For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of people who suppress the truth by their unrighteousness – Romans 1:18 (NET)
Immediately after speaking of the power of the Gospel, the Apostle Paul launches into a statement concerning the pouring out of the wrath of God, and its connection to ungodliness and unrighteousness. The remainder of the first chapter of the letter to the Romans is decidedly direct, as Paul, through his writing here, probably has in mind certain individuals or groups of people. Rather than analyze in an attempt to ascertain to whom or to what situation the words from verse eighteen through thirty-two are directed, we will take into consideration the grand narrative of the Scriptures so as to make an application.
So in looking at the eighteenth verse, and contemplating the Scriptural narrative, we can identify the verse with our human parents, Adam and Eve. Because human beings were made in the image of God, an aspect of Godliness is bearing the divine image. Ungodliness therefore, could be considered to be the failure to adequately bear the divine image. Righteousness is best defined as “covenant faithfulness,” and it is usually and accurately ascribed to God, though when humans find themselves in righteousness, it can also be said that they are in a state of faithfulness to covenant. Unrighteousness then is not being faithful to the covenant. When Adam and Eve partook of the “forbidden fruit,” in contradiction of the Lord’s command, they were not faithful to the covenant. Therefore, they found themselves in a state of unrighteousness. This resulted in them not being able to completely fulfill God’s intention for the pinnacle of His creation to bear His image, reflecting His glory into the world. They now found themselves unable to attain to the reflection of God’s glory for which they had been created, and thus, entering into unrighteousness, they succumbed to the condition of ungodliness, and they fell short of the glory of God. This was the beginning of sin. With this, mankind began to lose its knowledge of God. With this, one could say, the truth of God began to be suppressed by the presence of sin.
This occurred even though what could be known about God had been made quite plain to them (Romans 1:19). Indeed, it seems to be the case that Adam and Eve had a regular fellowship with God, in His very presence, as it was following their eye-opening fruit-eating that “the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God moving about in the orchard at the breezy time of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the orchard” (Genesis 3:8). We can take this as an indication that such was a regular occurrence. In that time spent with Adam and Eve, it simply had to be the case that God made Himself and His ways and His expectations very plain to them.
Based upon that, can we not assert that the experience of Adam and Eve is reflected in the next verse, where we read “since the creation of the world His invisible attributes---His eternal power and divine nature---have been clearly seen, because they are understood through what has been made”? (Romans 1:20a) Though they would not have been able to tangibly see or feel God’s eternal power, it would most certainly have been the case that they would have been brought into an understanding of it by the very fact of their existence, along with that of the world. They would have understood that power by observing what was all around them---what had been made.
God’s divine nature would have been understood, especially by Adam, as having been made in the image of God, and undoubtedly having had that communicated to him, as he was given the responsibility of naming all of the living creatures (Genesis 2:20). This was part of the exercise of the stewarding authority over the creation that had been delivered to Adam. Along with that, Adam had been placed in Eden, in the world, to care for it and to maintain it (2:15). These two things, along with the command in regards to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, would have given Adam a vision of God’s nature, as part of the bearing of the divine image (which would seem to entail some measure of a shared nature) was the authority over and responsibility for God’s creation. It is owing to this direct knowledge of God and fellowship with God, with the explicit commands of God and responsibilities that sprang from that knowledge and fellowship, that left Adam and Eve “without excuse” (Romans 1:20b) when it came time for God to question them about the matter involving the serpent, the fruit, and their rebellion.
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