by jimwalton » Wed Mar 23, 2016 12:45 pm
In Romans 1.18ff., Paul writes that people, motivated by sin, suppress the truth, as if truth was there and out in the open, but people choose to put it in a box (or a prison, so to speak), sit on the lid, and hold it down. There are evidences of truth, and evidences of God, but people deny that and continually and deliberately push it away until they can't see it or sense it anymore. Verse 21 says the result is that their thinking becomes "futile and their foolish hearts were darkened." People make a choice. Though there is evidence of God, that evidence is refutable. Though God had revealed himself through more than natural revelation, but also through special revelation, that evidence is also refutable. (When it comes right down to it, all evidence in all of our disciplines is ultimately refutable. People make a choice what to believe.) Paul argues that people had enough evidence to go on as far as not just believing in God but knowing him, but intentionally rebelled and followed a path of their own choice. Because they rejected Truth, their thinking and knowledge became perverted (corrupted and distorted from its original meaning). I guess we would say it became secular: certainly still knowledge and truth, but "futile"—missing pieces that are supposed to be there. They were living in the shadows, only seeing part of the picture. Richard Hays writes, "As great-grandchildren of the Enlightenment, we like to think of ourselves as free moral agents, choosing rationally among possible actions. But Scripture unmasks that cheerful illusion and teaches us that we are deeply infected by the tendency to self-deception and are in bondage to sin (Rom. 6.17), which distorts our perceptions, overpowers our will, and renders us incapable of obedience (Rom. 7)."
Romans 1.22: "Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools." For all their smarts, at best they were still only seeing part of the picture. (We know that "fool" in the Bible carries with it a context of the person who doesn't see God in the equation.) The Interpreter's Bible adds: "The man who makes his own thoughts and desires his supreme standard of judgment has in effect abandoned the attempt to know what is the final truth—God’s will and nature—and consequently find himself at last engulfed in mental impotence and confusion. Those who put their trust in human wisdom (and to the Greek type of mind this was and is the highest form of virtue) are misled and end in a morass of folly. Cf. 1 Cor. 1.18-25.
"When man forsakes his true condition, his fate is that he becomes not only ignorant, but ignorant of his own ignorance. He was made to find his perfect freedom in humble dependence upon God; again and again he rebels against his created status, claiming a kind of autonomy that always eludes him, and discovers that his vaunted liberty is only slavery. When he claims a kind of wisdom that he cannot really achieve, he falls into all kind of darkened but pretentious error."
Christianity claims that God is trying desperately to reach you, but you have blinded yourself, hardened your heart, subjected your mind to darkness and futility, and you are unreachable until you start to seek God and allow him to take the blinders off your eyes.