Ever heard of a conscience?
The conscience is that part of us which is uncomfortable when we do wrong. The way I like to think of it is like this. Once before sin entered the human experience God could relate to people. When the first people were deceived into sin God pushed back from the kitchen table and fumbled in his pocket for a candle and cigarette lighter (they were just fire starters way back then, cigarettes came later, but that’s how we know them). He lit this candle, poured a little wax on the table and fixed the candle in that wax. God walked out the door and that was that.
Inside that house, Adam, Eve, and the rest of us would forever know good and evil, right and wrong. The conscience was the candle burning in the heart telling of what should and should not be done. It was a brake on bad behavior.
Hide it under a bushel, Yes!
I know that is not how the little American evangelism song goes, but it is what people too often do with the candle in their kitchen.
That brings us back to Romans 1. When people do not think that the knowledge of God is worth retaining when people do not glorify God, when they do not have gratitude he eventually blows that candle right out. The candle may still be under a bushel, but if ever the human cosmic-renegade was to lift the bowl he would not see the light. God, it seems is willing to say, “Ok, you can have it your way.” He gives them over to their heart of darkness, to their baser instincts.
Boom! To hell in a handbasket they go. (Check this link if you wonder where that phrase originated.) It takes a while, but when God gives you over, when he takes the brakes off your badness, well your mail-coach will go so fast down the hill it will over-run the horses, tilt, break its wheels, spill its treasure and people over the muddy road and jerk the horses down on top of the squealing, screaming squall.
Remember what the serpent in Eden said, “You will not surely die.” In some ways they did not die immediately, but death was a comin’. It just took some years to arrive. Without brakes on your buggy you are going to smash clear through the guardrail at the next corner and tumble down the cliff into the surf.
So….
Paul wants the recipients of his letter to miss this crash. Brakes on that which will break are good. Don’t kick at those goads, my friend.
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