GOD'S GREAT NEWS for MAN'S GREAT PROBLEM - Romans 1-8

A Passage for Our Times

As we celebrated the Glorious Fourth of July this week, it was a joy listening to Larry reflect on our liberty, and the associated costs for our nation's founders. I felt myself being very thankful for our great nation's history. It is worth celebrating the fact that the Pilgrims came to this country seeking religious freedom and found it here, and were thankful to their God at the first Thanksgiving. I am awed by the quality of men and women God raised up during the Revolutionary war era: Patrick Henry, Betsy Ross, George Washington. I love the honor and Christian witness of Robert E. Lee. I love Abraham Lincoln, whose writings never fail to inspire me. As I look to our nation's past, I am deeply thankful to God that I am an American.

But when I look to our nation's future, I see clouds of darkness amassing on all horizons. Here are some news items from this week. There was the Gay Parade in San Francisco, with greater numbers marching and more open debauchery than in the past. The Whitewater scandal in the White House has been expanding with newer and darker revelations in the past few weeks, and yet the President's popularity in the polls has been climbing at the same time. It appears that much of the media protects the President and his wife by any means possible as they massage public opinion. The Supreme Court has ruled that smut on the cable television stations should be protected under freedom of speech. The angry gay lobby has already taken control of the major universities of our country, and is pushing its agenda of total legitimacy for gay "marriages" and unquestioning validation of a lifestyle that is the most destructive and enslaving lifestyle in the sordid history of humanity. Thomas E. Schmidt, a Christian professor at Westmont College, wrote a book about the ongoing homosexuality debate entitled Straight & Narrow?. Here is the book's opening sentence: "I sit staring at a computer screen looking for words to introduce a moral issue, an issue so important that it increasingly appears to be the battleground for all the forces seeking to give shape to the world of the next century." Certainly this has been the battleground here in Greenville over the past month, with the furor caused by the City Council's resolution affirming the community's stance against the gay lifestyle. We are headed for dark days indeed.

Often we Christians stand in the eye of the immoral storms swirling around us, gaping in confusion. It is so easy to romanticize our nation's more God-fearing past, and contrast it with today's increasing godlessness. How did things get so bad? How can we understand the trends in our culture? Does the Bible have anything to say about American culture today as we rush to the end of the 1990s?

ABSOLUTELY!! Out of all the commentaries on our times that I have read in the newspapers and the national news magazines, that I have heard in talks by heroes of mine such as Cal Thomas and others, I have never yet heard a more perfectly accurate description of our culture than the one Paul wrote from Corinth in 57 AD as we find it in Rom. 1:21-32. More than any other passage in the Bible, this is a passage for our times. It is my prayer as we study together that God will equip each of us with absolute truth from this passage, that we will be wise in numbering our days and understanding our times.

Meanwhile, Back in Court ...

But while our culture is rejecting God and morality at a breakneck pace, God's court is still in session. When we studied Rom. 1:18-20, Paul abruptly ushered us into the courtroom, placing us before the bar of God's justice as he began to prosecute God's case against the human race. We heard the awful charge: all humanity suppresses the truth in unrighteousness. Then Paul charged humanity with ignoring both the internal witness of our conscience and the external witness of God's creation, both of which cry out to us about God. Because we have both of these witnesses with us, calling to us every single day of our lives, Paul concluded that all mankind is without excuse, literally without legal recourse as far as God is concerned. That was the jarring charge of God against the human race. But now, and for the next few studies, we will see Paul call three representatives of humanity to demonstrate by them how mankind has specifically chosen to suppress the truth. This week, the Immoral Man is called as Witness A, an archetype of man who started from a place of knowing God but proceeded to exchange God as his focal point of worship for worship of the self and worship of the creation through homosexuality and all manner of evil activity. Thus, Immoral Man suppresses the truth by exchanging the truth for the lie, specifically through idolatry of various forms. In this study, humanity's depravity is laid bare in the stark courtroom of God.

Man Exchanged God for Idols, so God Gave Them Over to Impurity - 1:21-24

As we begin studying this passage, I want to highlight some phrases that help us discover Paul's thoughtflow. First, underline the phrases "they knew God" in vs. 21 and "they know the ordinance of God" in vs. 32. These are the bookends of this passage, because at the beginning and at the end they knew about God and were thus suppressing the truth as Paul had said. He is clearly supporting his main thesis that humanity suppresses the truth about God through Witness A, the Immoral Man. Then, draw a box around the word "exchange" in vs. 23, 25 and 26b. This is the primary active verb initiated by Immoral Man in this passage. In response to these three actions, the text has three corresponding statements that "God gave them over" in vs. 24, 26 and 28, around which you can also draw a box. This helps you to understand what Paul is going to present to us in this passage. Using repeated verb phrases, there are three parallel cycles: vs. 23,24; vs. 25,26a; vs. 26b-28, with added expansion in vs. 29-31. As each cycle progresses, Paul becomes more specific, the drama grows, and the evil magnitude of the sin expands. This passage is a downward cycle into the depravity of man, with each of three cycles getting worse than the cycle before. Let's look at the first cycle now in vs. 21-24.

The first phrase in vs. 21 supports Paul's main thesis that they are suppressing the truth: "For even though they knew God..." Paul is saying they knew God, not only intellectually but through their experience. They had learned that you reap what you sow, that there are absolute rights and wrongs, that God does indeed exist. They knew some if not all of these things ... but they immediately suppressed that knowledge. This suppression came in two forms.

First, they suppressed their knowledge of God by refusing to glorify Him as God. We were all created to be light-bearers of the light of God in us by the Holy Spirit. We are to see our lives as extensions of His life, honoring Him and giving Him the glory. Instead, too often we loudly proclaim, "I Don't Need You," and walk forward alone, without God in our life and without the Holy Spirit indwelling us. Thus, too many of us become empty vessels, not fulfilling the design for which we were made. Too many of us are like a house with no inhabitant, without the lights on, full of darkness and emptiness; an empty shell.

Second, they suppressed their knowledge of God by refusing to thank Him. This may be the single most important point made in this passage. What started humanity on its downward skid was an UNTHANKFUL HEART. Having been given blessing upon blessing by God, living in a world perfectly tuned in a thousand ways for our comfort and enjoyment, humanity chose to complain instead of being thankful. And each of us is faced with this same choice every day. No choice we make each day is more important than the choice to be thankful.

Blythe and I were faced with this choice this week on what we will now call Black Tuesday. We closed escrow on our house last Friday a week ago, and began to move in over the weekend. By Monday, our air conditioning broke down in the house. The temperature inside soared to over 90 degrees Monday night. The first thing I did on Tuesday morning was call an air conditioning repairman. I called him at 8:15. By 11:00, our phone was dead. For no apparent reason, the phone line did nothing but buzz loudly in our ears. At about 1:30, Paden and Esther ran upstairs to tell us that a pipe had burst in their ceiling and that water was pouring from the ceiling into their room. Water was also flooding out of the half-bathroom just above their room into the hallway. And our washing machine hoses were spewing water everywhere in our laundry room. Chaos reigned. The air conditioning, the phone, the plumbing, and the washing machine were all haywire. And Blythe and I were tired. But by the end of the day, we reflected over the day. The Lord has given us many small choices to be thankful. I will share more about my wife's attitude than my own, since I struggled with Black Tuesday!! But I watched Blythe say how thankful she was that none of us were sick. She was thankful that we had nice neighbors to help us out. She was thankful for the Lord's presence in the midst of everything. At one point, Blythe looked at me and said she was thankful I was there and helping out, since she had seen her mother encounter similar problems with an alcoholic husband making things worse. We were thankful that God had secured us through American Home Shield. Even on Black Tuesday, there is much to be thankful for. The alternative to choosing thankfulness is taking the first step on the slippery slope into depravity.

"They did not give Him thanks ..." is such an indictment of our own generation: we have been raised rich here in America, we have been spoiled, and yet we are so unthankful because we feel we never get enough. Rather than slowing down and thanking God for what we do have, we cry and clamor for MORE, MORE, MORE. We have lost the art and power of a thankful heart, and with that our only chance at contentment. We join in this cover-up of truth by not acknowledging God as our gracious provider and the giver of good gifts.

So, having known God the Immoral Man has actively chosen to turn away from God, not giving God any honor nor any thanks. But what are the consequences?

First, "they became futile in their inward questionings, and their undiscerning heart was darkened." This is the immediate result of turning away from God: suddenly you are beseiged with all the unanswerable questions about life that only a relationship with the Author of Life can resolve. The great questions such as "who am I? Where did I come from? What is the meaning of life?" become pointless inward questionings leading to nihilism and existentialism, because the answer to those questions begins with God and God alone. Without Him, there is no answer, only fruitless speculation. Thus, their hearts become "undiscerning" and darkened. They have become so lost in their inward questionings that they are totally unable to discern spiritual truth in any form; the light can no longer penetrate their own fog. Paul here tells us a terrible tale of the death of the human heart and the closing of the human mind.

Verse 22 explains this in chilling terms: "Professing to be wise, they became fools." In other words, they had no self-knowledge whatsoever. Their internal befuddlement translated into a total inability to see themselves clearly. They saw themselves as the wise, the enlightened, but they were fools whose hearts were darkened. They have lost their moorings to the truth about God, losing themselves in the process. They were profoundly self-deluded.

So, they turned away from God and lost all knowledge of themselves in the process. But what happened when they turned away from God? They uncovered a deep nerve within them. They found they had to replace God with something else. Man was designed to worship and serve something greater than himself. God made us that way. So, when we refuse God His rightful place as King and Lord in our hearts, we find we must replace Him with something. We EXCHANGE God for something less. This is another ACTIVE choice on our part: we actively exchange the incorruptible glory of God, i.e. the shining reality of God discernible in the human world through creation and in those indwelled by the Spirit of God, for a "likeness of an image of corruptible man." Thus, we remove God as the focal point of our lives and substitute something far less worthy but far more morally lax. They traded the incorruptible, unchangeable reality of the eternal God for the "smoke and mirrors" image of mortal man. What really happened was this: removing God as the focal point of our worship, we then begin to think unrealistically about ourselves, and in our self-delusion we begin to believe WE are worthy of worship. We replace worship of God with worship of the self. Or, having jettisoned God off the throne of our lives, we jump right on and feel quite pleased with ourselves. Pleased for a season ... but not really satisfied.

It is easy to see how this happened historically in the pantheon of Egyptian gods against which our God mounted the Ten Plagues, especially when they made Pharaoh a god. And it is easy to see how Paul's Roman readers could see the Roman system of Emperor-worship fitting into this scheme. But what about today?

In the ultra-humanistic world in which we live, the "human spirit" is celebrated more universally than our God who is spirit. I remember listening to a radio program in the fall of 1992, a year after the terrible Oakland firestorm consumed whole neighborhoods of beautiful homes in the Oakland hills. One year later, to the day, survivors of the firestorm gathered to commemorate the event. They held a memorial service, then they unveiled a wood carving of a flame, celebrating the "triumph of the human spirit over adversity." This was essentially a religious service to worship the human spirit. They should have been thanking the one true God they made it out alive. But, to replace thankfulness to God, today we extol the greatness of the "human spirit." What a bad trade, especially at the end of the twentieth century, the bloodiest and most violent century on record.

Now, what about the rest of the verse, the "birds and four-footed animals and creeping things"? As if replacing God with man was not foolhardy enough, we have replaced Him with birds and four-footed animals and creeping things. The point Paul is making is that we have looked at creation and man, both of which clearly were designed to point toward God, and instead we have worshipped the physical creation rather than letting it lead us to worship the Creator.

The question for us today is this: what are OUR birds, and four-footed animals and creeping things? Today, we still worship them ... we revere "the environment." We have Earth Day, and we celebrate Mother Earth in ways that openly recall pre-Christian pagan religions. Now I am not talking about a Christian's right responsibility to be a good steward of God's created environment. I am talking about the open worship of the environment. In the public school my children used to attend, a new kindergarten teacher began snack time with a prayer addressed to "Dear Father Heaven and Mother Earth." Fortunately she was reprimanded, but I think that the worship of the environment may well underlie the coming world religion. In this new counterfeit religion, the idolatry of the 1990s, we worship whales and dolphins and spotted owls, putting their interests before those of human beings on occasion. The bumper sticker says it all: "Be a hero, save a whale; save a baby, go to jail." It is absolutely arresting how idolatry is just as alive and well in our culture today as it was thousands of years before Paul wrote, as it was when he was writing in the shadow of the Acro-Corinth and its temple to Aphrodite.

Now, what did God do in response to all this snubbing of Him, this exchanging of worship of Him for worship of humanity and creation? The text says simply "GOD GAVE THEM OVER in the lusts of their hearts into sexual impurity, that their bodies might be dishonored." This is the fundamental response of God to willful human sin, the "I Don't Need You" attitude. God simply takes His hands of protection away from them, and gives them over to fully taste the consequences of their choices. This is an ACTIVE step taken on God's part, in direct response to man's ACTIVE step to unseat and dishonor God.

The phrase "God gave them over" is one of the key phrases of the passage. First, God is the subject here, the main actor. The legal use of this term, which must inform us in light of the overall legal framework of Paul's argument here, literally means "to deliver up a prisoner." They are prisoners already, incarcerated by their own choices. This is how the wrath of God is worked out. Man denies what he knows about God and actively replaces God with counterfeits. In loving response to this willful rebellion, God gives him over to pursue his course, knowing full well that course will only lead him to experience terrible consequences that God hopes will lead him to repentance.

But what were they given over to in this case? Sexual impurity, which means sexual aberration in any form, sex outside of marriage in any form. This seems strange at first, until we grasp the essential connection between sex and worship. In Christian marriage, sex is a wonderful celebration of oneness, leading us to ponder the wonder of our oneness with God Himself. It is a mysterious and wonderful thing indeed. But in this case, humanity has removed God as the focal point of his worship. But having done so, he feels an itch. It is a spiritual itch. He tries to scratch that spiritual itch with physical sex. But having abandoned God and oneness with Him, he cannot find true oneness through sexual activity alone. Yet he tries, and tries, and tries. He trades the deep spiritual reality of oneness portrayed through marital sex for a cheap, animalistic, physical-only reality of promiscuity with little or no spiritual meaning. God's judgment is poetic here: since we dishonored Him, He allows our bodies to be likewise dishonored through meaningless sex.

If this doesn't describe our cheap sex-saturated society today, I don't know what does. Everywhere we turn in our culture, people are running after sex as the answer to their deep spiritual and emotional needs. How many lonely women feed on the smutty soap operas, yet stay love-starved? How many lonely men consume pornography in magazines, on cable stations, on adult videos, yet stay love-starved? How many young people today think nothing of having sex, because they are so familiar with it through TV and other media that nothing is special about it anyway? Having abandoned God, has God not given over our very own culture to be a culture of sexual abandon, while so many of us remain love-starved? Paul describes our culture as if he had been watching CNN and reading People magazine.

So ends the first cycle of denying God His rightful place, exchanging worship of Him for worship of the human spirit and idols, followed by God choosing in response to "give them over," in this case to sexual sin as a result of their idolatry.

Man Exchanged the Truth of God for the Lie, so God Gave Them Over to Their Passions - 1:25,26a

In Rom. 1:25, the next cycle begins immediately, with the next EXCHANGE actively chosen by man against God. This time man chose to exchange the truth of God for the ancient lie, the lie against God first articulated in the garden by the serpent.

What was traded away in this case is truth about God: that He is, that He is good and loyally loving, that He rewards those who seek Him, that He seeks to save not to judge as Jesus said in John 3:17, that Jesus Christ is Himself the Truth, that Jesus died on the cross to save man from his sin and that God raised Him from the dead as a sign that God accepted this sacrifice. It is against these truths about God, about His fundamental character, that the ancient lie of Satan was mounted in Gen. 3:1-5. These immoral men chose the ancient lie of Satan instead of the truth of God as the guidepost for their life's journey. Whose voice you heed you will be like indeed.

But what is "the lie"? Satan's lie in the garden has been re-told with many variations over time, but it is basically this: God is distant and impersonal; He is not a good God; what He says about life and death are not true; His word cannot be trusted, so you don't really need him to mature and grow to your full human potential. Now, let's analyze this same lie in today's modern terms: 1) "God is dead," 2) "Man needed a god, so he got together and imagined one." 3) "Religion is the opiate of the people." 4) "There might have been some creative power setting the universe in motion, but that power was not personally involved with its evolutionary growth and development," 5) "The God of the OT is an angry, vengeful god who sends judgment on the heads of undeserving women and children," 6) "Nobody really knows how life began and what happens after you die," 7) "The Bible is full of contradictions," 8) "The Bible was written by white males who could never have understood the plight of women," 9) "Jesus Christ was a good man and a great ethical teacher, but He certainly wasn't God," etc., etc., etc. We could go on for hours, but I hope you recognize how much of this thinking permeates our media and our educational system at the upper levels. It matches with one-to-one correspondence with the ancient lie first voiced by Satan.

In Rom. 1:25 comes the crux of Paul's argument thus far. Their main problem is worshiping and reverencing the wrong thing: they "worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever." This is their idolatry. But this intensifies in this verse in that they just didn't worship the "wrong thing," they worshipped a blatant lie. They were putting their hopes in something that was a total sham. They placed the weight of their lives and their trust on something that could never support that weight because it was nothing but a vapor of hot air from hell. If we trust the weight of our lives and eternal destinies on that hot air, this is what happens: the weight crashes to the ground and breaks apart.

So, man has openly embraced the ancient lie about God, and rejected God's truth in the great news about Jesus Christ. In response, Rom. 1:26 tells us, "For this reason, God gave them over to degrading passions." But what does this mean? Literally, it means "into passions of dishonor." The preposition "into" is very evocative. He gave them to be right in the middle of, to wallow in, to be engulfed by, these passions. But what are these "passions of dishonor"? The Linguistic key calls this "passion or a passionate desire. It represents the passive, ungoverned aspect of evil desire." It comes from the Greek word pathos, meaning "passion, suffering." What a picture: passions that lead one directly into suffering.

I remember a conversation I had with one of my three best friends from high school. He had come to visit me just shortly after I committed my life to Christ. He was one of the best-looking young men in our school. He was big, broad-shouldered, and looked like the Marlboro man. Walking down the street with him in Denver one afternoon, I was amazed at how many women catcalled at him! I had never heard that myself, I can assure you! However, my friend Gary was not a believer. He just didn't feel any need for God when I knew him. Gary moved to California at the same time I did, to go to college. He lived down in San Diego. There he got involved in the freewheeling beach lifestyle, and he slept with many a young woman. Eighteen months later when he came up to visit me after I accepted Jesus Christ, I shared with him everything that had happened with me. I poured out my heart to him that he might come to Christ. I could see his heart softening. Then I watched my big friend's handsome face crumble, and his shoulders jerk with deep sobs. He told me, "Dorm, you can't believe what I've done. I've done so many terrible things sexually..." He then told me some of those things, none of which God hasn't forgiven a million times before. But I will never forget the sense of shame and suffering his passions had led him to. Having no room for God, but having a deep need, he filled his bed but didn't satisfy his need. His passions caused him great suffering. To the best of my knowledge, his need still hasn't been met.

Man Exchanged Natural Sexuality for Anti-Natural Homosexuality, so God Gave Them Over to an Unfit Mind - 1:26b-31

Now we have passed the second downward cycle into depravity and human degradation in sin. Man traded the truth of God for the ancient lie of Satan, and was thus given over by God to be ruled by passions that would inevitably enslave them and bring them to a place of suffering. Not very pretty, is it? But with the upcoming third cycle, it gets worse. Much worse.

The third cycle gets started right away, as an outgrowth of the "passions of dishonor." In the second half of verse 26, Paul introduces the third EXCHANGE, where "their females EXCHANGED the natural function for that which is against nature." As the females exchanged the natural function, so also the males abandoned natural sex with the females and became literally "males in males" as Paul says in verse 27. What is most interesting here is the argument from the natural use of the body vs. the use of the body which is directly "against nature." What is also interesting is that in both these verses in the original text, Paul refers to "females" instead of "women" and "males" instead of "men." How is homosexuality "against nature," and why does he write of "females" and "males"?

To understand this, we must go back to Gen. 1:26-28 and 2:18-25. In those passages, we learn two things. First, God imaged Himself in man in two equal and COMPLEMENTARY parts, male and female, who together were commanded by God to go forth and multiply and fill the earth. God cannot be clearly seen in the intimate joining of two partners of the same sex, neither can the couple reproduce life, so the twofold purpose of sex remains entirely unmet in homosexual unions of any sort. Thus, God's order of nature is clearly perverted and convoluted through homosexuality. Second, the emphasis of God's creation orders is on the "oneness" the man and woman experienced in being "one flesh." This "one flesh" means man plus woman becoming one. Man plus man equals only man, woman plus woman equals only woman. Neither gender alone can equal a joining of two complementary parts into the divinely appointed oneness. God designed sex to be a physical picture of spiritual oneness. Man-to-man and woman-to-woman unions destroy the divinely instituted picture of oneness through human marriage.

Even literature written by "Christian" homosexuals who try to justify their stance biblically cannot answer these arguments out of Gen. 1-2. In one book, Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? Another Christian View, the authors admit, "For one thing, the idea of a lifelong homosexual orientation or 'condition' is never mentioned in the Bible." Thus, they admit that an inborn homosexual condition is not a part of God's truth as He revealed it. Furthermore, the authors were unable to answer these two questions, even though they bent over backwards to try: "But would such a [permanent, committed homosexual] relationship be permissable according to Biblical standards? Or do theological considerations such as God's plan in creating male and female and bringing them together to be "one flesh" rule out homosexual unions entirely?" (pp. 71, 72). Although the authors tried desperately to argue that the Bible does not present a clear case against homosexual activity and lifestyle, at the end of the book they could not respond against the natural plan of God in creating male and female and bringing them together to be "one flesh."

Simply put, homosexuality is "against nature" as God designed nature. Furthermore, since God's attributes can be clearly seen through what has been made, nature bears the imprint of God. Gen. 1:26-28 shows how man as male and female particularly bear the representation of God before the world. If that is corrupted, so the picture of God to the world is corrupted. That is precisely what homosexuality does, and why it becomes such a personal affront to God.

It fascinates me that in this case, like in the garden of Eden, the women lead the men. In Rom. 1:26, it was the females who first abandoned their natural function for the unnatural desire for one another. Certainly this can be charted in the history of our own country over the past thirty years. In the mid-60s through the 70s, the radical Feminist movement swept America. That movement was centered around the deep-seated rejection of men and patriarchal institutions in this country. At the core of the movement were militant lesbians. And the rise of lesbianism from within the Feminist movement in many ways gave vigor to the Gay Rights movement that has swept the country since the early 80s up to today. Paul certainly paints an accurate picture of our culture in these verses.

But the men are in no way better than the women. Looking more closely at verse 27, Paul's language becomes very graphic, and depicts the slavery of male homosexuality very poignantly. Here is a very literal translation of Rom. 1:27: "And likewise also the males leaving the natural use of the female were consumed in their desire for one another, males in males working obscenity and the due penalty of their error receiving back in themselves." First, the males literally "were consumed in their desire." The critical aspect of this verb is the passive voice. Their passions got so far away from them that they were consumed by them. The term here for "desire" is also very evocative: "It is always the reaching out after an object, with the purpose of drawing that object to itself, and making it its own." Thus, the "desire" here is to possess the object, to "take" it. What a perversion of love, which is to "give" rather than to "take." Thus, there is slavery to one's own passions, and there is slavery to a "taking" rather than "giving" atmosphere of false love. This false love is described in very graphic terms: "males in males working obscenity."

But the greatest tragedy of homosexuality is captured in Paul's final phrase: "the due penalty of their error receiving back in themselves." Whenever Paul uses the term "themselves," or "yourselves," he is speaking about our IDENTITY. The ultimate tragedy of homosexuality is that it tortures the man or woman with a lifelong identity crisis that can only be resolved when their identity becomes rooted in Christ and they quit trying to derive their identity from their sexual proclivities. Every person I have ever known who is openly gay or struggling with same-sex attractions struggles much more painfully at a far deeper level with his or her identity. Having rejected God and the way He created them as male or female, they totally lose their identity and try to regain it by forming gay rights groups. This is why the devotion of gays to groups like Queer Nation and ACT UP is so passionate: the only place they can anchor their identity is within a social grouping, because their own identity crisis is so acute within them. This whole lifestyle is so enslaving and so damaging that we cannot tell the tale in full here in such a short time span.

Now, having drawn a clear picture of this passage, it is CRITICAL to look ahead to Paul's great conclusion in Rom. 3:23: "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." We cannot allow homosexuality to become "the worst possible sin," while we turn a blind eye on our own gossiping, selfish ambition, lying, and other sins. Let's call ALL sin SIN, knowing that we are ALL guilty before God and that Jesus Christ is the only Advocate in this court who can save any of us, homosexual or heterosexual! Thus, we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with homosexuals at the bar of God's justice, Jesus Christ being our only hope and their only hope for salvation.

So, what is God's response to all this? In verse 28, Paul draws a wonderful picture of God's poetic judgment through the power of a wordplay. This verse tells us "just as they thought it UNFIT to have God in knowledge ... God gave them over to an UNFIT mind..." If this is not an accurate description of the American university, I don't know what is!! It galls me how God is allowed no place at the university, as if things of God were "unfit" for intellectual consumption. And how many of the bright minds I have known have been dulled because they have had to feed on so much politically correct garbage that they have learned to think only according to the PC dogma and not to think for themselves based on the rules of logic and evidence. But since they sat in judgment over God and decided He was "unfit" as a field of knowledge or study, God gave them over so that their mind was unfit for truly original thinking. Again, I have read many books describing the downfall of the university system in this country, but no one describes it more accurately and more concisely than Paul here in Rom. 1:28.

This is the next step in the downward descent into total depravity. The mind is the last stronghold to which the truth of God appeals. When God finally gives it over to be unfit, the fall into degradation follows immediately, as Paul shows us in vs. 29-31. Rom. 1:29 shows that their minds became filled with all manner of evil. Paul begins this catalog by saying their minds were filled with "all unrighteousness," i.e. the same unrighteousness against which God's wrath was revealed in Rom. 1:18, takes over the mind completely. This is the general category under which all the other items in this catalog fall. Next there is "wickedness, greed, and evil." The "greed" spoken of here is the insatiable desire to have more even at the expense of harming others, the idea of being exclusively a "taker" rather than a "giver." Furthermore, their unfit minds are now full of "envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice." This completes the list of general evil that filled and consumed their minds. Their minds are painted here as being evilly finite: filled only with these evil thoughts which can issue forth in nothing but evil deeds.

The rest of vs. 29-31 take us further into the specific actions of evil birthed by these evil thoughts. First, these men with unfit minds became "whisperers," or gossips. This is the whispering that slays a person's character behind his back. Then that whispering becomes outward and public when they become "slanderers." Certainly they have been "haters of God," having done anything to exchange worship of God for worship of something else. Then follows a list of malignant arrogance: cruel insolence, arrogant, boasting of themselves. Furthermore, they are "inventors of evil," like those who plot evil on their beds in Ps. 36:4. They are also disobedient to parents, willfully denying their parents a place of honor in their lives. They are undiscerning of truth, having denied it so long, and they are faithless when it comes to holding to their responsibilities or agreements. They are unloving, like the mother who kills her child or the father who abuses his daughters. They are unmerciful to the point of committing awful crimes against other people with no remorse, like Jeffrey Dahmer or any other serial killer you might name.

Thus, moving from the general in vs. 29 to the specific in vs. 31, Paul leaves humanity in a state of pitiless amorality which leads to cold, criminal behavior of the worst kind. Certainly this pictures for us the downward cycle, the degenerative effect of sin, as opposed to the upward cycle and regenerative effect of salvation and the working of the Holy Spirit. Truly, when God gives over the mind into unfitness, it is an awful thing to behold. But the depths of human depravity have not yet been plumbed. Let's look at Paul's wrenching conclusion in vs. 32.

Summary: They Knew About God All the Time, But Did These Things and Dragged Others Down With Them - 1:32

Paul ends this passage with a reaffirmation of what he said at the beginning of vs. 21: "Although they are KNOWING the ordinance of God ..." i.e. they know the just decision of God, God's claim that such deeds are worthy of death. Knowing this, THEY NOT ONLY DO THEM, BUT HEARTILY APPLAUD ALL WHO JOIN IN! They still know that God's rules governing life and death are true and real, and yet they heartily applaud when others choose the same path they have. This is chilling ... and so true of the gay lobby in America, of Hollywood, of much of the media, etc.

But what is it they are "knowing"? Paul says they know "that the ones practicing such things are worthy of death." This is the specific ordinance of God that they know and live to deny, i.e. that those who practice such lawlessness are worthy of death. But in what sense are they worthy of death? Should the death penalty be leveled against everyone who abandons his family or is a gossip? No, it is a deep knowledge of the iron law that sin produces death: you reap what you sow, so that they know there are consequences to their actions which certainly produce spiritual and sometimes even physical death. They KNOW the consequences ... but they do it anyway, and applaud others in the doing of these same sins. Certainly militant gay activism and outright recruitment in high schools and on college campuses everywhere during the age of AIDS is a classic example of this.

But this recruitment of others is what marks the low point of human depravity and evil. It is bad enough to do them oneself, and bring one's own death upon one's own head. But it is far more evil to actively applaud others in their bad choices leading to their deaths. This is the modus operandi of Satan: he fell through arrogant sin, so he wants to drag as many people as possible down with him. Such is the influence of Satan through their indwelling sin that they have become just like him. They are grabbing at others to drag them down with them, clapping on the sidelines while others throw their lives away as they have thrown their own life away. This is "evangelistic evil" in a sense: we evangelical Christians want to lift as many people as possible into faith and thus upward to the Father, while these folks so deny God that they clap for and try to drag down with them any who are likely to emulate their choices. They now are in the likeness and image of Satan, rather than the likeness and image of God as they were originally intended to be.

Conclusion: A Passage for Our Times ... A Passage for Me ... A Passage for You

In conclusion, this is certainly not a pretty picture of humanity. But it is a chillingly accurate picture of our culture today. It is almost uncanny. But there is an even deeper point to all this, a point we all have to face. This text is a clear picture of our own hearts. We must look this text squarely in the face, because we must all know how we could look if we were WITHOUT GOD. Without God, without Jesus Christ resident in us, this passage would describe our own lives as accurately as it describes our own culture today. This passage reveals exactly how things got so bad in our culture: BECAUSE OF SIN.

Sin is the great problem in our culture today, not the gay lobby or the media or the educational system, or wherever else we point the finger. This degenerative force of sin is a sickness that is seeking to claim the lives, the bodies, the souls of mankind and lock them forever into abject slavery. All humanity needs to be saved, and until we taste our own terrible need for salvation we cannot fully appreciate the great value of the salvation we have been offered at the cross of Jesus Christ. Let us not recoil from this passage. Instead, let us be filled with SINCERE THANKS at our own salvation and moved deeply by COMPASSION for all who are described by these words, ones who have not yet found freedom and life and forgiveness of their sin through Jesus Christ! Truly this is a passage for our times ... a passage for me ... a passage for you.

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