered one of the smartest people around today, high IQ and all of that, well, Paul would say, "Professing to be wise, they became fools." It doesn't matter how high your IQ is. He's got a lot of statements. Science makes God unnecessary. He believes there is no God. A guy who knows more about the universe than you and I, and it's not because he knows so much about it that he knows, "Oh, it's just this simple little thing." No, he knows how much more complex than even we understand it.
But because he's so smart in his own eyes, he's become a total fool in God's eyes, in truth. He says, "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing." Brilliant, right? Just real brilliant. That's what happens when your IQ gets that high. I say gravity can create a universe. So where did gravity come from? And how can you have gravity without matter or energy or anything else? I mean, gravity didn't come from nothing. And you talk about it as a law.
I mean, you recognize it. I mean, that's what Paul is talking about. People see these things, and they are without excuse when they reject God. I mean, we don't need to feel sorry for them. We don't hate them. We still want—I mean, I would love for him to, before he dies, to come to faith in God. But yeah, there is no excuse for that and for the people you mislead.
Romans 1:23, "They changed the glory of the uncorruptible God"—or maybe that should be incorruptible—"into the image of corruptible man and into birds, four-footed animals, and creeping things." Okay. So all of these so-called wise civilizations—it didn't matter if you go to the Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans—or primitive, I mean, you take your pick, they all did the same thing. They took the glory of God. I mean, obviously, he's greater than us.
And then they imagined that this creator that is unseen, who has obviously been able to do something none of us can do, they turned around and imagined, "Well, oh, he's like one of us, like a big man or a big woman." So many people worship Diana or Artemis. And you remember in Ephesus, that was the big thing. And I've seen the ruins of the temple there. And yeah, they're imagining, "Okay, this is one of the gods." And we've seen all the different statues.
So thinking, "Okay, this one who's so much greater than us that he just looks like us. He's just like a big man or a big woman." And then it got even more absurd. The Egyptian, this is the god Anubis, head of a jackal in the body of a person. I mean, we would reject anyone who looked like that. I mean, you would scream if someone knocked on your door and you opened this door. You would assume they had a mask on or something like that. So you imagine that a god, someone greater than us, has a head of a jackal.
It's just absurd. And then the Egyptians, this is the sacred calf. It was their god Apis. Calf or bullock would probably be a better word to use. But yeah, I saw a bunch of these in the Louvre in Paris. It's a museum, and they have a whole section on ancient Egypt. And yeah, a bunch of these. I saw how the Israelites ended up worshiping the golden calf because they had come out of Egypt. And Egypt, yeah, that's who they're worshiping. I mean, now, they weren't like the Hindus. They didn't view cows as sacred.
I mean, they ate the things. So you're worshiping something that you don't mind eating. Maybe you had it for your supper. Now you're out there worshiping. I mean, it's just stupid. It's Paul saying there is no excuse for such absolute stupidity. So he says, "For this reason, God gave them up to uncleanness through the lust of their own hearts to dishonor their own bodies among themselves." God didn't cause them to become unclean, to turn to lust. He's not saying that. He says he gave them up.
Now, John Chrysostom, who is—well, he didn't write a commentary on Romans, but we have his sermons. Their sermons back in the early church, they normally just went through books of the Bible, section by section. They didn't have chapters then. They would just take a section of it. And he explains this term to give them up. And the illustration he uses is a general of an army. Okay. There's a battle going on, maybe a huge battle, large campaign. And he can see that this one wing, it's hopeless.
They're surrounded by the enemy. They're going to be captured or killed. And there's no way the rest of the army can go and rescue them. It would just put them in danger. So yeah, a general has to make a decision, "I'm going to just give them up. They're beyond help. It's out of our hands." And he says that's what God has to do because, again, he doesn't force salvation on anybody. And so when people decided, "Yeah, we're going to worship cows. We're going to worship bulls.
We're going to worship these grotesque images," as one of them pointed out, I mean, it would be bad enough to worship a person. You're not even doing that. You're worshiping a stone image of a person and saying that that's God who created the universe. I mean, that's just so, so low and base for people to imagine such a thing. And God trying to reach them and just—I mean, just look at the Israelites who had all of this revelation.
They had the prophets, and they kept turning, "No, we'd rather worship one of these stone or wooden images. We'd rather worship sacred calf." I mean, it's like, yeah, after a while, God just says, "Okay, I can't help you. You are beyond help.
I'm going to give you up to your own way." And when he does that, yeah, people, because they have the wrong concept of God, because they didn't honor him in the beginning, then yeah, when God turns loose, yeah, it always ends up they turn to uncleanness, dishonor their own bodies among themselves, he says. So ideas have consequences. A distorted view of God leads to distorted morality. And the more distorted our view of God is, or if we deny there is a God, the more distorted our morality is going to become.
It's like this. And if you children don't know what this is, that's good. These are illegal drugs. You put this in your body, it's going to have consequences. This is going to be the consequence. I mean, you're going to end up out on the street somewhere. You're going to end up in the hospital. You're going to end up dead. I mean, you can't just stick stuff in your body that's not good for yourself and think there's not going to be consequences because there's going to be consequences to it.
So Paul says, "For they changed the truth of God into a lie, and they worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed forever. Amen." Now, he's condemning people who did believe in God, but they turned the truth of God into a lie by serving and worshiping images. Now, how much lower, how much worse is when people deny there is a God? I mean, that's not even on the same level.
I mean, the Romans falsely imagined that the Christians didn't believe in God because they had no images, no temples, no sacrifices, no nothing. And they thought—I mean, the Jews didn't have images, but they did have a temple. It's like these Christians don't have anything. They must not believe there is a God. And that was one of their charges. I mean, that was just notorious to the Romans that you don't believe there's a God. You're an atheist. You deny there's a God.
Because in all of their distorted everything else, they did recognize there is a God, and there's something really perverted to deny it. For this reason, again, we see this term, "God gave them up to vile affections." He's going to go through a list, but it's interesting to see where he starts. He says, "For even their women changed the natural use into that which is against nature. And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman.
They burned in their lust toward one another, men with men working that which is improper and receiving in themselves the recompense of their error that was fitting." So I know today everything is trying to—politics, the media, the world in general is trying to infuse us with the idea that there's absolutely nothing wrong with this. Yeah, God thinks otherwise. And Paul, when he starts off with how perverted the Gentile world was, this is where he begins. This is what he puts at the top of the list.
He puts this above murder, not that it's necessarily greater sin in God's eyes. I think he puts it there first because maybe it's more perverted. There's usually a murder. People get angry and do things. This is a little bit different. John Chrysostom makes a comment on this verse. He says, "There is not—there surely is not a more grievous evil than this audacious practice." So it's not our position as Christians to try to control the world.
When Paul condemns this, he didn't go out in the streets with placards, and the Christian church didn't demonstrate in the streets of Rome. What the world did, the world does. They're going to answer to God. But he didn't hesitate to call a spade a spade either. But again, Christians didn't try to change the world, but they did bring people out of that kingdom into the kingdom of God.
Jude 1:7, "Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them in a similar manner to these, having given themselves over to sexual immorality"—and notice this term—"and gone after strange flesh, are set forth as an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire." It's still there today. I mean, that is still a total burned-out waste there in the land of Palestine. I mean, it's never been rebuilt. I'm sure never will. It was eternal fire that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.
As I think definitely that God did that as a testimony to mankind in case anyone thought, "Hey, maybe this isn't so bad," that testimony was always there. Travelers would go by and see this area that was just a total burned-out waste. Now, I came across this passage, which was very interesting to me. I mean, we're not surprised that, of course, the Christians condemned homosexual practices, and of course, the Jews did. And of course, the Romans, you were free to practice this.
Some of the emperors had their own male lovers and things like that. But this writer, he's a pagan Roman, and he describes a marriage between two men. Now, I say a marriage because Rome would not recognize that as a marriage. In other words, it's something they went through, but it wasn't legal. Even pagan Rome said, "We're not going to cross that line." But this is something he was aware of had taken place in private.
And he writes this, "Behold, here you have a man of high birth and wealth." It generally wasn't something that the common people did. It seemed like the higher up you got, the more educated, the more sophisticated, the more perverted you tended to become. "Here you have a man of high birth and wealth being handed over in marriage to a man.
O father of our city"—here he's not talking about God, but he's talking about Romulus, the reputed founder of Rome—"from where did such wickedness come among your Latin shepherds? How did such lust possess your grandchildren? Do we need a soothsayer or a censor?" Now, this is a pagan saying this. The censors were something the pagan Romans set up because they didn't want immorality to get out of control. We still have that word today, censor, but it came from the Romans.
They were official things set up by the Roman government that they wouldn't allow certain plays and things that were just so wicked and perverted. He said, "Would you be more aghast? Would you deem it a greater omen if a woman gave birth to a calf or an ox to a lamb? The man who is now arraying himself in the train and veil of a bride once carried the shields of Mars. Yes, and if we only live long enough, we shall see these things done openly." I mean, this was something done in private in some villa somewhere.
"People will wish to see them reported among the news of the day." Now, I don't think he expected that that would actually happen. I think he was saying this because he's decrying this. I think he's saying this that if we don't do something, this could happen. Now, that never did happen. I mean, the day never did come in pagan Rome where that was done openly. It was still something in private villas somewhere away from the public and all of that. It was never recognized by the Roman government.
Then we come down to today, a society today. Now, it's not only done openly, it is now legal. I mean, none of these pagan societies ever legalized homosexual marriage. Like I say, Rome got about as perverted as you could be. The Greeks were maybe even worse. But yeah, they never made it legal as a marriage. They even saw that as a line not to cross. Well, yeah, there's a reason why we have it today. And if I had to come up with just one name, I would say Charles Darwin. Again, ideas have consequences.
He made it easy for people who didn't want to believe in God to hang their hat on something. Now, you have to not want to believe in God to imagine that our universe, something as complicated as our human body, just all got here by accident. I mean, there were people back in the days of Rome saying that, that they were a tiny minority, and the Christians talk about them who were saying the whole universe got here by accident, but they couldn't convince very many people.
But yeah, once it became acceptable, there is no God or we should operate as if there isn't a God. No prayer in school, no prayer in public places. Let's just pretend that we are in an official atheist state. And I'm not saying this from a political thing. It's not our—like I say, we don't get involved in politics. We're going to talk about it a little bit more, why we don't. I'm not saying this as a political message. I'm just saying we're seeing the consequences around us.
And we don't need to be upset in the sense that God has given them over to this. I mean, God is in control of the universe, and we can see he has decided, "Okay, this is where man wants to go," and he's allowed them to do that. But yeah, once you threw out that there's a God, and then the Bible, of course, went out with that, then yeah, you do see just perversion is going to follow that.
Paul says, "Who knowing the judgment of God that they who commit such things are worthy of death"—he doesn't mean that they should be taken out and executed by the government. When he says worthy of death, he's talking about the second death, eternal punishment, that they are worthy of the second death who practice that. He says, "They not only do the same, but they approve of those who do them." And that is, like I say, the big thing. And this is what we see today. It's not enough that, okay, this is legal, fine.
What the world wants to do is the world. But yeah, the world wants everyone else to approve of this. And if you will not approve of it, yeah, you're going to pay some consequences. We know in the case of homosexual wedding, okay, the baker in Colorado, "Hey, man, you're welcome to come in my bake shop, buy anything you want, but no, I'm not going to prepare a special wedding cake for a homosexual marriage." And yeah, I mean, the Supreme Court kind of ruled in his favor.
At least it was a pretty—what can I say?—wimpy decision. They didn't stand up at all for freedom of religion. But yeah, Christians have paid a price. It's small persecution compared to what Christians were facing in Paul's day and particularly at the end of his life and after that. But it's probably where persecution is going to start, I would guess, in our country. But again, we weren't—Christianity wasn't supposed to be a safe place. It wasn't supposed to be a safe religion.
So again, whatever God allows, that is there. But we cannot compromise with the world. And yeah, all they want is just approve it. You don't have to practice this yourself in your churches. Just approve it. Don't say anything against it. Paul continues, "And since they did not want to retain God in their knowledge"—yeah, I mean, Stephen Hawking, he's not an atheist because the evidence convinces him there cannot be a God. It's because he does not want to believe in a God.
God—again, that same term—God gave them over to a degenerate mind to do those things that are not fitting. Okay, so this is why we have what we have today. And again, it isn't our place to change the world. God has given them over to that. And then he starts listing these things: "Being filled with all unrighteousness, sexual immorality, wickedness, covetousness, and maliciousness. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, and evil-mindedness. They are gossips." Let's just talk about a few of these.
He says, "They're filled with covetousness." Covetousness—who can tell us what covetous means? Not a trick question. Everyone's a—exactly. You want something that someone else has. You're not content with what you have. And yeah, unfortunately, Christians can fall in this just as much as the world. Juvenal writes, "No God is held in such reverence among us as wealth." Wealth wasn't one of their gods.
This is a satire that he's saying this, that the Romans were so materialistic and everyone wanting more and coveting what their neighbor had. He says, "Try to produce for me in Rome a witness of blameless integrity." He's talking about in their courts, okay? He says, "The first question asked would be about his income. The issue of his moral character would come last of all. They want to know, how many slaves does he keep?
How many acres of land does he occupy?" In other words, if you were going to testify in court, well, they wanted to see, well, is this a reliable witness? And it didn't turn on, yeah, is this a man who never lies or anything? But yeah, how much money do you have? How much land do you own? Do you own a bunch of slaves? Oh, good. Okay, well, yeah, we can believe what you say because you're wealthy. Just—I mean, wickedness, covetousness. He says, "They are full of envy." It's very similar to covetous.
When we want what someone else has—I threw this in for the younger ones. Would you rather the candy bar or the apple? Who knows? But yeah, we adults, of course, are the ones with the problem that it doesn't matter. I mean, we live today, and if you're in Western Europe, the United States, Canada, whatever, I mean, in the wealthiest countries man has ever known. I mean, people have more than ever before in history. I mean, I have more than my parents did when they were my age, and I'm not anything exceptional.
I mean, most people I know, I mean, their parents didn't grow up with air conditioning, but they might have it or central heat or whatever. Two cars, I mean, not that long ago, our parents would have had no cars or one car was considered really up in the world to have one. It's just—and yet, are people happy? No, there's more unhappiness today. It's like, well, I'm not happy because he's got more than I've got. He's getting paid more than I'm getting paid.
Whatever it is that with all the wealth that our society has and societies in so much of the world, yeah, people, instead of being more happy, they're less because of covetousness and envy. He says, "They're full of murder." Now again, every human society has outlawed murder. It was illegal in Rome. Emperors could get away with it, but not too many other people. But the Christians pointed out four types of murder that the Romans didn't, in their own eyes, didn't usually think of as murder. One was war.
The second one was abortion. I was shocked when I first read the early Christian writings. I thought abortion was a 20th century. I was reading them in the 20th century. I just assumed that was something that came up in the 20th century. And it's like, you had abortion back in the days of ancient Rome? And they did. Apparently, we're fairly good at it. Infanticide. If you didn't abort the baby and you still didn't want your baby, you could just kill it. You could just strangle it when it got born.
You did not go to jail for doing that in ancient Rome. I don't know when the age of what the cutoff period was, but yeah, parents could strangle their infants. If you, in your own mind, were merciful, well, I don't want to kill our baby. We'll just go stick him out on the roadside, and yeah, maybe some good person will take him in. And if someone took him in, it was usually a Christian. A lot of Christians, yeah, they made that their ministry.
They would pick up these babies that were abandoned along mountainsides, woods, I mean, just wherever. And they would raise them. And again, that was perfectly legal in ancient Rome. The gladiator contest. People went to watch men being put to death, two men fighting each other with swords, not because they wanted to, but because they were made to. They were slaves, prisoners, whatever. And it was, yeah, you either kill the other guy or he's going to kill you.
Or if neither of you kill the other, then the guards will come out and kill both of you. But people watched this as entertainment. They didn't look at it as murder. It was the Christians who denounced all of these. Cyprian writes, "Wars are scattered all over the earth with the bloody horror of military camps.
And murder, which is admitted to be a crime in the case of an individual, is called a virtue when it is committed wholesale." And that was true in every ancient society, that yeah, murder was wrong, but boy, if you do it on a mass scale, if we all go out and murder our neighboring country, oh, that's a virtue. Wow, you're a hero. As far as I know, Christianity was the first religion to recognize war as murder. And the early Christians were very vocal about this.
Again, not out in the streets with signs, not trying to tell Rome what it needed to do, but trying to convince people to get out of that kingdom and enter into the kingdom of God. Not to physically leave the Roman Empire, but to mentally and spiritually leave it and become a citizen of God's kingdom. Abortion that we have today, that they had in ancient Rome, and then there was this long period where you had it under the closet, but not at the scale that it later became.
I just had to think of that sign: "Protect safe, legal abortion." Safe. Yeah, safe for who? Not for the baby, for the mom, but yeah, there's another life involved. And I was surprised to find a pagan, but this tells us something. I said, "God did plant natural law in mankind." I mean, here's the other pagan. He never became a Christian. He wasn't like semi-Christian or anything. Juvenal, he writes, "The skill of the abortionist is very great, and the drugs used for it are very powerful.
They are paid to murder mankind within the womb." I thought that was interesting. He used that word, to murder. And this is a pagan. Even though Rome didn't consider it murder, that obviously a number of individuals did, and they recognized this was not right that was going on. Then there was the gladiators that, as we've talked about, that Constantine finally made illegal. He says, "They are gossips." Now, I wanted to focus on that because, I mean, we've gone down a pretty bad list.
He talks about murders, and he's talking about homosexuals, murders, all of this. And he lists in there. I mean, when the first time—I mean, I read it a lot, but the first time I noticed that, I mean, it's like, whoa, what? Gossips. I mean, he puts that in there with these horrendous sins that he's listing. So we should never, ever think that being a gossip is a harmless nothing, that, oh, that's fine for Christians to do.
This is listed in the things that those who do that know that they deserve to die, he says, deserve death, the second death. So boy, that is something to just absolutely eradicate from our lives. If we're going to condemn these other sins that Paul talks about, and then we end up being gossips, we're in the same category, but we're hypocrites. And gossiping—because next he says, "Slanderers." So gossip—when he's saying gossip, he's not talking about even lying about people.
He's just talking about talking about someone behind their back, and it may be all true, but it's stuff that's tearing down their reputation, that it's going to make them look bad in other people's eyes. And that he condemns. Slanderers when it's not even true. Haters of God. Spiteful, proud, boastful, inventors of evil things. I mean, the first sin was eating the forbidden fruit. Well, the first sin was a lie that Satan told to Eve and then forbade eating the fruit.
Well, from that point on, every kind of sin and crime had to be invented, and they kept coming up with new forms of evil. I mean, Cain was next. He invented murder, okay? But then, yes, somebody invented stealing. Somebody invented adultery. I mean, it just kept going. Disobedient to parents. So he lists that, and I'm going to mention this too for the young people here, that that is not a small sin to be disobedient to your parent. Paul lists this among these grievous sins of not obeying our parents.
And so, yeah, remember that it's not a small thing. It's not like an option. The world treats it that way. The world is more concerned about parents. In a lot of countries on earth now, it's illegal to spank their children. If children are disobedient, society doesn't think anything of that, that they're only concerned about if the parents spank them, then the parents are in trouble. Without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, unbending and unmerciful.
This natural affection, a number of the early Christians talk about that term, and their understanding it to mean how they viewed their parents, that even if they loved their children, that, yeah, they neglected their elderly parents. Okay, I'm free. I've got what I want, and mom or dad, they can just sit alone, and I'm not going to waste time caring for them. And yeah, that's listed again with these ghastly crimes if we do that.
Paul, yes, it is Paul who says in his letter to Timothy that those who do not support their family—and he's talking about parents there—are worse than someone who's disowned the faith. So it is, again, a very serious sin. Unmerciful. And I don't know if you can tell that the focus is a little bit off there, but that's an emperor with thumbs down. I had to look at it several times to see the thumb. And we still have that sign. Everyone knows what thumbs down means.
Well, that came from the Romans in the arena when the two gladiators fought, and one of them got knocked down, maybe lost his sword, and he would look up to the crowd for mercy, and the other gladiator would stand over him with a sword. And if the crowd thumbs up, they fought well, then his life was spared till the next battle. I mean, I'm sure his life expectancy couldn't be very long. But yeah, usually the decision was, no, kill him. He didn't fight hard enough. Just kill him. I mean, that's unmerciful.
But what's killing unborn babies? See, that's done in secret. People don't see it. We don't do it out in a big auditorium, and we would think, oh, we would never do what those horrible Romans did. But yeah, the lack of mercy to somebody who is absolutely helpless. Who, knowing the judgment of God, that they who commit such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but they approve of those who do them.
Chrysostom says, "He that praises sin is far worse than even he that commits it." I was surprised to read that. And I don't know if he's correct, but in his mind, it's worse because there are consequences when you commit sin. If somebody goes and, let's say, Bill breaks in his neighbor's house and steals something, I mean, he knows he's risking. He could go to jail and all of that. So it's bad, but he's taking a risk. But the rest of us, hey, that's great, Bill. Man, way to go.
See, yeah, we're not taking any risk, but we're going to sit there and approve it. That's why Chrysostom says, "You're even worse." Yeah, because you don't have the guts to go out and do it, but yeah, you're praising somebody else who's doing something that, yeah, you're just too afraid to do it yourself. I mean, I think it's better maybe to be afraid, but yeah, if we approve it, we're at least on the same level. Ambrosiaster writes, "Consent is participation.
There are those who think that they are not guilty if they do not do what is wrong. But to accept such things when they should be condemned is to give silent approval of them." And again, we're not talking about political action here. We're talking about, yeah, what we say in our churches, what we believe and teach, and whether we're free to say that or we're not free to say that. To give consent would be to compromise with Satan, to compromise with the world.
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