Sermon Tone Analysis

Opening Remarks

Good morning!

I’m so glad to see everyone this morning, both online and in person.

We are so blessed to worship God as one family together with countless other Christians today who join us in Spirit to adore Christ with worship, and listen attentively to God’s word so that we can know God’s will.

I hope you will stay with us after service for our Winter Mission Plan.

I’ll introduce our church’s mission plan for the winter so that you know what we’re doing and where we’re going.

I’ve worked hard to keep this under 30 minutes and hope to make it under 20 minutes.

And I hope we’ll see you tonight in Ithaca for fifth Sunday worship, weather permitting.

Your Bible reading assignment for next week is Romans 2:1-16.

PREACHING NOTE: stick close to your notes and move quickly!

Exegesis: First Argument

One particular feature of Paul’s rhetorical structure is that the intended effect of the flow of his theological arguments are cumulative and climaxes in chapters 9–11, with chapters 12-15 calling the Christians in Rome to action.

Missing this continuity causes some to place Paul’s emphasis in the wrong place.

And this is why I believe some have built entire theological systems, which Paul, as an early Jewish Christian, would hardly have recognized as his own.

We must avoid this mistake.

For this reason we’re paying close attention to how Paul structures his thoughts and moves them forward so that we can preserve the continuity of his letter and evaluate the meaning of his individual arguments as we go.

So let’s briefly take a step back so that we can understand where we’re going and make sense of the dense texture of his individual arguments in today’s text.

To navigate the complex challenges that Paul faces as he writes to a diverse audience, with whom he has no prior relationship, he sets out to accomplish his purpose of bringing about “the obedience of faith for the sake of Jesus’ name” (Romans 1:5) by proposing the central truth of the gospel, which he believes changes everything for everyone.

And this central truth of the gospel is the propositional statement that the good news of Jesus reveals the righteousness of God.

Paul then explains the meaning of this central truth through twelve arguments in Romans 1:18-15:13, in which he hopes to accomplish his mission and “bring about their obedience of faith”.

Paul’s first argument in Romans 1:18–2:16 is a “leveling argument”, which places his entire diverse audience on equal footing by describing the fall of humanity.

One could read these verses as his Gentile-retelling of Genesis chapters 1-11.

This is how humanity, including both Jew and Gentile, fell away from God and came under his judgment.

Paul’s second argument will briefly deal with Jews outside of Christ in a diatribal format in Romans 2:17-3:20.

These continue Paul’s “leveling argumentation” by being based on common human experience.

After making his first two arguments, Paul will revisit, refresh, and expand his propositional statement in Romans 3:21-31 to prepare for his next lines of argumentation, which will draw on the authority of Scripture to explain how God’s redemptive plan is carried out in Christ by the Holy Spirit.

However, he must be clear that Christians, whether Jewish or Gentile, are not to submit to the Mosaic covenant because Christ is the end of the Law as the means of salvation.

Paul’s argumentation here isn’t against “obedience”, in fact he’s writing to bring about the “obedience of faith” (v.5), but against what theologians refer to as "covenantal nomism”, or what we might call “covenantal legalism”.

Salvation is by God’s grace, which was shown to us in his Son, Jesus our Messiah.

Now Christians are under a new covenant.

So, Paul will enter his final discourse on this new way for everyone to respond to God’s grace in chapters 12–15.

Paul’s first argument is composed of two movements: the first movement is Romans 1:18-32, which contrasts the righteousness of God that is revealed through faith, with the wrath of God that is revealed from on high and realized in human unrighteousness; the second movement is in Romans 2:1-16, and explains God’s judgment against human unrighteousness, both Jewish and Gentile.

The Wrath of God Revealed

Paul’s primary proposition is that the good news of Jesus reveals God’s righteousness.

For Paul, this is the central truth of the entire gospel.

God is righteous, which you’ll remember carries the meaning of being “just” as well.

God is righteous and just.

Holy and good.

God’s righteousness demands that he must be just in how he deals with sinners.

The first two arguments Paul makes are about how God justly punishes human unrighteousness.

Arguments three through nine are about how God justly redeems fallen humanity in Christ.

Both lines of arguments are necessary to establish the righteousness of God in gospel claims.

Unfortunately, the modern pulpits squeamishness about God’s judgment has left our gospel both imbalanced and philosophically indefensible.

So it is my task today to assert the perfectly balanced and righteous wrath of God.

I do hope you have taken the time to pray for me this week.

Paul begins his defense of God’s righteousness by arguing humanity’s guilt before God.

Humanity did not crawl out of some swamp in a state of ignorance, but was created in fellowship with him.

We knew God.

We see this in the epoch of Job, who lived in the land of Uz and knew God long before the covenant of Abraham or the Law of Moses.

Job, his family, and his friends understood who God was and his nature.

Consider Job’s unfaithful friend Bildad:

Although Bildad is perverse in how he uses his knowledge of God, he correctly understands the nature of his Creator.

Humanity began with the knowledge of God.

Consider Cain when he murdered his brother Abel:

Cain’s punishment was banishment “from the face of God”.

Our downward spiral into sin has separated us farther and farther from God, who is holy and unwilling to indefinitely dwell in the presence of evil.

This reflects the nature of God’s righteousness:

Humanity was not ignorant of God.

We understood our Creator from the beginning.

“For” (“γὰρ” v. 18)

You’ll remember from last week how we explained that the Greek word “γὰρ” functions as a “logical connector” and introduces the reasoning of the preceding verse.

We should be clear that the reason the righteousness of God is being revealed is because the wrath of God is coming against the sinfulness of men.

God has elected in his righteousness to save some before he destroys the world because of its sin.

We should also point out that the argument in 1:18–3:20 answers an implied question from 1:17, which is, “Why has God revealed his righteousness and appropriated it by faith?”

God is revealing his righteousness because he is about to reveal his wrath, “yes”, as we have just said, but he has appropriated his righteousness through faith because it was our breech of faith and faithfulness that caused our downward spiral into sin and death in the first place!

“God’s wrath is revealed from heaven” (v.

18)

As we’ve previously observed, the parallel between the unveiling of God’s righteousness and God’s wrath is clear.

N.T. Wright’s translations of this verse is insightful:

For the anger of God is unveiled from heaven against all the ungodliness and injustice performed by people who use injustice to suppress the truth

He describes the human race like a large tree that has become so rotten to its core that it must urgently come down before it collapses under its own weight and crashes into someone’s house.

But you can’t just start hacking away at the tree.

You attach ropes, saw off certain limbs, and make cuts in precise locations to drop the tree exactly where you want it to cause as little damage as possible.

The human race has become corrupt through its sin and will destroy God’s creation along with itself if left unchecked.

I think this reality is undeniable at this point in human history.

But God has planted a new tree, which he is cultivating through Christ to replace this rotten tree that he is about to cut down.

“Yes”, God is angry about what humanity has done.

And he has every right to be.

But the good news is that God isn’t just going to burn his whole backyard down, he is going to plant a new tree, and when the time is right, he will drop this old, rotten, gnarly monstrosity and finally be rid of the whole thing.

“Against all godlessness and unrighteousness of people” (v.

18)

Paul’s justification of God’s judgment against humanity is based on our corruption.

We understand from humanity’s origin story in Genesis that we are central to God’s plan to rule his creation (Genesis 1:26): that’s an essential part of what it means to be made ‘in God’s image’ (Genesis 1:26–27).

So when humans go wrong, our whole dominion suffers.

You’ll see Paul make this point in the climax of Paul’s eighth argument:

So we can see how from Romans 1:18 right through to 2:16, Paul lays out his charge against the human race in general: we are rotten to our core, and the eventual crash to which this will lead (See 1:32; 2:5; 2:16) is anticipated in the signs of corruption, disintegration and decay that are evident all around us.

We see this corruption, so to speak, in the upper branches of the human race (See 1:24–31).

Paul here is describing in our present passage (1:18-23) how this corruption begins with the rotting of the roots themselves.

And this point is essential to understand because Paul’s discourse on “idolatry” is meant to describe the first cause of humanity’s corruption.

“Who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth” (v.

19)

Perhaps my greatest disappointment in today’s sermon is that I can’t spend more time on this verse.

Paul describes the manner by which our faithless rebellion against God corrupts the whole human race.

It is as if the corruption at our root in the form of idolatry gets taken up into the branches through our suppressing the knowledge of God in unrighteousness.

When God creates us in his image male and female, we suppress the knowledge of God by confusing the reality of our gender.

And we pervert “masculinity” and “femininity”.

Likewise, God created us free in this world, but we suppress the knowledge of God by subjugating one another.

So we can see how humanity’s downward spiral away from God into sin begins by faithlessly rejecting the knowledge of our Creator and replacing him with other things.

“Since what can be known about God is evident among them, because God has shown it to them”

Paul’s argument rejects both the notions of “the noble savage” and “the ignorant pagan”.

Humanity is presented as repressing the knowledge of God through injustice and unrighteousness.

Although we like to deceive ourselves about our innocence, Paul warns that we are not innocent.

We will all be held accountable according to both the knowledge of God that we have received and what we have done with that light.