18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For 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, so that people are without excuse.
21 For although they
knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking
became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although
they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the
glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and
birds and animals and reptiles.
24 Therefore God
gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the
degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged
the truth about God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than
the Creator – who is for ever praised. Amen.
26 Because of this,
God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual
relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also
abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another.
Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty
for their error.
28 Furthermore, just
as they did not think it worth while to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave
them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. 29
They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and
depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips,
30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they
invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they
have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. 32 Although
they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they
not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practise
them.
Sin and Rebellion
(and Grace).
Humankind is
in a bad way! When you read this passage you can come to no other conclusion.
This is a damning list of rebellion to God, cruelty, perversion and all kinds
of sin. People have, through their own choice, gone away from God and from the
right way to live. We are created in the image of God, and part of the evidence
of his image in us is an understanding of right and wrong. However, people try
to silence their consciences, and they try to ignore the voice inside that
points to morality and right choices. And, if they want to, they can easily succeed
in silencing their consciences and stifling the inherent recognition of right
and wrong. This is what Paul is talking about in this passage – by turning
their backs on God, they choose the path of rebellion and sin: which leads to
problems of its own. And when people live like that, they can expect to face
the consequences of those choices. This is what is meant where Paul says that
God ‘gave them over’ to sinful life (verses 24, 26 and 28). God allowed them to
make a choice to go their own way, and thereby reap the negative consequences
of their choice. That is the situation that mankind is in – and without God,
that is the position we would all be in.
Some might
say that people have an excuse if they have never heard about God. If a person
has never heard that there is a God who created them and created the world, and
who loves them, then how can they know the right way to live? But Paul counters
that argument here in verses 19 and 20. God has revealed his existence, his
eternal power and divine nature to humanity through creation. Ecclesiastes 3:
11 is another verse that people quote to make the same point: “He has made everything
beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart.”
If we took this passage
entirely on its own, it would be a miserable thing to read. It would tell us
that mankind has chosen wickedness rather than the way of God, and therefore
the wrath of God is revealed against us. If that was the end of the story, it
would be a terrible story. However, it is not the end, and most of the rest of
the book of Romans tells us that! The solution to the problem outlined in this
passage is grace! It is the grace of God, by which we are saved, through faith,
and that is the theme of Romans. The Gospel message is a story of love – the
fact that God still loves us enough to send us his Son to save us, even
though we have chosen the path of wickedness as described here. Thanks be to
God!
Prayer
Lord, I am aware of my own sin, as well as being a
part of the sinful human race. I praise you for Jesus who came to rescue me
from sin and death through his life, death and resurrection. I thank you for
your grace, your love in action, by which I am given good things that I neither
earn nor deserve! Amen.
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