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Romans 1:24-27
We invite you to join us for worship each Sunday morning at 9:30. You can download our service on iTunes or tune in for “The Good Word” each day on AM 1230 WSAL or on Hoosier Country 103.7 FM just after 8am. Last time we began our study of justification by looking at the need or reason God must justify us if we are to be able to live in a right relationship to Him. We learned that God is angry with Mankind because we have become so wicked we have suppressed the truth of God. When we suppress God’s truth, we do not see the need to glorify God and at the same time, we become ungrateful to Him. The next step downward causes men to become idolaters worshipping the creature rather than the Creator. At that point men take the next step and exchange God’s truth for a lie. That lie is; we don’t need God because we are sufficient in ourselves. Paul continues his divinely inspired explanation of why God needs to justify us.
Having looked at the reasons for God’s anger; let’s turn our attention to The Revelation of God’s Anger. Most often when people talk about how God reveals His anger we think of those passages that create mental pictures of the earth reeling and rocking as in Ps. 18; or thunder and lightning out of thick dark clouds like so often happened at Sinai and in the wilderness. However, we must remember God is not a God of destruction; God is a God of creation, redemption, forgiveness, grace, mercy; but also a God of righteousness, justice, recompense and reward, and all His other divine attributes that describe Who God really is. In our focal passage this morning Paul is going to reveal to us how God’s anger is revealed toward all ungodliness and unrighteousness; and how He can allow a person’s sinfulness to be the very punishment that can lead them to repentance or to ultimate destruction! The point Paul is making here is that Man’s sinfulness is the reason God must provide justification as part of salvation or there can be no salvation! Read Rom. 1:24 where “God gave them up…” The term means “God’s judgment on sinners.” The concept here is that after innumerable times of encouraging the unsaved and the ungodly to repent of their sin and turn to Christ for salvation, God will bring about immediate judgment using whatever sin is being practiced as the dominant sin – sometimes called a besetting sin – or the one sin that more than others defines the real character of a person who lives in apostasy, or lives their life against the Word of God.
Notice in v. 24 God gives them up to defiled desires. Those desires are called “lusts” or “sexual impurity.” One writer and expositor gives the most concise definition of lust as “the desire which is alive and active in a person to the point of controlling their entire life!” Those strong desires are used in the right way to help true believers focus, and stay focused on their daily walk with Christ. It is when those strong desires find their origin in sin and sinfulness they become impure. When people get to the point described here in v. 24 God gives them up, or releases them, allows them to go deeper and deeper into their sin, until they either come to their senses, like the Prodigal, or their hearts become so hard they die in their sin, like Pharaoh, or the rich young ruler to refused to sell his possessions and follow the Lord. So the question is: what strong desire is controlling your life? Is it a strong desire to know more and more of God and His amazing grace? If whatever controls your life isn’t pulling you toward Christ, and being conformed to His image, it is, by its sinful nature, a defiled desire! When giving a person up to the sin controlling their life doesn’t lead to repentance, God can then give the person up to dishonorable passions as described in v. 26, 27. One writer says, “God’s anger against sin leads Him to withdraw from the sinner who willfully continues in wickedness. The penalty of sin is sin itself with all its inevitable consequences. Because men exchanged the glory of God for a lie, He gave them over to the passions that bring dishonor.”
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