God Gave Them Up (Rom. 1:24-32)

The Bible is true.  There are many reasons to believe this, not least of which is the fact that Jesus Christ our Lord received the OT Scriptures as completely true and authoritative, and gave us the NT Scriptures as completely true and authoritative.  But there are other lines of evidence as well.  One is the prophetic nature of the Bible.  As in, when the Bible says if this thing happens then this other thing will follow.  There is a sort of predictive power to the Scriptures.  You see that here in Romans 1.  It says that when a society and a culture rejects the knowledge of the true God for idolatry (whether that is polytheistic idolatry or atheistic idolatry), then certain types of behavior will inevitably become endemic.  That was true in the first century, because Paul was describing first century Roman culture here.  But it is also true in the twenty-first century, because when you read this text you realize that Paul is also describing the United States of America as it is today.  This is our culture we are talking about here.  Talk about being relevant!  

And it shows us that the moral laws of the universe that God has set in place are still in place.  It is still true that when you reject the true God and replace the Creator with the creature, you not only get false religion and false thinking, but you also get destructive and nature-reversing lifestyles.  The types of behavior that rose to the surface in Paul’s day because of paganism have also risen to the surface in our day because of the rise of a new paganism.

On the one hand, this is depressing.  And certainly it is right to look around our culture and see the ways in which it is destroying itself and weep.  Deliver us, O God, from the attitude of those who are at ease in Zion when the nation is being eaten from the inside out with moral rot!  But on the other hand, it is encouraging to know that God has not left our world to go on its own way without suffering the consequences of its rejection of God.  The evidence for God is not only seen in the creation of the universe but also in the revelation of the wrath of God, which is what Paul is unfolding for us here in these verses.

You see, when Paul says in verse 18 that “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven,” he is first of all referring to the manifestation of that wrath in verses 24-32.  In verses 19-23, the apostle is telling why God’s wrath has come, but now (24-32) he is telling us how God’s wrath has come.  We noted in an earlier message that “is revealed” is present tense. In other words, God’s wrath is not only something that is coming in the future; it is something that is already here, and Paul is laying out for us exactly how God’s wrath comes upon a culture that has rejected him.  It comes upon it when God gives them a society up to disordered lusts and sinful desires.

Now this is very relevant for us, not only because it describes our nation today, but also because it addresses some wrong thinking about these very lusts and desires.  The thing that is being said today is that if something feels right to you, then it must be right.  But regardless of what everyone else is saying, it is still true that though the way of a fool is right in his own eyes (Prov. 12:15), it does not make him any the less a fool because it is right in his own eyes.  

Our culture has so many things backwards, and one of the things it has backwards is this idea that your identity is the product of your desires.  That is, that who you are is the product of what you desire.  But what I want to argue is that this is backwards: that we ought to have our desires shaped by the identity that God has already given to us.  That is, that what we desire ought to be the product of who we are in God’s design.  Don’t shape your identity by your desires; shape your desires by your identity.  We are not our own: God has made us, and he has made us in his image, and this image comes with certain responsibilities and expectations.  We don’t make them, because they are given to us as those who are made in God’s image.

What I want to do today is to look at verses 24-32 as a whole.  Paul deals with homosexual behavior in verses 26-27 and I want to look at that separately next time.  If I had been preaching this text even 50 years ago, this would not have been necessary.  When Lloyd-Jones preached on this text in the 1950’s, he only mentioned these things in passing.  There was nothing wrong about that because that was not an issue then.  But it is an issue today, and I would not be a faithful pastor if I didn’t give some prolonged and careful consideration to this issue.  The Biblical view on this is under attack in our day and it must be defended and commended.  But today, I want us to consider the wider picture here.  This text as a whole is about God judicially giving a culture up to disordered desires because of their idolatry.  That is obvious because Paul mentions it three times (24, 26, 28).  There are three things I want to point out from this text.  First of all, what this judicial giving up looks like (but isn’t).  Second, what this judicial giving up actually is.  Finally, what future reality this judicial giving up points to.

What Giving Up Can Look Like: What seems natural may be unnatural

Paul writes, “Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves” (24).  What I want to point out here is that these people are being given up “through the lusts [desires] of their own hearts.”  You see that also in verses 26-27.  These disordered desires that idolators are being given up to are not being foisted on them.  They come out “of their own hearts.”  

When you do something out of your own hearts, because you desire it, we tend to say that such a thing is natural.  It may feel like we were born that way.  We might even say that God made us that way, and so how could he judge us for it?

But here’s the thing that this text teaches us: what seems natural might in fact be unnatural.  That is what these verses say.  These are disordered desires, yes, but they are desires, which means that the behavior that comes out of these desires are wanted by them.  They want to do them.  It feels natural to them.  But the apostle explicitly says that the things desired are in fact unnatural: “For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: and likewise also the men” (26-27).  They desire – they strongly desire them in fact – but they are still unnatural.

Hence we need to clarify that “being born that way” doesn’t make something right or good or even neutral.  The reason this is so is that Bible makes it very clear that because of our connection with Adam, because of the Fall of man into sin, we are born in a state of sin and sinfulness.  Paul puts it this way to the Ephesians, “And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others” (Eph. 2:1-3). We walk in the lusts of the flesh when we are dead in sins, and we are in that state “by nature children of wrath.”  The Bible makes it very clear that we have inherited a sinful nature from our first parent Adam.  That means that we are born with all sorts of disordered desires.  So it is natural in the sense that we are born in sin with sinful desires.  But that does not mean that is the way God originally intended us to be.  It doesn’t that this is the way God made us before humanity fell into sin.  We need to let that sink in: because of the Fall of man into sin, being born a certain way doesn’t mean God made us that way.

I think it’s pretty well known that some people are born with a propensity towards certain destructive behaviors, like alcoholism, for instance.  But that doesn’t make alcoholism a good or right thing, nor does it let anyone off the hook for getting drunk.  Nor can such a person blame God for making them a drunk.  The are many men for whom fornicating and committing adultery feels totally natural, but that doesn’t make it either a good or right thing, does it?  Or course not.  We could go on multiplying examples like this.  

Therefore, the fact that something feels natural may just mean that it feels that way because of our sinful nature, but that doesn’t make it natural in the sense that this is how God originally made man.  We need to understand that distinction.  We need to understand it because the failure to make that distinction is behind a lot of unbiblical justification for sins that are explicitly condemned in Scripture.  They can’t imagine that something that feels so right can be so wrong.  But they are failing to grapple with the reality that they are not the way God originally made man.  They are fallen.  These desires are fallen desires, and therefore they are not to be welcomed or pampered or approved or excused or even identified with; they are to be mortified.

What Giving Up Actually Is: It is a judgment from God for rejecting knowledge about him

But someone might respond by saying, “But how can this be a judgment from God?  If this is attributed to our sinful nature, and we do this because this is the direction that our sinful desires take us, then how in the world could this be said to be a manifestation of God’s wrath?  In what sense can God give people up to desires that they naturally have?”  

I think the answer to that question is rooted in the fact that God in his goodness restrains the wickedness even of the non-elect.  This is one of the things that, like the rain, falls upon the just and the unjust.  Even the non-elect, those who will eventually die in their sins and under the wrath of God, even they are by virtue of the restraints that God has put on them in this life kept from being as bad as they possibly could be.  In fact, many of them can be quite nice, can be good neighbors, and can live out many virtues.  We must remember that the doctrine of total depravity doesn’t mean that men are as bad as they can be but that they are bad in every part of their nature.  And this means that God has in fact kept men from being as bad as they can possibly be, and we should thank him for that.

There are a number of things that God set up in this world to make this happen.  He has instituted governments, and he has put the sword in the hand of the government to punish the evil-doer and to reward the righteous.  This alone is a powerful incentive to live in an upright way, at least on an external level.  Then there is the conscience.  The conscience is not a sign of saving grace, but an instrument of restraining grace.  This too keeps many unbelievers under a sort of restraint.  Even the opinion of others acts this way.  Then there is the fact that though the fall of man into sin has certainly deformed the image of God in man, it hasn’t destroyed it, as the apostle James makes very clear in his epistle.  All these things act as curbs upon the lusts of the ungodly.  We should thank God for that.  This is not a haphazard thing; it is something which God has ordained.

What it means therefore for God to give people up in a judicial sense to their own lusts is that God takes away certain restraints upon them and removes his common grace from them so that they go down the paths of disordered desire.  I think Pharaoh is a good example here.  You will recall perhaps that it says in the book of Exodus both that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and that Pharaoh hardened his own heart.  Which was it?  It was both!  It could be both because God hardened Pharaoh’s heart by removing his restraining grace from him and the result of that was that Pharaoh ended upon hardening his own heart as a result.  The same thing is going on here, I think.  God gives people over to their lusts in the same way God hardened Pharaoh’s heart.  And the result in both cases is the same: the ungodly end up hardening their own hearts by following wicked and destructive and disordered desires.

And no one can condemn God for doing this, can they?  For he is only letting them do what is right in their own eyes.  He is removing the restraints; he is giving them the freedom they desire.  God can’t be blamed: he is giving them what they want!  But what do they do with this freedom?  They use it to do things that are against the order of creation, that are unnatural in that sense.  They have made an exchange.  They have exchanged the Creator for the creature, and as a result they end up perverting and twisting the created order by following their sinful desires.

And we see the justice and the fitness of it, do we not?  We have noted that there is a three-fold giving up on God’s part in these verses.  But there is a corresponding three-fold exchange that precedes the three-fold giving up.  Do you see it?  Look in verse 23: “And [they] changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.”  This corresponds to the first giving up in verse 24: “Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves.”   Then the next exchange happens in verse 25: “Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.”  This corresponds to the second giving up in the first part of verse 26: “For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections.”  This is followed by third exchange in verses 26-27: “for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.”  This is met with the final giving up in verse 28: “And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient.”  It’s pretty clear that each sinful exchange is met with and followed by God’s judicial abandonment, the removal of restraining grace.  It’s a judgment, but it’s a just judgment.  They can’t complain about it, because God is just giving them what they want.

Friends, beware of wanting God to always give you what you want!  You could be asking for judgment from God.  In speaking of Israel’s grumbling over manna and the consequent miraculous sending of quails to satisfy the grumblers, the Psalmist reminds us of another instance where God gave people what they wanted as a judgment upon them: “So they did eat, and were well filled: for he gave them their own desire; they were not estranged from their lust. But while their meat was yet in their mouths, the wrath of God came upon them, and slew the fattest of them, and smote down the chosen men of Israel” (Ps. 78:29-31).

The better thing to do – really, the only thing to do – is to ask God to form desires in us that match his will.  This will not only please God; it will be for our good.  As the Psalmist put it, “Delight thyself also in the Lord: and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart” (Ps. 37:4).  When we delight in the Lord, we will not only want what is God’s will for us, we will also want what is best for us.  And the Lord has no problem giving us the desires of our hearts when we are men and women after his own heart.

Brothers and sisters, as we look at this passage, we again have to acknowledge that it describes our culture, the culture of the United States in the twenty-first century.  And that means that our culture is under the judgment of God.  We are not waiting to be under God’s judgment; we are under it now.  It is displayed in all the ways God has given us over to foolish and destructive lusts.  Ichabod is written all over our nation, for the glory has departed.  We need, more than ever, the mercy of God to bring us to repentance.  The church needs to be awakened and revived.  Let us pray for that and let us live for that!

What Giving Up Points To: This judgment is not an end in itself but a forewarning of future and final judgment

We have seen that God’s wrath is revealed, and the way it is revealed is when God gives men and women who have rejected him over to their own lusts.  However, it would be wrong for us to think that this is the full extent of God’s wrath.  At the end of this chapter, the apostle hints that this giving over, this judicial hardening in sin, is but a foretaste of future judgment.  The apostle writes: “Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them” (32).  Note what the apostle says there.  He says that those who commit the things listed in the previous verses know that they are under the judgment of God.  They know they are under the wrath of God, and the way they know this is that they know “that they which commit such things are worthy of death.”  The wages of sin is death (6:23) and they know that.  

Now this doesn’t just mean that they are aware that they will die physically, which every man will do, whether they are righteous or wicked.  It means that they are worthy of eternal death and that in some sense, on some level, they know this.  In 6:23, the apostle contrasts death with eternal life: “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”  The wages of sin is not dying and going to heaven; it is dying and failing to receive eternal life.  It is dying under the judgment of God.  It is dying in one’s sins.  It is dying without forgiveness.  It is dying and going to hell.

Every temporal judgment of God points to this. This is the point of the apostle Peter, for example, in his second epistle.  He says, in reference both to the Flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, that these were both pointers to the final judgment of God upon all the wicked: “For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment; And spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly; And turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrha into ashes condemned them with an overthrow, making them an ensample unto those that after should live ungodly; And delivered just Lot, vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked: (For that righteous man dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds;) The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations, and to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished” (2 Pet. 2:4-9).  In Jude, we read it even more explicitly: “Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire” (7).  

Sin can be its own punishment, but brothers and sisters, it is not the final judgment.  Sometimes I have heard hell described as if it can be completely described in terms of people being left to themselves.  But as awful as that really would be, that is not the way the Bible describes hell.  It describes it in terms of punishment justly and proportionately inflicted by God upon the wicked who deserve it.  You see that, for example, in the very next chapter of Romans: “But unto them that are contentious, and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Gentile” (Rom. 2:8-9).  It is upon every soul of man that doeth evil.  It is not simply something they do to themselves, but something God justly does to them.

And we ought to fear this.  It ought to make us afraid of sin and of God’s wrath upon sin.  It ought to make us afraid of the folly that the rejection of God and the truth about God entails.  It ought to make us afraid of the creation-order-twisting wickedness it leads us to.  And it ought to make us afraid of the end of the wicked.  Above all, it ought to make us hate sin.  It ought to disgust us, and we ought to so believe what the Scriptures have to say about it that we repent of all known sin and turn in faith to Jesus Christ to cleanse us from all our sin.

But above all things, as Christians the way we should respond to all of this, the way we should respond to the depths of folly and sin that our culture has descended into, is not in any kind of self-righteousness or from a sense of superiority.  That’s Pharisaism, and God hated it in Jesus’ day, and he hates it in our day as well.  If there is any difference in you, it is because of the grace of God in your life.  If God has not given you up, it’s not because you were better than those who are given up but because God rescued you from yourself.  We are not saved from the wrath of God because we are righteous but because God has given us his righteousness in Jesus Christ.  That’s the gospel and it ought to humble us as well as make us thankful.  

Nor should we give up on the people around us who have been given over to unnatural desire.  The wrath of God revealed in giving people up to these sins in this life doesn’t mean God in his grace can’t rescue them and cause them to repent and save them from the wrath to come.  We know this from Scripture.  Do you remember what the apostle said about the Corinthians?  He said this about them: “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:9-11).  The Corinthian believers had been doing these very things, things that if unrepented of will exclude people from God’s kingdom, things like fornication and adultery and homosexuality.  But they had repented; God had rescued them.  “Such were some of you.”  God had washed, sanctified, and justified them in the name of Christ through the Spirit of God, and they were saved.

Now what if there is someone in here who feels given up?  I have good news for you.  God saves people like you.  He can wash you, he can sanctify you, and he can justify you.  Not because you deserve it, but because God is able and willing to do it through his Son Jesus Christ.  How can you experience this and know this?  By putting your trust in Christ.  The Bible says that those who put their trust in him will be saved. God draws his elect to faith in Christ in order to clothe them in the righteousness of his Son.  You can bank on the word of God.  Because the Bible is true.