25Such
ones exchanged the truth of God in the lie and worshipped and served the
creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed into the ages. Amen. 26Because
of this, God gave them up into shameful passions, for even their females
exchanged the natural use into that contrary to nature. 27Likewise
also the males, abandoning the natural use of the females, burned in their
desire into one another, males with males, practicing the indecency and
receiving in themselves the retribution which was fitting of their perversion.
Once again, these verses are bombshells. If you even posted
them on FaceBook – just the raw verses themselves – you’d probably lose your
job and get death threats in the mail.
It is heartbreaking to see how far we’ve come…or gone.
That aside (for now), what these verses are telling us, as
we saw in v.24, is that when humans turn their backs on God, they do not
evolve, they devolve. When God saw
that there was no fitting companion for the man, He made woman and presented
her to the man. God’s plan for the human race has always been for a young man
to find a young woman to marry and thence to bring children into the world. In
His big, beautiful fractal picture, sexual intercourse between a man and a
woman is an expression of the “one flesh” reality God intended for them – for them
to “complete” each other and together to become something far greater than
either one alone could have ever been.
Once again, what these verses are telling us is that, when
humans turn their backs on God, the judgment they suffer is that God lets them
lose the beautiful simplicity of this wholesome picture. Also once again, just
as we saw in v.24, it’s not so much that God judges the sin (which He does),
but that the sin is its own judgment. As I lamented on v.24, we may be fearing
in our hearts that God will judge our nation for not only allowing but even
honoring this sin, but we need to realize the sin is the judgment.
And we also need to realize the real sin isn’t the act
itself, it is the turning away from God. Note carefully that v.25 is a statement,
“Such ones exchanged the truth of God for the Lie…” Verse 26 begins “For this
cause,” or “Because of this,” and then describes how God gave them up to this
sin. The actual sin He is judging is their turning away from Him. In verses 23
and 24, we see the same pattern, where there the humans exchanged the glory of
God for idolatry, which is the sin, and so God gave them up to impurity and the
degrading of their bodies with one another – sins in themselves but sins which
are their own judgment.
I said then, we need
to realize that sexual sin in and of itself (either hetero or homo) is God’s
judgment on those who turn away from Him. I think that is an important point to
note – that all sexual sin is itself
a judgment on people who have first of all turned their backs on God. What I
mean is that I think we all (including myself) have way down deep in our hearts
the idea that, although adultery is “bad,” at least it’s “normal.” In a sense
it’s “okay,” it’s just what hot-blooded young people end up doing. People who
have engaged in heterosexual sin, think nothing of jumping up on their high
horses and condemning homosexual sin. Their sin was “okay” but people who go
further, well, that’s just terrible.
I once had a young woman confide in me that her brother had
come home to announce to the family he was gay and she was distraught with how
to deal with it. I asked her, “What if he’d come home and announced he was
climbing in and out of bed with girls?” I pointed out that what he was doing
was, in a sense no worse – it was just that in our minds jumping in and out of
bed with girls would have been “acceptable” or “normal” – wrong, yes, but “not that
bad.” Being the sweet person she was,
she immediately saw my point and I believe went away to continue loving that
brother, even if she had to tell him (kindly) what he was doing was wrong.
This brings us back again to acknowledging the real problem –
which is turning away from God. The answer for America is not to somehow stop
homosexuality. It is for people’s hearts to turn back to the Lord. If they did,
they’d not only stop their homosexuality, they’d stop all their sexual sin and
get back to the beautiful picture of faithful, monogamous marriage which the
Lord intended from the beginning.
This is, of course, Paul’s whole point over all of this
discussion of man’s devolvement – that the Gospel is the answer. The good news
for (all) us sinners is that there is an answer, there is a solution, there is
a hope. Even for an entire race that turned away from the Lord, He Himself has
provided a way back. Jesus is the Way. He is the Truth we exchanged for the
Lie. And He is the Life we all need.
As I said in the beginning, it is sad to see how far we’ve
come…or gone, but these verses are not here to use as a club to selectively
beat sins we don’t like. They are here to help us see the real problem, to
bring us back to the real solution. Oh that people everywhere could, like Mary,
see Jesus in His beauty and choose to sit at His feet and drink in His words.
What peace they could know. What love for others they could know if only they
could know loving Him. May you and I live that love for Him and show the world
there is a real answer.
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