Romans 1, Part 2. On the truth we hold down. Start with Part 1: Before the Cure.
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.— Romans 1:18
Last time we lingered on the first half of this verse, the wrath of God. The second half tells us what provokes it. Paul describes people who “suppress the truth” (Rom 1:18).
The Greek word is katechō (κατέχω), to hold something firmly in place. Paul can use it in a good sense. When he tells the Thessalonians to “hold fast what is good” (1 Thess 5:21), it is the same verb. In Romans 1 the grip is turned the other way. Something true keeps rising, and someone keeps pushing it back down.
It is easy to read past what Paul is describing here. These are people with the truth already in hand, pressing on it. The next verse says that what can be known about God “is plain to them” (Rom 1:19), and even at the bottom of the chapter’s long slide, Paul says they still know (Rom 1:32).
Anyone who has tried to talk with a friend about Christ has probably met this. The conversation rarely stalls where we expect. Many people will grant, if we ask, that there is probably some Creator behind it all. What holds them back is usually something else: what it would mean to let that God be God in their own lives, to be answerable to Him and to thank Him for a life they would rather call their own. The mind has mostly arrived, and the heart would rather not follow. This may be what Romans 1:18 looks like today.
So a better argument rarely settles it. And look at what does the pressing. People hold the truth down “by their unrighteousness” (Rom 1:18). The hand that holds the truth down is made of the very thing the truth would expose.
Paul names what draws God’s wrath: “all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men” (Rom 1:18). The first word is asebeia (ἀσέβεια), the second adikia (ἀδικία). Many readers take the first as what goes wrong between us and God, and the second as what goes wrong between us and other people. Paul lists ungodliness first, and a few verses later he names its root. People knew God and “did not honor him as God or give thanks to him” (Rom 1:21).
This is where the grip comes from. To honor God as God means He gets a say in our lives. To thank Him means admitting we did not make ourselves. Either one loosens our hold on the center of our own world. The psalmist sees where it begins: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Ps 14:1). In his heart, long before the words reach his mouth.
It also explains why so much of our effort goes to the wrong place. We work on unrighteousness because we can see it. We apologize and try to repair what we broke with people, and those things matter. But if nothing changes between us and God, it is like weeding by tearing off the leaves. The ground looks clean for a week. Then the root sends up the same plant again.
C. S. Lewis tells the story of noticing his own grip in his memoir Surprised by Joy. He was teaching at Oxford then, a man who had spent years as an atheist and still wanted, above everything, to be left alone. There was no word in his vocabulary, he admits, that he hated more than interference.
One day, riding up Headington Hill on the top of a bus, he became aware that he was “holding something at bay, or shutting something out.” No argument had prompted it. He compared it to wearing a stiff suit of armor, and he realized, right there on the bus, that he could keep it on or loosen it. He chose to loosen it. Not long after, alone in his college room at Magdalen, he knelt and admitted that God was God. It was not yet faith in Christ. That would take more time and many more long conversations with friends. But this was where it started.
Lewis does not credit a new piece of evidence for the turn. By his own account, the arguments had been closing in on him for some time. On the bus, he simply noticed his own hands.
Scripture shows the same grip with a darker face. When Stephen tells the council in Jerusalem that he sees Jesus standing at the right hand of God, they “cried out with a loud voice and stopped their ears” (Acts 7:57), rushed at him, and stoned him. The witnesses laid their cloaks at the feet of a young man named Saul, who approved of the killing (Acts 7:58; 8:1).
Years later, standing before King Agrippa, Paul recalled what the risen Jesus said to him on the Damascus road:
It is hard for you to kick against the goads. — Acts 26:14
A goad was a sharpened stick for driving oxen. An ox that kicked against it only hurt itself. Jesus was naming what the resisting had cost Saul all along. The man who wrote Romans 1:18 had once been one of the hands.
Holding the truth down takes more out of us than we realize. Pressing on anything all day wears us out, and after a while we stop noticing the ache. So the question this verse leaves with us is a quiet one. What are we holding down right now? Maybe something about God we already know and would rather not honor. Maybe something about ourselves.
The truth under our hand has not gone anywhere. “The word of our God will stand forever” (Isa 40:8). Lewis did not have to produce anything on that bus, and neither do we. We only have to stop pressing.
Saul’s story did not end on the road. He got up blind, and “they led him by the hand” into Damascus (Acts 9:8). The hands that had held the truth down for so long were empty now, and someone else had to hold them.
When we finally let go of what we have been holding down, we find that we are the ones being held.
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