It is not a comfortable subject to talk about, but it is essential that we understand sin. How sin works, what it does to us, and how the gospel heals us from its damage. In his first message at the 2015 Pastors Conference, John Piper offered a brief survey of sin from the book of Romans, and we jump into that message in the following clip as John Piper addresses Romans chapter 1 verse 18.

Here's what he said. Verse 18, "The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth." So here mankind in general is described as ungodly and unrighteous. John, 1st John 5 17 says, "All unrighteousness is sin." So we know we're dealing with here.

"To all unrighteousness and ungodliness of men, who," what's the first thing they do? They suppress the truth. Our ungodliness and unrighteousness inclines us to suppress truth. We repel the light. We run into darkness. Jesus said in John 3 that we are guilty sinners, not because we're victims of darkness, but lovers of darkness.

John 3 19, "Light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light." So right off the bat, I'm getting the feeling, okay, deep down in me issues are love issues. I love the dark. I can suppress the truth so much more easily in the dark, and that's what sin does.

It suppresses truth. What truth does it specialize in suppressing? Verse 19, "Because what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them." Knowledge of God is the truth that sin wants to suppress. So he says, "Therefore we have no excuse." Verse 20, middle of the verse, "So they are without excuse." Verse 21, "Why?

Because although they knew, they knew God, they did not glorify Him or give Him thanks." So the root of why we suppress the truth is that we don't want to glorify or thank God, and the truth is always testifying to His glory and His beneficence, and so it has to be squished down, put out of our mind, lest we feel guilty about not glorifying and thanking Him.

We don't want to do it because we're sinners, and sin doesn't thank God. Sin doesn't glorify God. Sin loves darkness, which conceals the glory of God and the beneficence of God. Sin is not just a hater of the light and of the knowledge of God desiring to suppress it.

Sin is a lover. When the hated truth is suppressed, the loved lie is embraced. Verse 22, "Claiming to be wise, they" — that is, those who suppress the truth — "have darkened hearts. Claiming to be wise, they have become fools, and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images." They don't just bury truth, they embrace alternative lovers.

There's no vacuum in the human heart, ever. When the real God is rejected, images are embraced. They exchanged the glory of God for images. Sin hates the true God, and sin loves God-substituting images. And we, more than any culture in the history of the world, live in an age of images.

We spend almost all our leisure time looking at images. Quite irrelevant, I think, that for Paul those images were stone or wood along the side of an Athenian road, and ours are on our phone or television or computer. Irrelevant. The issue is substitution. They exchanged the infinitely valuable glory of God for the glory of that show of images coming off the screen.

Yes, amen. This clip was taken from John Piper's message, "What is Sin? The Essence and Root of All Sinning," from the 2015 Pastors Conference. The full message is on our site, along with all the conference media and over 1,200 other messages from John Piper. See our archive at DesiringGod.org.

Tomorrow, Ray Ortlund will join us to talk about Bible reading, specifically, what are we doing when we read the Bible, and how does the Bible ground us and stabilize us. I'm your host Tony Rehnke. We'll see you tomorrow.