Paul says in Romans 1 that the heathen weren’t even grateful to God for the physical provisions He made to keep them alive.

Jordan reasons, “Now that’s about as base a type of ingratitude as you can have; not even to be grateful for that which sustains you through life!”

Paul goes on to describe how they deliberately chose to reject the God-consciousness put in them from birth, determining, “We don’t want to worship God as Creator.”

“When man began walking in his own ways, it originated with not giving God the glory, and when you quit giving God the glory, you then quit thanking God for what you have,” says Jordan. “Now, those are two very simple concepts, but they’re basic to every problem man has today.”

As a result of not glorifying God as Creator, Paul says “they became vain in their imaginations.”

Jordan explains, “That word vain there means empty. Empty thoughts, empty ideas, empty concepts. Just useless, worthless, valueless thinking.

“The ‘vanity of their mind’ means a vacuum. They take the truth of God and throw it out and it results in a vacuum where (the truth once was) and that vacuum sucks in all this stuff.

“That man’s mind; he goes around and he’s listening for all these ideas, and he just sucks them all in, and those things result in his understanding being darkened. It results in the blindness of his heart. There’s a blackout in the man’s soul. Down inside there’s no light.

*****

“Paul says, ‘And their foolish heart darkened.’ That means their foolish hearts, by way of their vain, empty thinking, darken the light. There’s the verse in Job 38:2 that says, ‘Who is this that darkeneth council with words without knowledge?’

“A bunch of dumb, stupid, human ideas come along—they sound real great, but what they are is the result of rejecting the revelation that God gave, and they cause darkness in the soul.

“It’s not, ‘Professing themselves to be stupid they became wise.’ No, it’s just the opposite. You see, the thinking in verse 21 is about themselves. That’s the problem. They don’t want to give God the glory; they’re going to give it to themselves.

“The useless, vain thoughts that result in their foolish heart being darkened have to do with ‘professing themselves to be wise they became fools.’ They began to puff themselves up and glorify themselves. Then they began to thank, not God, but became thankful to themselves.

“You go around in human wisdom, and human philosophy, and human viewpoint, and it’s all positive toward man and negative toward God. The viewpoint of the world’s religious system is the same way. Man says, ‘We’re going to work it out; we’re gonna get the answer. We’re going to fix it; we’ll have our wise ideas and we’ll go on,’ and God says that human wisdom is foolishness.

*****

Jordan continues, “It’s obvious from the passage, the idea is to get rid of God; get rid of that light God’s given. Darken it. Turn out the light! That’s how you create darkness.

“Having rejected the revelation, they develop a rationalistic system to exult themselves and to explain away God. The whole emphasis is to get rid of the light. How many times have you heard me tell you that the creative genius of unsaved men is satanically inspired?

“Now, that’s not because I don’t appreciate the ability of man to use his noodle and think. It’s because I understand the principal in Romans 1 that man’s creative genius, when it’s not controlled by the Word of God and by the Spirit of God, has one aim and that’s to get rid of the working of God.

“They turn aside from the revelation of God because, brother, they’ve got some sin in their life. They’re corrupt and they don’t want to be called into account by God.

“Sinful man does not want God to call Him into accountability. With man, what he wants is to eliminate the judgment of God against sin. And the way you eliminate the judgment is eliminate the judge and the one who sets the standard.

“Hebrews 9:27 says, ‘And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.’ And that’s what people don’t like. It’s not the dying that bothers them; it’s the ‘after that.’ That judgment. And if you want to eliminate that, you just get rid of God.

“Psalm 10:4 says, ‘The wicked through the pride of his countenance, will not seek after God: God is not in all his thoughts.’ In other words, all of his thoughts are just saying, ‘There is no God! There is no God!’ God isn’t there in all of his thoughts.

“Verse 11 goes on, ‘He hath said in his heart, God hath forgotten: he hideth his face; he will never see it.’ This is what they’re interested in—what the man says in his heart. Now, boy isn’t that a verse?! That guy goes on in his sin and he says, ‘God isn’t going to see it.’

“Verse 13 says, ‘Wherefore doth the wicked contemn God? he hath said in his heart, Thou wilt not require it.’ You see, that fellow’s trying to get away and eliminate the judgment of God by, in his heart, devising a system that denies and rejects the revelation God put there.

“And what he does, back in Romans 1, is change ‘the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.’

“In other words, he invents a God who can tolerate his sin; he invents a God who he can successfully appease by his works and by his actions.

*****

“Man wants to deal with God on his own level; lower Him down to be just another one of us, and what that does in reality is it makes a God out of us. But he isn’t satisfied just with that—he makes Him to birds. Not flying around in heaven, but just flying around where he can get at Him and shoot Him down if he wants to.

“Fourfooted beasts—that’s just domesticated animals. You get God down where now you can control Him. And then to creeping things. That’s just bugs. Beatles, roaches. You know what you do with them? You step on them! You get God down where you can tread on Him; you can crush Him.

The result of the rejection of truth is man’s rationalizations where he actually affirms that the errors he has invented are really the truth. He convinces himself he’s right and that he can make right conclusions even after he’s rejected the source of truth.

“You take modern education or ancient education—all human wisdom and education is designed from the point of view of Romans 21: 21-22. That’s the whole sum and substance of it all and the Word of God isn’t bashful about saying that.

“The guy has a desire, so he separates himself and he just seeks after wisdom. He intermingles with it, and he goes on in it and he’s associated with it. He’s wanting to hear and tell something new and he’s always open-minded to everything that comes along. Any idea that comes, he wants to hear it.

“The guy’s studying for an alibi to do whatever he wants to do. He isn’t just trying to get wisdom as he studies; he wants an excuse that he can go out with and do whatever he wants to do and have it be no problem.

*****

“Folks, you know the greatest brains this world’s ever produced; they couldn’t answer the simple question of what was going to happen to them when they died. Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud . . .

“Freud spent his life trying to prove that there wasn’t any God to have to worry about and that religion was just frustrated sex drive. That’s his philosophy all boiled down into two sentences.

“Because the Bible won’t leave these fellows alone, they develop a defense mechanism against it, saying it isn’t true, it isn’t relative, it isn’t what it claims to be. And it’s just another way unsaved people try to get out of receiving Jesus Christ as their Savior. That’s all in the world it is.

“They don’t just respond negatively to God’s Word; they decide not to believe—‘We’ve got to cover up the light because the light keeps hitting us; it won’t leave us alone.’

“So, they’ve got to darken the light, and their heart begins to function on its own councils, and its vain imaginations, and they begin to develop ways to walk in. They come up with religion.”

“Baal worship in the Bible is sexual perversion and religion, and Freud was right about this to that extent. You see, Freud had the ability that any usaved man has; that is to gather facts. The problem the unsaved man has is he can’t interpret the facts properly because he doesn’t have the proper frame of reference to operate on.

“But Freud indicated that religion—and he’s talking about the religious system, not salvation or the Bible—is based on sexual perversion and frustration. Idolatry, and Baal worship in the Bible is the apex of it, is based in sexual perversion.

“In Revelation 2:14, talking about tribulation period, the fornication is committed in the worship of idols. It’s part of their religious ceremony.

“So when Paul’s talking in Romans 1:24 about the ‘dishonoring of their own bodies,’ he’s really talking about the fact that this stuff degenerates into a perversion of everything that God created man for and one of the very first things God told man was to go out and reproduce and replenish the earth. So this thing goes down to the very corruption of the very purpose for which God put man on the earth and makes a debauchery out of it.

“To worship the creature is to be involved in satanic control. In Romans 1, man does this stuff all by himself. Satan doesn’t have to come in and attack him as he does with members of the Body of Christ. Man does all this by himself and goes hand in hand after Satan’s lie and Satan’s policy of evil.”