“18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men 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 men 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 im- ages made to look like mortal man 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 of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural 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 indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.
28 Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, He gave them over to a depraved mind, to 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; 31they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless.
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 practice them.
”
In the summer of 1970, Reg was engaged to a girl named Linda. Reg’s friend Bernie didn’t like Linda. Reg’s friend John didn’t think the marriage was going to work either. One night, Bernie and John met with Reg to convince him to break off the engagement. John said something to Reg that convinced him to break it off and Reg did. Bernie wrote a song about it. Reg sang it; the song went to number four on the charts, ‘When I think of those east end lights, muggy nights, the curtains drawn in the little room downstairs; prima donna, Lord, you really should have been there, sittin’ like a princess perched in her electric chair, and it’s one more beer and I don’t hear you anymore. We’ve all gone crazy lately, my friends out there rolling ‘round the basement floor, and someone saved my life tonight, Sugar Bear. You almost had your hooks in me, didn’t you dear? You nearly had me roped and tied, altar bound, hypnotized; sweet freedom whispered in my ear, “you’re a butterfly, and butterflies are free to fly—fly away, high away, bye bye.”’
John’s nickname was Sugar Bear—“someone saved my life tonight, Sugar Bear.” What did “Sugar Bear” John say to Reg that convinced him to break off the engagement? He told Reg that the marriage wasn’t going to work out because Reg was gay but apparently didn’t know it. Reg thought about what John said, accepted it, and decided to live as a gay man. Reg borrowed part of John Baldry’s name for his own stage name—Elton John.
“Someone saved my life tonight.” Did John really save Reg’s life that night when he convinced him that he was a butterfly and butterflies are free to fly, so to speak? Imagine instead of talking with John about these same sex attractions, Reg spoke with the apostle Paul. How would Paul have advised Reg?
This morning we are studying one of Paul’s teachings on homosexuality. We aren’t trying to answer every question about homosexuality; we are just looking at Romans 1. The message here is that homosexuality has to do with wrath not with righteousness. I’m using the language of Romans 1 because this language is often left unexplained.
Now when I say that homosexuality has to do with wrath not with righteousness I’m not saying that homosexual practice is somehow uniquely worthy of God’s wrath, but I am saying that it, like the other sins we will see in this passage, is under God’s wrath. I’m not saying that Christians who, by the Spirit’s power, fight against their same-sex attractions are under the wrath of God. I am saying that such desires like all disordered desires have to do with the consequences of the fall. There is a good deal more that I am saying and not saying when I say the claim of this sermon which is that homosexuality has to do with wrath not with righteousness.
We will study it in three points. First: we are without excuse. Second: being given over. Third: approving of sin. We see that we are without excuse in verses 18-20; we see what it means to be given over in verses 21-31, and the danger of approving of sin in verse 32.
First: we are without excuse. This passage isn’t primarily about homosexuality. It is about the wrath of God; “the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness.” We could have focused on disobedience to parents which is part of this passage too and said that disobedience to parents has to do with wrath not with righteousness. This is a passage on wrath.
To understand why Paul began this discussion on God’s wrath saying in verse 18, “the wrath of God is being revealed,” you need to look at verse 17 and see that “in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed.”
This is a contrast between righteousness revealed and wrath revealed. If you want to see the way of righteousness, look at the gospel. If you want to see the way of sin, look at this lengthy description of it starting in 1:18 and going all the way to 3:20. There is a way of righteousness and there is a way of wrath; which way are you taking? That’s the focus here in Romans.
This first part of Paul’s explanation of wrath in 1:18-32 has primarily to do with the Gentiles, the nations; the next section has to do with Jews. Paul focused on homosexual behavior section with the Gentiles because it was common among the Gentiles and exceedingly rare among the Jews. This was a slick move on Paul’s part because it allowed him to both highlight some of the peculiarities of homosexual behavior and to surprise the Jews by telling them that they were no better. “There is no difference between Jew and Gentile for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”
Paul wrote one section about wrath and the Gentiles and another about wrath and the Jews because these two groups were apples and oranges when it came to understanding wrath. The Jews had the law of Moses to warn them of wrath. They had oracle after oracle from God’s own mouth warning them of the wages of sin. The Gentiles didn’t have that. They had something else to warn them of wrath; verse 18, “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 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 men are without excuse.”
Paul was saying that we don’t need the word of God to see that there is a Creator. Every day this world constantly bombards us with evidences for God. As Thomas Cranfield explained, “[the nations] have been constantly surrounded on all sides by, and have possessed within their own selves, the evidences of God’s eternal power and divinity, but they have not allowed themselves to be led by them to a recognition of Him.” The creation in which they lived and we live teaches us all that we are creatures with an obligation to our Creator.
Just as the Jews could see that they were sinners by looking into the law of Moses, so the Gentiles could recognize within themselves that they had unfulfilled obligations to their Creator. They are not what they should be. Both groups suppressed what they knew in an attempt to justify themselves; “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness.”
This message about the Gentiles tells us that even those who know nothing about God’s word know the wrong they are doing is wrong but suppress that knowledge. Paul will talk about this in regard to homosexuality. People know that homosexual behavior is wrong but suppress that knowledge. This is why Paul describes it with words like, “shameful, unnatural, indecent, and perversion.” He didn’t do so to offend; he does so because it is contrary to the created order; it runs afoul of our obligations to our Creator. It is not the way it is supposed to be.
Now all sin is contrary to the created order; homosexual behavior is just a strikingly clear example, which might be why Paul spends so much time on it in chapter. Pride is contrary to the created order too. To use Paul’s words about homosexuality, pride is shameful when you think of it as an attempt to grab glory. It is unnatural when you think of it as creatures exalting themselves above their Creator. You know it is indecent whenever you see it unmasked. It is certainly a perversion when you place it side by side with the humility of Christ.
So the wrath of God is revealed against sin, but the righteousness of God has been revealed too. God revealed it in the gospel. You who have sinned against the Law-Giver Creator can be right with the Law-Giver Creator because the Law-Giver Creator took on flesh, like you, and suffered the wrath you undeniably deserve. You can suppress the knowledge that you deserve wrath, or you can accept that you are a sinner and that Jesus Christ died for sinners.
The gospel leads you to righteousness. Suppressing what you know about God and yourself leads to the wrath of being given over; that’s our second point: being given over. Paul gives three explanations for what it means to be given over to wrath. If you have your Bible open, you can see the first in verses 21-24, the second in verses 25-27, and the third in verses 28-31.
First, those who refuse to treat God as God are given over to worship something else. Every human was created to treat God as God, or, to use the language of verse 21, to glorify Him as God and give thanks to Him. To treat God in any other way is a sign of futile and foolish thinking, to use the language of verse 21. There is a reason that Proverbs says that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”
I hope you can see that the nation in which lacks this wisdom Proverbs extols and that this nation is now exceedingly foolish. You can see that by the fact that God is almost never treated as God. He is never taken into account in any public conversation. His desires are excluded from public life. That’s foolish. Remember, “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”
Now when you remove God from the center, something else will fill His place. Since the Creator is removed from the enter, something created must fill that spot; that’s verse 23, they “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.” Notice the Genesis 1 language here—birds, animals, reptiles. This is about people centering their lives on the creation rather than the Creator. An idol is anything created standing in the place of the Creator; it can be hunting; it can be your reputation; it can be your spouse—anything created; it’s all idolatry.
There is a consequence to such idolatry; verse 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.” As we’ve seen over and over again in this study, there is a deep connection between idolatry and sexuality; if you give yourself over to anything other than God, you will give your body over to some form of immorality. If you don’t glorify God, you degrade Him and, as a result, you wind up being degraded.
The degradation we see around us in this culture didn’t just happen; it happened because enough people “exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator.” What that means is this culture is being given over. People sometimes ask, “do you God’s wrath will ever fall on America?” Our sexual ethics indicate that we are in the process of being given over in wrath.
Those who refuse to treat God as God are given over to worship something else and wind up degraded; that’s the first explanation of being given over; the second focuses on one form of this degradation: homosexuality; verse 26, “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.”
Now those words were even more unwelcome in Paul’s culture than they are in our own, and they are certainly unwelcome in our culture. Ours isn’t the first culture to embrace homosexuality. It was all over in Paul’s day. Now despite how common homosexual behavior was in Paul’s day, notice that he focused not on what we call “orientation” but on behavior. Brendan Byrne is right to say that both Paul and the culture “made no distinction between being of homosexual disposition as an abiding personal psychological orientation.” This means that people didn’t think of each other in categories like gay or straight. They thought in terms of behavior and Paul was arguing that homosexual behavior was contrary to the created order.
Paul makes that clear by using unusual words for “male” and “female” when talking about them exchanging and abandoning natural relations; he used the unusual words from the Septuagint of Genesis 1:27, “male and female He created them.” Rejecting that created order is part of being given over.
So does that mean that you are being given over if you have homosexual desires? That depends. Do you acknowledge that your desires are disordered like so many of our desires since the fall, or are you convinced that your desires must be right even if that puts God in the wrong? The first—acknowledging that you have sinful desires that you must fight against—means that you are not being given over. You are treating God as God. The second—suppressing the truth of God—is a sign that you are being given over and must repent.
Those who refuse to treat God as God are given over to worship something else and wind up degraded—that’s the first explanation; one form of this degradation is homosexuality—that’s the second explanation—but being given over manifests itself in a host of sins—that’s the third explanation; verse 28, “since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, He gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. 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, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless.”
Homosexual behavior is an indication of being given over, and so is slander, which is quickly becoming the way we as a nation handle public disputes; so is disobedience to parents which has only been not long since tolerated but largely celebrated in our culture. My guess is you can see yourself somewhere in that list. Homosexual behavior is part of this list; it is part of this process of wrath.
The only way to avoid being given over is the gospel. If you suppress the truth that your sin is sin and that your sin deserves, you will receive wrath. You will be given over to wrath working itself out in your life until you are given over until eternal wrath. If, by the gospel, you trust Jesus enough to confess your sin as condemnable and trust him rather than yourself, you will receive righteousness. The gospel teaches you that.
The world doesn’t. The world teaches you to suppress the truth and approve of those who practice it. That’s our final point: approving of sin. The man who refuses to repent of sin winds up approving of sin. He throws God under the bus to justify himself and winds up justifying sin in others; verse 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 practice them.”
Boastfulness, to take a sin from the vice list we just read, is part of being given over; approving of or excusing boastfulness in anyone else is part of that same process. Heartlessness is part of being given over; approving of or excusing heartlessness in anyone else is part of that same process. Homosexual behavior is part of being given over; approving of or excusing homosexual behavior in anyone else is part of that same process. All three have recently been glorified in our nation. You live in the mist of the suppression of any awareness of the sinfulness of these sins.
Suppressing the truth about such sins so you can commit them is a sign of part of the process of being given over to futile and foolish thinking and a darkened heart. Approving of such sin in others is part of that same process.
Now to be considered an LGBTQ ally, you need to approve of homosexuality. You need to “approve of those who practice it,” in the words of verse 32. That’s a sign of being given over. Being an ally of sinful behavior doesn’t help your fellow sinners; it is, “actually making a deliberate contribution to the setting up of public opinion favorable to vice, and so to the corruption of an indefinite number of other people,” as Cranfield put it in his Romans commentary back in 1975.
Now you can love someone in sin without approving of the sin in question. You can be long suffering without approving of sin. You can be kind without approving of sin. You can refuse to dishonor without approving of sin. You can do extraordinary acts of self-sacrifice without approving of sin. Look at Jesus. In the gospel, you don’t affirm anyone in their sin; you affirm that Christ died for sinners.
That’s what could have saved Reg’s life that night. That’s the only way any of us sinners can be saved. That’s why Christ came. Amen.