Romans 1:24-32

Recap

In my last post in this series I left off with Paul’s statement in verses 22-23 that “Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.”  This is the cause of our sinful condition.  We suppressed the truth of God, exchanged it for a lie and turned to the worship of the created instead of the creator.  When we replace God with something else we become idolaters and a Paul identifies this as the root of our sin.  From here Paul goes on to explain the effect of this suppression of truth.

The effect of our rebellion

24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.

26 For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; 27 and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. 29 They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.

Romans 1:24–31 (ESV)

“Therefore God gave them up to sin”.  R.C. Sproul calls this Judicial Abandonment and characterizes it as the worst possible punishment.  Because of this basic violation of placing ourselves above God he gave us up to the power of sin.

The imagery in verse 25 (“worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator”) calls us back to our creation:

26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

Genesis 1:26 (ESV)

God created us as his masterwork, in his very likeness.  So when Paul reminds us of what our punishment for the suppression of God’s truth is he illustrates it with how far we have perverted God’s original design.  Paul lists three ways that we have strayed from God’s original intent:

1. sexual lust & impurity –  v. 24
2. homosexual sin – vv. 26-27
3. corrupted mind, leading to all sin – vv. 28-31

God created us specifically and intentionally.  Inherent in his design was the coupling of man and woman in marriage, as shown in Genesis 2:

But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. 21 So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. 22 And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. 23 Then the man said,
  “This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
  she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.”
24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

Genesis 2:2-24 (ESV)

So, we see Paul emphasize the sins of sexual immorality as being the antithesis of God’s design.  His emphasis here is rhetorical, he is trying to emphasize the rebellious nature of sin.  In our culture of twisted sexual conventions this point does not hit us very clearly with this intent, we tend to see it as a hierarchy of sin, with sexual sin at the top and the rest as lower sins.  This is a misguided interpretation – sin is equal, it is all rebellion against God.  So, when Paul moves on to homosexual sin in verses 26-27 he is using the same device.  When man gives up our natural (God-created) sexual impulses and go against his design for heterosexual, monogamous marriage in seeking sexual fulfillment we are rebelling against God’s design. 

However Paul throws in something else here in verse 27.  After describing the sin, he comments on the punishment stating that by committing this sin we are “receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error”.  This is a enlightening comment.  Paul basically says that one part of the punishment for sin is more sin.  How true this is.  How often have we seen in our lives one sin lead to another to another and on down the line.  When we properly view sin as not just a transgression of God’s law but as a state of being separated from God, logically we see that by committing sin we are actively taking steps farther down the road away from a deep relationship with him.  The only way to stop this is to break the cycle of sin by the power of the Holy Spirit (if you want to explore this idea of defeating sin further, check out this sermon by Matt Carter.  It’s excellent).

Finally Paul closes out his discussion of the effects of sin by discussing the effects on our mind.  He states in verse 28: “God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done“.  Traditionally Christians have affirmed a noetic effect of sin on the human mind.  this is the idea that our minds are corrupted by sin in a way that reduces our capacity to think and behave from God’s original intent.  This is illustrated by Paul through a laundry list of sins that we all commit as a result of the ‘debased’ God gave us up to:

29 They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.

Romans 1:29–31 (ESV)is

This list extends the two points above regarding sexual immorality.  All sin is rebellion and the effect of our suppression of God’s truth.  Sin is so deeply rooted in our nature that we cannot escape it without the saving grace and Christ.

Finally Paul notes that because of sinful nature we not only continue to commit the sins in light of the obvious knowledge of God, but give our approval to the sins of others.  Personally, I think we do this because it gives us a hall pass of sorts to look at our own sins and explain or excuse them away. 

Because of the innate knowledge we have on God through his general revelation we have no excuse, but we try to look at our sin relative to others.  Whether it is an argument of “I’m not as bad as that guy” or “its the norm” we attempt to water down the full meaning and transgression of our sin.  Paul very specifically tells us this is a losing game in this passage, and this lays the groundwork for the rest of the book of Romans.

Tags: Paul, Romans, scripture-series, sin