When God
Gives Up

There is nothing wrong with desire. We all have them — for a good meal, for our children to flourish, for our marriages to thrive. As your pastor, I desire for you all to grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord. But Paul isn't talking about proper desire. He's talking about disordered desire.

In verse 24, Paul says God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts. The word translated "lusts" here isn't limited to misplaced sexual desire. It points to any inordinate, self-indulgent craving — any desire that takes on the role of an idol and displaces what should be proper affection for God.

As man pursues those lusts, Paul says, they embrace impurity. That word is built around a concept you know — catharsis. A hike up to Lula Lake, standing in the mist of a roaring waterfall — that is cathartic. Running is cathartic for me; it manages stress and produces health. Paul's word here is the negation of that: the disordering of our desires leads us to pursue not what is cathartic, but what is "uncathartic" — things that are inherently against our own interest rather than for it.

Paul reiterates the exchange he introduced in verse 23. The truth about God is making itself known — unavoidably, relentlessly. You have to work to ignore it.

Some of you have driven through the Great Smoky Mountains on the way to Gatlinburg. You know what that drive looks like — the mountains rising around you, light through the trees, the sheer scale of what God has written into creation through your windshield. The glory is everywhere. It demands a response. And somehow we manage to drive right past it because we've got Ripley's Believe It or Not plugged into the GPS.

We roll past the majesty of what God has put on full display and get genuinely excited about a pancake restaurant shaped like a barn. That's not a failure of attention. That is a choice. And Paul says that's exactly what sinful man does — not accidentally, but willfully.

And when creation becomes the object of worship rather than the pointer toward the Creator, desire doesn't just get confused — it gets handed over. That's the word Paul uses. Given up. Given over. What follows is not a punishment handed down from outside. It is the natural catastrophe of a soul cut loose from what it was made for.

For the second time in this text, Paul emphasizes God's action of "giving them up" — this time to what he calls dishonorable passions. Christians must treat these verses with what we might call interpretive integrity. We will quickly turn to Romans 1 and Genesis 19 to address homosexuality. But we must not pretend those are the only sins of consequence in Scripture.

Paul isn't pointing to the sin of homosexuality because it is the worst of all sins. He points to it because it perfectly illustrates the argument he is making. Creation itself declares the truth about God — his power, his nature, his design. That declaration is not subtle. Paul said in verse 19 that it is plain, clearly perceived.

It is written into the fabric of the physical world, including the human body itself. Male and female are not arbitrary categories. They are part of the created order through which God has written something undeniably true.

In the union of male and female we see a remarkable truth — it is the only union capable of producing life in the image of God. The created order is constantly declaring something about the wisdom and design of its Creator.

When Paul highlights same-sex relations as the illustration of the exchange, he is making a specific argument: in order to fully embrace and celebrate what he is describing, you must suppress what creation is plainly declaring — not just theologically, but physically.

Before anyone thinks this text is about somebody else's sin — remember where Paul is headed. Before Romans is finished, every one of us will stand guilty before God. The point of Romans 1 is not to identify the sinners. The point is to expose the depth of humanity's rebellion.

The suppression of truth has shown itself very capable of corrupting our relationships. And chapter 1 ends by revealing how that rebellion reaches all the way into the human mind — because a disordered mind doesn't just affect the person who holds it. It begins to call what is wrong, right — and what is right, wrong. And then it invites everyone around it to agree.

For the third time, Paul tells us God "gave them up" — and this time he highlights the corruption of our whole society. For three verses Paul gives a list of the moral consequences of depraved minds: unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice, envy, murder, strife, deceit, gossip, slander, pride, disobedience. It is a remarkable list. We could all circle some points of struggle in it.

But the list is not the most condemning part of Paul's argument. That comes in verse 32.

Paul names two profound consequences. First: we know better. We suppress the truth, but we never fully escape it. We act in spite of what we know to be true. But the second consequence is even more alarming.

The prophet Isaiah warned: "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness." This is what happens whenever humanity suppresses truth long enough. Eventually we lose the ability to distinguish light from darkness. And when that happens, the collapse is no longer merely around us.

This passage is all rather dark. If it were a painting, there is a lot of black paint on this canvas. But Paul is painting darkness so that we can recognize the light when it appears. He is driving us somewhere — toward the moment where the righteousness we could never produce is freely given to us in Christ.

R.C. Sproul lamented that people in our time seem to care less and less about the gospel. And the reason they care so little is because they have never understood the peril they are in. If we understood the peril, we would stop treating the gospel like optional information and start seeing it as a rescue.

We are not good people who need a little improvement. We are sinners who need rescue. The greatest danger in the room is not that you recognize your sin. The greatest danger is that you continue suppressing what God is making plain.