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Romans 1:18-32 – Sins of the Gentiles (The Unreligious) – The Ugly
A. Sin is the choice to do wrong (Rom.1:18-20)
1. We have exercised our right to ignore, suppress, or postpone dealing with the evidence of God in nature (“godlessness”) in order to practice “unrighteousness.” That has been our choice and we are “without excuse.”
B. Sin is the refusal to glorify and thank God (Rom.1:21)
1. God deserves both glory and thanks, but we chose a path which dishonors him and robs him of the thanks He deserves. The result? God gets His honor and thanks from someone else and we sink into futile thinking and living.
C. Sinners exchange the immortal for the mortal (Rom.1:22-25)
1. With minds beclouded by self-will man becomes the center of his own world. We give our affections to created things instead of the Creator. This triggers a kind of abandonment by God in order that the folly of our exchange might be fully felt by us.
D. The sexual implications of sin (Rom.1:26-27)
1. While I am not qualified to determine if Freud may have been right when he concluded that just about all human behavior has sexual connections; for sure sinning does. It has in its very nature not only habituation, but degradation. We seldom curtail sin, or taper off. Once it has severed our relationship with God, God’s image, in which we were created (Gen.1:26), seems to dim, and we become more like animals than people, driven more by instinct than intellect. Put another way, once we have misused moral freedom by making wrong choices about God, our moral nature is overtaken by our bestial nature and we seek satisfaction in perverting our own sexuality. “Sexual perversion will give us the meaning we have been missing in life,” we tell ourselves. In such obvious misuse of our sexuality we attempt to shake God off and justify our choice of self over Him. But abused sexuality has its own judgments, some of which are almost immediate (venereal disease, unwanted pregnancy, and jealousy and murder, for instance). Thus sexuality, which God designed to offer great meaning to life, when sin enters into it, loses its meaning, and in some instances even becomes a shortcut to death.
E. The moral and spiritual implications of sin (Rom.1:28-31)
1. The original wrong choice and its subsequent wrong choices start a spiritual chain reaction which ends in total spiritual bankruptcy. Sin has created a moral and spiritual environment which is virtually hostile to life itself.
F. The final subjugation of conscience to sin (Rom.1:32)
1. We become so overwhelmed by the power we have given sin in our lives that the conviction of broken laws and consequent punishment recedes into the background of our minds. We sin almost without conscience. To increase our ease we encourage others to make the same wrong choices. Why should we care about others if we don’t care about ourselves? Sin makes us want nothing better than to go down the drain and pull the rest of the world down with us. Could there be any worse degradation of God’s crowning creative act?
(Based and borrowed from William Pile, “The Problem of Sin,” What the Bible Says About Grace, pp.17-26. The well-founded point of Pile is that we cannot appreciate the glories of grace until we appreciate the depths of sin.)
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