Sermon 3-10-24

Pastor Ray Lorthioir

Trinity Lutheran Church

W. Hempstead, NY

The Fourth Sunday in Lent

The Big Lie

Let me remind you quickly of what we looked at last week — namely the thesis of Dr. Michael Heiser about the source of paganism in the ancient world. So, here’s the outline. At the Tower of Babel, Yahweh put all the nations of the world under the authority of the “sons of God” — spiritual beings of the highest order. Years later, Yahweh called Abraham from among the nations. Abraham’s descendants became Israel, the only people in the time before Jesus that Yahweh called to Himself. In the meantime, the sons of God that Yahweh had put over the nations of earth defied Yahweh. The rebellious sons of God led the human nations of the world into denial of Yahweh — the Creator God of everything that exists both seen and unseen. Instead, the corrupt sons of God proclaimed themselves gods and led the people of the nations to worship them as their gods instead of Yahweh.

As I mentioned, I’ve always been puzzled why ancient people got into polytheism and idolatry. Why did they attribute supernatural power to statues, stones and trees? I think Heiser’s explanation of idolatry is the best one I’ve seen to date. The rebellious sons of God are the strong spiritual beings behind every form of rebellion against Yahweh. Even though these beings are unseen, they are powerful enough to get all humans to agree with them in their rebellion.

Their power was not superseded until Jesus — the power of the Gospel — came into the world. Indeed, this is why we saw Paul say in his teaching to the Athenian philosophers in Acts 17:30-31, “30 In the past God overlooked such ignorance [meaning idolatry], but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. 31 For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.” That man would be Jesus.

Paul said this nearly 2,000 years ago now. But, how was it that after the millennia of idolatry that had preceded his time Paul could say that Yahweh’s tolerance of idolatry was over because of Jesus, and that wrath would fall upon those who did not repent?

We know from a sermon that Paul gave in Acts 13 that he was fully acquainted with an important prophecy found in Isaiah. I’m only going to show you one verse. But in this verse Messiah is speaking about what Yahweh has said to Him. Thus we read in Isaiah 49:6, “he [Yahweh] says: ‘It is too small a thing for you [Messiah] to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth.’” This also confirms the prophecy we saw last week in Psalm 82:8, “Arise, O God, judge the earth; for you shall inherit all the nations!” [ESV] So, being a student of Moses and the Prophets, Paul knew that the prophecies of Isaiah 49:6 and Psalm 82:8 had been fulfilled in his time because Messiah Jesus had come. That’s why he could say that he was the apostle to the pagan Gentiles and that the pagan Gentiles would listen to him.

Jesus also had something to say about the change in the history of the world that He was bringing. In the Gospel lesson two weeks ago, we saw Jesus take the disciples to the ancient pagan pilgrimage site of Caesarea Philippi. There, He asked them, “who do you say I am?” Peter replied, “You are the Christ.” Now when we dig into Matthew’s version of the event, we see this dialogue. Matthew 16:16-19, “16 Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.’  17 Jesus replied, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. 18 And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.  19 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.’”

At the ancient site of Caesarea Philippi which now lays in ruins, there is a large rock platform upon which ancient temples and places of sacrifice once stood. There is also a cave leading back into the cliff in front of which Caesarea Philippi was built. The entrance to that cave was known by the pagan worshippers as the Gates of Hades. They believed it led into the underground dungeons of the dead.

Jesus brought the disciples to Caesarea Philippi to tell them that in His Name they would assault the very paganism that they saw there. The disciples would bind and loose the forgiveness of sins upon the Gentiles who would hear the Gospel. And the devil and his kingdom would not be able to resist the Gospel. The gates of Hades would not be able to stand up to it.

Immediately afterward, Jesus led Peter, James and John up a high mountain — probably Mount Hermon — where He was transfigured before them. That high mountain also had religious significance. In Genesis 6 and the apocryphal book of 1Enoch, we’re told that rebellious sons of God had come down upon that mountain in very ancient times and had corrupted human hearts and had even corrupted human DNA. In this way, Jesus served notice to all rebellious spirits that He had come to bring all the Gentiles back to their Creator God. No longer could the corrupt sons of God have dominion over the nations. Instead, Jesus would have dominion. He still does.

And that dominion was established through Jesus’ sacrificial death and resurrection. Just days prior to Jesus’ suffering and death we find this incident recorded in John 12:31-33, “31 [Jesus said] ’Now is the time for judgment on this world; now the prince of this world will be driven out. 32 But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.’ 33 He said this to show the kind of death he was going to die.” The death Jesus died drove out the prince of this world who had power over all nations. Therefore, when Jesus said He would draw all men to Himself, He meant the Gentile nations as well as Israel.

As we go forward in Romans 1:18-32, we need to keep all this in mind. Because Jesus came, Yahweh is no longer putting up with idolatry. For 2,000 years now His wrath has been revealed against paganism in the power of the Gospel. And the power of the Gospel has advanced very greatly even down to our time.

The United States was once a predominantly Christian country. Therefore, as the Church, we need to reiterate to all concerned, that if we turn away from Yahweh, the Creator God and His Son, Messiah Jesus, and instead become godless idolaters of ourselves, then the wrath of Yahweh will fall upon us. Indeed, it’s already upon us in what we’re seeing.

This past week, one of Carol’s doctors said to her, “we’ve never seen times like this.” And he’s not a young man. In an interview on The Rubin Report, Ashely St. Clair, a twenty-five year old conservative journalist stated that “so much of Gen Z feels out of control.” She noted that some within her generation are starting to realize that they’ve been tremendously lied to. This is part of the wrath. Many are feeling it. There’s something just not right with the way things are going. But, how did we get to such a place? We’ll see it in St. Paul’s description in Romans 1:18-32 of how the ancient Gentile world fell into paganism and idolatry.

Again we turn to Romans 1:18-20, “18 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 the 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.”

There are key concepts that arise in this revealed Word from the Lord. First is the claim that an uncreated, eternal, infinite and self-existent being transcendent to this universe who calls Himself Yahweh is our Creator, as well as Creator of everything that exists both seen and unseen. Second, is truth with a capital T. Third, is the suppression of truth. This is called deception and lies. It’s also called sin. Fourth, the complexity of everything that exists shouts out Design! And where there is design, there is a designer.

For thousands of years before Jesus, the nations of the world rejected the truth that there is an uncreated Creator God. We just recapped the reasons for that. But, when the time was right, Gentiles were given faith to respond to the Gospel. Almost three hundred years later Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Everyone in the empire became Christian like their emperor. 

When the Roman world accepted Messiah Jesus and became Christian, something very fundamental changed. This truth was accepted by the Gentile world — Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Therefore, for about the next sixteen hundred years Yahweh became the undisputed God of the European nations that succeeded the empire and also the lands that Europeans colonized. For all that time not only theology but science, art, music, and life itself flowed around the central idea of a Creator. The great cathedrals of Europe were built to the the glory of the Creator.

But, then, in the 1700’s came the so-called enlightenment. With it, the ancient lie of an uncreated, eternal, infinite, self-existing universe was resurrected from the pagan dust of antiquity. All this so we could be our own gods. Later, in the mid 1800’s the intellectual structure to doubt the Bible was set in place, as was the intellectual structure upon which to build the materialist, evolutionary view of science, history and culture. All this reached full flower in the 1900’s. And, by the end of that century something that previous generations would have scoffed at — atheism — was taking over the intellectual, moral, and cultural fabric of formerly Christian nations. Thus, the wickedness and godlessness of men was again suppressing the truth about the uncreated, Creator God. The ancient world denied the existence of an uncreated, eternal, infinite and self-existing Creator God. And since the mid-1800’s, we’ve been spending a lot of time and grant money in the West doing the same thing.

Truth with a capital T is at the root of our present situation. If this universe has an uncreated, self-existing Creator God, then everything He says about His universe is True. He knows what He did in Creation. He knows what He intended and what His eternal purposes are. Therefore, if we listen to Him, we also know the only real Truth that exists.

On the other hand, if there is no uncreated Creator and the universe itself just is, then truth can be anything we want it to be. As the pagan Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, said to Jesus during Jesus’ trial, “what is truth?”

Now, if there is no Creator God we should be able to make our own truth without limits. But this is not so. This week I saw a bizarre video in which a young mother admits she brought her young son to a veterinarian because he self-identifies as a cat. She tells that the vet refused to treat him. She’s not going to sue the vet. But, in making the video she wanted to bring attention to this situation which she believes needs rectifying. There should be vets who can practice veterinarian medicine on humans who self-identify as cats.

I pray this video is a hoax or parody. If not, it’s a tragic sign of the times, and the vet should have called child protective services. But parody or reality, it demonstrates that making our own truth appears to have distinct limits. If we really can make our own truth, why would anyone question this young mother’s insistence on having her son treated by a vet? The very fact that we can rebel against such nonsense proves that there is transcendent truth — truth that goes beyond any of us. A human is a human is a human and cannot be a cat. Such transcendent truth points back very clearly to a Creator God. For if there were no Creator God, a human could be a cat. If there were no Creator God, none of us would be able to rebel and call such a thing what it is: the mother is insane at best; demon possessed at the worst. 

Author, Greg Koukl, has been a Christian evangelist for fifty years. In his book, “Street Smarts”, Koukl makes an interesting observation concerning the destruction of truth. “The principal weapon at the enemy’s disposal allowing him to gain ground in the spiritual conflict, then, is not power but deception. If the basic strategy for Satan’s spiritual assault is spreading lies, then our most potent countermeasure in the battle against him is its opposite: spreading truth. . . . And here is the clue, the ‘tell,' the giveaway that reveals [a lying scheme of the enemy] and helps inform our own counteroffensive against it in battle. Look for the big spiritual lie that seems completely transparent, the obvious ploy that appears ridiculously ham-handed, the massive ditch that can’t be missed but the world doesn’t seem to see, the abyss the blind masses fall into without giving it a second thought. Find that and you will find the scheme.”

A monstrous lie of this kind is staring us in the face. It goes by the name of “self-identifying.” It’s mantra is: “my pronouns are. . .” News came a month ago that a new law in Connecticut has been defied by junior high school boys. The law requires that a tampon dispenser be installed in at least one male bathroom in every secondary school. The news was that in one particular school, the boys tore the dispenser off the wall twenty minutes after it was installed. As the news commentator asked, “what took them so long?”

It might be said that these youngsters are not yet sophisticated enough to understand the need for such a dispenser in a boys room. Give them time and they’ll believe and understand. And that’s basically what the school principal said. 

Now, I rather doubt that the boys who tore the dispenser off the wall were meditating upon the fact that they have a Creator God who has made us male and female, and His transcendent truth can’t be violated. But they were demonstrating that God’s transcendent truth — as yet uncorrupted in their young minds by the big lie — is naturally within them. Hopefully, as they mature they will stick to their rebellion against the big lie and not succumb to it.

The problem with these big spiritual lies is that they can be made to look very plausible. So it is with the macro-evolution myth Darwinism foisted upon the world — that one species can evolve into another. Darwinists make it sound like their unobservable, unscientific narrative is actually possible and even scientific. Thus, in the West, Darwinism has been used to deceive many into denying the existence of a Creator God.

We’re approaching two hundred years of Darwinism and the missing links are still missing. Not only that, but actual science is calling Darwin’s major assumption into question, namely that the environment (especially death and the so-called survival of the fittest) is the sole cause of all changes we see in animals and ourselves. Experimentation being done as we speak is revealing instead that the pre-Darwin model is more likely correct. This model is the assumption that the cause of changes in animals and ourselves comes from within an organism itself. And, unlike those before Darwin, we now know change comes solely from an organism’s DNA and all the complex mechanisms influencing it. 

This leads us to ask how DNA information came to exist in the first place? The simplest answer is the one most easily observable in the world. Wherever there is information, there is an intelligence behind it. Wherever there is programmable information, like DNA, there is an intelligence behind it.

Random chance playing out over immense measures of time means that blundering stupidity is responsible for life and everything we see. This idea itself is just plain stupid given what actual science is currently revealing about the incredible complexity of this creation. And that very stupidity is the “tell” that this is one whopper of a lie. Denial of a Creator God is the basic monstrous lie that brought the ancient world to sacrifice their children to gods and goddesses. It’s the basic lie that has brought formerly Christian Western civilization to the moral and spiritual morass we now find ourselves in: lie upon lie upon lie. But this is what happens when the sinful lust to be our own gods is allowed to play itself out without any restraint.

Years ago, writing in The New York Review of Books, Harvard “evolutionary biologist” and famed Militant Atheist, Richard Lewontin, admitted, “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises. . . and in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated, just-so stories because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.” There it is folks. The religion of materialism. Not science.

As author Evan Sayet says in his book, “Magic Soup, Typing Monkeys, And Horny Aliens From Outer Space,” what Lewontin should have written is: “We Militant Atheists who call ourselves ‘scientists’ take the side of atheism despite its patent absurdities, extravagantly failed promises, and wholly unsubstantiated just-so stories, because our loyalty to the truth is trumped by a commitment to our political cause.”

The truth of Yahweh, the Creator God, may not be the first doctrine a new believer will accept as they come out of the present atheist/materialist lie. However, Christians must understand that denial of Yahweh the Creator God is the foundational lie upon which all other lies rest. Denial of Yahweh is the denial of objective truth — transcendent truth outside of us. And without believing there is objective truth outside of us, the only other possibility is to believe whatever truth we want to believe on the inside of us. So, if a young child believes they’re a cat, they need to be affirmed in that belief. 

What makes the world sane is objective truth. Without it, men are winning women’s sports events. Stores have to close because prosecuting theft is racist. We shouldn’t farm because farming causes greenhouse gases. We shouldn’t have children because climate change will make it impossible to live on earth. All human males are evil. All white people are born racist. And on it goes.

As we dig further into Paul’s analysis in Romans 1:18-32 we’ll see how all these lies and more proceed out of the first, and greatest lie — that there is no Creator God. Right now we’re simply repeating what happened to the Gentile nations between the flood of Noah and Jesus Christ because this is the only way denial of a Creator God can possibly work itself out. And that’s God’s truth.

But we Christians need to let the whole modern world know what Paul proclaimed in Athens. The time for listening to the paganism and idolatry of the rebellious sons of God ended two thousand years ago. Yahweh no longer tolerates it. The consequences will be fierce. Therefore, repent. You can be saved from the lies by believing in the man Yahweh raised from the dead — the man who gave His life for yours, the man who said He is the way the truth and the life — Jesus of Nazareth. Amen.

All Bible quotes are from the NIV, except where otherwise noted.