Hello hello, welcome to the first ever recorded Bible teaching that is posted on Wired by Weather! Now, before we get started, I want to cover a couple of points. I created this entirely different platform with a specific intention. I’m not going to post these Bible teachings on YouTube, or any other social media. And, this website isn’t only going to be Bible teachings. It’s going to be an institution for anthropological publications that relate the science of the natural world to real human experience and to the Word of God. I want to make this information free to access. I believe that your attention is also a form of currency, so when I say free to access, that also means your brainwave space. You’re not going to see any ads and you’re not going to listen to any either. I’m doing this purely out of faith. I have no idea what this will become, yes, I’m a little scared of expectations and time commitments but that is absolutely not going to change any course of action. I’m just trying to be obedient.
So, I’m saying this because I’m not going to be advertising this website or any of this work—the Bible teachings, or any publications—in the traditional sense with social media. I’m fully trusting the Lord and I sense the Holy Spirit telling me that this will be a fully word of mouth, underground, source of information and social connection that will only grow. This means, IF you think this message should be heard elsewhere YOU are going to have to send it to who you think should have access to it. It’s totally free, and the objective is to form a network of people based only on human connection. No Algorithms, no cookies trying to collect your private data and preferences. I’m not trying to sell you anything, or get rich, but I do have an inclination that somehow, I’ll be dedicating my life and my effort to growing a true and healthy community from this, whatever this will be.
Psalm 27 - Of David.
1 The Lord is
my light and my salvation—
whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life—
of whom shall I be afraid?...
…14 Wait for the Lord;
be strong and take heart
and wait for the Lord.
David exemplifies a closeness, a true bond and reliance on God. We look to the Psalms of David when we want a reminder of the loving character of God and the relationship that we can have with the God who is described as the Creator of the Universe. Whatever your spiritual, religious or social status may be, I think it’s safe to say that it’s a part of the human condition to desire closeness with God.
Naturally, humans feel the void that comes with our own distance from God.
Romans 1:18-20
“18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For 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.”
I’m not going to shy away from the truth of what is written. The scripture says it clearly “God has made it plain to them”. Paul tries to meet the Roman populus exactly where they’re at. He relates to the state of their principal doubt. It isn’t only in recent centuries, since science has advanced and we have a universally agreed upon set of theoretical laws of physics, that humanity has turned its back on God and looks towards the material world to describe life as we know it. We can take this same text written to the Romans in the first century and apply it to academics and general society, for that matter, around the world today.
When I read verse 18, what are the emotions that you feel? Listen, “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness”
That’s a genuine question, what does that verse make you feel? I don’t know about you, but for me personally, at first it made me cringe a little bit. I personally feel afraid of what you will think when you hear that. I imagine that your body will have some type of physical reaction that kickstarts the shutting off of the rational part of your brain. Maybe you rolled your eyes or your throat closed, or that nagging pain in your shoulder or back just started up again, or you had the impulse to do something that takes your attention away from listening. When I read the words “wrath, godlessness, wickedness”, I think “No. Avoid.” Maybe that’s an impulse that you notice too and it actually makes you want to run away from God, or Christianity, because you don’t see yourself as wicked and you don’t think that you deserve wrath, much less from the “all-perfect and all-loving Creator of the Universe”. Maybe if you’ve spent some time in the church, or have learned about the resurrection and culturally wear a cross, or some holy person icon around your neck, even if you have marked off all of the religious checkboxes in the order in which they’ve popped up in your life, you might have felt safe with a thought like “I’m not godless, I believe in God. I now the commandments and try to be good so I’m not wicked. And even though I’m not perfect Jesus died for me, so I’m saved from the wrath, and this verse doesn’t apply to me.” And then you keep reading or move on before studying the text.
I want us to notice the context and ask ourselves what these trigger words really mean. The word “wickedness” in this verse is translated from the Greek word “adikia”. Adikia has the root definition a, meaning “not” and dike, meaning “right”. If we replace “wickedness” in this verse with the root definition, but for grammatical continuity we’ll use the word “wrong” instead of “not right”. The verse says: “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wrongs of people, who suppress the truth by their wrongdoings”. Godlessness, I think is more self-explanatory, it means living as if God does not exist. And “wrath”, the original word Paul writes is the Greek word “Orgē”. This word has the root meaning “to teem” t-e-e-m, which leans more towards a swelling which eventually bursts. I’ve also seen this word referred to in the context of “re-ordering”. In historical context, this word was used in reference to natural processes and internal motion. Thayer’s Greek Lexicon states that this word was used “especially in reference to plants and fruits swelling with juice” we can see that this word refers to a natural process, and natural growth. Within the context of true feelings from a personal God, we could think of this word “teem” as more of a ‘desire from His natural character and the agitation of the soul’.
We can rephrase it once again to say: “The teeming of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wrongs of people, who suppress the truth by their wrongdoings”. Verse 19 “since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.”
That just reinforces the use of the word “teeming”. The teeming of God is being revealed from heaven—actively--since what may be known about God is plain to them, God has made it (the teeming) plain to them. This reminds me of Newton’s third law of motion that says: “for every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
In part, because it reminds me of our own natural response in conversation. “since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.” In healthy conversation, we respond in kind, for example “She spoke softly, so I responded in a soft tone of voice”. When someone comes to us and speaks from a state of feelings we respond with feelings, if someone comes from a position of logic, we respond with logic. If someone runs up to you in panic, you feel their panic and you will respond in kind. Or, if your sibling does something that offends you but they themself don’t realize it, you’ll have the natural drive to let him or her know that you’re unhappy with what they did… Sometimes we may do that without telling them directly.
If you have siblings, or close friends, or maybe if you don’t really have friends, or if you’ve experienced a prolonged tension in your marriage, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Maybe you know the pain that this can bring into your life, or into your family, or maybe you’ve witnessed this in a different relationship. You may have heard yourself say that if that person can’t see the way they’ve hurt you, it’s on them and you won’t let it bother you. You block out the feelings, grow distant, and maybe lose contact with that person entirely. Or, you might be on the other end of that conflict, where this person you were once close with has been snappy with you, was treating you differently and now, they are totally avoiding contact with you and treat you like you don’t exist. Well, I have one consolidation, this is a case of unhealthy communication. We were designed not to support this type of rupture and heartache in families or in community. We were designed to feel the emotional distress that comes with distance between us and a person we love. It’s modeled in the way that God has structured nature, we find this truth throughout scripture everywhere. “For every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
We feel guilt, remorse, shame and all of these other emotions to help us relate to others emotionally and with God himself. We feel that we have wronged someone afterwards, even if we did it unintentionally.
This example models the message expressed in the second half of verse 19. “God has made it plain to them” This is referring to God’s wrath. When we experience negative emotion and don’t know the right way to process it, we can end up pushing it down and burying it within ourselves until it becomes something that we lose connection to. We don’t want the anxiety, or anger, or sadness to seep into our day and ruin our ability to get work done. On an individual note, we can also notice when we’ve messed up. We’ve all known the feeling when we’ve let a damaging pattern or a behavior go on for way too long. Eventually the signals that we get that try to point us away from the habit become a shame factor, and it’s almost like we’ve found it harder to change our behavior because the shame overtakes the place of the feelings and because the shame attacks who we are, it changes the ordering hierarchy. No longer are we trying to repair our behavior because of the natural emotional pain, we’re trying to repair our behavior out of guilt that we are stuck in a pattern that makes us feel in some way shame. We can grow numb to our emotions, and we can grow cynical under the weight of guilt and shame. And that second example is just on an individual level. When you add the complexity of a partner or parent into that, I think the pain becomes worse. One of the hardest things for us to admit when we find ourselves in this position is that our own pride is in there pushing our emotions out of the way.
By suppressing the truth, these people make themselves godless, because they ignore the invisible qualities of God that He is actively making obvious to us through our own consciousness. When we avoid our emotions to push through our daily lives on our own, we are avoiding the voice of the law that God has written on mankind’s heart. Here’s a verse in the next chapter of the same letter to the Romans that supports the understanding of us having an intrinsic desire to keep the order that God intends for us to have.
Romans 2:14-15 say “Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature the things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.”
The thing about pride in this context, is that when we get to a position where we feel like we’re being shamed because of a pattern that we can’t let go of we take the things that God made obvious about eternity and his divine nature and distort their applications and use them to validate our behaviors. That’s the “people who suppress the truth by their wrong doings” from verse 18 in chapter 1. Suppressing the truth may be something like taking natural cycles on Earth and in life, like biological processes, things that do have some systematic wiring and complex reliable structure—we take those things and use them in a way that they were never intended to be used in order to gain something that was never meant to be gained through that pathway in the first place.
We convince ourselves to avoid our spiritual senses and emotions so often that we either forget or don’t learn how to properly tune into them. This eventually becomes a void that we’re either busily running away from, or running to try to fill with substances, food, attention, money, approval or achievements. Because of this broken human heart, we don’t pay attention to the law. Again chapter 1, verse 19, “God made it plain to see” “it” referring to the teeming, the building up of the internal motion of spiritual disorder that we create through our wrongdoings. This building up was done intentionally so that we would be able to feel the distance between us and God. When we try to hurry away from the feelings and use the natural periodic cycles of manmade life--paycheck, alarm clock, lunchtime, due date, cook dinner, pick up kids, cut grass—to distract us from resting and listening to what it is that God might be telling us through the Holy Spirit, we’ll miss God all together.
And in chapter 2 it’s all tied together. Before I read this to you, I want you to ask yourself this question after you hear what it says “Do you feel like there’s a pain in your heart that has you running away from God?”, “Do you feel like there’s always going to be a later time to slow down and tune in to what the Holy Spirit is trying to reveal to you about the state of your soul?”, “Do you feel like you are leashed to your concerns and priorities of this material world, or are you walking alongside them pleasantly?” “Do you believe that is possible?”
Romans 2:5 says “5 But because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed.”
I’ll encourage you to read the rest of Romans chapter 1 on your own and ask yourself in the wrongdoings from Paul’s context, how this same behavior in the world in our day is driven by pride and suppresses the truth. Going back to the original word choice in verse 18, “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness”
Once we find peace in proximity to the LORD we find that justice has been served. Grace, and understanding that grace is a gift from God, that is what comes from finding peace in his presence. But we must decide that we want it. In the case of the blind man in the book of Matthew, Jesus asked him if he wanted to be healed. We have to WANT the life change. We have to want to feel free. We have to want the peace.
Nothing compares to proximity to the LORD and one way we experience this truth is through the absence of His presence. Distance from God brings pain. If you haven’t had an encounter with the presence of God before, you may not recognize this feeling as pain, it may just be a void that you’ve grown insensitive to. But because God, being God, knew that it would be in the human condition to grow distant from His original design for us, verse 19 says that He made it plain for us to see. He structured nature so that in moments stillness we would be able to sense this “active teeming”, or the wrath that is revealed from heaven in verse 18.
-It’s also evidence that it is by grace that we are saved. It’s by faith in God. Faith that God is who the Bible says that He is. It’s by faith that Jesus did what the Bible says that He did. It documents that Jesus fulfilled over 300 prophesies throughout the course of His life. It’s by faith in the resurrection of the dead messiah, prophesied centuries before Jesus birth, proving the ultimate divinity and omnipotence of the eternal Hebrew God, the creator of the Universe, the one that math and physics and biology strive to explain. It isn’t by works. It isn’t by our goodness, or our perfection. That’s intentional language. Paul writes in Ephesians chapter 2 verses 8 and 9 “8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—9 not by works, so that no one can boast.”
It is not a normal human reaction to forgive someone who has been cruel to us without first receiving some form of justice for that wrongdoing. That’s grace from a loving father. But in order to receive that grace we have to acknowledge God first and receive the truth that God wants us to be with Him in heaven. Paul didn’t say “it’s by grace that you have been saved—the proud—by all you’ve achieved in your moral holiness and good deeds”. We’ve all wronged God, and at some points in our lives that wrongdoing could have been dense and unrepentant. What we once believed was enough, or the truth—that religiosity, and rituals are the way to God, I’m here to tell you that that is not true. That is not the gospel. We can read it written in Acts 17:29-30
29 “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. 30 In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.
We need to seek the presence of the LORD. To all of the other scientists, remember Newton’s third law. “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
If you want a genuine relationship with the creator of the universe, you need to make the first move. It’s out of humility. This is a truth WRITTEN and exemplified over and over in scripture. We’ve heard it in James 4:8 in the new testament, “8 Come close to God, and God will come close to you. Wash your hands, you sinners; purify your hearts, for your loyalty is divided between God and the world.” and it’s scattered also throughout the old testament: Zechariah 1:3 “3 Therefore, say to the people, ‘This is what the Lord of Heaven’s Armies says: Return to me, and I will return to you, says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies.’”. Malachi 3:7 “7Ever since the time of your ancestors you have turned away from my decrees and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you,” says the Lord Almighty. “But you ask, ‘How are we to return?’”. Psalm 145:18 “The Lord is close to all who call on him, yes, to all who call on him in truth.”
Naturally, humans feel the void that comes with our own distance from God.
This has been built into nature from the beginning of creation. So that through the awareness, and what we can learn when we listen to the stillness, we would be able to notice Him. In response, we may desire to close the distance and seek reconciliation with Him.
And likewise, verse 20 says “20 For 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.”
I introduced the pain that comes from distance with God using a universal human example. We can see this fundamental truth mirrored in the pain that comes with distance from a loved one. We feel emotional discomfort, we notice a void that was once filled with the presence of a person, we desire to be with that person again, and we reach out to them. “For every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction.” I can’t help but feel the deep wave of emotion that comes over me when I read the scripture of Esau and Jacobs reconciliation in Genesis 33 verses 3 and 4 “Jacob himself went on ahead and bowed down to the ground 7 times as he approached his brother. But Esau ran to meet Jacob and embraced him; he threw his arms around his neck and kissed him. And they wept.” Distance in relationships with our family and loved ones due to unresolved conflict, pain, and unforgiveness is not the way God designed us to operate.
Paul tells us in verse 20 that we will be without excuse for not closing the distance with God. If something is clearly seen, then it is unmistakable. But even being invisible, God makes it clear to understand. And it has always been so, ever since the creation of the world. Again, this is referring to a natural process. Like our ability to understand that there is pain in a relationship by feeling angry or sad. He says that because of this, no one will have an excuse—yet he warns us here that people will try to suppress the truth by their wrongdoings themselves, and that because of that, those people will inevitably face God’s wrath.
Now, I rearranged Romans 1:18-20 to make it a little easier to process. As we conclude, as we have walked through this scripture we have learned that:
… “God’s eternal power and divine nature are invisible qualities that are understood from what has been made... “because God has made it plain to them... people are without excuse…” since what may be known about God is plain to them,” “The teeming of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wrongs of people, who suppress the truth by their wrongdoings”
I hope that, given this Bible teaching, you feel a sense of peace and hope for reconciliation in any broken relationships with others. That you feel a yearning to be reconciled with God, your creator from the beginning of time. Though maybe for you, He’s been forgotten or overlooked, you have not been forgotten in His eyes. He is omnipresent. He is with you. He has invited you to seek a relationship with Him. I want to encourage you to close the distance with Him. Confess the pain you’ve been trying to process on your own, maybe by totally avoiding it. Lock yourself in a closet or the bathroom and just be alone in prayer to God and tell Him that you want to welcome His manifest presence into your life.
That might go something like this “God, I’ve heard about you today. I’ve listened to what you’ve said. I want to know if it’s true. I want to know if you’re really there. God, if you’re really there, I want to know if you’re my Father. Is that who you are to me? A Father? Do you love me like your child, really? God I’ve been so distant. I’ve lived my life without thinking about you. I’ve listened to the desires of my heart that pull me away from you, God. Can you tell me how that makes you feel? God, If I have some form of unrepentant sin in my life, can you show me what that is and why it hurts you? If there’s some part of me that wants to push you out can you remove that desire from my heart and my mind? Father, draw near to me and show yourself in an unmistakable way. Though I may be alone in the material world show me that you are with me in Spirit… I want to have faith in Jesus, that He did what the Bible says that He did. God cast out the doubt in my mind and help me feel the way to you using my heart. Help my unbelief. Through this prayer, I’m stepping forward towards you in faith, in the name of Jesus. Amen.”
Now, if you’ve made it this far I want to remind you of the point that we covered here which is: “Nothing compares to proximity to the Lord; we seek Him intrinsically.”
Happy Monday, if you’re listening on the day this was posted, or shared with you. Happy day for any other. I’m praying for you to have an amazing week, even for those listening on Wednesday or any later day. God is with you and He has been with you.
Either next week or in two weeks I’ll release another Bible teaching that covers the second point for this series “Why seek the Lord as your ‘One Thing’” and that second point is “We’re in Desperate need for a Father.” I hope you’ll tune in again once it’s live.
Thank you for tuning in, I love you. God bless you. Take Care.
- Susan