Daily Thoughts from Romans: Wrath for All (1:24-32)

Daily Thoughts from Romans: Wrath for All

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

For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; 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.

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. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.  (Romans 1:24-32 ESV)

The consequence of refusing to believe in God and instead to repress the truth and falsify worship of Him is that God stops holding people back from sin.  This is His wrath revealed in present time.  All of us have been guilty.  He begins to let us run the gamut of our rebellious hearts and the results are a gradual step down in behavior to complete lawlessness.  We can trace the demise of every civilization to this factor.

Strangely, it is the grace of God that puts restraints in our paths to help keep us from going off the rails as he describes.  Social stigma, parental training, laws of the land and, of course, our own individual consciences.  When we find ourselves pushing these out of the way it is a signal that we are experiencing His wrath.

Sexual sin is usually the first place we find ourselves justifying disobedience.  From there we degrade to homosexuality.  And we also ultimately become those who champion unrighteousness.  We may see this process beginning even as believers when we start hardening ourselves to our consciences in any area of our lives.  If we confess our sins, however, He is righteous and just to forgive us our sins (1 John 1:9).

Much has been made of the current enlightened views of sexuality and desperate defenses have been erected to justify homosexual behavior.  Undoubtedly people have grown up with a sexual attraction to the same sex, and though this is not the way we were designed to be, having this attraction is not sinful in and of itself.  What attracts us sexually is created by such a conglomerate of factors that it is near impossible to define why it is so.  And it must be said that many of those who have been encouraged by our society in their expression of sexual desire have not abandoned belief in the true God.  They are not the ones Paul is describing here.

With that said, Paul is not endorsing here a judgmental spirit toward those who are adulterers, transvestites, lesbians or gays any more than he is endorsing hatefulness toward gossips, slanderers and haters of God.  Rather, we are to love all people without at the same time giving their behavior a stamp of approval.  It would not be loving to encourage someone to do wrong.  People need compassion but they also need truth.  Perhaps the worst way to discourage someone doing wrong, however, is to berate them.  That is not how God won us to Himself.  Jesus was a friend of sinners but never compromised on what sin was.  That’s how we are to be.