Sermon Tone Analysis

THE LIFE WHICH HAS LEFT GOD OUT OF THE RECKONING

Romans 1:28–32

Just as they have given themselves over to a kind of knowledge that rejects the idea of God, so God has given them over to the kind of mind that all reject.

The result is that they do things which it is not fitting for any man to do.

They are replete with all evil, villainy, the lust to get, viciousness.

They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, the spirit which puts the worst construction on everything.

They are whisperers, slanderers, haters of God.

They are insolent men, arrogant, braggarts, inventors of evil things, disobedient to their parents, senseless breakers of agreements, without natural affections, pitiless.

They are the kind of men who are well aware that those who do such things deserve death, and yet they not only do them themselves, but also heartily approve of those who do them.

There is hardly any passage which so clearly shows what happens to people when they leave God out of the reckoning.

It is not so much that God sends a judgment on them as that they bring a judgment on themselves when they give no place to God in their scheme of things.

When people banish God from their lives, they take on certain characteristics, and in this passage is one of the most terrible descriptions in literature of the kind of men and women they become.

Let us look at the catalogue of dreadful things which enter into godless lives.

Such people do things which no one should ever do.

The Stoics had a phrase.

They talked of ta kathēkonta, by which they meant the things appropriate to human behaviour.

Certain things are essentially and inherently part of being human, and certain things are not.

As Shakespeare has it in Macbeth:

I dare do all that may become a man;

Who dares do more is none.

Those who banish God not only lose godliness; they lose their essential humanity too.

Then comes the long list of terrible things.

Let us take them one by one.

Evil (adikia).

Adikia is the precise opposite of dikaiosunē, which means justice; and the Greeks defined justice as giving to God and to others their due.

The evil person is the person who robs both other people and God of their rights.

People like that have erected an altar to self in the centre of things so that they worship themselves to the exclusion of God and of everyone else.

Villainy (ponēria).

In Greek, this word means more than badness.

There is a kind of badness which, on the whole, hurts only the person concerned.

It is not essentially an outgoing badness.

When it hurts others, as all badness must, the hurt is not deliberate.

It may be thoughtlessly cruel, but it is not callously cruel.

But the Greeks defined ponēria as the desire to do harm.

It is the active, deliberate will to corrupt and to inflict injury.

When the Greeks described a woman as ponēra, they meant that she deliberately seduced the innocent from their innocence.

In Greek, one of the most common titles of Satan is ho ponēros, the evil one, the one who deliberately attacks and aims to destroy the goodness of men and women.

Ponēros describes the person who is not only bad but wants to make everyone equally bad.

Ponēria is destructive badness.

The lust to get (pleonexia).

The Greek word is built up of two words which mean to have more.

The Greeks themselves defined pleonexia as the accursed love of having.

It is an aggressive vice.

It has been described as the spirit which will pursue its own interests with complete disregard for the rights of others and even for the considerations of common humanity.

Its keynote is a predatory greed.

Theodoret, the fifth-century Christian writer, describes it as the spirit that aims at more, the spirit which grasps at things which it has no right to take.

It may operate in every sphere of life.

If it operates in the material sphere, it means grasping at money and goods, regardless of honour and honesty.

If it operates in the ethical sphere, it means the ambition which tramples on others to gain something to which it is not fully entitled.

If it operates in the moral sphere, it means the unrestrained lust which takes its pleasure where it has no right.

Pleonexia is the desire which knows no law.

Viciousness (kakia).

Kakia is the most general Greek word for badness.

It describes someone who is lacking in any of the qualities that make people good.

For instance, a kakos kritēs is a judge completely lacking the legal knowledge and the moral sense and uprightness of character which are necessary to make a good judge.

It is described by Theodoret as ‘the turn of the soul to the worse’.

The word he uses for turn is ropē, which means the turn of the balance.

A person who is kakos is someone whose life is tilted in the direction of all the worst things.

Kakia has been described as the essential viciousness which includes all vice and as the forerunner of all other sins.

It is the degeneracy out of which all sins grow and in which all sins flourish.

Envy (phthonos).

There is a good and a bad envy.

There is the envy which reveals to people their own weakness and inadequacy, and which makes them eager to copy some great example.

And there is the envy which is essentially grudging.

It looks at a fine person, and is moved not so much to aspire to that fineness as to resent it.

It is the most warped and twisted of human emotions.

Murder (phonos).

It must always be remembered that Jesus immeasurably widened the scope of this word.

He insisted that not only the act of violence but also the spirit of anger and hatred must be eliminated.

He insisted that it is not enough only to keep from angry and savage action.

It is enough only when even the desire and the anger are banished from the heart.

We may never have struck another person in our lives, but which of us can say that we never wanted to strike anyone?

As the thirteenth-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas said, ‘Man regards the deed, but God sees the intention.’

Strife (eris).

Its meaning is the contention which is born of envy, ambition, the desire for prestige and place and prominence.

It comes from the heart in which there is jealousy.

If we can eliminate a sense of jealousy, we have come a long way towards ridding ourselves of all that arouses contention and strife.

It is a God-given gift to be able to take as much pleasure in the successes of others as in one’s own.

Deceit (dolos).

We get the best sense of the meaning of this from the corresponding verb (doloun).

Doloun has two characteristic usages.

It is used of debasing precious metals and of adulterating wines.

Dolos is deceit; it describes the quality of people who have tortuous and twisted minds, who cannot act in a straightforward way, who stoop to devious and underhand methods to get their own way, who never do anything except with some kind of ulterior motive.

It describes the crafty cunning of those who plot and scheme and who are found in every community and every society.

The spirit which puts the worst construction on everything (kakoētheia).

Kakoētheia means literally having an evil nature.

At its widest, it means malignity.

Aristotle defined it in a narrower sense which it has always retained.

He said it was ‘the spirit which always supposes the worst about other people’.

Pliny called it ‘malignity of interpretation’.

The seventeenth-century theologian Jeremy Taylor said that it is ‘a baseness of nature by which we take things by the wrong handle, and expound things always in the worst sense’.

It may well be that this is the most common of all sins.

If there are two possible constructions to be put upon anyone’s actions, human nature will choose the worse.

It is terrifying to think how many reputations have been murdered in idle gossip, with people maliciously putting a wrong interpretation upon a completely innocent action.

When we are tempted to behave in this way, we ought to remember that God hears and remembers every word we speak.

Whisperers and slanderers (psithuristēs and katalalos).

These two words describe people with slanderous tongues; but there is a difference between them.

Katalalos, slanderer, describes the person who trumpets slanders abroad; such a person makes accusations and tells tales quite openly.

Psithuristēs describes the person who whispers malicious stories in the listener’s ear, who takes people on one side and whispers a character-destroying story.

Both are bad, but, of the two, the whisperer is the worse.