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“If you’re able please stand.” Reading Rom 1:16–32. “Thanks be to God.”
Imagine a man who builds a house. Wants separation from people. Decides he doesn’t want too many doors or windows. So committed to being isolated that he builds his brick walls from the inside. Keeps adding bricks to his walls but never a door or a window. Eventually he’s inside and gets exactly what he wanted. But there are no doors or windows. And he realizes he built himself not a HOUSE but a PRISON CELL. Eventually he’ll realize that this PRISON is really a TOMB. He’s alone with himself, exactly as he chose. But his life isn’t FREEDOM, it’s PRISON.
Our passage this morning has a similar dynamic. We get what we want, but we find that in the end it doesn’t offer freedom—but slavery.
The slavery is being trapped in our own sin. And this slavery ends in death, not life.
Romans:
To explain his gospel he takes a long time to develop why we NEED this gospel.
Our text this morning is part of explaining our NEED for the gospel.
We’ll divide our sermon by the three statements on God giving us over to:
Prayer – Tomorrow is Veterans Day.
We start with verse 24.
“Therefore...” – This follows the devolution above. Above we started with God’s wrath being revealed because of the “unrighteousness and ungodliness of man” (1:18). They suppressed the truth about God that was plain to them. Eventually their hearts and minds were darkened. “THEREFORE God gave them up.” Their sin started the dominos falling. Eventually “God gave them up.”
“God gave them up” – Doesn’t mean that God will not save them. But until he does they are given over to their sins. It is an act of “divine permission,” God not restraining them in their sinfulness.
This is the first of three times God will “give them up.” The triple-emphasis adds a heaviness and seriousness to it. It is intentional, deliberate, purposeful on the part of God. There’s nothing accidental about it.
We’re given over “to impurity.” A Brittish scholar, CEB Cranfield, says that in the “God gave them up” phrases, they are given up “to” (eis) something, and each of these is really like a “prison.”[1]
Just like we talked about at the beginning. We chase after “the lusts of our hearts” thinking we’re finding freedom. But in the end, we’re building a prison and we’re trapped inside.
In this first part of the passage, we’re given over “to impurity.” The word is a morally or ceremonially “uncleanness.” It’s often used in contexts where it means sexual immorality (1 Thess 4:7; 2 Cor 12:21; Eph 5:3) but it can also mean a general impurity (Rom 6:19; Eph 4:19; Matt 23:27).
Here because it’s combined with “the lusts of their hearts” and “dishonoring of their bodies among themselves,” it seems sexual immorality is intended.[2]
Verse 25 is really an echo of v. 23 where sinful man “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.”
Now in v. 25 there is another terrible “exchange.” Now the exchange is “the truth about God” given away for “a lie,” as we “worship and serve the creature” instead of “the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.”
Notice how immorality and IDOLATRY go together. Giving ourselves over to immorality and impurity is giving ourselves over to false gods and worshiping the creature instead of the Creator.
IDOLATRY is giving anything other than the true God a god-like place in our lives. We pursue it, bow down to it, give our time and money to it, conform our life to it. The more we do this, the more our sin becomes like a god to us.
Sexual immorality can have that effect, where you shape your whole life to it.
Paul is giving us a cautionary tale. He’s wanting us to see what happens when the occasional sin becomes an IDOL. When you choose that sin instead of God, and God gives you over to it.
Words like “impurity” and “dishonoring of their bodies.” You’re moving more and more toward something very dirty and very shameful.
That’s episode 1 of our cautionary tale. Episode 2...
Read Rom. 1:26–27. Now the “impurity” gets developed. It’s full-blown homosexual sin.
The second “God gave them up” phrase is to the prison of “dishonorable passions” (eis pathē atimias).
Throughout this passage Paul is using terms that even an unbelieving Roman would value. Things like “honor” and “shame” meant something in that culture. To call these “passions” “dis-honorable” or “without any honor” would have struck a chord in this culture.
But it affects us as well. We don’t want to be “dis–honorable” or “shameful” either.
Of all the possible “dishonorable passions” to highlight, he chooses to highlight homosexuality. It’s not really clear why, except that it does demonstrate a vivid sin and a dramatic way of God giving them up.
He describes the sin of homosexuality in two ways, first focusing on women and then focusing on men.
With this sin, both women and men take what is natural and reject it. They “exchange natural relations” for “those that are contrary to nature.”
The Bible here is teaching that the way the body of a man fits with the body of a woman is something “natural” to God’s design. To pursue homosexual sin is to reject this “natural” order and give in to something “dishonorable.”
What is being condemned here is the whole array of homosexual practice.[3] Adding monogamy to homosexual practice cannot take away the unnaturalness of it. So, gay marriage is condemned here along with any other form of gay behavior.
It’s good to notice that while homosexuality is being highlighted here, it’s not at all the only sin highlighted. It’s not presented as the most serious sin. It’s simply part of the whole array of unrighteous behaviors that we choose when we turn away from God. In the next verses Paul will list 21 sins that are worthy of God’s wrath, so homosexuality isn’t unique as something worthy of judgment.
But maybe he’s thinking of his audience here. Homosexual sin is “impure” and “unclean.” But it’s also “dishonorable.” And it’s a sin against nature, and so a culture like Rome that understood the concept of things being natural and unnatural would understand what he’s saying.
Homosexuality in the Roman world was particularly bad and prominent. As one of many examples, Emperor Nero (ruled AD 54–68) took part in two gay marriages. In one he was the groom, and in the other he played the part of the bride. These took place after Paul wrote Romans, but they show the level of depravity in Rome around the time of this letter. Ours is not the first generation to experiment with this type of behavior.
And of course, that goes for the whole set of LGBTQ+ behaviors and values.
God is not calling us to make this sin MORE than it is. But he’s definitely calling us not to think LESS of it either.
Compassion stops being compassion, love stops being love, acceptance stops being acceptance, when these stop being consistent with God’s Word.
In our dark streaming tv show, we go from episode 2 on homosexuality to episode 3...
Read Rom. 1:28–32.
In the third “God gave them up,” we’re given up to the prison of “a debased mind.”
Notice that it wasn’t arbitrary what God gave them up to. They were misusing their minds—“did not see fit to acknowledge God.”
And so God gave them up “to a debased mind.”
But “a debased mind” doesn’t simply think bad thoughts, those thoughts spill over to a whole array of sinful behavior.
“Unrighteousness” is the first of 21 sins Paul lists in this catalog of sinfulness.
Sins come in all shapes and sizes:
“Disobedient to parents”! We don’t want to miss that in this catalog of sinfulness is “disobedience to parents.” How we respond to our parents is no small thing.
One thing to see in this catalog of sinfulness is that sin grows: “filled with all manner of unrighteousness....They are full of envy...inventors of evil.”
We like to think we can keep our sins small, keep doing them but keep them small and manageable. But this passage reminds us that sin is like cancer, it grows without radical intervention.
The passage ends with something unexpected. He’s still talking about the unbeliever, the non-Jewish unbeliever. A typical unbelieving Roman. And yet, he says “they know God’s righteous decree” that death is the punishment for these sins. They don’t have the Bible, the Word of God. But “they know God’s righteous decree.”
In Romans 2:14–15 he’ll develop this idea a little more:
14 For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. 15 They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them (Rom 2:14-15)
Paul is pointing to a “natural law” that people know. It’s “natural” in the sense that it’s in us without knowing God’s Word or being a Christian. It’s not “natural” in the sense that it’s somehow a part of nature and not connected to God.
In Romans 1:32, the “decree” they know is that these sins deserve death. And that’s exactly right. It’s possible Paul is referring to certain traditions like the Greeks who believed the wicked experienced some kind of retribution after their death.[4] All people have some sense that the wicked get what they deserve. Even Disney cartoons have been showing that to us for generations. The wicked witches always die in the end, the good princess are the ones who live happily ever after with the good prince.
But the end of Romans 1 is truly diabolical, because though people know this “righteous decree” that death is the result of these sins, they still continue to commit these sins and even “give approval to those who practice them.”
People want others to commit these sins, and when they do, they celebrate it.
We see that today. There are many in our world who spend a lot of time celebrating homosexuality and others who practice homosexuality—even though they have some sense it’s wrong and worthy of death.
UNDERSTAND the reality of human sinfulness. It’s dark. But it’s not a just a cautionary tale. It’s real, and it’s happening all around us.
But, as God’s people, it’s essential to BE HUMBLE. Apart from Christ, this is how we live. There are no exceptions. We won’t commit every sin on this list, but we will commit many of them. And we won’t just commit them, we’ll celebrate when others commit them—even though we know the sin brings death.
Apart from Christ that’s where we are, so we need to be humble.
When we survey this dark catalog of sinfulness in these verses we’re aware we need two things. If this is problem, then we need two things to be a true solution.
We first need FORGIVENESS. Any solution to our problem of sin that doesn’t include forgiveness isn’t a true solution. It’s a band-aid. It’s a sip of wine while you’re dying on a Roman cross. You need forgiveness of sins.
Through Jesus Christ, we can get forgiveness from God. When we believe in him, his blood becomes the cleansing we need.
In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace. (Eph 1:7)
But any solution to the problem of our sinfulness needs to have something else, too. It needs to have a way out of the sinful behavior. A way to stop committing the sinful act.
We need a way out of that prison we talked about, the prison of our own making where we are trapped in a behavior we can’t leave behind.
The gospel has the solution here, too! Through Jesus Christ we can get that power to obey. When we believe in him, we are united with him. And being united with him, we can walk in righteousness:
3 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. (Rom 6:3-4)
In the 1700s a man named Augustus Toplady (1740–1778) got saved as a 15-year old. A few year later when he was 23, he wrote about the way Christ offers both forgiveness and power to obey. He called it “the double cure” and put it in a poem called “Rock of Ages.” He wrote,
Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee
Let the water and the blood,
From Thy wounded side which flowed
Be of sin the double cure,
Save from wrath and make me pure
Augustus Toplady, “Rock of Ages”
If you’re not a Christian, turn to Christ to receive the double cure—forgiveness and power to obey. That’s what Toplady meant by “make me pure.” It means, “make me walk in purity.”
But if you’re a Christian, remember that you have the double cure. He’s forgiven your sins. And if you struggle with one of the two-dozen sins I talked about this morning, remember you have the double cure. You can walk in purity.
Going from walking in impurity to walking in purity is almost always a process. Sometimes a slow, painful one. But in this fight, “fight the good fight of faith.” Jesus is still the ANSWER. Jesus is still “the WAY, the TRUTH, and the LIFE.”
Thank him for forgiveness. Trust him for power to obey going forward.
Let’s pray.
[1] C.E.B. Cranfield, Romans 1–8, ICC (NY: T&T Clark, 1975), 122.
[2] Louw & Nida 88.261 indicates this, too.
[3] See James Dunn, Romans 1–8 (Nashville, TN: Nelson, 1988), 65.
[4] See John Murray, Romans, I:51.
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