Romans 1, Part 3. On the God who was looking first. Start with Part 1: Before the Cure.
For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.— Romans 1:19
The people of verse 18 are holding the truth down. Verse 19 explains why that takes so much effort. The truth under their hand was put there by God.
Look at who acts in the verse. Paul makes God the subject: “God has shown it to them” (Rom 1:19). Before anyone went searching, He was already showing Himself. He does it outside us, in “the things that have been made” (Rom 1:20), and within us, where “the work of the law is written on their hearts” (Rom 2:15).
That is why Paul can say people are “without excuse” (Rom 1:20). Creation and conscience tell us that God is, and that we owe Him honor. They cannot tell us how someone who has refused that honor finds the way home. That is where what we know runs out, and where the ache begins.
Augustine spent his youth reaching for everything his gifts could reach. A brilliant career in rhetoric carried him from North Africa to Rome and then Milan, and a religious sect promised him answers. None of it settled him. Years later he opened his Confessions with a prayer: “our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
Picture a child who has lost her mother. We could fill her room with gifts, and she would push them aside. Nothing in the room is her mother.
The psalmist knew this ache: “As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God” (Ps 42:1). Much of what unsettles us may be this same longing under other names, like the low unease that follows us through good days, or the loneliness that stays in good company. We read these as signs that something is missing. Paul would say something has been shown to us, and we keep living as though it had not.
If the soul already leans toward God, the way to Him should be simple. Too often religion is what makes it look impossible. Jesus saw this in the religious teachers of His day, who “tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders” (Matt 23:4). It is like someone sitting in a doorway, charging a fee to everyone who wants to go in.
It is easy to point at others for this. But many of us collect that fee from ourselves. We tell ourselves we will come to God once we are a little more worthy of Him. So the restless heart waits outside a door that was never locked.
The rest Augustine longed for is the rest Jesus offered:
*Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. * — Matthew 11:28
There is no fee in that sentence. Isaiah had said it centuries earlier, inviting the thirsty to “buy wine and milk without money and without price” (Isa 55:1).
Jesus once told of a son who came home rehearsing a speech. He meant to confess his failure and ask to be taken on as a hired servant, as if he could still pay something at the door (Luke 15:18–19). He never reached that part. “While he was still a long way off, his father saw him” (Luke 15:20), ran to him, and held him before the speech was done. Then the father turned to his servants and spoke of the boy who had come asking to be one of them: “this my son was dead, and is alive again” (Luke 15:24).
In the first part of this series we pictured God as a parent at the window long after dark, watching the road. This is what that parent does when a figure finally appears at the far end of it.
The son did get one sentence out: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you” (Luke 15:21). Before he could reach the part about working off his debt, the father was already calling for the robe.
Paul’s long diagnosis was always meant to bring us to that sentence. It is the truth we spend our lives holding down, and saying it is how the grip finally opens. What we find underneath is two truths at once: we have sinned, and we are still wanted at home.
This is why Paul would not skip to the cure. Grace that never names sin has nothing to forgive, and the Father whose heart burned over our leaving is the same one who runs when we turn back.
Most of us are still rehearsing the rest of the speech, the part about earning our place. You can stop there. Say the first sentence, and let Him interrupt you.
We were never the first ones looking.
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