“For though they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became worthless, and their senseless hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man, birds, four-footed animals, and reptiles.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the things I have enjoyed as a dad over the years is playing with my kids. We’ve played all sorts of different things, but when they were younger, the playing tended to be more make-believe in its nature. Playing make-believe games is fun, but it’s not real. Part of the fun is in knowing there is a real world to enjoy together. When someone gives into a fantasy too long or too thoroughly, that’s a sign of a problem that needs to be addressed, not just harmless fun. The trouble here is that some of the fantasies we indulge in don’t look like fantasies, and so we dive in not realizing how they are warping our thinking. Paul says that’s really a problem. Let’s talk about it.

We often hear about gaslighting nowadays. Popular use of the word is a fairly recent phenomenon even as the word itself has been around for a long time. It came from a 1938 play in which a man sought to manipulate his wife into thinking she was insane by constantly dimming the gas lights in their home. The word as it is used today refers to attempts to convince people of something that is not true by repeating the lie so many times that people start to believe it is true by sheer repetition.

Gaslighting as a political or social practice causes cynicism in the culture as people lose confidence in truth generally. It also helps to convince people that truth isn’t an objective thing at all, but a personal decision. The problem with this, as we have talked about before, is that what we believe matters. Belief affects behavior. When we believe things that aren’t true, we are going to do things that aren’t good. When we believe these false things are true, though, we don’t think the things we do that aren’t good aren’t actually not good.

Living in such a delusional state for long begins to have an impact on us over time. More specifically, it begins to warp our minds and character. The more we come to believe evil things are good, the more likely we are to support other evils by convincing ourselves they are good as well.

Such warping, though, doesn’t necessarily take on a sinister sheen. It may just play itself out as the ridiculous, sometimes the pitiable ridiculous. Perhaps you’ve encountered someone who believed something that just wasn’t true, but try as you might, you couldn’t shake them from it. They may have looked silly to anyone who actually knew the truth, but in being so convinced of the lie, they just couldn’t see it, and remain steadfast in their silliness. They were like the one kid who never really understood the inside joke, but kept trying to act like they did. It’s a sad look after a while.

Yesterday, we talked about the fact that people are without excuse in their refusal to acknowledge God as God. There’s just too much you have to ignore or otherwise interpret in ways that are obviously flawed to make such a conclusion reasonable or rational as far as an interpretation of the existence and nature of the world as we know it. And yet, people persist in such a deluded state of affairs all the same. A lot of them, in fact.

What Paul is talking about here is one of the consequences of this refusal to accept reality for what it is. When we refuse to give God glory – that is, acknowledge who He is and give Him the praise and worship He is due – and show gratitude – that is, receive with gratefulness what He desires and indeed has given us – there are consequences for that. Of course, in saying something like that, our minds immediately go to all of the active things God might do to smite those who oppose Him. But what Paul introduces next as the initial results of rejecting God in spite of the unavoidable mountain of evidence for His existence, nature, and character, is not anything active on God’s part at all. It is entirely passive. This is because God doesn’t necessarily have to do anything active to punish people who reject Him. The fruits of life apart from Him will be bitter enough all on their own.

Remember what I said just a second ago is one of the results of embracing a fantasy for too long? It eventually warps your mind. That’s just what Paul says here is one of the results of rejecting the reality of who God is. “For though they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or show gratitude Instead, their thinking became worthless, and their senseless hearts were darkened.” Okay, but what does that mean? Well, as one Christian philosopher once rather crassly put it, it means their brains stop working properly. Refusing to accept God for who He is is both a symptom, but also a cause, of a broken brain.

Their thinking became worthless, Paul says. When we start trying to define reality in terms that cannot accurately describe reality, all of our thoughts about reality stemming from that point are worthless. Our reasoning becomes fatally flawed. Our philosophies become empty and fruitless. And ideas built on worthless thinking aren’t typically very good. They are often, in fact, very bad. The two most egregious examples of this over the last two hundred years are Darwinism and Marxism. Darwinian thinking formed the philosophical roots of the evil of Hitler’s regime. Marxist thinking is what ultimately led to Stalinist Russia and Maoist China.

Those are obviously extreme examples of Paul’s argument here pushed to its logical conclusion, but we don’t have to go nearly that far to see what a problem it is to refuse to accept the existence, nature, and character of God as revealed solely in the natural world. To put that another way, sin doesn’t have to be flashy or dramatic to make our lives and the world around us miserable. C.S. Lewis captures this truth beautifully in his book, The Great Divorce, where he imagines Hell not as some fiery place of torment, but rather as a dull, gray, meaningless expanse in which its residents are isolated from each other by choice. Hell is boring and illogical and lonely. Bad thinking leads to all sorts of undesirable outcomes. Some of them are dramatic, but most of them are mundane. The misery of mundane is what most people find themselves trapped in. Because their thinking is too broken to see and enjoy what’s really true about the world.

The trouble is, they don’t see this. They can’t see it. When you stick with a lie long enough, eventually you can’t see the truth anymore. And so, “claiming to be wise, they became fools.” The particular foolishness Paul identifies is the foolishness of worshiping something in creation and not the God who is the Creator. They “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man, birds, four-footed animals, and reptiles.” When a grand building is created, we don’t praise the building. We don’t praise the furnishings. We praise the architect and the builder and the designer.

We are going to give glory to something. We can’t help it. It’s how we were created. If we refuse to give glory to the God who uniquely deserves it, we will give it to something or someone else. No matter what this something else is, though, it is not the Creator God who made all things from nothing, and therefore it is less worthy of that glory and our devotion than He is. If we keep giving it, eventually it will ruin our thinking. Perhaps worse than that, it will reduce our understanding of what is deserving of glory in this world to something entirely smaller than what – or, rather, who – really is. It will make our world far smaller than it has to be. It will take away our experience of real joy and leave us clinging desperately to a transitory happiness. Peace will elude us and anxiety will take its place. Hope will become nothing more than wishful thinking. And love will be replaced by mere emotion.

There’s really just not any good news here. But then, when we reject the good news, what else would we expect to find in its place? Spend today examining what’s true, really true, about the world around you. Then, make sure your thinking is aligned with that. It’ll make your world a whole lot bigger and better than it will be otherwise.