"Without Excuse"

 Romans 1:20

Dear Friends in Christ,                                                                                   

   This morning I’m starting a brand new sermon series that I am entitling “Back to the Basics” and I’ve got to tell you that I am really excited about it.  I don’t know how long it’s going to last.  I don’t know how many sermons it will consist of.  But I do know one thing: I know that what we’re going to be talking about in these sermons is something that we all need to hear.  Let me explain why.

   The sermon series that I started back in January and that I just completed last Sunday was called “Back to the Bible.”  It was a series that grew out of a plague that has swept across all denominational lines over the past few decades and that only seems to be getting worse.  We called that plague “biblical illiteracy,” which is the failure on the part of many Christians today to read and study and know their Bibles well.  Because of this plague, knowledge of the most basic doctrines and teachings found in the Bible has declined significantly.  And along with that has come an acceptance and an infiltration into the church of many false and aberrant beliefs that simply do not line up with what God tells us in his Word, something that is being consistently backed up by polls that are being conducted today and that are designed to gauge where Christians stand on certain biblical doctrines.

   For example, in the June 27 issue of the Pastor’s Weekly Briefing that I receive from Focus on the Family, the front page article cited a study of 35,000 adults that was recently completed by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.  The first sentence in that article stated: “The good news is that Americans are deeply religious.”  Then it went on to say that according to this study 92% of Americans believe in God, 74% believe in life after death, and 63% say their respective Scriptures are the word of God.  Those are pretty encouraging statistics considering the highly secularized world that we find ourselves living in right now.  But then came the bad news.  And the bad news was that while most Americans are deeply religious, the religious beliefs they hold to don’t line up with the Bible, especially when it comes to the most important doctrine of Scripture, the doctrine of salvation.  That doctrine clearly teaches that there is only one way to be saved from our sins, only one way to get to heaven, and that is through Jesus Christ.    As he himself stated it in John 14:6: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Elsewhere in John 10:9 Jesus says: “I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved.”  Peter understood the exclusivity of Christ when it came to salvation, and in Acts 4:12 he couldn’t have stated it more clearly when he said: “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved."  This is Christianity 101, my friends, Christianity at its most basic. 

   Yet according to the Pew Forum survey I referred to before, 70% of Americans who have a religious affiliation, which simply means that they are members of a church, believe many religions can lead to eternal life.  It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Jew, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, all of which reject Christ as Savior.  They all lead to heaven.  Now that’s discouraging enough, but it gets even worse when you start breaking it down by religious groups.  For example, 83% of American Protestants believe many religions can lead to eternal life; 79% of Catholics believe this, as do 57% of evangelical church attenders, which are the most conservative Christians there are.

   So obviously something is wrong here.  And I believe part of the problem rests with our postmodern culture where it is deemed rude, intolerant, insensitive, bigoted, and politically incorrect to say that there is only one way to heaven and that way is through Jesus Christ.  For that smacks of exclusivism.  “And who are you to say that those who don’t believe in Jesus will not be in heaven.  That’s being awfully judgmental, don’t you think?”  And yet it’s not we who are saying that.  It’s God himself who says it over and over again in his Word. 

   But I think another part of the problem rests with the fact that because Christians are not reading their Bibles these days and because they are not attending church and Bible studies regularly and faithfully, they don’t know even the basics of the faith anymore and therefore they are much more susceptible and receptive to the false teachings that are so prevalent in our world today.  And what’s even more frightening is that many are not just ignorant of the teachings of the Bible, they are abandoning them altogether.  In fact, according to an American Religious Identification Survey, almost 30 million Americans now claim no religion at all, which is twice as many as 10 years ago.

   So what can be done?  Well, when I was a young boy playing on our parochial school basketball team, we had a coach named Bud Dietiker.  And whenever we’d get into a rut and lose several games in a row, Coach Dietiker would take us back to the fundamentals of the game.  We’d spend our entire practices working on those fundamentals: passing, dribbling, free throws, proper shooting technique, and so on.  And it wouldn’t be long before we’d be back on the winning track again.

   So in this new sermon series I want to take us back to the fundamentals of the Christian faith.  Now in case you’re thinking, “But I already learned all that stuff in Confirmation.  Why do I need to hear it again?” I want you to first of all understand that I’m going to do my very best to present these fundamentals to you in a new and fresh way that will hopefully keep you coming back, anxious to hear what’s coming up the next week.  But I also see this as a way of reviewing and reinforcing what you may have learned and probably forgotten in Confirmation class, however long ago that may have been.  And let’s face it.  For some of us, it’s been a long, long time!

   It’s kind of like an article I came across sometime ago relating to the collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis on Aug. 1 a year ago.  Thirteen people died that day and many others were injured.  As engineers wrestled with the cause of this 8-lane bridge’s failure, they noted one key component.  It had to do with an engineering term called “redundancy.”  Redundancy means support is duplicated to ensure safety.  In other words, where you could use one bolt to hold something in place, two bolts are used.  That way if one bolt fails the other maintains necessary support.  Bridges today are built with redundancy, but when the Minneapolis bridge was completed in 1967, “redundancy” was not a federal requirement.  And experts feel that is what contributed to its collapse.

   Well, doctrinal redundancy is likewise essential to maintain doctrinal strength and integrity in our churches as well as our personal lives.  And I really feel that at no other time has this become more necessary than it is today because just about every belief of our Christian faith is being challenged or called into question these days.  So we need to be well-grounded in those beliefs or else we’re going to get swept away in the currents of a postmodern culture that are going to carry us far away from the God we love and the Bible he’s given us as a revelation of himself and his will.

   Having said all that, let’s get started.  Let’s get back to the basics.  And what more basic question could we possibly ask than this one: How can we know that there is a God?  What if somebody asked you that question?  What would you say?  I suspect most Christians would probably say something like this: “We know there’s a God because the Bible says so.”  Well, that may be a nice answer to give to your fellow believers, but for those who could care less about the Bible, for those who look upon the Bible as nothing more than a book of myths and fairy tales, an answer like that is not going to be very convincing.  So we need more.  And I believe the Apostle Paul addresses this issue quite well for us in our text for today when he says: “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.”  To put it another way, we know there is a God because of the creation that we see all around us.  And according to Paul, the evidence is so convincing, so overwhelming that men are without excuse.  In other words, nobody will be able to stand before God on Judgment Day and say, “I’m sorry, but I didn’t know you existed” because the handiwork of God and the fingerprints of God can be seen everywhere we look in this world and, King David would add, everywhere we look beyond this world.  In Psalm 19:1 he says: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.”

   One of the things that I love about living in the country is that at nighttime we are free from the lights of the city.  So we get a pretty well untainted and unobscured view of the nighttime sky.  And it can be breathtaking.  For you don’t just see individual stars dotting the heavens.  You can actually see clouds of stars.  Do you have any idea how many stars there are?  Sometime ago I came across an article which stated that a team led by an Australian astronomer calculated that the number of stars in the known universe is 70 sextillion.  That’s a 7 followed by 22 zeroes!  That unfathomable number is said to be more than the grains of sand on every beach and in every desert on earth.  Well, where did all those stars come from?  Some would say they are the result of the Big Bang, that back around 14 billion years ago all the matter in the universe was infinitely compressed into a ball about the size of a grapefruit, some say as small as the dot of an i.  And then for some unknown reason that ball exploded producing the expansive universe that we know today.  In fact, listen to this article that appeared in the Post-Dispatch earlier this year… (in AIC book)

   Well, you know what?  I believe that.  I believe there was a big bang, only it didn’t take place 14 billion years ago and it wasn’t caused by blind random forces acting upon one another.  Rather it was caused by a Creator God who started with nothing and who ended up with everything.  In Isaiah 45:12 this great and powerful God says: “It is I who made the earth and created mankind upon it. My own hands stretched out the heavens; I marshaled their starry hosts.”  And I love how Gen. 1:16 puts it: “God made two great lights--the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.”  So after telling about the creation of the sun and the moon, Moses, the author of Genesis, says, almost as an after thought:  “And oh yeah, he also made the stars.”  Yes, the same 70 sextillion stars that number more than the grains of sand on the earth.  He made those also.  Now some people say, “Well, why did he make so many stars?  Isn’t 70 sextillion kind of like overkill?”  And the answer to that question is found in that same Ps. 19 verse that we looked at earlier: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”  All those stars have been placed in the heavens as ample evidence that there is a God and that God is far wiser and far more powerful than we could ever imagine.  And amazingly, this great and awesome God longs to have a personal relationship with you through his Son Jesus Christ so that you can one day live in his glorious presence forever.

   Well, our time for today is up.  But we have touched on something this morning that definitely needs more attention because of the prominence and popularity that it enjoys today.  And that is the whole theory of evolution.  So next week when we get together, we’re going to spend some time looking at some major flaws in that theory that will reveal to us the absolute impossibility that it could have ever occurred.  Until then, you might want to take a drive out into the country on a clear starlit night this week and just spend some time looking up into the heavens and allowing them to declare to you the glory of God and to proclaim to you the work of his hands.  Amen.