Four Ways Unbelievers Suppress The Truth

We have all been there at some point. A discussion turns to spiritual matters and it becomes clear that the person you are talking to does not believe in God. But it gets worse than that. They are incredulous about your faith. Not only do they not believe, they also don’t understand how anyone could believe. They press you for evidence because they see nothing that would indicate there is a God.

How could this happen? Psalm 19 says that the heavens declare the glory of God, yet they see none of it. The clearest and most important answer from the Scripture is Romans 1:18 which says they “suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” I want to explore what this suppression actually looks like. How does the unbeliever suppress the truth? What form does it take? What does it look like and sound like? The Christian will be helped by knowing what is going on behind the curtain of their friend’s unbelief.

First, we need to understand the reason behind the various suppressions. The kinds of suppression vary, but they all have the same root. This root is a commitment to personal autonomy. Romans 1:21 says, “For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks…” Instead, verse 25 says they “worshipped and served the creature instead of the creator…” The main creature they worshipped and served is the one they find in the mirror. The unbeliever has exalted his own desires, thinking, and pursuits to the place of final authority. Every unbeliever follows the way of their first mother, Eve, who heard God speak, heard Satan speak, then looked to herself and made up her own mind. This will manifest itself in a thousand different ways, but all those ways grow from the same seed of prideful self-determination.

I see four categories that all the various suppressions of truth fall into.

1. Honest Suppression

These are people who will tell you straight up they hate God. These are not atheists, because they will confess openly that God, or at least some god, exists. The problem is they want nothing to do with him. What they are suppressing is the truth of the glory of God, not His existence. They are suppressing the truth of His holy love and wisdom, rather than denying God in totality. Often times this is closely tied to the problem of evil. Perhaps a traumatic event happened in their life and they believe God is blameworthy. Maybe they refuse to believe there is a sufficient answer to why so much evil exists in the world. Whatever the case, they hate God and they honestly admit it. They don’t want to talk about Him. They don’t want to think about Him. They want to stay as far away as possible from anything related to Him.

Let me add a quick note to encourage the suffering saint. It is with these people that your suffering matters. When you are “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Cor. 6:10) they are going to pay attention. These in particular will ask you to “give an account for the hope that is in you” (1 Pet 3:15). A firm and joyous hope in Christ, while suffering, is what these people can’t understand. They hate God for suffering, but here you are loving Him. God may be using your suffering to stop the suppression of truth they have been engaged in for so long.

2. Systematic Suppression

The rest of these suppressions are dishonest. They don’t want to say they hate God, even though that is true. This next kind of suppression utilizes a system for holding down truth. This is kind of like “safety in numbers”, with all the benefit of organization and tradition. In this kind of suppression you are going to hear phrases like, “it is established fact that…”, or “standard consensus says….”

Most of these systems of suppression are going to tie back to some field of science. Science is the system that creates, builds, and organizes knowledge through testable explanations. This is a perfect place for intelligent suppression to run. Science provides stunningly detailed and complex explanations that can only be attained by rigorous, disciplined, and intelligent people. Once you package these explanations up in ways understandable for the general public, they make for powerful places of apparent authority.

Many of these explanations will be wrong and many will be right. That is the nature of all the sciences, whether used by a Christian or an unbeliever. There is nothing inherently evil about science. But there is something inherently evil in people. Therefore, evil people will use science to suppress the truth, to explain away God or what He has done.

When you press an unbeliever about science itself, how it uses immaterial laws of logic, or how it rests upon a foundation of the uniformity of nature which he can’t account for, you are starting to uncover that his commitment to science is simply a commitment to his own autonomy. Science can be a wonderful thing, but ultimately unbelievers are hiding behind an authority that science itself cannot sustain so that they can continue to rebel against the God they run from.

3. Unconscious suppression

When you step away from the rigor of the sciences and into the daily grind of the average person, you are going to find a generic suppression. While everyone knows a little science, most people don’t live in a lab. They aren’t strategically applying the scientific method for washing the clothes and cutting the grass. Instead, they are just using God’s world without any conscience recognition that it is His world.

These very normal people represent a unique challenge for the Christians. They don’t seem angry or hostile to God. They don’t seem driven by some system. They just don’t see God in anything. They say they have no evidence of God and so they live their life based upon that perception.

But this is a suppression of truth as well. This is the person who is so committed to their own autonomy they don’t even sense a need to ask questions about their autonomy. It is so assumed and so expected, they can’t imagine why it would not be the case. Therefore, they don’t take the time to look under the surface of what they do and think. God is suppressed under the normalcy of their own living and decision making.

For instance, they think that hurting people is bad. Maybe they have been hurt and they didn’t like it, so it seems sensible that hurting people is wrong. What they don’t do is go deeper. Why is hurting people bad? What importance does their liking it or not liking have? Is there objective morality and why? Who has the authority to answer these questions? You see, they have touched on a truth that hurting people in most cases is wrong. But the reason they know this is because they are created in God’s image. They are living in God’s world, but they are not seeing that the morality, the order, and the consequences are all from God.

They have suppressed the truth under a mountain of unexplored questions. And at the top of that mountain they have planted the flag of their own autonomy. What they want to do seems to work most of the time and that is all they really care about.

4. Religious suppression

This last suppression is the most deceptive and deadly of all the suppressions. No wonder it is Satan’s specialty. This person gets to suppress the truth of God by means of a substitute god. They might not even like their religion or their god that much, but what they do like is they don’t have to live with the tortuous task of denying God’s existence.

With this suppression a person can affirm massive amounts of truth, and even back it up with a supposed authority that bypasses much critique. Through it all, though, the religious unbeliever is doing the same thing that all the other suppressions are doing, making a place where their sin can exist. Now, this sin may be of the more religious type; self-righteousness, pride, lust for power, hatred for sinners, perpetual immorality through means of a confessional of some type, etc. The reality remains that they want to keep the lordship of Christ and the message of the cross suppressed.

Conclusion

For the unbeliever, suppression of the truth is unavoidable. The only question is which type they will employ. The glory of God, His sovereignty over their lives, the centrality of God’s grace in the gospel, and the worship God alone deserves repels self-absorbed sinners. Their denial of these will force them into inevitable contradictions, and our evangelism will have to expose these at some point. Knowing what kind of suppression is happening will help in that endeavor.