Righteousness & Wrath Revealed

There is a power greater than the fiercest storm.

And by fierce storm, I'm thinking of like an apocalyptic hurricane.

The fiercest storm you could imagine on planet Earth, there is a power that is greater than that storm, a power greater than the largest economy, the mightiest army, the loftiest ideology.

The Bible tells us that the Gospel is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes.

Romans E1, 16.

There is nothing so powerful in all the world as the Gospel.

Amen?

Stop and think about that.

What does that even mean?

But it's the truth.

It's what the Bible teaches.

There is no power greater than the Gospel, which is the righteousness of God revealed.

The Gospel can transform a person and a planet, and it has and it will.

It has the power to break the curse of sin over the universe and mend the hurt in a human heart.

There is nothing so powerful as the Gospel.

If the world looks blue to you, I won't ask you to put your hand up and say this.

It does.

It does.

If it looks blue to you, your world, it's probably because you're wearing blue glasses.

Similarly, if the world looks green, this is just a tip for you, if it looks green or orange or pink, it's probably because you're wearing colored glasses, and we do wear colored glasses.

We look through our cultural lenses at the world, don't we?

And it's called our world view.

Jews, Greeks, Romans, they saw the world a certain way, as do Australians, Asians, Europeans, and Latinos.

We all see the world through our certain cultural lenses.

We perceive what is weak and strong in our view of how the world should be, from our cultural lenses.

We know what is up and what is down, at least we think we do, and what is right and what is wrong.

But the question that's a challenge is, who's wearing the right glasses?

We're all wearing different glasses.

Which view of the world is the right one?

The Book of Romans is a presentation of how things really are.

It's the clearest bunch of glasses you can look through.

Now, it's a challenge to look through the clarity of Paul's revelation of the Gospel, of the meaning of life, without our own glasses getting in the way.

But it's our challenge that's before us.

There is nothing more powerful than what creator, father, God has done in history through His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, in the Gospel.

Nothing.

Amen.

And this is what Paul explains in the 430 verses of his Letter to the Romans.

So let's begin a journey into what I think it's fair to say is the greatest account of truth ever penned.

I would say the Sermon on the Mount was until Jesus actually died and rose again.

So post the Gospel happening, I'm not sure there is a more pure form of truth than the Book of Romans.

And Romans has a bunch of key characters and key concepts.

Let's see if we can name some of them.

And I wonder if we could throw out the names and concepts.

Let's start with God.

He's a major character in the Book of Romans.

Who are some other characters and concepts that we find?

Sin.

Janet's going to try to keep up with you.

Abraham.

She doesn't have that one.

But it is a good one.

What else?

Grace, salvation, faith.

What else?

Adam.

There's a lot of ones that I don't have for you to go to.

I've got things like Jesus, the gospel, the Jews, the Gentiles, humanity.

Rome is a significant character.

The church, righteousness, faith, glory, creation, the spirit, the law.

There are lots of characters and concepts.

And theologians, and in my study for the Bible loop and for this series, I've spent a lot of time wading through what theologians say.

And they argue about what's the main concept, what's the main theme out of all these for the Book of Romans.

And I would put it to you, like many would agree, it's the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

That's the main theme.

Romans is about the gospel and how the true gospel is the most powerful thing in all of existence.

Paul starts with a significant New Testament character himself.

Verse 1, Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle.

If you can have your Bible open, it will be helpful, because we're actually going to work through all the verses in Chapter 1 this morning.

Paul began, as many of us know, as the persecutor of the church, and then through a radical conversion, experience was appointed by the risen Jesus, literally from heaven, as apostle to the Gentiles.

That is, a sent one, a messenger to proclaim true truth.

Paul has spent his life up to this stage, the last 25 years, telling people all over the Mediterranean, planting churches that followed Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord.

And after 25 years, he finds himself in Corinth, a Greek city just up the road from Athens, and from that city, he writes, scribes through a scribe, the letter of Romans, and he's writing it to the church in Rome, a church that he hasn't visited yet.

And he states that the call he received back when Jesus called him, his vocation is to give his life for the gospel of God.

Verse two, another character, the gospel, Romans E1, 2, and 3, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God, the good news of God, the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures.

From the moment that Adam and Eve sinned in Genesis 3, there was a promise, Genesis 3, 15, and God said, the seed of the woman will crush this serpent's head.

That was the first inkling of the grace of God being unleashed to fix the problem that had been unleashed on earth in the disobedience of sin.

And this promise of reclaiming what had been lost in the garden echoes throughout the centuries, throughout creation.

God's promise, a seed of the woman will come.

And we know what line of people that would come from, because Genesis 12 says, God chose one man, Abram, and said, from your descendants, which will be many, from your wife's barren womb in her late years, will come a massive group of descendants, out of which I will use someone to bless every nation.

This is the promise of the gospel.

I'm going to fix the problem of sin.

That's what the favour of God gives to humanity.

The gospel is not just some random good news, it's the good news of God.

It's God's promise.

It's the long-awaited promise to be fulfilled.

And then Paul goes on to explain this gospel.

And to do so, he needs to introduce to us the hero of the gospel, Jesus Christ.

Verse 2.

The gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures regarding his son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David, and who through the spirit of holiness was appointed the son of God, and who was empowered by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.

The birth of Jesus was foretold in Scripture, Paul says.

And Jesus is key to this gospel of God.

Who is Jesus?

Very succinctly, he says, he's fully human and Israelite of the royal family.

And yet he's also fully God, the son of God, fully divine, fully human.

And what did he do?

What a pithy version of the gospel.

He died and rose again, which made him Lord of all.

Hallelujah.

Verse five, through him, Jesus, we have, Paul says, received grace and apostleship to call all the Gentiles, the non-Jews, the people who are not part of that Genesis 12 family.

Call all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith for his name's sake.

A great line to underline in your Bible.

And you also are among those Gentiles who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.

He's talking to the people in Rome.

This good news of Jesus involves calling people everywhere to obey him and have faith in him, even the non-Jews known as Gentiles.

They're being called as well.

So we have God, Paul, the Gospel, the Lord Jesus.

These are all the pieces of the puzzle.

And then Rome.

We're introduced to Rome, the great city of the empire, that great bastion of civilised power in all the world, the greatest city.

Rome is brought into the story.

So he writes, to all in Rome who are loved by God and called to be his holy people, grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.

First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ.

I haven't met you yet, but I've thanked God because your faith is being reported all over the world.

God, who I serve in my spirit in preaching the gospel of his son is my witness how constantly in my spirit, sorry, how constantly I remember you in my prayers at all times.

I pray that now at last by God's will, the way may be opened for me to come to you.

I long to see you so that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to make you strong.

That is, that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other's faith.

I don't want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that I planned many times to come to you, but have been prevented from doing so until now in order that I might have a harvest among you just as I have had among the other Gentiles.

I'm obligated both to Greeks and non-Greeks, both to the wise and to the foolish.

That's why I'm so eager to preach the Gospel also to you who are in Rome.

The New Testament tells us nothing in Acts about the planting of the church in Rome.

It was just there.

Someone took the Gospel there.

And so Paul has never been there.

He's writing from Corinth.

He's keen to connect with them.

But for some reason, he wants them to know, I have tried.

I haven't neglected you, but I really want to get to you.

And one of the reasons we find that he wants to get there is he wants it to be a united, powerful launching pad to take the Gospel that Paul and others would take the Gospel further west to Spain.

So it's very important that Rome is a strong church, but he's heard that they have a lot of disunity.

Now, the disunity is between Gentiles and Jews.

And that's caused from a pretty obvious reason.

They were together, the Jews and Gentiles, and then Emperor Claudius gave an edict because they were suspicious of the Jews, and they exiled the Jews for five years.

So you imagine there's this church in Rome.

It's growing and thriving.

And then all the Jewish people who were in leadership positions as well as the Gentiles, they're all taken out of the picture.

Five years later, the Jews come back and there's no Jewish leadership.

And so the Gentiles and the Jews in Rome are at loggerheads.

Now I would just encourage you to hold that because if you get that that's the overarching vibe of Romans, it helps us understand some of the things that are quite difficult to understand later on about Jews and Gentiles.

But it's a major factor, this tension between the Jewish Christians and the Gentile Christians that Paul is wanting to address.

He wants them to be united.

This gospel, it's the most powerful thing in all the world, it can unite people horizontally.

And in this case, the Jews and the Gentiles.

And then this leads us to one of the great memory verses of the Bible, I am not ashamed of the gospel because it's the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes, first to the Jew, then to the Gentile.

For in the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed, the righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written, the righteous will live by faith.

Paul's been laying out the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, hasn't he?

Of how things really are for the meaning of life, understanding the way things truly are.

So, it's a whole bunch of ideas and challenging thoughts, and he's laying them out.

And if you've ever done a big jigsaw puzzle, who's done a big jigsaw puzzle?

Just a few of us.

You get your corners in.

There's only four corners.

So you find your corners, and then you find your sides, and then you're probably going to organise the pieces, maybe by colour or something that identifies them.

We'll come back to that.

Christians have been scared to stand up for Jesus from the very beginning, before he died and rose again, haven't they?

I mean, his right-hand man, Peter, became very quickly a bit of a scaredy-cat when the pressure was on.

Paul says, that's not me.

I'm not scared.

I'm not in the least bit ashamed of what I know to be true.

Why?

Because I'm convinced it's the truth.

Paul's like, I saw the risen Jesus who I was persecuting, and he was glorious in heaven next to the right hand of the Father.

Like, I know what I have seen.

I've traveled the world here, the known world, for 25 years, and I've seen the name of Jesus rise people up from the dead in every way, spiritually and physically.

Blind people healed, lame people walk.

I know what I have seen.

I'm completely convinced of Jesus' calling and the efficacy of the truth that I have been preaching.

And this good news is for everyone.

It's the power of God.

It's not just for the rich and the educated.

It's not for the powerful or the religiously correct.

The good news, the gospel of Jesus is for everyone.

Paul says, I'm not ashamed of that.

And so, just at the moment here, we get about two opportunities for application in this sermon.

This is one of them.

How does that sit for you?

Are you ashamed of the gospel?

Do you keep it quiet that you follow Jesus Christ as Lord, because he's the Lord of the universe?

Often, we do.

We haven't learned yet, like we sang in that song, that we boast in the cross, as Paul said.

We boast in a crucified Saviour who rose from the dead.

That's what Paul says, and that's what Christians are called to live in, that power to say with Paul, I am not ashamed of the gospel.

I hope and pray that as we study Romans, our faith will be bolstered.

We will be like, wow, this is so true.

And it's true in my heart, and it's true in history, and it's true in society, and it's true in every way, any philosophical way to understand truth.

It's the truth.

And it is in the gospel, the righteousness of God that is being revealed.

Righteousness, as many of us know, is a super rich word in the Bible.

It means God's justice.

He will do right by everyone.

And also his promise keeping faithfulness.

Paul's going to unpack all of this, that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus pays for the punishment that God's justice must impose on sinful humanity.

So, his righteousness means he's a just God.

And I haven't talked to many people who think, oh, we want the universe to be unjust.

We want the bad people to not get what they deserve.

Most people you talk to think, no, look, justice is you get what you deserve.

You shouldn't do wrong and get away with it.

Well, that's the righteousness of God.

Sin needs to be punished.

But the sin was punished in Jesus, and that's what we're going to find out.

It's also the demonstration of God's integrity, the righteousness of God.

Remember, he promised that he'd fix the problem of sin.

He's good and honest and faithful, and he keeps his promises, and he did.

Hallelujah.

So the righteousness of God is being revealed in this gospel, which is the most powerful thing in all the world, that Paul is going to unpack for us.

It's the righteousness of God that is revealed.

Paul adds faith to the list of characters and concepts.

We've got God, Paul, Jesus, Gospel, Jews, Gentiles, Rome, righteousness, and he says it's received by faith.

So lots of pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, they're all out on the table, and Paul decides in his wisdom to gather all the dark pieces together and start putting in the dark pieces.

This second half of Chapter 1, has anyone found it's dark?

It's quite dark.

But as we know, good news normally needs the bad news to sort of reflect how good the good is when you understand the bad.

So he dives in 17 verses of opening up the stories that needs to be brought together, the characters, the concepts, and then he speaks the truth.

And I would challenge you to ask yourself whether you think this is the truth, or the glasses you wear are the truth, if they're different to this.

He says the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.

And then, very importantly, he goes straight back to creation.

In this argument of the pieces of the jigsaw piece, of coming and making sense of it all, he goes back to creation.

Since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

The Bible presents a worldview which is built on the understanding that human beings are fallen, spiritually, physically, relationally damaged since Adam and Eve first sinned.

Human beings, the Bible is saying here, are flawed and broken and bent towards sin, which, let's face it, it sounds glass half empty, not glass half full.

So it's an interesting conversation.

A human being is naturally good.

And if you travel the world, you sort of want to have the posture, the leaning to go, I trust you're a good person, and I'm going to treat you like that.

Has anyone sort of done that?

Like, that's the natural way we want to be.

But this is an interesting challenge to that.

It's saying, there's a bent towards the dark more than the light in every human being.

There's a bent towards selfishness more than servanthood, towards sin more than holiness.

Paul explains that fundamental to the gospel, the good news, is an understanding of our predicament as humanity.

God's wrath is being revealed against the sin of the world.

The Bible doesn't teach only that God is love.

Do you know that?

It teaches that God is light.

So he is love.

He's love and his mercy is unbelievable, really.

His compassion is beyond.

But he's also light.

And if you have the simple metaphor that you might use at a high school lesson, what happens to the darkness when you turn a very strong light on in a room?

Where does the darkness go?

It flees.

Inside of us, there is darkness, which is sin.

And God is holy and light.

And so a dark person comes to a holy God who is light.

There's a problem there.

That's what Romans is unpacking.

There's a problem and it's called sin.

Paul teaches that in Romans chapter 1 here, that humans are made with incredible capacity and have been made responsible for their actions.

Humanity did not and has not been told, everyone has not been told about Jesus, but they have been told about the glory of God, Psalm 19.

In fact, it says the heavens are declaring day after day, night after night, there is a God.

There is a creator.

You know, you yearn to give glory to something transcendent and greater than you.

Give glory to the one who you may not know by name, but the one who is there.

That's what people are being judged for.

But Paul says, even though you know that every culture on earth he is stating, this is true truth through clear glasses, no matter where you come from, people suppress that yearning to give glory to the greater designer and creator.

And what do they do?

They suppress the truth.

And so they have no excuse, he says.

For although, verse 21, although they knew God, which is an interesting question, statement, really, how much?

General revelation.

You know enough about God.

Though they knew God, they neither glorified him as God, nor gave thanks to him, and the thanks part is important.

But their thinking became futile, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal human beings and birds and animals and reptiles.

So Paul is saying at the very beginning, the foundation to understand the truth of the universe, you've got to understand the power of the gospel begins with realising we need the gospel.

It begins with sin.

People knew that there was a creator, but they did not thank the creator.

I've heard it many times, it's quite popular and trendy almost, to thank the universe.

You hear people all the time, they thank the universe.

They don't know they are pantheists or animists in saying that.

It's just cool.

It just makes sense.

It's just something bigger, transcendent.

And we thank, I thank the universe for their goodness to us.

The Bible says when we do this, we suppress the truth of a creator and worship the created.

And our hearts get darker and more futile.

I would put it to you, think about this, anti-creator god rhetoric.

Anti-creator god rhetoric typically considers itself the nuanced, and educated, and progressive, and advanced side of the argument.

But no matter what era, when humanity refuses to worship creator god, they always create something man-made to worship.

They become, as Paul says, fools, and exchange the glory of the immortal god for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.

This is the story of idolatry.

Trace it throughout every generation, throughout history.

People take trees and fashion them into totem poles and worship them.

They take stone and carve it into idol statues and worship it.

They look at a mountain and sort of go, we must worship.

They look at a tree and say, we must worship.

They want to worship things.

And we haven't stopped.

Now we worship celebrity.

We worship certain ideology.

And of course, the big one in our day is we worship who?

Ourselves.

We are God.

At least we're worthy of God in the world's eyes.

And so this is the predicament that has happened.

It happens again and again and again, so Paul says.

And you know, as we work through this quickly, I find it confronting as a world view.

But who's getting the fact that I'm reading so much scripture out and saying less words than sort of the scripture?

It's the Bible saying this.

That's what we're coming under today in Romans and finding the challenge affecting our minds and heart.

He says, Therefore, verse 24, God gave them over.

Now, we have to remember that, gave them over.

Gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts, the sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.

They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served, created things rather than the Creator who is forever praised.

Amen.

Because of this, again, God gave them over to shameful lusts.

Even the women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones.

In the same way, the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another.

Men committed shameful acts with other men and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

Do you see what's being explained?

When a human being gives over part of themselves to sin, that part of them tends to become futile.

Rationality can become futile.

Sexuality can become warped and ultimately futile.

Relationships become futile.

Governing authorities and their wisdom can become futile.

Have you picked up what I mentioned before, how this is so obviously going back to creation?

He's putting in the dark pieces of the puzzle, but in explaining it, he's going back to the creator and creation, and immediately he goes to the mandate given to man and wife to steward and procreate.

There's this issue of sexuality that's brought in the picture.

It's obvious that the problem in the garden was they didn't listen to revelation.

In the most basic sense, God said, Don't eat of that tree.

And Adam and Eve are like, Why?

It looks great.

He said, Don't eat of that tree.

And what that tells us is this profound insight about God's revelation, true truth.

There are things that we cannot work out as human beings unless we're told.

That's what Genesis teaches.

Am I right?

Is that fair?

Eve looked at the tree and said, It's good for all these, it's good for wisdom, it's good to eat, it looks, everything about it.

The only pointer was that the creator said, Don't eat that tree.

The tree of the knowledge and good of evil is going to kill you, even though it looks good.

And we're still learning this, that when God says it, it should settle it.

Notwithstanding, the fact of interpreting scriptures can be a challenge.

I know for sure, but Paul is setting up a worldview that says, humanity have not worshipped the creator, they have chased other things to worship instead of him, and the most basic way of living, they have not listened.

They have not listened.

Chapter 1, verse 28, Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind.

You see this futility of rationality, and the irony that progressive thinking says, progressive is the thinking.

It's not lacking in wisdom.

We're going to deconstruct everything that maybe we think the Bible says, because we're going to find what is far more intelligent.

He's like, you've been given over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done.

They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity.

They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice.

They are gossip, slanderers, god-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful.

They invent ways of doing evil.

They disobey their parents.

They have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy.

Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things, but also approve of those who practise them.

And the challenge that I feel in my heart is not only the governments that approve of those who practise them, but what about us who engorge our hearts and minds on films, on streaming content, that glorifies everything I just read as our entertainment?

As our entertainment?

Now, we need the Holy Spirit to walk alongside of us and go, oh, that's not great.

Don't hear me.

I'm not sort of saying we should burn our TVs or something.

But you know what this is doing.

It's holding up a world view and saying be careful what you marinate your heart and mind in.

Don't let the media producers of your entertainment content that comes through the visual cortex that are ungodly, don't let them help you come up with ways of doing evil that you never would have thought of yourself.

Amen.

That's what he's saying.

So ends chapter one.

They're dark pieces of this jigsaw puzzle.

People filled with every kind of wickedness.

So in biblical thinking, sin is a problem.

It's a personal problem because sin will affect my own self-image and my self-talk.

How I relate to myself gets messed up.

How I interact with others relationally, sin will mess that up.

And certainly between God and I, sin profoundly affects that.

But in today's society, looking through 21st century glasses, progressive glasses, I'm not picking political sides from the US or something in that.

I'm not saying that at all.

I'm just saying as though future thinking gets more progressive.

Many would beg to differ.

They would say, sin, it's a social construct, mate.

Depends where you live, what's good for you is not good for me.

What does the whole society want to say?

Do whatever you want, just don't hurt me.

That's the end of all being.

Be proud of who you are, the way of living you've chosen for yourself as the sort of self-appointed divine carrier of truth that you found somewhere.

But you know what?

That mantra, everyone do whatever is right in your own eyes, but don't hurt anyone else, it's logically flawed.

It's logically flawed.

Let me show you, I hope you can stay with me for a page of text.

Got a page to go.

That's worth it.

For 1,500 years, the prevailing legal philosophy in the West was known as legal naturalism or natural law theory.

That philosophy held that there's something bigger than every sovereign nation.

It's moral law outside.

It's like because people had a spiritual worldview.

This leading into the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment, that was like, well, I don't know really if our law should be governed by something supposedly spiritual, some moral code that's outside of us.

So, in the middle of the 19th century, that legal philosophy, so the 1800s, was replaced largely in the West by a philosophy known as legal positivism, which stated that law is the command of the sovereign, which is a way of saying countries can do what we say humans can do.

Make up your own rules.

Make up your own rules.

Legal positivism.

Each country should make up its own laws and not be bound really by what outsiders think.

And so, as we were coming through the 1800s and coming to the beginning of the 1900s, progress was so awesome, no one could see it going anywhere bad.

So, this is like, this is great, we're all going to do our own thing.

And then they came in, can you think of anything that happened that was a downer in the first half of the 20th century?

Couple of world wars, depressions, terrible stuff that made people think, whoa, this is not good.

And then came the two world wars and the defeat of the Germans.

And then after World War II, when the Nuremberg war crimes trials took place, the Nazi leaders attempted to defend themselves by virtue of the philosophy of legal positivism.

This is what they said.

This is a quote of what they said.

Granted, our legal system is not the same as yours.

Our fundamental, this is when they're being judged for what they did in the Holocaust.

Our fundamental values are not the same as yours either.

And we simply made our legal system reflect their own cultural values.

Our rule involved Aryan supremacy and we did not regard Jews as human beings on the same level as Aryans.

From our standpoint then, Jews certainly did not deserve to benefit from Aryan rights.

And the only reason that we find ourselves on trial here is that you won and we lost.

At Nuremberg, the American chief prosecutor was Robert H.

Jackson, an associate justice at the Supreme Court of the United States.

And in his summing up, he said, it is common to think of our own time as standing at the apex of civilization, from which the deficiencies of preceding ages may patronizingly be viewed in the light of what is assumed to be that word, progress.

Humans getting better and better and better and not needing the divine, because we're so intelligent.

He says, the reality is that in the long perspective of history, the present century will not hold an admirable position.

This legal positive thinking, it won't hold an admirable position unless its second half is able to redeem its first.

Did the second half redeem the first?

Stalin died in 53, but what he did to the Russians made Hitler look not so bad.

And then we've had a host, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, the Rwandan genocide.

People struggle.

And they're not just the obvious bad guys.

We know that, don't we?

People that are meant to be the good guys do lots of bad things.

Archimedes said, give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum outside the world and I can move it.

The point being, if you have a fulcrum long enough, with your little finger, you could move the entire globe.

He's thinking ideologically, spiritually.

How do you change the world?

Archimedes said, with a fulcrum outside of it.

Because if it's inside, it's like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.

This is why John Warwick Montgomery, one of the greatest human rights lawyers, this is where this all came from.

He said in a Veritas Forum Lecture to Oxford, Oxford students, I think, he said, You cannot get human rights the way they're meant to be legally without getting laws that are transcendent from outside this planet.

Because we're not good enough as ourselves.

We need help.

We need help to treat people the way they should be treated.

What happened?

The person who knows what happens with the fulcrum, he turned up on planet Earth.

Amen.

There's a truth that turned up that understands what is required for that fulcrum to move the planet.

And it's the gospel.

It's God becoming a human being in Jesus and showing us what love means, what justice means, what righteousness means.

The Bible clearly states, certainly from this sort of pinnacle of condensed truth, the Book of Romans, it says there is such a thing as sin.

There's such a thing as the judgment to come, and there is such a thing as the need for a saviour.

But the saviour has turned up, and the Gospel is his life, the life of Jesus, his death, and his resurrection from the grave.

And that good news in Jesus is available to everyone, whoever would believe.

It's what makes sense of the meaning of life.

And Lord willing, that's what we're going to unpack as we read.

Some of us will read through the Book of Romans ourselves, and other times, Lord willing, we'll get to look at, study it in sermons like this.

If you want to skip ahead, go for your life.

You want to get to Chapter 3 and hang out there for a bit.

Things get really good Chapter 3, and then really good after that too.

Chapter 1 and 2 is the set up of why we need a Saviour, and it culminates in this beautiful yet challenging and profound line in Chapter 3.

If you think you're righteous, the righteousness of God has been revealed in Christ that every mouth may be silenced.

Every tongue stopped.

No one on earth gets to say, I think I was good enough.

There's only one.

And his name is Jesus.

And friends, that is good news.

That is the good news of the Gospel.

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