Therefore, God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity that their bodies might be dishonored among them, for they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed forever, Amen. For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural. And in the same way the men also abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desires towards one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error. And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind to do those things which are not proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, malice, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful; and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.
Today’s lesson falls in the overall outline of Romans in the following way:
Theme: The Righteousness of God (1:16-17)
The Need for God's Righteousness (1:18-3:20)
(1) General Statement Explaining Why Man Needs God’s Righteousness (1:18a)
(2) The Gentile Need for God’s Righteousness (1:18-32)
(3) The Jewish Need for God’s Righteousness (2:1-3:20)
God’s Provision of Righteousness (3:21-8:39)
The Method of God Making Us Right with Himself (3:21-31)
Evidence from the OT that God Makes Us Right With Him (4:1-25)
Results of Being Made Right with God (5:1-6:23)
(1) A New Relationship with God (5:1-2)
(2) A New Understanding of Suffering (5:3-5)
(3) A New Assurance in Judgment (5:6-11)
(4) A New Humanity (5:12-21)
(5) A New Life (6:1-23)
Experiencing God’s Righteousness Daily (7:1-8:39)
(1) The Way Not to Experience God’s Righteousness (7:1-25)
(2) The Way to Experience God’s Righteousness (8:1-39)
Read Rom. 1:24, 26, and 28. What clause does Paul repeat in all 3 verses?
What we are seeing in these 3 verses is the principle that God is visiting wrath upon those who have rejected Him as God (see verse 21). Before you read verses 24-32, ask yourself the question: “When you normally think of God’s wrath, what do you normally think of?“
Normally when we think of God’s wrath, we think only in terms of fire and brimstone. While there is a real element of truth in this (see Rev. 19:20, 21 and 20:10-15), the truth is that God’s wrath encompasses more than that. Many times whenever we discipline our children or sit in judgment upon others, we base our decision upon insufficient evidence and deliver a sentence which may or may not be appropriate with the crime. God’s judgment though is always just. He has all the evidence, and He knows what the just verdict is in each instance. When God judges, the punishment is always commensurate with the crime.
Now read verses 24-32 which describe the wrath of God and then describe the wrath He pours out upon mankind.
How is the judgment in verses 24-32 commensurate with the crime? The crime is mankind’s desire to commit sin; God, therefore, punishes mankind by taking off the restraints in his life and allowing him to experience sin fully. You see, most of us want to experience sin in small doses. We don’t want to be flagrant sinners; we just want to get away with the “small” sins. That just won’t work with God. Whenever we reject Him and choose to go our own ways, God takes off the restraints so that we can experience sin to the fullest.
Why does God do this? Read 1 Cor. 5:5. In this passage why does Paul turn the offender over to Satan for the destruction of his flesh?
Until the final day of judgment God’s wrath is nearly always redemptive, not punitive. In other words, God disciplines us in order that we will wake up and repent of our sin. In the same way God allows us many times to experience the full depravity of sin so that we might get disgusted, repent, and turn to Christ for forgiveness and a new life.
It is like the time my mom prayed for my granddad. He was a pretty heavy drinker. She got so tired of it that she prayed God would make him so sick the next time he drank, he would never drink again. Sure enough the next time he drank, he got so sick that he gave it up completely. That's what God wants to happen to us when we sin. We wants us to get so sick of our sin that we will give it up. Any time you see somebody going down the spiral of sin, pray for that person because God is probably desiring that they experience the horrible nature of sin in order that they may come to their senses and repent (2 Tim. 2:26 “they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil.")
The tragedy of all this is that many times people do not wake up and repent. At that point they will bring upon themselves the full extent of God’s wrath. Until that day comes though, there is hope for everybody.
Sexual Immorality (1:24-25)
In the first announcement of God’s judgment, Paul writes that God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to ______________________.
What happens to a person’s body whenever he gives himself over to sexual impurity?
Notice that Paul links sexual impurity with idolatry. People today claim that they are exercising their sexual freedom. Paul though informs us that this is not sexual freedom. Because they have rejected God as Lord in their lives and have tried to place themselves on the throne, they become slaves to the very things God placed them over, animals, etc. This is the essence of God’s wrath in these 2 verses. Does God want them to experience this? No, but He has removed the restraints off their lives so that now they are enslaved to their sexual perversions. Even though they loudly proclaim their sexual freedom, they are actually enslaved to their own lusts. [This illustrates Paul’s claim that whenever a person rejects God and substitutes himself for God, man ends up lowering himself and becomes less than animal (Rom. 1:23, 25).]
Reading Playboy and Penthouse is not the only way to experience sexual impurity. First, ask yourself the question how you treat women other than your wife. If you tell a sexually-charged joke around them, you are engaged in sexual impurity. If you make subtle, sensual remarks to women other than your wife, you are engaged in sexual impurity. Second, look at the programs you watch on TV? If you and I can flip the channels the instant a commercial comes on the air, how much quicker should we flip them when a sexually-charged moment hits the screen. [“Oh, but that seems a little extreme, “you may say, or “Oh, but that is ridiculous.” Keeping yourself pure is not ridiculous because it honors God’s will for your life (1 Thess. 4:3, 7), and if God is on the throne of your life, then you should honor His will for your life.]
Homosexuality (1:26-27)
In verses 26 and 27 Paul is using euphemisms to describe homosexual behavior (that is, he is using polite language to describe something very impolite.) In verse 26 what do some women do as a result of God’s wrath?
In verse 27 what do some men do as a result of God’s wrath?
Homosexuality was primarily a sin of the Greek culture. “Platonic love” was more than just the love of the mind; it was the sexual activity of males with each other. By the time of the first century BC and first century AD homosexuality had become the rage of the Roman empire. Numerous Caesars, including Julius Caesar, engaged in homosexual activity. In the Greek household it was standard for the man to have a male lover in addition to having a wife and children. This mindset disgusted the pious Jew who read God’s injunctions against this behavior in the Mosaic Law.
According to Paul what do homosexuals receive in their own persons?
Paul claims that they receive the due penalty of their error in their own persons. By this he means that homosexuals experience wrath in themselves and a wrath ("penalty") which they deserve (that is, it is "due" them). I had a friend who worked in the Oak Lawn area of Dallas at a major hotel. He said that the gay lifestyle was unbelievable. He described them as being creatures of the night, being steeped in alcohol and drugs. The picture of the happy homosexual according to him was pure tripe.
There is a discussion going on today about the inevitability of some people to engage in homosexuality. They justify their behavior because they claim they were born homosexual? What would be your response to this? Suppose some people are born with a bent to being homosexuals. What would your response to this be then?
When it is all said and done, it does not matter whether a person was born homosexual or not. That cannot be proved or disproved. The truth is that we are all born with a bent towards some kind of sin: lying, greed, lust, thievery, etc. Simply because somebody is born with a bent to thievery, do we say it is OK for them to steal? No. We expect them to be responsible and deal with the way they are. In the same way, even if a person is born homosexual (which has yet to be proved), this does not relieve him/her of his moral responsiblity to deal with it. If God's Spirit raised Jesus from the dead, then He is quite capable of giving a person victory over homosexuality.
In verse 28 Paul engages in a play on words. According to Paul how did the Gentile respond to God?
How did God respond to this?
In the Greek, Paul is saying that because the Gentile world examined God as in a laboratory and found Him “unfit,” God gave them over to an “unfit” mind, a depraved reason which in their minds justified their godless behavior. It is as if the Gentiles said, "OK, He claims to be God; let's take Him into our lab, run some tests on Him, and see if He is fit to be God." After running their tests, the Gentiles decide that He is not "fit" to be their God and therefore, throw Him out the window. God though informs us that He alone is the Judge and not the judgee. No one runs tests on Him. When they were in their lab, they thought that they were running tests on God, while all along they were running tests on themselves. They did not find God "unfit." What they really found unfit was themselves. They and not God were the ones rejected and thrown out the window. Their finding God unfit really meant that they were unfit; their rejection of God meant that they were the ones rejected.
Write down the list of sins Paul enumerates in verses 29-32.
Look carefully at the list of sins in verses 24-32. Does Paul categorize them in these verses? Does he say that the sin of verses 26-27 is worse than the sins in verses 28-32?
Why do we normally say that the sins of verses 26-27 are worse than those in 28-32?
The reason we hammer homosexuality is that we tend to hammer the sins we're not guilty of. Yet take a closer look at the situation and you will see that homosexuality gets undue attention. The way some Christians act, you would think it was the sin destroying our nation and our churches. When I asked somebody though what percentage of the population would probably go to hell on Judgmentn Day, he said, "70%" The most liberal estimates are that homosexuality makes up only 10% of the population (it is actually only about 3-5% at the most). In other words, 60% of those not going to heaven are not even gay. Moreover, look at the churches themselves. Is homosexuality the sin killing our churches? I don't think so. Power, greed, apathy, and selfishness have harmed churches more than homosexuality ever thought of harming them. We need to focus primarily on our own sins.
Moreover, we act as if it's OK to criticize people who divorce their spouse because we're not divorcing ours. Hammer the gluttons whenever you have a high metabolism rate. There is a really interesting scene at the end of the movie Driving Miss Daisy in which Miss Daisy attends a banquet with Martin Luther King, Jr. as the speaker. In it he says that the great sin of that generation was not the burning of crosses by people filled with hate or the murder of blacks by white supremists; the great sin is the apathy of the good people who did nothing and allowed this kind of behavior to continue. Simply because we did not murder blacks means that we were innocent. Our silence was the greatest sin. C. S. Lewis when asked to condemn especially homosexuality said that he did not think it right to hammer sins he was not guilty of. In other words, to quote Jesus, we need to take the beam out of our own eyes before we try to take the speck out of the eyes of another. (This does not mean that homosexuality is OK. It's just that we need to focus on the sins we're guilty of and not on somebody else's sins.
If one sin stands out above all the others, it is the one listed in verse 32. According to Paul what is that one sin?
