So Romans chapter 1 verse number 18, it says, For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who hold the truth in unrighteousness. Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has showed it unto them. Let's pray. Father, we thank you and praise you, God, for what you do. We pray that you watch over us, help us to serve you. Thank you, Lord, for this opportunity to study your word. I pray that you speak to us, Lord, through this message that's all said here. Lord, we ask it in your son Jesus' name. Amen. Now, I want to preach on the idea of ignoring the truth. To give you a little bit of contextual understanding before I start getting into more stuff, let's consider what this part of the passage is. Up until now, we've been talking about a lot of things as far as introducing the book of Romans, talking about the gospel, some basic things to do with that. But now Paul's getting to a part of the passage where this is what the rest of the chapter is going to be about. And he's introducing two of the first thoughts right now, that being God as the Creator and the fact that men have chosen to reject Him. Those are your two thoughts. He is the Creator. Men know that. They can see that. It's very evident. But people reject it. So I'm actually quite excited to get into the passage because if you know me, you know that I love to actually talk a lot about Daniel. Daniel Amo, not Fadi's son, made the mistake, writing home from the Bible study the last time he was with me, of asking me a question, what do you say to someone who says something about evolution? I don't remember what it was. And about 45 minutes later, I finally realized that I had been talking and talking. No, I wasn't that bad. He got a much bigger answer than he ever wanted to to that question, and he himself will probably never ask me another question again. But the thing is, it's a subject that I'm very passionate about. It's something that I, part of why I became a Christian is because of the realization that there's a creator. And it's something that we'll be talking about in June. The three Sundays coming once I get back, we'll be talking about this idea of being able to see God in creation. We'll talk about some things concerning science and the Bible and all of that, some things I'm really excited to get into. But before we jump to that, we have the introduction to it, which is this passage. And that's the fact that God is saying that his wrath is revealed. And this is where I say it tells you what the rest of the chapter is about. He's telling you the wrath of God can be seen in this, and then he mentions how that there's men who hold the truth. They know the truth, they know what God says, they know that God's real, they know all of that, but they hold it in unrighteousness. Because it's been revealed to them, they just don't want to accept the truth. And so what you're going to get is a few verses about the truth that God is the creator, and then the rest of the chapter is going to be about God, how His wrath is revealed against those kind of people, how that eventually He turns them over to their sins and lets them destroy their lives the way that they want to. And then chapter two gets into His judgment and how that once they're done making a destructive mess of their life, that they're going to have to answer to God for what they did with that life. And so that's what the outline from this point of the chapter goes. And admittedly, one half of that I enjoy preaching a little more than the other, but the other half is just as important. So we'll spend our time in both of them. But today we're going to preach what is an introduction. So there's a lot of verses that I'm going to use. that, for example, they'll come up again in maybe a month or so when we get to that part of the passage. We'll use a lot of the same verses all over again when we talk about what it means to be without excuse, because the ideas go hand in hand together. The idea that men know the truth, the truth has been revealed, they just don't want to see it, and the idea that men are without excuse are really, in a lot of ways, the same idea. There are two sides of the same coin, I guess I would say. And so that's where this is going. I want to give you that context to understand where this part of the chapter is going, what this part of the study is going towards, so you know what we're pressing towards. But today I just want to pause to focus on what we have just read. We already talked last week about the wrath of God is revealed from heaven and what that looks like, how that a God who's so long-suffering, so merciful, how you can push Him to a point that He says, okay, I'm done bothering you. just what that really means and how that does show you God's anger that He has towards sin. Now, we cut that message a little bit short last week because we had some distractions with people online, but regardless, that's what we talked about last week. This week I want to pick up in the last half of that verse where it says, For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against men and all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who hold the truth in unrighteousness. I want to talk about that phrase, holding the truth in unrighteousness, and what that means. Now, we're going to use verse 19 to understand it. We'll also read a few other verses in the chapter. Like I said, we'll come to those verses later and talk about them in detail, but today we're just going to touch on them because it gives you the context of where we're going. But this idea that men hold the truth in unrighteousness means that they have the truth. They hold it. They know what it is. It's not something that's intangible to them. It's not something that is completely foreign and they have no idea. Now the truth you're going to see in the next few verses is that there is a God and that God is the creator of all things. Now, it doesn't mean that everybody in the world knows who Jesus is and everybody in the world knows how to be saved and everybody in the world knows the gospel. That's not what he's getting at in this passage. He's taking it much more basic, much more elementary than that. He's saying that everybody in this world has the truth revealed to them that there is a God. Now, what they choose to do with that truth is up to them. And what He's saying in this context is that there are people who hold that truth, but in unrighteousness. Like, they're holding the truth. They know what it is, but they're not willing to believe it. They're not willing to do with it what God intends to be done with it. They're not using it rightly or correctly. They are, as the rest of the chapter is going to explain, they're rejecting it. When they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, and so forth. But that's what it means. Like, in the actual context, what it means to hold the truth in unrighteousness is what you read in the next several verses when he talks about men knowing God and glorifying Him not as God, which we'll read some of that. But I want you to understand that there's two ways you can understand this. In the context, that's what it means, what I just said. But there's another idea, another aspect of this, other than just denying the truth in the sense that you know it, but you don't want to believe it. And it's how men misuse the truth, how the men take the truth and use it and abuse it and use it for things they shouldn't. They hold it in unrighteousness. as a false prophet taking, you know, like the devil, taking a few verses and misusing them to try to make them say whatever he wants. That's another way that people hold the truth in unrighteousness. That's not the direct intention of what he's saying in this verse, but that is another understanding of it. So we'll talk about both of those if we have time. But if we keep reading, verse number 19 says, Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them, for God hath shown it unto them. So he says what God wants them to know about him, it's been made manifest. Now there's many layers of what you can unpeel from that. The first is understanding that The knowledge that there is a God, like the evidence and proof that God exists, that it's not a fairy tale that's made up by men, there's some evidences we'll talk about in a minute that are available everywhere in the world, doesn't matter where you live, everybody can see the fingerprints and evidence that there is a God. Now, on the other side of that, when he says that everything that men need to know about God has been revealed, that goes a little bit deeper though. That everything He wants you to know about Him is not just revealed in creation itself. Creation teaches you a lot about who God is, but the Bible is where God ultimately reveals Himself. Creation is just a taste. It's just an appetizer to get you interested in knowing God, so that once you begin to believe there is a God and your heart wants to know Him, you have the opportunity to get to know Him through the letter that He wrote to you. So he's saying that there's nobody in this world who is completely cut off from the truth that there is a God because creation speaks to this and then after creation he has always had people who represent him here on the earth and he's always had some portion of his word here available on this earth so that everybody has that access. That's why later he'll say they are without excuse. Now, if we keep reading, I say these are the verses we're not going to get into much detail today because we'll come back to them in just a few weeks. It says, in verse 20, for the invisible things of God, sorry, the invisible things of Him from creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse. Because when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man and to birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, through the lust of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves, who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. So you want to see, like, in the context, what it means to hold the truth in unrighteousness. That's what it is. It's that creation has declared to you, it has preached to you. In fact, we're going to see in Psalm 19 in just a moment that every day the sun rising and setting is a preacher who goes across the sky preaching the message to you that there is a God in heaven. He rises and he sets every day preaching to you the message there is a God who created this. That this is not just something that happened, it didn't just come about, but there is a God who designed all of this to work so perfectly as it does. And so as that sun passes across your sky, as this world turns and all that stuff, every day God says you're being preached to that there is a God. And He says, yet there are men in this world, and now it's becoming the majority by a lot, there is a majority of men in this world, especially the area we live in, who see the sun and say, well, you know, that just came about. There was an explosion, things came together, and over time it all accumulated. and started to build its own gravitational forces. It began to spin. Some of it broke the laws of physics and began to spin backwards, but, you know, that's another story. And so all these things started happening and, yeah, there's no God. The sun just... created itself. Gravitational universal forces that we can't explain how they started, where they come from, because we can understand why they exist after something would be created. We can't explain why they would exist before, but they all happened and stuff started to accumulate and make what it did. And now you have all these planets and things, and that's how it all works. And he's saying they know the truth. They can look at this universe and see that it's not logical what is being presented, but they take that truth and they hold it in unrighteousness. They are misusing the truth. They're not using it rightly. They're not doing with it what God would want them to do. And so he says, they turn the truth of God into a lie. And what that is, is that they begin to worship the creature more than the Creator. And he defines for you what he means by creature in the verse by showing, he's not talking about animals specifically. He says they make images of animals and four-footed beasts and birds and all this stuff, but he says they also make images of men. And so when he says creature, he means creation. that they began to worship creation more than the Creator, that they began to worship their understanding of the universe more than the One who created the universe. They're beginning to worship their philosophies about the universe more than the One who created it. That's what he's getting at when he talks about holding the truth in unrighteousness, is that we live in a world where the vast majority of people around you worship the scientists who wrote the book and take him at his word so that they don't believe he could possibly lie to them about anything. His word is infallible. It is pure. And when you put it against the word of God, they say, well, God's word is a lie. That is truth. And you think about the craziness of that. They think that because a man put doctor in front of his name and wrote a book, and there's a lot of Christians have that same way of thinking, but we'll stay off of that for now. But they think because a man put doctor in front of his name, and I'm not saying he didn't study for it, but he put doctor in front of his name and he wrote in a book claiming that he did research, but not telling you how much he was paid to do that research and that he was asked to produce certain results and all these things, that there was an agenda behind all of it. That because he wrote that book, he must be honest. Nobody would ever lie to you who wrote a book. Surely, there's no books in the libraries that have lies in them. There's no books in a classroom that have lies in them. When in reality, they know themselves, the people who produce these things, that much of what's in it's been proven to be a lie for more than 100 years. And I'm not going to get, again, that stuff we'll get into maybe in the coming weeks if we have time to work in the messages. But there are so many things that you were taught in school, things that you find in a common textbook, a common textbook that if you were to do even the bare minimum research on it, you would find it's completely false. Some of it's even stuff you don't have to do research. You just have to actually open your eyes and look at the world you live in. I mean, think about it. You've been told that for a stalactite or stalagmite to form in a cave, that it takes millions or possibly even billions of years. If you've ever visited any of the old buildings around here, because they're built like basements, you know, like man-made caves, you will find stalactites growing in buildings that are less than 100 years old. I mean, you understand, like, it stood out to me that I went to just outside of Brussels where they have a concentration camp there. I took Dr. Baker there when he was visiting. And we're walking through this concentration camp that's from World War II. So it's less than 100 years old, this building, right now. And there are stalactites everywhere, growing from the ceiling, hanging down. If you know what I mean, it's the thing in the cave that hangs from the ceiling. They're everywhere. They've painted over top of them to try to keep them from growing. And they started growing through the paint. I mean, you think about that. You're being told when you go in a cave, don't touch that. It took millions of years for that to form. And if you touch it, the oil on your finger is going to mess it up. And it's not going to be able to grow anymore. It may take another billion years to grow just a few centimeters and all this kind of crazy stuff. And they have a stalactite in the concentration camp from 100 years ago this long that's been painted over three times. And it just keeps growing through the paint. But the oil on my finger is going to stop it from growing. Think about that. You don't have to be a scientist to realize that somebody's not telling you something that's correct. You've been told the reason why your universe has to be old, like there's no reason, there's no possibility that it could be young. It has to be old is because anywhere you dig in the earth, if you dig a little bit, you'll find that the layers of earth, the strata changes as you go down, that there's a layer that's like this and like this, and it's all equal across the earth so that you can tell anywhere in the world you are. If you just dig down, you can figure out what time period that was. But yet you cannot find that anywhere in the entire world. You'll find stuff where natural disasters and stuff in local environments have affected it so that there's layers of stuff deposited because of that. Anywhere there's ever been a flood, you'll find that because the sediment deposits in a certain way after a flood. But that picture you've seen in science your entire life, if you went to public school, you had that beat in your head, that picture. that there's this layer of earth that's this color, and this layer that's this color, and this layer that's this color, and in this one you find this, and in this one you find that, and all the dinosaur bones are evenly distributed, and you know all this, that nothing passes from one layer of strata to the other. You can't find that. In fact, there's a joke in my area that nobody who works in a coal mine is an atheist. And most people who say it think you're saying it because it's a hard job. But in reality, the saying mostly comes from the fact that if you work in a coal mine, you know that's a lie. Because if you're digging up coal, you'll find trees. fossilized, sticking through coal beds that were supposed to have formed over thousands of years. And yet there's a tree that survived through, actually, I'm sorry, millions of years. There's a tree that somehow survived for millions of years to let the coal grow around it and then fossilize in the middle of it. You have hammers and all this kind of stuff, tools, that were not supposed to be invented those millions and billions of years ago in the middle of all that. I mean, you see where the layers of strata are mixed. It's like there was a flood that somehow deposited everything. And now it's all together, mixed together, because it was deposited by a flood that just happened to flood the entire world. So what I'm saying is, like, you don't have to be a scientist just to look at basic stuff that you can observe. Like, you can observe the universe around you, and it's very evident that there is a truth, that there is a creator, there is a God somewhere out there who did all of this. Basic logic would dictate to you that something so precise and so perfect as what we have in this universe could not come about by accident. Like, I don't know about you, but I have never accidentally created a masterpiece. Like, I've created some food that was edible by accident. I've created a few things that were decent by accident. I've said some stuff that actually turned out to be smart that I said by accident. You know, it's occasionally I do something good by accident. But I've never, you know, created a masterpiece. I've never, you know, took the pieces of a machine and put them in a box and shook them until they suddenly came together and made a perfectly functioning machine. And what I mean by that is to why you can see that is you don't have to be a scientist to see what I just said. Now, as a scientist, you can see a little bit better. As a scientist, you can realize that the amount of change that could be allowed in our universe before it would collapse is almost nothing like it. The percentage of what you could change, gravitational force or any of the other unseen forces around us, the amount you could adjust them before it would destroy the entire solar system and all life or possibility of life is so small you can't even imagine it. It's so minuscule, you can't imagine how precise and how perfect all of that is, how perfectly everything in the universe is timed so that things are not crashing together any worse than what they are. All of that evidence is right there in front of anybody who has even a minimal understanding of science. And so that's why, honestly, and I'm going somewhere with this, that's why, honestly, we've got to a place where people are beginning to realize that evolution by itself is not an answer. That if you were to add an infinite amount of time, that's what evolution is. Evolution is the idea that if I give you enough time, anything is possible. That if I give enough time, then rain falling on rocks can produce life. And if I give enough time, not only can rain falling on rocks produce life, but also that life then can mutate into other life. The idea is very simple. If we just keep waiting long enough, something good's going to happen. Now, anybody who's been in this world knows that that's not really the way it works. Things break down, they get worse over time. That's a law of science. That's not an opinion of science. That's a factual thing that can be observed, that over time, matter breaks down. It's just the natural process of things. But even though in science, we don't see any mutations to the positive generally. Like, typically, mutations are always to the negative. But the idea of evolution can be boiled down to this. Anybody who believes it's going to be mad at me, just like if I show how the Koran is not true, every Muslim will be mad at me. And if I show how Hindu writings are not true, the Hindus will be mad at me. It's normal. So anybody who's watching this maybe finds it online, and they're an evolutionist. And of course, they're going to be mad and say, oh, that's not right. That's too simplistic. But it's correct. This is what it is. The idea of evolution is that if I flip the coin enough, I can hit heads enough times that eventually I can turn a nothing, where there's no life whatsoever, just rain falling on rocks, to a single-celled organism. And if I keep flipping the coin enough, eventually I'll get it to turn into something a little more complicated, and eventually I can make a human with this thing. I just keep flipping the coin, and if you give me billions of years, an infinite amount of time, then eventually I can make this thing work. Statistically, it's still not possible. If you actually have to calculate the amount of changes necessary, if you even accept the idea that life can begin from nothing, rain falling on rocks and transforming into life, but even if you can begin to accept that and move on with it and say, OK, well, let's see how many mutations it would take, the amount of mutations necessary to get from a single-celled organism to a human being is so significant that there is no amount of time that you could allow for it. It's impossible. And the very fact that you have to have chance, which means there has to be loss. Like, you understand, if you're gambling with each of these organisms, you have one single-celled organism, and you're gambling on its ability to reproduce, at some point, all of life is going to stop because somebody's going to mess up. I mean, if you don't understand what I mean by that, I'll use the one that I've used as an example many times, the bombardier beetle. It's in South America. It's a beetle that produces two types of fluids in its body that, when put together, make an explosion. One of them has to be released half of a second or maybe even a millisecond faster than what the other one does or else they will explode inside of the body of the beetle. Now, let's just say you believed evolution and you believed that there was an animal who said, it's going to be really profitable to me to make my butt an explosion, a cannon. So I'm going to do that. And so I'm going to develop that ability. Well, I mean, What's the chance you're going to flip the coin right every time? Because if one beetle messes up, it's all done. Like, if one beetle explodes because he sent the stuff out too fast or too slow, it's done. He gets one chance to get it right, and you're telling me something so impossible, it has to be timed to the millisecond. Your body has to develop the ability to make it in the first place, and you have to know exactly how to time it to put it out. How many beetles exploded in the jungle? Like, you would run out of beetles at some point. Like, it's not a process. A scientist can't even get it right. And you're telling me an animal somehow developed that ability by exploding its cousins until finally they figured out what the proper formula was? I mean, you think about the nonsense of a statement like that. You think about the human eye and just how complicated it is. It's impossible for that to have come about by accident. Like, you can't evolve that. The idea that a single cell could somehow break itself into designs where it's going to form all these functions, it's impossible. You don't observe anything like that. You don't see anything like that. But here's the thing. The average person, if you tell them that it happened, but it happened so long ago, you can't imagine it. In billions of years, the average person doesn't want the truth. They don't want to believe that there is a God. So that's believable enough for them. That's acceptable enough that I can take that and I can change the truth into a lie and I can worship the creature more than the Creator and I can go along with this because it allows me to deny that there is a God in heaven. And that's what it's really all about is the fact that men in general want to deny God. They want to move on from the idea that there is a God. And so what I'm saying to you is You don't have to be a scientist to realize that so much of what you were taught is not right, that somebody's playing with the truth. They know what the truth is, but they have held it in unrighteousness. They have misused it. They've turned the truth into a lie, and they're trying to cause you to worship something other than God because that is the ultimate goal, is to let you be your own God, to let you worship yourself because there is no God. So back to the point, or back to what I'm saying, they give you an infinite amount of time because most people, I'm just going to be honest, I'm not trying to hurt anybody's feelings, most people are not smart enough to realize it still doesn't make sense. Like even if I give you infinite time, the average person is okay to swallow that. They're happy with that. They're not going to ask questions. They're not going to say, well, wait a minute, that doesn't add up because it's a big equation. It's infinite time. But here's the thing that has began to happen in the past few years. And if you pay attention, you'll see this growing more and more. People who are smart enough to actually ask the question and say, you know, that doesn't make sense. How does that happen? Well, now they've realized infinite time is not enough, so they're introducing the idea of infinite possibility. And if you don't know this, what I'm getting to is that the average person who believes in evolution has realized that what they have presented to you is the equivalent of back in the very old days when somebody asked, what is the world setting on? And they said, well, it's setting on the back of a giant elephant. And they said, oh, OK, well, I guess it makes sense. I'm sorry, giant turtle. I said, I guess that makes sense. Then what is the turtle sitting on the back? Well, four giant elephants. Okay, but what are the elephants sitting on? There's a giant snake, and they're all standing on the back of this massive giant snake. Okay, but then what's holding up the snake? Like, where does this line in somewhere? Oh, he's floating in a giant cosmic ocean. So there's a giant cosmic ocean just floating in something. Like, they never got past that one, I guess. There's a giant ocean floating in the outer space, and in it somewhere is a giant snake, and on it are four giant elephants, and on it's a giant turtle, and the world's all sitting on his back. And if you think that sounds foolish at one time, some of the smartest men in the world said that's the best they could figure out. So when you believe somebody just because they have a degree in front of their name, just remember that you're in the same camp as people who used to believe that. Because it's the same thing, we just evolved the terms and we got a little bit smarter about how we say it. Because when you believe the Big Bang as it's presented, and evolution as it's presented, you get back to the point where you say, okay, but where did the bowl of infinitely dense mass that exploded, where did it come from? What caused the explosion? I mean, that matter didn't come from nothing, so where did it come from? And all you have to do is start picking a little bit to realize, like, it doesn't make sense. And you can start looking at the things we just talked about and realize it doesn't make sense. Like, infinite time still cannot take a single-celled organism and produce men. It cannot produce humans. Honestly, it can't produce gender because single-celled organisms don't breed by gender. They split cells. So the very fact that you would have gender in all the reproductive organs and stuff, it doesn't make sense. It's not a natural evolutionary step if you really believe that. Like, all these things don't make sense in the science itself. It doesn't add up. It doesn't work. But even if all of that involves you first swallowing and accepting that life began from nothing in the first place. Like, you understand the people who criticize you because you believe God created life from nothing believe that life was created from nothing because rain fell on rocks long enough that it happened. That's what it really is. And they tell you you're dumb and you're childish and you're foolish because you believe that, but then they believe something so much worse than what you do in terms of how blind you have to be to accept it. It's not hard for me to believe that there's a God who created everything. I'd have to be pretty blind to believe that rain fell on rocks and suddenly it's just life. It's there. It's magic. It's the most amazing magic trick in the world, but it happened. And it happened on this planet of all planets, the one planet that could sustain it. It happened in a planet that somehow formed after a giant explosion sent shrapnel across the entire universe. It somehow formed perfectly so that it could sustain life. And somehow this ball of mass existed without a creator to create it. And so the last one there, nobody ever has given a good answer. You'll find people who make up stuff because it's their job. They have to make up something. But nobody's ever given a good answer as to where it comes from because ultimately it's the cosmic ocean that everything's floating in. It's that level of answer. It's like, well, it's just something you can't actually calculate what it's sitting on. You can't calculate where it comes from. But here's the thing, because they realize that no amount of time can answer for what we see in this world around us today, the question begins to come, how is it possible that all of this could just happen so that there's one world that can sustain life the way this one does? So that life could begin on this planet, so that all these universal forces don't change just a little bit and tear everything apart. And they begin to realize, well, you know what, that doesn't actually make much sense, does it? So, men get paid to come up with theories, and they, honestly, at this point, they've turned to comic books. And your prominent theories that are starting to be taught, and that's why I'm saying, you're going to think I'm silly when I say it, because it's not as mainstream enough for you to have heard it, some of you. But some of you have already started to hear this, because it is catching on. Really, I did not think it would catch on, but so did the people back in the day didn't think evolution would catch on. When Spurgeon was asked about evolution, he always laughed and said only a foolish person would ever believe that. And so men in his time, like him, didn't combat it and didn't preach against it because they didn't think anybody would be dumb enough to actually believe it. They said it would take a foolish man to buy such a lie. And so I learned a lesson from reading what they had to say about it to realize that men will believe pretty dumb stuff if you give them the chance. And so now the three theories that you see the most are ones that were taken directly from comic books. One of them is literally the idea of the giant snake, giant tortoise, all that stuff. Because the idea is, well, aliens come here and seeded the planet and put life on it. Which is, OK, then where did they come from? And how did they? You just shift the question. It's the same thing. Well, the tortoise is on the back of an elephant. So you're just shifting the question. The same logic that was used all those thousands of years ago is now being used again. Actually, not even that far back in history. A few hundreds, a couple thousands at the most. The point being, that's the same logic. That's not a good answer of any kind. Nobody intelligent really looks to that one right yet. But they'll get there eventually, maybe. And then you have others who believe that it's all a simulation. It's inside of a computer. But then again, you're just shifting the question again. You're shifting, OK, then who made the computer? Who's in charge of it? All of that stuff. It's another nonsensical answer. But there's one that's catching traction that I would have never thought would, because it's literally the story behind most of your famous comic books. And it's the idea that there are multiple universes that are all layered together, and each one is slightly different than the other because it's all the different infinite possibilities and variables. And we just happen to live in the one where everything did go right, where nature flipped the coin and got heads every time so that eventually you evolved a single-celled organism into a person. But there's other universes where that didn't happen. So if you don't understand what that means, when they finally realized that infinite time cannot explain away God, they started introducing infinite possibility. And there's enough people who are degreed scientists who are supposed to be smart but are yet foolish enough to take what is the story behind most of your comic books of the past 50 years and say, oh yeah, we now believe that. That's our religion. We're going to teach it to our children. We're going to indoctrinate it in schools. We're going to force the government to pay for it. This is our religion now. And you'd be surprised. It's being taught in colleges and all this stuff, just the way evolution started. And you may think that's foolish. Nobody would ever believe that there's multiple universes and we just happen to live in the one where everything went right. but that's exactly what people said about evolution a couple hundred years ago. So you give it some time and you'll see where it is within the next 50, 60 years and how it changes. So all of that, honestly, I apologize, is not part of what I intended to talk about today. It's the introduction of verse of Psalm 19, verses 1-6, that the universe declares the glory of God, that the heavens declare it, and that when you look at the universe around you, you can see that there is a God. But all of that is to get to the point that you don't have to be a scientist to see that what science is teaching you makes no more sense than what Hinduism tells you about how the universe got here. It makes no more sense than what the Muslims teach you about how the universe got here. It makes no more sense than what any of these religions teach you, and honestly requires much more faith than most of them do. Because you're still looking for some force in the universe to have intelligently designed everything, only now that force is not intelligent itself. It's not an all-knowing God who created everything. It's a force of nature that somehow orchestrated it from behind the scenes. I mean, you understand the foolishness of people who would criticize you for believing the Bible when they actually believe it. When they believe that, I mean. So let me give you a few passages because I do want to show you some other verses. I have a lot of great stuff here to show you. Psalm 19, verse 1 through 6. I have to be quick though because I'm pretty much out of time already. Psalm 19, verse 1 through 6. It says, the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which is a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race. His going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it, and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof." You know what he's telling you? Is that there's literally nothing in this world, there's no person, doesn't matter what language they speak, it doesn't matter where they come from, who can't step outside the door of their house and look up in the sky and see the sun and feel the heat coming down from it and come to the realization that there is a God. He said, it doesn't matter. If you live in Belgium, you've been lied to your entire life and indoctrinated with the world's number one state religion, evolution. You've had that beat in your head your entire life. He says, it doesn't matter. When you step outside that door, I understand the sun doesn't shine very often. You may have to wait a few weeks. But when you step outside that door, at some point, the sun will break through the clouds, and it will shine on you. And you will feel the heat of it. Now, if you go somewhere else, you might feel it faster. But here in Belgium, it will eventually happen. In fact, we've had it the past few days, so my joke doesn't work as good. But you step out there and you'll feel the heat of that sun shining down on you, and you can look at it and you can watch it run its course every day like a man running a race, and you'll know that there's a God. You have to be willfully ignorant. You have to deny the truth to come to any other conclusion. You cannot look at the evidence of the universe in front of you and say, I don't believe there's a God. You are willfully in denial and you're just looking for any excuse to hold the truth in unrighteousness, to worship the creature more than the Creator, to worship the things that are here on this earth, the philosophies, traditions, and all this stuff, as opposed to God Himself. So much so that God says in Acts 14, Acts 14, that God is not without a witness in any land. Acts 14, verse 14. It says, which then the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard of. They rent their clothes and ran in among the people crying out and saying, Sirs, why do you these things? We also are men of like passions with you and preach unto you, preach unto you that you should turn from these vanities unto the living God. which made heaven and earth and the sea and all the things that are therein, who in times past suffered all nations to walk in their own ways. Nevertheless, he left not himself without witness, and that he did good and gave us rain from heaven and the fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness." God says that there is not a place on this earth where the sun is not shined, where people cannot see that there is a God, where the rain doesn't fall and people cannot see that there is a God. He's telling you His creation, if you look for it, His fingerprints and His design and how intricately and special it's put together so that each thing that needs something has it. Like all of it works together so that there's these cycles that just keep perpetuating one another that are all there. I'm talking about this on a surface level. If you talk about this much deeper, you'll start to understand just how much the rising and setting of the sun is necessary for these cycles. That's actually elementary science, to understand that the sun It's what caused the water to evaporate, to cause the rain to water the ground, and so forth. Like, it's basic. That's fundamental stuff. But it goes deeper than that if you actually start looking at it. How amazingly all this is orchestrated so that anywhere you live in the world, even if you don't have the ability to know what we know about science, There's evidence that there's a Creator who made all of this. There's evidence that there's a Creator who put this together so that it doesn't just fall apart, but it continues its course. Acts 17, you find Paul talking about the unknown God there and how they had the temple and the worship to the unknown God in Athens. Let me read that to you, Acts 17, verse number 22. It says, Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars Hill and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For I passed by and beheld your devotions. I found an altar with this inscription to the unknown God, whom therefore ye ignorantly worship. Him I declare unto you. God hath made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is the Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands, neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he need anything, seeing he giveth to all life and breath and all things. And he hath made of one blood all nations of men, to dwell on all the face of the earth, and have determined the times before appointed and the bounds of their habitation. He says, when you look at this world around you and you see how that everything follows its course, that God's command for the sea not to overtake the land, the way everything's made, that it falls in its time, like the universe is like a clock, you can predict exactly where everything's going. All of that stuff, God set that in motion and He made that. The fact that all the people of the earth are of one blood shows you that we didn't have, you know, over time this one evolving a little bit and this one evolving there. No, we all came together. There's God's fingerprint in all of that, but he says of the men of Athens that they knew. You understand, in Greece, they had a pantheon of gods. They had multiple gods they worshipped, gods for different things, like the chief god was Zeus or Jupiter in Roman culture. They had all these things, and they had all these gods they worshipped, and yet in Athens, the place where education was the priority for them, they stepped back and said, you know, that still doesn't answer where the universe comes from. That still doesn't explain to us who actually made all of this. Like, we have our philosophy and our ideas. Like, we have a belief of, like, this one did this and this one did that. It's really some crazy stuff. I used to love Greek mythology, so I can get into it with you, but it's too crazy and too perverse to talk about in a church, so don't worry about it. We're not getting into it. But the thing is, they have their beliefs. But in Athens, where they were a little bit smarter and a little less quick to just believe whatever was spoon-fed to them, they started to think about it, and they said, you know, that doesn't really answer, like, on a logical standpoint, where all this comes from. So they built another temple to the unknown God, because they knew there had to be another God who was out there above all the rest of them, because there was no way the gods that they had imagined and dreamed up could have done all of this. And so that's why Paul preached to them about that, because deep in their heart, they knew that there was a God. But here's where I want you to understand that in the context that the wrath of God is revealed against men, Jesus told in Matthew 11, 20 through 24, speaking to some cities there He was ministering to, He said, it will be more easy for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than it will be for you. And He explains the reason is because if they had the works, if they had seen the works you've seen, if they've seen the light that you've seen, they had the understanding that you had, they would have believed. Sodom and Gomorrah would have fell down and sat clothed in ashes and they would have repented like Nineveh did, is what he says, if they had seen what Jesus did in those cities where the Jews were, where the people who were supposed to believe God were. And I'm telling you, you come from a country that was supposed to be a Christian country. Like, I understand Catholic Church is not truly Christian. I understand that a lot of false things get taught, but you have a whole lot more light available to you than most places in this earth do. And you live in a day and time where light is available like it has never been. Like, you can go on a computer, you can sit down. And understand, because light is heavily available, so is darkness. You can go to that internet and you'll get a whole lot of stuff that's false. You'll get very little that's true. But you can be anywhere in the world, speak any language you want. You can probably find somebody preaching the gospel and preaching the truth to you just at the touch of your fingertips. You don't have to get up off your couch and go look for it. You can pull out your phone and find it. You understand that there's nobody in this world who doesn't have light available to them. And we're not just talking about the sun now. We're talking about the fact that God has, as we said before, revealed Himself in our text passage, and it's not just the Son that He's revealed Himself with. This Bible has been translated in a great number of languages, and it's available almost anywhere in the world to people. You just have to be willing to pick it up and read it. You live in a country where you can buy one, like you can go on bowl.com, the same place you buy the junk you don't really need for your house and sometimes the junk you do need for your house, and you can buy really nice Bibles and have them shipped directly to your door. You don't have to leave the house to get them. You can get, I mean, a good King James Bible shipped to your house, nicer than you can buy, nicer than people have had at any other point in history. You don't have to leave. But people don't even read the one they have. They don't even read, I mean, they're not going to read it even if it comes to them. If I give it to them and donate it, they're still not going to pick it up and read it because they're not willing to believe that there's a God in heaven. So He's telling them that the amount of light you have, the opportunity you had to see the truth, is going to be weighed. And God will consider that when He judges. So that all of us have to understand that when it comes to mankind, God says to whomsoever much is given, much shall also be required. And you live in a place where much has been given. There's no excuse for anybody. That's why I don't want to get into that message about being inexcusable. But there's no excuse for anybody in this room to be blind to the truth or deny the truth. And I'm not talking about the science of it. This is all interesting to me and within the context. You can drop every bit of that and go on and you can still be in the will of God. So don't worry about that. I'm not telling you you have to go sit down tonight and study everything, all the inconsistencies in science and all of that. That's not actually what I'm saying. I'm saying to you something very different than that. I'm saying there's no reason for you to not know this Bible. There's no reason for you to not have the truth and have it in your house and read it every day and study it and get to know it. I understand that you live in a world where truth has been held in unrighteousness. Men have changed the truth into a lie. Men have rejected God. They know the truth. They know that He exists, but they're not willing to believe it. They're not willing to live by it. They're not willing to let it affect their lives. I understand all of that. We live in a day where essentially the world we live in is pilot. And if you don't know what I mean by that. Jesus speaks to Pilate in John chapter number 18. He's talking about himself and he mentions the truth. He mentions himself like he's the truth kind of idea. And he brings that up to Pilate. And Pilate just looks at him and says, but what is truth? And then immediately proceeds to reject and deny Jesus while he's looking the truth in his face. See, Jesus tells him the truth. He says, this is the truth. And he presents it to him and he gives it right there to him so that he's holding the truth. But in unrighteousness, he throws it down like it's trash and says, what is the truth? And I understand why the world does that because it's easier to do that than believe there's a God. I understand why when I go knock doors and I talk to somebody that they would rather worship the scientist who wrote the book that's already been thrown away and replaced with a new one because it was wrong. You understand the silliness of that. I understand it's silly, but I do understand why they do it. Because some people have said that Christianity is a fairytale for those who are afraid of the dark, but the reality of it is, and a pretty good apologetist has said this, that the reality is that atheism is a fairytale for those who are afraid of the light. Men deny Christ. They deny the light. They reject Him because their deeds are evil. Men love darkness rather than light. God says it Himself. And so men take and throw away the truth. They drop it and say, well, what's the truth? because they don't want it. They see it. They know what it is. It's obvious to them that it's the truth, but the consequences of it are too great, because then I don't get to be my own God, and I don't get to decide what the consequences of my actions are, and there is a God in heaven I have to answer to. And so it's easier to believe a lie than to believe the truth when that's the situation for them. I understand them, but I'm asking you. Why do we hold the truth in unrighteousness? Why do we know the Bible says something but then still don't do it? Why do we know what the Bible preaches and teaches on subjects, but then we won't apply it because, well, I just don't live in a day where people live like that, because my co-workers are going to laugh at me, because my friends and family are not going to understand, because I'm going to be rejected. I'm not going to be accepted in society if I live according to what the Bible says. I understand why unbelievers hold the truth and the righteousness. I'm asking why do we do it? Why do we have Bibles that we don't read? We hold the truth that we don't do right with it. We have Bibles that we know what it says, but we don't believe it. We have the truth, we're holding it, but we're not doing right with it. We know what it says, but we don't practice it. We're holding the truth, but we're not doing right with it. So my question for you is not today, why do unbelievers so quickly swallow the pill when it comes to evolution and so quickly buy into what is clearly indoctrination? I mean, it's honestly just as foolish as the people in North Korea believing that their king or their leader is a god and that he's evolved to the point that he doesn't have to go to the bathroom anymore. And if you don't know that, that is the religion of North Korea. And it's just as foolish to believe that as it is to believe that this universe came about by nothing. Like, honestly, neither one of them make any more sense than the other one does. It's just one of them puts the evidence so far back that the average person can just turn a cheek to it and be blind to it, and they're not confronted by the falsehood of it. I get them, though. I understand them. What I don't understand is how we can sit in a church, hear the Bible preached, have a Bible in our lap, have it on our phone, have it on our computers, have it readily available to us everywhere in our house, You have things that will read it to you. You can open your phone, most of you have the same app probably, it's the most prominent one, and if you have it, it will read the Bible to you while you're walking around the house doing whatever you're doing, and yet we'd rather listen to somebody talk about something on a podcast that has nothing to do with anything. We'd rather waste our time watching TV, listening to conspiracy theories on the internet and all this other nonsense that has nothing to do with nothing and no eternal profit whatsoever. So my question is, why are we holding the truth in unrighteousness? Why do we take the truth and not do what's right with it? That's what He's talking about. When He says, hold the truth and righteousness, this is what He means. They have the truth, but they're not doing what's right with it. They're turning it into a lie. They're rejecting it. They're doing all the things they shouldn't. So why are we doing all the things we shouldn't be doing with it? Why aren't we doing what we should be? Why are we calling Him our Master if we're not going to obey Him? If we really believe God to be who He says He is, and we believe this Bible to be what He says it is, then we should be living it and carrying it out in our lives. I understand it's a lot easier to preach that than it is to practice that, but it still doesn't change. It's the truth, and we need to stop holding the truth in unrighteousness. Father, we thank You and praise You, God, for what You do. We pray that You watch over us and help us to serve You. Thank You, Lord, for Your blessings and Your goodness. I pray that, God, You just speak to us through these things. Use this message, Lord, just to speak to our heart about the importance, Lord, of holding the truth, to buy the truth and sell it not. Lord, not to just treat it as cheap. But to see how important it is, Lord, to take Your truth and hold it in our lives and let it change and infect us and sanctify us through Your truth, Lord. We thank You, God, for all this and we ask it in Your Son, Jesus' name. Amen.