What about those who have never heard the gospel? How can God send someone to Hell for not believing in Jesus, when that person has never heard of Him? It just doesn’t seem fair! That’s a tough question. Here’s another sticky question: How can God create people with a same sex orientation, then turn around and condemn those people for wanting to do what comes natural to them? Two of the most perplexing questions anyone could ask about the justice of God pop up in this last section of Romans 1. But as perplexing as these questions are, they are really secondary to the larger question—why do our hearts find solace in dwelling on dark thoughts about God? It’s because those thoughts justify us in our resistance of God.

In Romans 1:18 Paul speaks of those “…who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.” We suppress the truth. We spin it and evade it. We use soft words to describe our failings. We leave out embarrassing facts. We make apologies that don't really own up to anything. We make ourselves look as good as we can and point the finger at others to make them look as bad as they can. We shift the blame to our parents, to society, to our genes. We habitually look for ways to change the subject from our guilt before God to someone else's guilt before us. We tilt the conversation from the vertical to the horizontal and make it all someone else's fault. And what gets buried and suppressed and censored in all the blaming is the one truth our guilty consciences are so afraid to face—the truth of who God is.

This Sunday we’ll investigate the sticky questions I referred to earlier. I’m not going to run away from them as much as I might like to. So I’ll give you a biblical perspective on these thorny issues. But that’s not my primary objective, nor is it the primary objective of Scripture. The primary objective of Scripture is not to protect us from the living God, but to show him to us. We're not supposed to feel comfortable. We're supposed to feel awakened.