Everyone Knows God

Romans 1:18-23

Immanuel – 9/18/22

Last week we began a new sermon series entitled “The Ministry of Reconciliation.” It is a series that is meant to give legs to many of the glories we beheld in Revelation. If God is making all things new, and He is largely doing it through His Church, then we had better be about it!

Last week, in 2 Corinthians 5:17-21, we learn that God is reconciling the whole world back to Himself through the gospel of Jesus Christ. It’s an amazing truth! For unless God’s plan fails, the world is not going to burn, it is going to be reconciled to God!

But more than that – stunningly – God has entrusted to us, His Church, the ministry of reconciliation. God’s plan for this whole fallen world is that it would be reconciled back to Him through the gospel of Jesus Christ, the very gospel we hold and herald.

2 Corinthians 5 also clearly reveals our identity in Christ: we are new creations and we are ambassadors. You cannot be a new creation and not be an ambassador. You cannot be an ambassador unless you have been recreated. If you are in Christ, then you are both: new creations and ambassadors. Therefore, to neglect one or the other, is to neglect – or live in disobedience towards – your identity in Christ.

This sermon series focuses particularly on the ambassador side of your identity. It is meant to teach and train you to fulfill your calling as an ambassador working to reconcile the world unto God.

Today we consider another stunning truth. No matter how it may appear, no matter what you are told, everyone knows God. And I do not mean that everyone knows that God exists. I mean that everyone truly knows the one-and-only living God, the Christian God.

Purpose

How is it that everyone knows God?

What is it that everyone knows about God?

Why is it that no one appears to know about God?

How does this help us in our ministry of reconciliation?

Read Romans 1:18-23

Fundamental Principles

Before we get to the text, an illustration:

A cricket moves along the ground. You also move along the ground. A cricket needs food to stay alive. You also need food to stay alive. Crickets reproduce. People reproduce. Despite these similarities, and countless others we can deduce, you and the cricket are worlds apart. So much so that your commonalities are far outweighed by the vastness of your differences.

Yet, the difference between you and the cricket is miniscule, compared to the chasm between you and the omniscient, omnipotent, infinitely perfect, eternal God of the universe. It is much easier to relate to a cricket, and understand the being of a cricket, than it is to the Being that is God.

In fact, God is so otherly, so far beyond our reckoning, that it should be impossible for us to perceive Him. Like a cricket cannot comprehend the nature of a human, to an even greater degree, we cannot comprehend the nature of God.

Though those statements are completely true, you must realize that they are not entirely true. After all, the sermon is titled, “Everyone knows God.”

Truly, it should be impossible for us crickets to perceive the infinite God; except that God did two completely astounding things in order for us to know Him. And we find these two things at the very beginning of the story.

God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion…over all the earth”…So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion…” -Genesis 1:26,27-28

First, God made us all in Him image. God placed parts of His nature inside of us. He hardwired Himself into us.

Therefore, as God’s image is within us, to know something true about ourselves is to know something true about God. And to know something true about God is to know something true about ourselves.

“There can be no separation between the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves. To the extent that we know ourselves truly, to the extent that we know God truly; the two are inextricably moored. This is part of what it means to be image of God.”

-K. Scott Oliphint “Covenantal Apologetics” pg 43

God hardwired this into us. He hardwired the knowledge of Himself into our very being. This means that we cannot truly live unless His image is being expressed within us. If His image is broken, we are broken. If we attempt to kill His image, we attempt eternal suicide.

The second thing that God did so we would know Him, is that He condescended. God blessed Adam and Eve, and He spoke a purpose to them. The very moment God spoke to man, He had to condescend through the vastness that separates us; so we could relate to Him and He to us, so that we could have a relationship. God wanted to condescend, so He created us to need relationship with Him.

And that relationship is fundamentally covenantal. Meaning, God blesses us and we are all obligated to worship Him and obey Him. And we primarily do this by having dominion through imaging Him. So, from the very beginning, God created us to be covenantal beings. If we want blessing from God, if we want a life that is fulfilling and joyful, if we want relationship with the Almighty, then we are obligated to worship and obey Him.

Promise on one side, obligation on the other – that’s the nature of covenant. But make no mistake, this is fundamentally founded on love. God promises to love us, through pouring out blessing a favor. In return, we are to love Him, through worship and obedience.

Our relationship to God is nothing like our relationship to crickets, because our relationship to God is fundamentally covenantal.

Therefore, every human being is bound by nature and bound by covenant, to worship and serve our Creator. And because this is how our first parents were created, imaging God and fulfilling the terms of the covenant was as easy as breathing.

That is, until the fall. With sin, God’s image was corrupted and the covenant broken. Then, like unknowing crickets, Adam and Eve immediately tried to hide from their Maker. But there is nowhere to escape the eye of God. In an attempt to kill the image of God, we had killed ourselves. The punishment for sin was, and always will be, death. Because not only is sin an offense against God, but it destroys our very nature.

In time, at the fulness of time, God condescended even farther. He became a man in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus perfectly imaged the Father and fulfilled the terms of every covenantal obligation. He, the perfect man, then stood in the place of the image breakers and covenant destroyers. He died our death, the death of a shamed criminal and a condemned rebel.

Now all who place their trust in Jesus, surrendering their brokenness and corruption unto Him, are reconciled to God. We are justified according to the covenant, and we are transformed – from one degree of glory to another – into the image of the Son of God; we are reconciled to God and He reconciled us to our true nature. We can truly have peace.

Now, to all who have been reconciled, Christ calls us into the world as new creations and ambassadors. We speak these glories to the dead and dying, that they might have life, that they might be reconciled unto God.

Now that we have established some fundamental principles, let’s return to our text.

Read vs 18-19

Knowing God

In verse 19, Paul makes an absolutely earth-shattering claim: What can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. The “them” in Paul’s statement, is found in verse 18: all godless and unrighteous men. And since we know from Romans 3:10 that no one is righteous, all godless and unrighteous men is all humanity. Paul is unashamedly stating that everyone knows God.

Once more, Paul is not claiming that everyone knows God exists, or has a sense that there is some higher power. No, Paul is talking about true knowledge of the true God. Knowledge of the God of the Bible, the only God, is plain to every single person. Everyone knows God as God truly is.

In fact, the word for known, as in what can be known about God, the Greek is gnostos. It means “to apprehend with certainty”; to know beyond a shadow of a doubt. That’s the kind of knowledge Paul says every human has regarding the Christian God.

It really is quite a claim. Then, in the next verse, Paul reveals exactly what it is that every person knows about God.

Read vs 20

Since the beginning of time, and from within the core of our being, every human knows three things about God: He is eternal, He is all powerful, and understands His divine nature. This last term, divine nature, is quite a general category. All the attributes of God are found within His divine nature. This means that everyone knows that God is love, He is good, He is omniscient, He is holy, He is merciful, He is Judge, and on and on.

And because we bear the image of God, we can see reflections of God in the things that He has made. Just as Paul writes, we clearly perceive knowledge of God through the things that God has made. God’s goodness in a summer rain, His power in a thunderclap, His beauty in a sunset, His love in a babbling baby. We humans see it all and we know from where is has come.

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims His handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. -Psalm 19:1-3

David writes that every day, all day, creation declares the glories of God. The last sentence of this passage means that there is not a single living person who does not hear creation’s declaration.

Again, every person knows God as God truly is; which is exactly why Paul writes – at the end of verse 20 – that all men are without excuse. So when you think of people in a remote Amazonian village, or those growing up in an Islamic society, know that they have enough knowledge embedded within them to have a covenantal relationship with God. They may not know the name of Jesus, but they certainly know about their Creator. All men are without excuse.

Ok, we have now thoroughly answered the question, “How is it that everyone knows God?” (1) We know God because He created us in His image, (2) He created us to be covenantal, (3) and we can see knowledge of Him reflected back to us through creation.

We know God because we are absolutely swimming in knowledge of Him: from the depths of our being (image bearers), springing out of our desires (which are intrinsically covenantal), streaming in from every corner of the universe (creation).

Also we have mostly answered the question What is it that everyone knows about God? In short, everyone truly knows the divine nature of God. But there is one more thing that everyone knows about God. And this is not knowledge that came with creation. This knowledge came with the fall.

Read vs 18

The fallenness of the world, the suffering of humanity, so much of what could be, isn’t; all of it points to the same, singular reality. It is heaven revealing that God’s wrath is against all the unrighteousness and the ungodliness of men.

You may ask, why is there so much suffering in the world? Because we are so deeply sinful. We were meant to image God as we exercised dominion. But because we have corrupted His image, everything under our dominion is likewise corrupted. The internal corruption we feel, is externally expressed in the corruption of our world. This cause and effect is the expression of God’s wrath. It is the consequence of a broken covenant.

Now we see that man clearly knows 2 things about God.

We know the nature of God (eternal, powerful, divine).

We know God’s wrath is extended towards us because we are ungodly.

This is the knowledge that every human being has of God, the knowledge that God has hardwired into us. Just as Adam and Eve discovered, God is definitively inescapable.

And because knowledge of God is part of our nature, and we are unable to escape it, we defiantly suppress that knowledge. Like verse 18 says, we suppress the truth.

Suppressing the Truth

Why does every single human willingly suppress the truth? Because, like Adam and Eve, we know we have been exposed and we are deeply ashamed. We hate it that we are not good enough. We hate it that God’s wrath is coming for us. And because we cannot escape these shameful realities, we do everything we can to deny them, to pretend like they don’t exist. We use lies like little fig leaves, and try to hide what is so nakedly true.

We suppress the truth of God, and we suppress the truth of ourselves.

This is why no one seems to know about God. Everyone has exchanged the truth of God for a lie. And humans are so profoundly good at self-delusion. We latch on to a lie so completely that it seems utterly true, to ourselves and to everyone around us.

But such self-delusion is absurd. Everyone believing in a lie does nothing to rescue you from the truth. And suppression of the truth has grave consequences.

For when we suppress the truth about God, and therefore suppress the truth about ourselves, we end up at war with our very identities. And we turn our world upside down seeking what is forever unattainable: autonomy. We are covenantal beings, made for relationship with God. Autonomy is diametrically opposed to our nature. Thus, we create for ourselves a world of delusion and lies, a world of futility and brokenness, a world of darkness.

And is this not the world that we see all around us. Men truly believing they are women and women truly believing they are men, murder of the unborn labeled a human right, the powerful profiting from the powerless.

Such suppression of truth, such darkness, is the expression of foolish hearts.

Read vs 21-23

There is no room in the Christian worldview for an agnostic; for someone who is unsure of the existence of God. Such ignorance does not exist. There is only truth and the willing suppression of truth: the refusal to acknowledge God as God truly is.

This means that, according to Scripture, all agnostics, all those who place their faith in science, all Buddhists, Mormons, Muslims, non-Messianic Jews, all who do not fear God, all are gathered together and categorized as atheistic: deniers of the true and living God. We have all exchanged the truth of God for a lie. We’ve sold the glory of the immortal God for the fleeting things we can see, touch, and taste.

And once more, we are all without excuse, because we would rather have 30 pieces of silver rather than the glory of God. No one is guilty of ignorance. All are guilty of rebellion. All are enemies of God. All will face His wrath.

As Paul writes to the Ephesians:

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. -Ephesians 2:1-3

Because of who we are, from our deepest desires to our most fleeting thoughts, all are touched by the lie. Sin pervades everything. This is the same as saying that we are totally deprave. We are, by nature, children of wrath. And it certainly does not look like everyone knows God.

Ok, we have answered the first three questions. We know how it is that we all know God. We know what it is that we know about God. And we know why no one appears to know God.

Ministry of Reconciliation

Now let us answer the final question. How does all of this help us in our ministry of reconciliation?

Because we have what every human heart desperately desires. We have the gospel. And whether people know it or not, the gospel satisfies the deepest longing of the human heart: the longing to be reconciled to God.

But God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by His blood, much more shall we be saved by Him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by His life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. -Romans 5:8-11

Look at all the antidotes to the sinful condition in this passage! When we deserved wrath, God showed His love by giving His one and only Son. When we were covenantally condemned, Christ justified us with His own blood. When we were dead, God gave us life. This is the greatest news possible; we sinners can be reconciled unto God!

The problem is that unbelievers may not realize the goodness of the gospel. They believe in the lie so thoroughly that they are lost in the darkness of self-delusion. They are blind to the truth. They are unable to see the light.

Therefore, if we are going to be successful ministers of reconciliation, we need to show people the Gospel. We are covenantal beings, made to have relationship with God, and every time we speak Scripture, God condescends once more, speaking to His image bearers, calling them back into covenant. The very fabric of our being comes alive as we hear God’s word.

Either that, or we recoil, remembering the truth and the coming wrath.

Regardless of the outcome, if we are going to be effective ambassadors, we need to show people God’s word, not our opinions.

To be effective ambassadors, we need to be able to diagnose the unbelieving condition. We understand that everyone knows God, we understand what it is that people know about God, and we understand that everyone suppresses that truth.

And because we know this, we immediately have an advantage. We understand the unbelieving position better than the vast majority of unbelievers.

But, usually, we do not deal with categories of people. We deal with individuals. Therefore, we need to be able to diagnose the unbelieving condition of the particular person you are talking to. What is the particular way that person is suppressing the truth of God? What is the lie they are believing?

So, when you are engaging with an unbeliever, it is your job to listen carefully and ask lots of questions. Truly try to understand their way of thinking. Because, because they are covenantal beings created in the image of God they cannot escape the truth. Embedded within their lies are actual truths: truths about themselves, truths about the world, truths about God.

Brothers and sisters, those truths are what we are looking for. What are the truths embedded within their lies? If we can identify them, then – with prayer and the Spirit’s guidance – we can gently offer God’s word shed the light on their lie. That tiny truth is a potential highway to the much larger truth of all reality, the truth of God.

It is impossible to explore all the ways we can do this, but I want to give you one example of how this might work. To be sure, this is example is far more simplistic than real life, but for the sake of this sermon, it gives you an idea.

After speaking and listening with someone at length, you come to understand that because they believe they have endured so much pain, how on earth could God love them?

Identify the lie: If pain exists, God is not loving. God is certainly not loving towards me.

Identify the truth embedded within the lie: Pain does exist, and it is a terrible problem.

Pray. Ask for the wisdom and guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Before responding, remember that we are covenantal beings, and we are covenantal because God condescended. So how is their lie undone by God’s condescension through the gospel?

Gently answer with gospel principles:

Pain does exist, and it is a terrible problem. Almost everything we humans do is an attempt to escape pain. But God entered our pain by becoming a man in the person of Jesus Christ.

He endured every hardship common to humanity, and then the very worst of suffering and shame as He was crucified on a criminal’s cross. This was a demonstration of God’s great love for you. He loved you so much that He sent His one and only Son to soak up all the suffering we deserve.

And if we believe in Him, we will not perish, but have eternal life; an eternal life where God will wipe away every tear and every sorrow. He will take this broken world and make all things new.

If the Spirit so chooses, the very fabric of that person’s being will come alive as they hear God’s word offered with gospel application. Either that, or they will recoil, remembering the truth and the coming wrath.

Regardless of acceptance or rejection, such a strategy will help every ambassador of Christ fulfill the ministry of reconciliation. This is how we can hear the unbeliever’s words and respond to their heart.

Everyone is made in God’s image and are covenantal beings. Therefore, every knows God as God truly is. But every unbeliever suppressed the truth of God and believes in a lie.

But because we cannot escape the truth of God, make it your habit to identify truths embedded within lies. Apply the gospel to those truths. See what the Holy Spirit does next. Such is the task of the ambassador of Christ. Such is the ministry of reconciliation.