Another Horton Excerpt

Such a great book…  Here’s a few paragraphs from chapter 3 I thought were very helpful:

As we have seen, the Bible indicates that we “suppress the truth in unrighteousness.”  We either let ourselves off the hook, making excuses, or hide from the world in despair of ever being able to face it because of our failures.  The “journey within” that characterizes so much of contemporary spirituality, even in our own Christian circles, easily becomes just another way of running from God as he summons us to appear in his courtroom.  We need God’s Word, standing outside of us, to pass judgment on our lives, calling us out of our optimism and pessimism to hear things as they really are.  If our introspection leads us to greater self-confidence, we have only deceived ourselves…

Paul tells the Roman Christians, “None is righteous; no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks after God” (Rom. 3:10-11).  Can that really be true?  Is Paul exaggerating here?  What about all those people around the world devoting their lives to the search for God, and the many decent people who give their lives to serve humanity?  Surely God will judge the world on the basis of whether we have done our best with the light that we have been given.  But Paul’s whole point in these first three chapters is to convince us that regardless of how much light we have been given, we always do the same thing with it.  We suppress the truth, whether it is the light of nature (God’s existence and moral will known to unbelieving Gentiles) or the light of grace (God’s revelation of the gospel in the Scriptures).  There is enough revelation to render a guilty verdict.  Regardless of our own evaluation, before God’s bar no one is good and no one seeks God.

This does not mean that no one is morally decent before fellow human beings, since Paul has affirmed that even Gentiles without the written law sometimes follow their conscience (Rom. 2:14-15).  Nor does it mean that nobody seeks a god; indeed, Gentiles as well as Jews are very religious.  However, we systematically distort this revelation of God’s moral will in order to justify ourselves and keep God’s truth about us and his righteousness at bay (Rom. 1:21-2:11).  Natural religion, spirituality, and morality are in fact our chief means of running away from God.