Romans 1:18–32 (ESV)✞: God’s Wrath on Unrighteousness
I’ve often seen the next section of Romans (1:18–4:25) summarised something like this:
- 1:18–32: Gentiles aren’t righteous
- 2:1–3:8: Jews aren’t righteous either
- 3:9–20: In case you didn’t get the point, nobody is righteous
- 3:21–4:25: Jesus provides the solution to the problem
And I’m not against that way of looking at it—especially since part of Paul’s reason for writing this letter is to address the fact that Jewish and non-Jewish Christians aren’t intermixing, and therefore likely not getting along—though he doesn’t explicitly say in this first part, “I’m speaking to Gentiles here.” He just waits until the next section to address the fact that the Law isn’t enough to make anyone righteous, so Jewish Christians shouldn’t feel that they’re more righteous than non-Jewish Christians.
That being said, let’s get into a difficult passage, the entirety of which can be read here✞. Not difficult to understand, just difficult to hear. There are two main sections I see in this passage: first, Paul tells us that we’re to blame for our own rejection of God, and second he calls out the result of that rejection – which isn’t what we’d expect!
The last passage ended with the phrase, “The righteous shall live by faith,” and this passage continues that thought – though maybe not in an expected direction:
18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.
I might have expected Paul to talk more about righteousness, but he goes the opposite way: we can’t properly understand righteousness until we understand unrighteousness (which I’m going to shorten to just “sin” for this post; there are probably nuances between the two terms but I don’t know them). Sin is what this section of the letter digs into.
And Paul isn’t pulling any punches either! He starts right in by talking about God’s wrath. When we sin it’s not just disappointing to God, or displeasing, it incurs His wrath.
I said this passage wasn’t something we like to hear, and I definitely don’t like to think about the fact that God’s wrath was directed at me because of my sin!
But we aren’t just sinning, we also suppress the truth. He goes on to say what he means by that next:
19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
I think this is a somewhat debated passage. On the surface it seems that Paul is saying anyone can be saved just by looking at nature, seeing the obvious existence of Him, and worshipping Him. In fact, that reading of it is very explicit! It’s “plain” to us; His attributes are “clearly perceived;” we are “without excuse;” we “knew God” but we “darkened” our “foolish hearts.” So yes, it’s pretty clear!
The counter argument, of course, is that the way we’re saved is through faith in Jesus; there’s a name for the idea that you can be saved just by observing nature, seeing God there, and coming to Him (which I’m too lazy to look up), which the Western Church considers blasphemy – and yet, doesn’t that seem to be exactly what Paul is saying here?
Not quite, because Paul only observes the negative side of the equation, not the positive. That is, he talks about the blame for rejecting God but not the idea of coming to Him.
This passage is part of a larger section of Romans (outlined above), in which Paul is pointing out that we’re all sinful, by nature. We’re not good people who do bad things and then get judged for it; we’re bad people. It’s not just that we don’t believe in God because we don’t know about Him; we don’t want to believe in God! If we know more about God we have more to reject (and our rejection becomes more explicit), and if we know less about Him we have less to reject (and our rejection becomes more nebulous), but however much or little we know about Him our default reaction is the same: rejection. We don’t want to bend the knee to anyone, including God.
At one end of the spectrum we have people who’ve been going to church their whole lives hearing Jesus preached Sunday after Sunday but refusing to submit to God, and at the other end of the spectrum we have people who have never heard of this Jesus person, or never heard of the Jewish/Christian God, but they look around at nature, see the wonders of the universe, and think of the awesome power it must have taken to build all of this, and the result is the same: I’m in control of my own life, I won’t submit. It’s the very essence of human nature.
Paul isn’t saying here that we could look at nature and “figure out” who God is and start worshipping Him; this is the beginning of a larger argument that we all naturally reject God, however little or much we know about Him. In the subsequent passages he’ll get into those who have traditionally been God’s people, and have His Law, and yet still reject Him – because that’s our nature.
In today’s world we don’t necessarily exchange the glory of the immortal God for “images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things,” idolatry doesn’t look the same anymore—at least not in the place and time in which I live—but we do exchange God’s glory for money, and power, and just plain pride. “If I let Him be in control of my life then I wouldn’t, so… no thank you!”
So once we reject God, what happens? Is Paul going to talk about punishment, or retribution?
24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
He gives us up to the lusts of our hearts. In other words, when we reject God, the result is that He gives us exactly what we want – He lets us do whatever we want! Which… doesn’t sound that bad, right? I want to do whatever I want to do, so I reject God and I get to do whatever I want to do! There are a couple of problems, however:
- What about eternity? I get to do whatever I want to do right now, but what happens after we die?
- Even aside from the next life, right here in this one, is it good that I can do whatever I want?
That second part might not feel intuitive, but the Bible makes it clear that we’re made in the image of God, so even if my soul is fundamentally sinful and doesn’t want to submit to Him there’s also a part of me that is made to be like Him and sin, in its essence, is just doing something that’s unlike God. Being righteous is not about following rules and regulations, it’s about being like Him. The rules and regulations that exist are put in place in an effort to point us toward being like Him, they don’t just exist for their own sake. When I reject Him and just do whatever my sinful little heart desires, I’m going against part of my nature – the part that was made in His image. Paul himself talks about this later on in this very letter:
18 For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.
Romans 7:18–20 (ESV)✞, part of the larger passage of Romans 7:7–25 (ESV)✞
It’s tempting to use the analogy of parents having to forbid their children from doing certain things; a child doesn’t know why they’re not allowed to drink that, but for their own good the parent has to forbid it, until such time that the child is old enough to understand things and then it can be explained more fully. I don’t think it’s a perfect analogy, though, because it’s not a matter of sinning until we know better and then learning not to sin; again, Paul is talking about something fundamental to human nature, not something we “grow out of.”
And once God gives us over to our own passions, we go all out:
26 For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; 27 and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.
28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. 29 They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32 Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.
This is the other part of the passage we hate to read! First we had to encounter that word “wrath,” and now we get a specific list of things Paul says are sinful. It’s not a question of figuring out what’s sinful “for you,” there are things that are just plain objectively sinful!
This is especially contentious in the time and place I lived when I wrote this. If I may be so bold, I think the Western Christian Church has so strongly overemphasized homosexual sin that we’ve turned it into an all-out war, and I’m sure this passage in particular has been one of the ones we’ve used the most when condemning those sins. And I’m not saying it’s not sin – but I am saying that we miss the point of this passage when we use it in that manner. We typically read this passage as a list of the “worst” sins; “we are so sinful,” the argument goes, “that we even do these terrible sins!” And then, as we’re reading it, we tend to gloss over sins like “gossip” and “slander.” “Well, that’s just old fashioned,” we think. “Those were bad sins in Paul’s day, but these days we know better. But homosexuality, on the other hand, that’s still a bad one!”
And I don’t think that was Paul’s intention at all. I think Paul is just trying to show that we’re sinful through and through; from things we consider “bad” sins to ones we consider “minor.” We’re not just murderers, we’re also gossips; we’re not just evil, we’re also boastful.
And here’s the thing: every society is going to define what’s “bad” vs. “minor” differently. Something we consider terrible might be considered trivial in other societies; things that we don’t stress about at all, they might consider fundamentally evil.
As an exercise, read through verses 26–32✞ again and make a mental note as to whether you consider each sin a “bad” one or a “trivial” one. Where do you place malice? Covetousness? Murder? Envy? Gossip? Disobedience to parents?
Paul isn’t trying to produce a list of the “worst” sins—and most commentators will point out that this list isn’t intended to be an exhaustive list of all sins—he’s just trying to show that whoever you are, whatever you value, you want to do things that God doesn’t want for you, big and small.
Another way to look at this: I can’t claim to be OK with God because I don’t murder when I’m boastful; I can’t claim to be OK with God because I’m not a homosexual when I gossip. Pick any sin from the list that you consider “big,” and you can’t claim you’re righteous for avoiding it, because there are others considered “trivial” that you do commit. There are no “big” sins and “small” sins, though I expect that Paul knew his readers would view things that way so he mixed in a lot from both categories (whatever those categories were in his day), there are just “sins.” We all fall short of the glory of God.
There’s a flip side to this, too: although I’m getting way ahead of myself, Paul is eventually going to get to the “good news” of all of this, which is that Jesus took care of this problem that we weren’t able to solve ourselves, and those of us who believe in Him are made us right with God because of that work. Avoiding the “big sins” doesn’t free me from the wrath of God, but neither does committing the “big sins” put me beyond His Grace! A lot of terrible people throughout history have assumed they were right with God because they didn’t commit murder or adultery, but didn’t accept His Grace; a lot of other people have committed murder or adultery or the “big sins” but accepted His Grace, and are now with Him forever.
But, as I say, that’s for a future passage. For now, we need to sit in the fact that, by nature, we’re not right with God, and don’t even want to be!
No comments:
Post a Comment