Romans 1:24-32

Every cause has an effect. Every action has a reaction. Everything we do has a consequence. We saw in the last lesson the fact of sin, the fact that the Gentiles, the pagans had rejected God's revelation and turned to their vain imaginations instead. Paul will now explain the consequences of that rejection.

The key phrase to this passage is “God gave them up” which is found three times. Verse 28 says this specifically: “Even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind.” The words translated “retain” and “reprobate” are connected in Greek. Because they did not accept God's revelation, God gave them up to an unacceptable mind. God, in His righteousness, in His goodness, gave a revelation of Himself to man, through nature. And they rejected that. They had the truth and they took it back to the store and exchanged it for a nice set of lies. They had access to the Creator and they traded that in for a creature. At the end of verse 25, Paul breaks into praise to God who is blessed forever. And perhaps the silent implication is that if man had entered into a relationship with God, he could have been blessed forever. But he decided that he liked the curse of sin rather than the blessing of God.

And so we have the righteousness of God and the unrighteousness of man. Man's attitude towards God was ungodliness--a rejection, a refusal. And so we have the wrath of God revealed from heaven, and that wrath, that punishment involved allowing man to follow his own course of action. Man was punished by his own vices. Virtue is its own reward, and sin is its own punishment. Eugene Peterson paraphrases this whole passage in words that sound profane but are strictly true: he says that when God left man to his own devices: “all hell broke loose.” 

Man is sinful. Paul describes in quite extensive terms the sin of the Gentile world. William Barclay comments that there isn't a single thing Paul says here that cannot be confirmed by heathen writers of Paul's time. He wasn't exaggerating or making things up. This is what the Roman world was like in Paul's time; but more than that, this is what sin is.

Sin brings forth evil. As we read this list (incidentally noticing the similarities to the works of the Flesh in Galatians 5) the thing that strikes us is the various nature. We have sexual perversions and injustice and murder and cruelty.  And mixed in the middle of that we have envy and gossip. Some of these sins seem worse than others to us. Which sins would be the worse would seem different to different people. But when we put all these different things together, we have a picture of what sin is. Every sinner does not commit all these sins. Some societies more consistently practice some vices and encourage some virtues. Romans 1:24-32 is not an accurate picture of the actual life of every individual sinner but it is a picture of what sin is, of its nature and character. 

If you look up a given disease, you will find a list of symptoms, of ways it may manifest itself in a person. Not every person who gets the disease will necessarily show every symptom, but that doesn't change the fact that they have the disease or that the disease has those symptoms. There are even people who are asymptomatic--who get sick without showing any symptoms. But they are still sick. So not every sinner commits every one of these sins. Not every society has all these sins. But this is what sin is. This is its characters and attributes, even if those aren't visible in every sinner.

And the essence of sin is that it is the rejection of God's authority and order. All sin is unnatural. All sin is a contradiction of reality. And maybe you could make the argument that this is why Paul mentions homosexuality first; that there is a special connection between sexual perversions and this defiance of reality.

Two things we need to note especially about this passage. We are not pagans, in the sense that the Romans and Greeks were. In western society, we do not have explicit idolatry, though we do have implicit idolatry--and explicit idolatry may be making a comeback. But the course of sin in our world is more or less the same as what Paul describes because sin is always the same thing. And because sin is a rejection of God, all sin is a kind of idolatry, because it means rejecting God and worshipping something else instead.

The second thing to note is this. We have, if you will, two stages or two forms of sin. In the verses leading up to this passage, you have the religious and intellectual side of sin, which is the rejection of God and refusal to worship Him. In this passage, we have the ethical and sociological side of sin--the specific actions and attitudes which sin produces. The heathens had no excuse for their idolatry because God had revealed His existence. And also they had no excuse for their immorality because God had revealed His law.

Look at verse 32: These people knew the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death. They knew the law. They knew what was right and wrong. They were sinning against the law. Even though they didn't have God's revealed law, which was given only to the Jews, God had given them a law in conscience (and perhaps also in traditions passed down from Noah.) If you look at people the world over, you will find the same kinds of statements about right and wrong. Obviously, this revelation was not complete and became corrupted, but they had enough knowledge of right and wrong to be guilty. “The world has always had a great deal more moral light than it well knew how to make use of.” (Orr, The Problem of the Old Testament, 469) They knew the judgment of God, they knew that the wrath of God is revealed from Heaven upon the unrighteousness of man. And yet they deliberately went into sin and not only committed sin but admired it; they had pleasure in them that do them--they set up sinners as their heroes and even as their gods.

There is a judgment that comes on sin in the next life--that is verse 32 “they which commit such things are worthy of death.” But there is a judgment in this life. The wrath of God is (not will be) revealed from heaven against the unrighteousness of man. And that judgment is that God allows men to continue in sin. Paul will later speak of God hardening the heart of a sinner and that may be the same thing as what he is saying here.

William Barclay on this passage writes: “The most terrible thing about sin is just this power to beget sin. It is the awful responsibility of free-will that it can be used in such a way that in the end it is obliterated and a man becomes the slave of sin, self-abandoned to the wrong way. And sin is always a lie, because the sinner thinks that it will make him happy, whereas in the end it ruins life, both for himself and for others, in this world and in the world to come.”