Thus, the mission itself and the importance of that mission are clear.

We are called to proclaim

the Word of God because we are in Christ, and the Lord has chosen to call His elect through our
preaching. It is not our Word, but His. What, then, is the content of that message? Because Christ
has come to call sinners to faith, one must first recognize his own sin. The third passage for
consideration, therefore, is Romans 1:18-23. “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven
against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the
truth.” Paul here states that God’s wrath is not something that is hidden. His wrath is not part of
His special revelation, but it is evident to all men. However, men suppress the truth in
unrighteousness. Everyone knows, whether he wants to admit it or not, that God exists, because
they know the Law of God in their conscience. This is not a deistic concept of God, as if we have
a vague notion of a creator deity who demands something from us. Paul says that they know
God, because God has revealed Himself to them. “For what can be known about God is plain to
them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power
and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things
that have been made. So they are without excuse.” All people are without excuse, because even
though they know God, they suppress this knowledge through sin. If they did not know God as
He is, then they might have a defense before the judgment seat, claiming ignorance of Him and
of His Law. Yet all are without excuse. All men must answer to God, because they have broken
His Law. “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him,
but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be
wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling
mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.” Idolatry, according to Paul, is not
putting a face upon a vague notion of a god. It is not creating an image of a sense of divine
power. It is deliberately giving what properly belongs to the only God to one of His creations. In
their desire to suppress what they know to be true, they worship the creature rather than the
creator and pile sin upon sin.

This is an important consideration, because the message which Christ has sent us to proclaim is
not one that is entirely foreign to our hearers. If they truly did not know God at all, not even in
their heart of hearts, then there could be no proclamation. They would not be guilty of breaking
the Law, because then the Law would be something foreign. Men would be neutral with respect
to God, something which is plainly not true, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of
God. We should not hesitate to proclaim the Law to the unbeliever, because it reveals what he
refuses to admit: that he is a lawbreaker guilty before the only God whom he tries desperately to
deny. There is also no relativism here, as if the Christian worldview was an alternative to the
unbelieving one. This is not a case of I have mine and you have yours. Rather, there is one and
only one reality, the Christian. The unbeliever knows God, as Paul says, because he must assume
so in order to make sense of anything. Morality, for example, presupposes that God is good. Evil
has no meaning apart from contrasting it with the Triune God. Science presupposes order,
something which makes no sense apart from God. Of course, the unbeliever denies this
vigorously, but in order to know anything at all, he begins with the very God he tries to suppress.

The task of apologetics, therefore, is to “destroy strongholds,” to use the language of Paul in 2
Corinthians 10:4. I believe that there is a real danger in treating apologetics as merely
preliminary to the Gospel. There is in fact no truly middle ground between belief and unbelief.
Everything which the unbeliever sees is colored by his suppression of the truth. Even the
resurrection all by itself can be distorted, as Christ Himself says in Luke 16:31: “If they do not
hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the
dead.” A vigorous proclamation of God’s Word, therefore, is the most vigorous apologetic.

This five-part series was originally presented at the North Dakota District Convention in
January 2018. This is part three.