ROMANS 1:18-32

LESSON 2 DEPRAVED SOCIETY

ROMANS 1:18-32

 Nothing keeps people away from Christ more than their inability to see their need of him or their unwillingness to admit it. “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Mark 2:17) The self-righteous will never come to Christ. Deny our problem and nothing can be done about it. That is the first step of AA: admit powerlessness over oneself. So, a true diagnosis of the human condition is necessary before a solution can be found. Secularism diagnoses the problem as ignorance for which education is the solution. Paul reminds each group of their knowledge of God and goodness. He then shows that they have deliberately suppressed it and contradicted it and are guilty. They are not innocent and cannot plead ignorance.

What is the wrath of God? It does not mean that God loses his temper, flies into a rage, or is ever malicious, spiteful or vindictive. His wrath is his holy hostility to evil, his refusal to condone it or to come to terms with it. It is his just judgment upon it. Human history is a study of evil.

Against what is the wrath of God revealed? “The godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their own wickedness.” (18) The essence of sin is godlessness. It is the attempt to get rid of God and, since that is impossible, the determination to live as though one had succeeded in doing so. The essence of goodness is godliness, to love him and obey him with joy. Wickedness is the decision to live for oneself, rather than for God and others, and therefore deliberately stifle any truth which challenges their self-centeredness. God has made it plain “since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made” (20). This truth of revelation through creation is a regular theme of Scripture (Psalm 19:1, Isaiah 6:3, Acts 14:14ff.). So “men are without excuse” (20) q.v. Paul at Athens, Acts 17:22-34.

How is God’s wrath revealed? It operates not by God’s direct intervention but precisely by his not intervening, by letting men and women go their own way. God abandons stubborn sinners to their willful self-centeredness and the resulting process of moral and spiritual degeneration is to be understood as a judicial act of God. There is a downward spiral of depravity. “They neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him (21); they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator (25); they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God (28). He gave them over to sexual impurity (24); to shameful lusts (26); and to a depraved mind (28)”, leading to antisocial behavior.

Verses 21-27

“Their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened (21), and they became fools (22). They fell into idolatry: “they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles (23). Their rejection of the true God led them into superstition and immorality. The cultural idolatry of the modern world is seen in the secular obsession with wealth, fame, power, personal autonomy and identity politics, q.v. Joseph Ratzinger warned about “a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”

This leads to the exchanging of the truth of God for a lie, the ultimate lie. It is the transferring of our worship to created things from the Creator, who should be praised (25). God gave them over to shameful lusts, which Paul specifies as lesbian practices (26) and male homosexual relationships (27). Verses 26-27 are a crucial text in the contemporary debate about homosexuality. What does Paul mean by ‘nature’? The LGBTQ+ community claim that their relationships are perfectly natural to them. Some commentators argue that Paul is referring to nonconsensual homosexual acts such as rape. Others have said that we cannot interpret ‘nature’ as meaning ‘my’ nature, or natural as meaning ‘what seems natural to me’. “Natural means God’s created order. To act ‘against nature’ means to violate the order which God has established, whereas to act ‘according to nature’ means to behave ‘in accordance with the original intention of the Creator’. What this was Genesis tells us and Jesus confirmed: ‘At the beginning the Creator “made them male and female”, and said, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh,” So they are no longer two, but one.’ Then Jesus added his personal endorsement and deduction: ‘Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.’ In other words, God created humanity male and female; God instituted marriage as a heterosexual union; and what God has united, we have no liberty to separate. The only context which he intends for the ‘one flesh’ experience is heterosexual monogamy and that a homosexual partnership (however loving and committed it may claim to be) is ‘against nature’ and can never be regarded as a legitimate alternative to marriage. This also applies to gender confusion. It is a suppression of the truth about our natural creation.

Verses 28-32

“Since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God (in other words they rejected his authority in their lives), he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done.” (28) Paul describes a whole variety of antisocial practices that lead to a  breakdown of human community, as standards disappear and society disintegrates. He gives a catalogue of 21 vices: ‘every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity,’ five more sins which depict broken human relationships: ‘envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice’ (29); followed by ‘gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless’ (30,31).

Verse 32 is a concluding summary of human perversity. First, they know (by their conscience) that ‘those who do such things deserve death.’ Secondly, they have seared consciences and continue to do them and encourage others to do the same. Charles Hodge wrote, “Dark as the picture here drawn is, it is not so dark as that presented by the most distinguished Greek and Latin authors, of their own countrymen.” Paul was not exaggerating human evil.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS FOR ROMANS 1:18-32

1. What is the problem with human society?
2. What comes to your mind when you think of the wrath of God?
3. “God abandons stubborn sinners to a downward spiral.” What is the rescue plan?
4. What happens to people when they serve created things rather than the Creator?
5. What are the most popular idols of today?
6. How can Christians relate to non-biblical sexual lifestyles and marriages?
7. What is the definition of natural and unnatural?
8. What leads to the breakdown of human community and the disintegration of society?
9. What are the most prevalent today of the 21 vices Paul lists?