Matins Devotion: January 8, 2025

Romans 1:18-32

When Paul tells us that men had the knowledge of God but traded Him, in one sense, he’s speaking theologically. He’s essentially saying that all men have the natural knowledge of God, a knowledge that should drive them to seek the face of the Creator that can only be found in the Scriptures, as opposed to inventing idols and worshiping the creation instead.

But there’s also a sense in which Paul is speaking in historical terms here. Paul’s point is not that everyone is born belonging to God but then people drift away from him and begin to serve idols. That’s certainly not the case. His point is that Adam knew God, and then after the fall into sin, Adam’s descendents began to stray from the God they knew and give themselves over to wickedness. Likewise, everyone on the ark knew the true God, the one who drowned the unbelieving world but spared them through His mercy. And then their descendents strayed from the God of their fathers, giving themselves over to idols, creating sacraments out of sexual immorality and destroying themselves with the consequences of their sins.

And so, in this historical sense, when Paul goes on to tell us of the mercy of Jesus Christ in Romans, he’s not just calling us to come into the kingdom. He’s calling us to come home, to return back to the faith of our fathers upon the ark, the faith of our father Adam. He’s calling us to put aside worthless idols that only lead us into destruction and come back into the arms that, in a sense, once held us when they preserved Noah and his family in the ark and when they formed Adam from the dust of the earth.

So let’s do that. Let’s come home. Through faith, let us see the salvation of Jesus Christ, the One who came into the flesh, the one who has pulled every murderous idol out of our hearts and healed us with the final beat of His perfect heart upon the cross. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, the one who knew us when we were in the loins of our father Adam who knew Him, when we were in the loins of our father Noah, who served Him. Christ Jesus died for your sins. He rose for your justification. He ripped this world out of the hands of the devil who deceived us. And in doing so, He made us His own once more. Let’s go home to our Brother and rest with Him in the eternal love of our Father.