What Goes Around Comes Around: Self-Destruction Through the Self-Deception of Unbelief

God, through the Apostle Paul, tells us, "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). That is, God has so revealed Himself in His creation (see Psalm 19:1-4) and in the nature of man that every man knows Him and our accountability to Him. However, the unbeliever, in order to maintain his myth of independence, suppresses his knowledge of God.

Since he is acting against his own knowledge, the unbeliever must resort to irrationality, because logic doesn't permit the holding of contrary "truths." That pesky Law of Non-Contradiction pops up. Therefore, the unbeliever must deceive himself, as well as others, in order to avoid the rational contradictions in his worldview.

"All the ways of a man are pure in his own eyes,
     but the Lord weighs the spirit...
There is a way that seems right to a man, 
    but its end is the way to death." 
-Proverbs 16:2, 25

One of the main ways that self-deception occurs is by stealing from the biblical worldview, in order to fill the gaps that unbelief cannot supply. A godless universe cannot provide a foundation for morality, for example, but no person can function in society without a sense of right and wrong. Therefore, the mind of the unbeliever, in order to satisfy his God-given conscience, "invents," he believes, a system of morality, though, in actuality, he has merely expressed the law written in his heart (Romans 2:15).

That is why what seems right to him actually leads to death, that is, the spiritual consequences of God's wrath at his rebellion. His conscience reveals what his heart really knows, that God is, and that he is accountable to Him. Yet, in his profession, he denies those truths, and, instead, curses God and His Word. His self-deception has thereby, not relieved him of that accountability, but rather brought him under the consequences of it.