Now a certain woman named Lydia heard us. She was a seller of purple from the city of Thyatira, who worshiped God. The Lord opened her heart to heed the things spoken by Paul.
Acts 16:14

All natural born sinners deny God. Only a tiny number of them do so blatantly by claiming to be atheists. The rest (and that is the rest of all of lost humanity), deny Him by reinventing Him according to their idea of how He should be.

Some deniers of the one true and living God invent religions they can follow to justify themselves before God. This doesn’t work.

Others reinvent a God who loves and forgives everybody of everything, These insist that all that is needed to go to Heaven is to die, because according to their beliefs, everyone who dies goes to a “better place.” This makes these deniers of God feel good while alive, but it will not help when they die and find out that their “god” does not exist except in their imaginations.

Still others reinvent a god who judges as they would judge. Good people go to Heaven and bad people go to Hell. And of course these people always consider themselves to be among the “good” ones. A variation of this is: they insist that while they may not be good all the time, their good deeds outweigh their bad deeds, so they are sure to be okay. These are self-righteous fantasies of those who deny God.

Why are we naturally God-deniers? We’ll attempt to answer that next time…