The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 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. (Romans 1:18-20)
In his continuing exposition of the foundational Christian doctrine in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans, Pastor Dan Gardner (Assembly of God Church, Cohocton, New York) used the term “natural man” to describe secularists who steadfastly deny our Creator God.
The natural man looks into the mirror and sees his god: himself, the egotist for whom there is no higher power than his own mind. The natural man is he who, like Protagoras (quoted in Plato’s Theaetetus), declared, “Man is the measure of all things,” meaning that there are no independent, transcendent standards of right and wrong, that every person is free to make his own rules.
Natural man found great comfort in the 1920s and afterwards in the mind manipulation hypotheses of Sigmund Freud. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud wrote that the problems of western civilization arose from conflict between morality and deep-seated sexual desires. The result was debilitating guilt; the solution was to junk morality and come to terms with one’s sexual drives. By implication, the purpose of humanity was no longer aspiration toward the highest of ideals, but surrender to sexual drives. The future of humanity was not upward, but downward toward the sewer of moral relativism. The human soul was thrown out and replaced by worship of our genitalia. We see the results today in our juvenile adulation of hedonistic sensual gratification in movies, TV, and the print media.
As Paul makes clear, however, even the dullest of intellects can perceive order in the immensity of space surrounding our planet, in the vast panorama of the sun and stars and our moon, which move in regular patterns, from day to day and over periods of many years. Suppressing the truth of such obvious evidence of design in the cosmos is to turn one’s back on God and to invite His wrath.
He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. (Ecclesiastes 3:11)
A current example of large scale suppression of the truth is our climategate scandal. Secularists who fancy themselves capable of controlling the weather of the entire planet and brook no challenge from God’s Truth go to criminal lengths to manipulate and to fabricate data, as well as to prevent publication of contradictory evidence. Without regard for the attendant, immense setbacks in standards of living, particularly in poorer countries, secularists are intent upon imposing their unsupportable hypothesis of man-made global warming upon all of humanity. . . . .
