Or, Lies, Lusts, and Cultural LunacyRomans 1:24-27October 24, 2021 Lord’s Day Worship Sean Higgins

Introduction

We have every reason to hope in the gospel. The gospel is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes (Romans 1:16). Unlike Paul’s recipients in Rome, we have two thousand years of gospel history, of gospel blessings, and those blessings have mostly moved west from Jerusalem through Rome and through regenerated men and the cultures they’ve forged. Many have tasted that the Lord is good, and then they have walked in the good works prepared beforehand (Ephesians 2:10).

God gives blessings to individual believers and their communities, some hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty (see Matthew 13:23). But when men throw that fruit back at God, when men thrown that fruit down on the ground, or when men come to think of themselves as producing their own fruit, individuals are damned and cultures are dismantled, gutted. We are living in a brand new set of ruins. We are not climate-deniers, we are Creator-deniers.

The complement of the righteousness of God being revealed (Romans 1:17) is the wrath of God being revealed (Romans 1:18). The Apocalypse proper unveils eschatological, final, eternal wrath. The unveiling of wrath here in Romans 1 is a trajectory wrath, not the telos wrath. The wrath that God reveals against those who conceal what they know about God corresponds with the lies they use to do the concealing. It’s been referred to as abandoning wrath, it results in a web of lies and lusts and cultural lunacy that defines itself against truth and goodness and beauty.

Paul repeats a simple but awful phrase three times starting in verse 24: “God gave them over.” It marks three factors of God’s abandoning wrath; we’ll consider the first two today.

Given Over to the Lie That Corrupts Them (verses 24-25)

Paul’s argument progresses with a Therefore, but this is anti-progress for mankind.

God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to uncleanness, to the dishonoring of their bodies among them,

In verse 24, the lusts are a consequence of God’s wrath, not the cause of His wrath. It does not mean that God implanted desires that were not there. It means that God not only does not restrain those desires, He positively puts men in a position to be more and more dominated by their own desires. He gives them what they think they want. He gives them the desires of their hearts. Abandoning wrath could also be called delivering wrath. God gives over, as in He transfers custody (for example, “committed to prison” Acts 8:3; or when He delivers Israel’s enemies into her hands, Exodus 23:31). See Psalm 81:12 – They won’t listen to the Lord? He lets them eat confusion and corruption.

The resulting status of being given over is: uncleanness (KJV), the sort of decay found in graves (see Matthew 23:27), filth, “impurity” (ESV). Their practice: self-dishonoring. It is not an adjective, it is their activity. The verb starts with honor and then removes it (ἀτιμάζεσθαι). Note the “their,” the “them,” and the middle voice of the infinitive in Greek, pointing toward a reflexive action. They are doing it to them-selves. They are victims in so far as they are also the victimizers.

Such dishonoring happens to their bodies. There are physical manifestations of God’s wrath, just as there are physical, bodily obligations of worship for living sacrifices by His mercies (Romans 12:1). Sometimes you can see when someone has lived a hard life.

Verse 25 finishes the sentence, and qualifies the “them” who are being given over as those who chose against the truth.

those who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, who both worshiped and served the creation rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever, amen.

Exchanged was found in verse 23, it is used again in verse 26. In all three uses it is a bad trade; immortal for mortal, natural fo[...]