A Depraved Mind – Evansville Bible Church

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Romans 1:28-32, And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper, 29 being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips, 30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful; 32 and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.

As we descend deeper into the dark pit of human depravity in Romans 1, don’t forget Paul began with the hope of verses 16-17. He declared he’s not ashamed of the gospel because it is the power of God to save all who believe because in the gospel God provides sinners with the very thing they need: the righteousness of God. Now Paul’s been detailing the history of man’s depravity and desperate need of the gospel. While many people think man is basically good and others think man is sick or in need of more education, God says man is cursed with original sin going back to the fall of man in Adam. And ever since then, all people everywhere are radically depraved, unable to do anything that pleases God in their own strength. We are all totally depraved. Although that doesn’t mean we’re as wicked as we can be, it means we’re infected with sin in every part of our being and apart from God’s grace we’d all spend eternity under the wrath of God.

Ephesians 2:1-3 gives us a four-point summary of our radical depravity.

Ephesians 2:1-3, And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, 2 in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. 3 Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.

What does God say about our spiritual condition?

We were dead in our sins.
We were captives to the devil.
We lived by the lusts and desires of our flesh and mind.
We were all children of wrath.

With that background, let’s do a quick review in Romans 1:18-27.

God’s wrath is real and a present reality against all sin.
We deserve God’s wrath because we suppress, reject, and replace the knowledge of God with idolatry as we live to please ourselves rather than glorify God.
God’s wrath is seen as God gives people over to their own sinful, self-serving desires. Hell will be made up of people who didn’t want God and they get what they wanted.
When God abandons us, He lets us defile and dishonor our own bodies. We see this in the multibillion-dollar pornography industry with millions of Americans visiting porn sites regularly. As God lets us slide down into grosser immorality, we become perverted to the point where women turn to lesbianism and men burn in their desire for other men. And today the perversion is even worse as men try to become women and women men.

All this moral corruption is evidence of God’s wrath revealed against ungodliness and unrighteousness. This morning we’re looking at the third abandonment as God turns us over to a depraved mind in verses 28-32. It’s perhaps the ugliest picture in the Bible of the godless heart and man’s thinking as he tries to live without God.

When I was working in the hospital in Boston, one day I visited the pathology lab. Several medical students were in there doing an autopsy on a cadaver. It was both fascinating and gruesome as they sliced and sawed and probed and cut to discover the nature of the woman’s disease. Pathology is the study of the origin, nature, causes, and development of a disease. That is what Paul is doing in these verses before us – a spiritual autopsy. With the knife of truth, he is cutting into mankind, exposing what’s in there, and frankly it’s not a pretty picture. The exposure of evil should make us long for the cleansing power of the gospel of Christ.

MAN’S REJECTION OF GOD

Romans 1:28, And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer…

The picture here is of men testing whether or not they think God has any value. It’s like testing a light bulb. You screw it in, if it turns on you keep it. If it doesn’t you throw it into the waste basket. That’s what man has done with God. We test Him, see what He’s like, and throw Him out. Like the Jews rejected Christ, “We don’t want this stone in our building.” This is exactly what mankind does with the true God. We don’t care what God says. We don’t like what God says. “Go away, God. We don’t want you or need you.” Job 21:14 concurs, “They say to God, ‘Depart from us. We do not even desire the knowledge of Your ways.’”

GOD’S REJECTION OF MAN – OK, try to live without Me.

Romans 1:28, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper.

Here is the third judicial abandonment in this passage. We were made to live in God’s presence, in fellowship with God, submitted to God’s authority, and feeding on God’s Word. When we run from God, things go haywire. God calls it a depraved or reprobate mind. Man does not think straight without God. It’s spiritual and moral suicide. He may be extremely intelligent, but his thinking will always be wrong. His motivations, reasoning, values, decision-making will always be wrong. He’ll be living for himself and end up doing things which are not proper. He ends up being a spiritual and moral fool.

That is where we are in our nation on every level. This is why we are flummoxed at the insane and ridiculous decisions we hear about every day in the news. One commentator wrote, “Turning away from the true God means cutting ourselves off from any ultimately accurate understanding of this world and our place within it.” Our culture today actually buys into the nonsense that our exquisitely designed ears and eyes evolved over many millions of years, or that we evolved from monkeys or apes. Our thinking is depraved.

MAN’S MENTAL AND MORAL CORRUPTION

Romans 1:29-31, 29 being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips, 30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful.

Here is Paul cutting deeply into that spiritually dead sinner, exposing the heart, the thought processes. What does he find? He doesn’t find a victim of oppression so common today. He doesn’t find a spark of divinity down there at the core. He doesn’t even find a god-like creature, like Shirley McLain, who stood on the shore and said, “I am god.” No, he finds at the core of our being, all of us, this seedbed of moral and mental corruption, our radical depravity. Everything we do has a sinful aspect to it and nothing we do is acceptable by God. Before Noah’s flood God describe man like this, “Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5).

If you aren’t as wicked as other people, it is only by the grace of God. As the 16^th century English preacher and martyr John Bradford said when he saw criminals being led to the scaffold, “There but for the grace of God go I.” We must understand that it is God’s restraining grace that keeps us from fully expressing our sinful hearts. And total depravity means we are helpless to change our own hearts. We all need new hearts, or we will perish in our corruption. And that’s exactly what God does as He makes us new creations in Christ Jesus. There is no room for the slightest self-righteousness as we survey this ghastly description of the depraved human heart. We see in each description something of our own hearts that makes us turn to the cross and thank Jesus He died for sinners just like us.

There are twenty-one characteristics given here of the depraved, God-forsaken human heart. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but Paul has put his finger on the most grievous of thoughts and deeds. These are what he finds as he performs this autopsy on the sinner under the wrath of God. Notice two words, “filled” and “full” in verse 29, indicating they are not half-hearted about their self-serving practices. Remember, they kicked God out as unapproved, so they are left to themselves.

There are four leading characteristics of the depraved, God-forsaken heart.

Unrighteousness is the deliberate rejection of God’s revealed will. R. C. Sproul said, “Every sin is cosmic treason against a sovereign God.”
Wickedness is that rebellious attitude insisting on having its own way with no concern for God or anyone else. You see this evil throughout history as men like Alexander the Great and his army march through enemy lands murdering, raping, and pillaging like global gangsters. You see it in Marxists like Stalin, Chairman Mao, or the Khmer Rouge slaughtering their own citizens by the millions.
Greed or covetousness is that restless desire for more. People sin because they like to sin, but the pleasure is temporary so they want more to fill the void.
Evil or malice is hatred and doing harm to other people who cross you.

The rest of these rotten fruits all flow out of the first four.

Envy not only wants more but resents his brother who has more than he. Or she resents her sister who is prettier than she. One author described envy as pure evil, as toxic and sickening to the envier as it is to everybody else.
Murder follows envy and is often the cause of murder. Cain murdered Abel because he envied his brother. Envy turns to hatred which turns to murder, although sometimes there isn’t a cause of murder.
Strife argues and insists on having the last word, even if it hurts the other person. Strife destroys marriages and families and friendships.
Deceit lies to gain an advantage, get out of a situation, or to keep a good front.
Malice secretly wishes something bad would happen to a competitor or someone you don’t like.
Gossips go around whispering rumors, whether true or false, to destroy other people’s reputation.
Slanderers take gossip a step further, also known as backbiting and smearing another’s character, a highly-honed political skill.
God-haters. Thomas Watson says the sinner would ungod God if he could.
Insolent, arrogant, or boastful are three expressions of pride, promoting yourself and letting others know how great you are. Cassius Clay was the paramount braggart, “I am the greatest.” Someone described arrogance as “a certain contempt for everyone except oneself.”
Inventors of evil – Coming up with ways and means to do even more creative evil. Porn suppliers must be “innovative” to come up with “product differentiation” to get “new market segments.” Just plain old pornography won’t keep them coming back; they have to stretch the boundaries to keep the money coming in.
Disobedient to parents in this list highlights how evil this is. The ancient Jews and Romans saw this as extremely dangerous. The punishment prescribed for a rebellious son was stoning in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 21:21). Proverbs 30:17 says, “The eye that mocks a father and scorns a mother, the ravens of the valley will pick it out, and the young eagles will eat it.”

The last four miserable characteristics all begin with the Greek letter alpha, an example of alliteration.

Senseless, meaning so blinded as to think evil is good and good evil. Isaiah 5:20 pronounced a woe on these: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.”
Faithless, don’t keep their promises, can’t be trusted.
Heartless have lost their natural affection for parents or children. There is a desensitizing of natural affections going on in our own nation. The news today talked about two 12-year-old friends who plotted to murder their parents and run away from home. One of them shot her father and then was found in the street with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Neither wound was fatal. The frequency and cruelty of not just shooting but raping and bludgeoning and abusing others is shocking.
Merciless or ruthless have no sense of human pity or compassion for the distresses of others.

Paul has opened the depravity of the human heart and put it on full display. This is what happens when men reject God and God turns them over to their own devices. We shudder when we see cockroaches or rats running across the floor. These are the cockroaches and rats of the depraved heart. One time when I was splitting logs, I recall taking a whack at one, it fell into two halves, and hundreds or thousands of ants poured out, reminding me of the human heart.

There’s an even worse quality of this depraved heart in verse 32.

MAN’S SPIRITUAL INSANITY

Romans 1:32, and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.

First, we know our sins deserve the judgment of death. No one sins without knowing sin deserves death. But there is a tendency to suppress the truth, override and harden our consciences so we can go on pleasing ourselves in spite of God’s threats.

Second, and here is the insanity, the bottom point of man’s slide into moral depravity. We chose to cheer others on in their sin. This is precisely what is happening today as adults who know better are affirming and cheering on those who are living a life of sexual perversion. They beat the drum to “be your own authentic self, be you, come out, display yourself publicly in the streets to show you are bold and courageous in identifying with perversion.” They present it as the cool thing to do. Everyone is doing it. You’re not alone. This is so evil because it is clearly against God and so will cause harm and pain to those who live such a lifestyle.

A sincere young lady challenged Oprah Winfrey about her affirming homosexuality and claiming to be a Christian at the same time, since the Bible clearly condemns it as sin. “Isn’t this a double standard?” she asked. Oprah’s response was, “I have a different view of Christian than you do.” The audience clapped in approval. “The God I serve doesn’t care if you’re tall, short, black, Asian or gay. I take full responsibility for my going to hell or heaven.” Ronnie Reagan is a representative for the Freedom From Religion Foundation. He says as a youngster he found the idea of God silly and refused to go to church. In a commercial he assures the world, “I’m Ronnie Reagan, life-long atheist, and not afraid to burn in hell.” (https://youtu.be/7INIhD9P0Pw)

Knowing they themselves deserve God’s judgment, they cheer others to go on in their depraved way of living. They assure others they are bold and courageous to openly flout and mock God’s standards

SO WHAT?
Paul, you’ve opened that cadaver and look at what a mess you’ve found in the God-forsaken, depraved human heart! You should have left it hidden out of view so we could all feel good about ourselves and assure ourselves we’re good enough in ourselves to work our way to heaven. No, doing that would be the cruelest, most awful thing to do.

We are here to hear God’s truth and thank God that man’s sin isn’t the final word. When we see our own depravity and natural inclination toward many of these sins, we can truly grasp our need of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. Paul isn’t telling us to try to do better. He isn’t urging us to polish our halos and fix ourselves up. There is a point when God gives us over to our own sin, but He hasn’t left us there. There is hope in God’s powerful message, the message of the gospel of the grace of God in Christ Jesus. Recognize your sin and accept through faith alone in Christ alone by grace alone that God promises to save even the chief of sinners. Make that promise a reality in your life.

And as God’s people who are being sanctified by His grace, it is God’s will for us to turn away from our depraved thinking and be renewed in the spirit of our minds. We need God’s Word and God’s Spirit to transform our thinking and motivate us to think in ways that glorify God.

Romans 12:2, And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.