Romans 1:26-27

Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.

Because they exchanged the truth for a lie, because of sin, God gave them over to shameful lusts, to more sin. Same idea as last time. Paul is still telling the believers in Rome about God’s wrath specifically against those who have exchanged the truth of God, Who He really is and what He’s really said, for a lie, an idol, a false god. And again, the penalty of sin here is more sin. The penalty of turning away from God is having God back away. God lowers His hedge of protection, His hedge of sustenance. John Piper says, “The root of all our disorders—sexual and social and physical and emotional—is the exchange of the glory of God for idols. Our soul was made to orbit around the glory of God as its sun. And the entire human race has exchanged the glory of God for weightless, substitute satellites that have no gravity and can hold nothing in proper orbit. Therefore the world is disordered and decaying and moving toward destruction.” And Paul gets specific. We’re talking about shameful lusts of the flesh, sexual immorality, and homosexuality.

Homosexuality is an unnatural shameful lust. They received in themselves the due penalty for this perversion. First of all, homosexuality is not only unbiblical; it is unnatural. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that 2 female parts don’t connect. Now why has Paul picked out homosexuality? He singles this sin out precisely because it is an example of the human heart working against reason, working against Scripture, and working against nature. Paul’s stress falls upon the unnatural character of the vice, and the peculiar gravity of the abomination. The implication is that however grievous fornication or adultery is, the desecration involved in homosexuality is on a lower plane of degeneracy; it is unnatural and therefore reveals a perversion more basic. Paul is saying, you want to see evidence of the power of sin unchecked? I give you female homosexuality. In Scripture, women are always the last ones to be swept under in pervasive societal moral degradation. Paul says, look, even your women have fallen prey to this. Paul says, I know that this is more prevalent amongst men than women, but the fact that even your women, upper-class women, educated women, women who know better than this had fallen into this practice. He said that’s an evidence of how pervasive sin is in your society. Paul is telling us here what can happen when sin unchecked by God’s grace is occurring in a society. It leads literally to inhuman deeds.

Second, remember Piper’s analogy from last time: The Ephesians 5 idea that an ideal relationship is monogamy between husband and wife to symbolize the intimacy of Christ and the Church. Remember that the farthest one can get from this ideal relationship is homosexual promiscuity. And I think that’s exactly what Paul is talking about here. Don’t get me wrong. Paul is talking about all kinds of sexual sin in general: pornography, prostitution, adultery, one-night stands, sex before marriage, sodomy, molestation, even perverted intimacy, etc. And the result is more sin, more idolatry, increasing lack of reverence for God. But specifically here, Paul says that the promiscuous homosexuals will receive in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. “In themselves” is judgment. “The due penalty” is judgment. AIDS? Maybe / maybe not. There will be not only consequences of behavior, but behavior is the consequence of behavior! Have you ever heard from a repentant homosexual? They are absolutely scarred for life. Yeah, they can move on and even marry and have children and live normal lives filled with a love for God. But they are scarred, and that scar is a punishment; they have received the due penalty for their perversion.

" " was deep into pornography while in college, before he became a Christian. He even struggled with pornography after becoming a Christian, and only with the help of his accountability group (and the Holy Spirit of course), was he able to regularly (even always) overcome the desires to look at pornographic images. Not to say he never has any desires like that. He still does. But he no longer yields to that temptation as a slave, and it’s because of God’s sanctification. But he's scarred. He's got a scar that depicts the due penalty for his perversion. His emotions are seared. His eyes have seen too much. The images are burned into his mind. And he hates it. Oh, how he wishes pornography had never been introduced! But it was. And now he's scarred. He knows God can take the scar away, but he doesn’t believe He will. God wants him to remember Him, and call on Him when a temptation arises. God wants him to say, along with Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you.”

He could be wrong about that. But that’s his experience. And I think that homosexuals who leave the lifestyle are scarred like that. So the due penalty is received in yourself when you commit sexual sin. And it doesn’t matter if God leaves you to wallow in your sin or if He pulls you out. The scar remains if you are pulled out. Piper says, “We have forgiveness for sin now; we will have freedom from all sinning later.
We have reconciliation with God now; we will have complete intimacy later. We have the firstfruits and the downpayment of the Holy Spirit now; we will have the full harvest of his power and presence later. We have some healing now (from our sexual disorders); we will have full wholeness later. We see his beauty through a glass darkly now, later we will see face to face. We have peace with God now; we will have perfection later.” The due penalty continues in your body and results in destruction if you remain in that sin.

Lastly, Paul is not condemning only heterosexuals who occasionally or perhaps even regularly perform homosexual acts. Some of the liberal denominations will interpret this passage that way. They might say that Paul says it’s wrong if you are “naturally” heterosexual to engage in homosexual behavior. But, they would also say that it’s okay for “naturally” homosexual folks to be who God made them to be: homosexuals. That’s wrong. Paul clearly condemns all homosexual acts, regardless of “natural” orientation. By the way, what do you think of homosexuality being a genetic thing? There’s no proof of that, but what if it is? There’s still no excuse. It’s a moral decision. And we’ve seen that the problem is a moral one, not an intellectual one, not even a physical one. Alcoholism is genetic. But that doesn’t make it right. Addictive behavior is often classified as genetic, but that doesn’t make it right. In fact, it’s wrong to be addicted to anything. So you can’t say, “I was made this way.” You have no excuse, genetic or otherwise.

It is not unloving to condemn homosexuality. God does not accept any of us as we are. He does something better than that. He accepts us in spite of who we are. And then by His grace, He makes us into what we are not. And every single believer knows that experience.

Romans 1:25

They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator--who is forever praised. Amen.

They exchanged the truth for a lie and worshipped and served the created instead of the Creator. I always think here of Creation vs. Evolution: the ultimate truth vs. the ultimate lie. But what Paul is getting at here is that we deny the totality of God, exchanging this truth, Who God really is, for a lie. Anything other than God’s True Self is a lie—a lie that is idolatry. When we think of idolatry, we may consider ancient peoples worshipping the sun and moon or just plain nature. This type of idolatry is still around in astrology, tree huggers, evolutionists, etc. But today, idolatry is seen more by folks who are very uncomfortable with the bothersome god of the Bible, always telling us what we ought to do. People want freedom. So we invent gods that don’t bother us. We use them when we want, and then we put them back on the shelf. That god of convenience, the god who is love, but who would never interfere with what I want to do, I have created in my own image. He doesn’t get in my way, doesn’t tell me what to do or make things difficult. Or we think maybe all religions are spokes on the wheel, where God is at the hub. After all, we are all the same, we are all one, and we all worship the same God, right? Wrong. That is a false god. And yet, that is a very popular teaching today. The Bahai faith manifests that particular belief.

Those are typical ways we make idols. But we also make idols out of worshipping things that are good, but aren’t God—family, for instance. Family is a wonderful thing. But if you see your ultimate significance, safety, fulfillment, and satisfaction as being a husband or a father, or maybe a son, you have made family an idol. No human being can possibly give you the satisfaction that you need as a creature created in the image of God. Only God can do that. When we place all of our significance in a marriage, we are ultimately disappointed, because no human being can fulfill what we need. If we find our hope, our significance, our satisfaction, or our comfort in family, money, work, popularity, appearance, even in who we are other than children of the Living God, then we are idolators. Idolatry is placing anything or anyone before the one true God. And Paul is saying to us, that is what we need to be saved from, because every human being has a sinful nature, a natural inclination to that idolatry.

God is FOREVER PRAISED. AMEN. Paul, greatly troubled by being in the midst of an idolatrous world that dishonors his God and does not worship his God as the one true God, gets to the word, “Creator,” and he just has to pause for a second and say, “He is forever praised.” God’s truth, God’s glory, God’s blessedness are independent of our assessment. God, in order to be blessed doesn’t need to have our approval. God, in order to be true, does not have to have our concurrence. Remember the bumper sticker, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” As far as Paul is concerned, that’s wrong. It should read, “God said it, that settles it, it doesn’t matter if you believe it or not.” God’s glory is not going to be in the least diminished by my refusal to glorify Him; but I will never participate in His glory, if I do not glorify Him. This is ironic: I can refuse to glorify God, and it is not going to decrease His glory one bit, but it will destroy me. If I refuse to give myself to Him, I am in the end destroyed; but if I give myself to Him, and I glorify Him, I find that I get to partake in that glory. Paul wants us to realize that God’s glory is not impacted by our rejection of Him. God will be glorified. The idols will not triumph. The question is this: Will you participate in glory or destruction? Are you prepared for glory or destruction? Romans 9:22-23 “What if God, choosing to show His wrath and make His power known, bore with great patience the objects of His wrath–prepared for destruction? What if He did this to make the riches of His glory known to the objects of His mercy, whom He prepared in advance for glory?” Do you have faith in Christ? Are your sins forgiven by Him? Has He born the wrath of God in your stead? Then He will fill you with His glory.

Romans 1:24

Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.

Therefore, God gave them over to their desires. Paul shocks the system with this pronouncement. Ask yourself, how does God judge sin in the world today? Is it by natural disasters, like tsunamis and earthquakes? Is it by terrorist attacks? Yes. But what Paul says here is that God judges sin in the world by giving sinners over to more sin. God’s judgment against sin is seen in sin itself. That is, sin unchecked is in itself God’s judgment against sin. We see God’s hand of judgment against sin, when we see Him withdrawing the restraints in our society against that sin and when that sin begins to work itself out in our conduct, both individually and corporately. God’s judgment against sin is sin. We might think, “Lord, if we continue to commit this crime of abortion, You will bring judgment against this nation.” Paul would say, “His judgment against this nation is abortion.” You are killing your own kind. Animals know that you cannot do that and survive. Sinners manifest even in their own conduct God’s judgment against sin.

“God gave them over” is the same language used when the Jews handed Jesus over to Pilate. It is the same language used of Pilate handing over Jesus to His executors. It is the same language used in Romans 8:32 to speak of God delivering over His Son to pay the penalty of our sin. God removes the constraints and allows you to go the way of your own wicked hearts. When a human heart says, “I rebel against You God; I want to be my own god; I want to do it my own way.” Then God says, “Okay, have it your way.” And that judicial deliverance, that abandonment into our own desire becomes our own punishment. C.S. Lewis said, “The doors of hell are locked from the inside.” Those in hell don’t want to get out of it, they have chosen it. They have chosen their sin, they have chosen their wickedness. They love it. And God abandons them to their own desires. Does this abandonment to our desires mean freedom? Or slavery?

Sexual Impurity. Paul connects sexual sin, immorality, and idolatry. Paul was writing this letter to the Romans from Corinth, a famously immoral city. In Paul’s time, ‘to act like a Corinthian’ meant to act in a sexually immoral way. It was a sailor’s port town. It had a temple in the city center with 1000+ cult prostitutes servicing it. Paul could see the connection visibly displayed between the idolatry of the Corinthians and their sexual immorality. If your desires are not conformed to the truth, then you will try to conform the truth to your desires. And thus, there is always an inseparable connection between idolatry and immorality. Idolatry is simply immorality worked out. And immorality is simply idolatry worked out.

Paul says that sexual sin is a result of God’s giving us over to our desires. Sometimes people ask, “Is AIDS the judgment of God on homosexuality?” The answer from this text is that homosexuality itself is a judgment on the human race, because we have exchanged the glory of God for the creature—and so is AIDS and cancer and arthritis and Alzheimer’s and every other disease and every other futility and misery in the world, including death. That’s the point of Romans 5:15-18 and Romans 8:20-23, which we will see down the road. Paul will discuss homosexuality specifically in the next section of Scripture that we study, but for now, he says that sexual impurity, which includes but is not limited to homosexuality, for the degrading of our bodies with one another is a desire that sinful man has, and it is a judgment of God.

John Piper says: Paul, in Ephesians 5:31-32, tells us that from the beginning, men and women existed to represent both God’s relation to His people and Christ’s relation to His bride, the Church. The man represents God or Christ and is to love his wife as Christ loved the Church. The woman represents God’s people or the Church. And sexual union in the covenant of marriage represents pure, undefiled, intense worship. That is, God means for the beauty of worship to be expressed in the right ordering of our sexual lives. But instead, we have exchanged the glory of God for images of man. The beauty of worship is destroyed. Therefore, in judgment, God has determined that this disordering of our relation to Him be dramatized in the disordering of our sexual relations with each other. And since the right ordering of our relationship to God in worship was dramatized by heterosexual union in the covenant of marriage, the disordering of our relationship to God is dramatized by the breakdown of that heterosexual union. Homosexuality is the most vivid form of that breakdown. God and man in covenant worship are represented by male and female in covenant sexual union. Therefore, when man turns from God to images of himself, God hands us over to what we have chosen and dramatizes it by male and female turning to images of themselves for sexual union, namely their own sex. Homosexuality is the judgment of God dramatizing the exchange of the glory of God for images of ourselves.

Simply by showing the pervasiveness (regularity or commonness) of sexual immorality in the world, Paul has proven two things. He has proven the doctrine of depravity and the doctrine of the wrath of God. You don’t have to look for mudslides to see the wrath of God against sin. The wrath of God against sin is seen when He breaks lose the restraints of sin in a society and lets sinners go their own way.

Romans 1:23

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. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

They exchanged God’s glory for an image. If you want to assume the role of God in governing your life, you will perceive this exchange— the glory of God for idolatry—as the wisest thing in the world. But in reality, idolatry is a pitiful, corruptible substitute for the incorruptible, real glory of God. John Piper offers an analogy: “This exchange is like trading a masterpiece for a copy of a copy of a copy.” The glory of God is the apex, the pinnacle! And how stupid it is to exchange this for a likeness of an image of man (NASB), who is an image of God. Ever heard, “Image is everything”? Well, it’s not. The glory of God is everything.

Idolatry is the consequence of futile thinking, darkened hearts, and foolish wisdom, all of which result from suppressing the truth of God. You will worship anything if you refuse the One True God, Who has revealed Himself in you, to you, and around you. Idolatry is the central religious problem. God has made us to be religious people, and if we won’t worship Him, we’ll find someone or something else to worship. There is a god we want (mostly to serve us), and there is a God Who is (Whom we are to serve), and the two are not the same. If we don’t want the God Who is (which we won’t), we will invent the god we want (which we do), and we worship him or it. This is why doctrine is so crucial. How many denominations today are struggling with issues that seem so simple to us? Homosexual marriage? Lesbian preachers? Child-molestation? Pro-choice attitudes? Etc. All this is due to a denial of sound Biblical doctrine. We must worship the One True God, and we must do so according to His revelation, in Spirit and in Truth.

When we misdiagnose the human problem by misunderstanding Who God is, we will always provide the wrong solution. New Agers say the problem is that we have lost touch with the divine in us. Their solution is to come together and unite in order to find the divine nature in each person. Wrong Problem = Wrong Solution. Perhaps some people in this church might diagnose the problem as this: People simply don’t know that Jesus died for them to save them. If that’s the problem, then the solution is to tell people that Jesus saved them by His death on the cross and thereby inform them of the “truth.” Again, a misdiagnosis of the problem leads to a bad solution. That’s not the problem. But here is the problem: Idolatry—not that mankind doesn’t know God, but that mankind has denied God. We have rebelled against God in one way or another. We need redemption from that rebellion. Redemption is by repentance and faith in Christ alone. Diagnose the problem correctly and the right solution can follow.