Romans 1:25-27 “The Real Answer”

As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

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.

Romans 1:25 “The Truth”

As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

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.

I left my last post pondering the words “the lie.” I’m still not sure whether the “the” is simply an article of previous reference, referring back to the idolatry of v.23, or whether it is literally “the Lie,” Satan’s Edenic deception, “You shall be as gods” – out of which grows all the falsehood that seems to predominate and wreck our world. I’m also not sure, in the end, it is of any practical significance which of the two views we embrace. Either way, the fact is we are choosing between truth and falsehood.

That is what I want to stop and ponder today. Truth vs. falsehood. Our verse would have us know that we human beings actually deliberately knowingly “exchanged the truth of God for falsehood.” We weren’t just deceived. We chose to believe lies and why? Because those lies were delicious. They “saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom” so they took some and ate it. We still have with us today, “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” – our love of pleasure, possessions, and applause – and the frightening realization is that we will each of us actually embrace what is not true, if only it means we can get what we want.

Francis Schaeffer, in his book, “How Shall We Then Live?” did a masterful job of probing this very problem. Truth is truth. Truth is true whether we believe it or not – which then leads to the problem that, if you in any way deny the truth, you have set yourself up for some kind of self-destruction. You can stand in the middle of the railroad tracks and tell yourself the train won’t hurt you – with the inevitable consequence of your own funeral. You can believe you can jump across a 50’ wide chasm and you will only end up a lifeless bloody pulp on the rocks below.

You can tell yourself it’s okay to climb in bed with that beautiful girl, but because God says it’s wrong, one way or another you will suffer for it. Proverbs warns us, “For the lips of an adulteress drip honey…but in the end she is bitter as gall…She reduces you to a loaf of bread…until an arrow pierces your liver…Her house is a highway to the grave.” We can tell ourselves that men are women and women are men. We can call homosexual sin a “lifestyle choice” and say it is okay to murder helpless babies. We can tell ourselves basically anything that “gets us” what we want, but if it isn’t true, sooner or later we will get hurt. Truth is true and the only way to safely navigate our lives is to do our best to order our lives according to truth.

Obviously that brings us to where we are today. We were a nation founded on the common understanding that the Bible is true. Whether we followed it very well or not, at least there was a common assent that it is true, that there is Truth, that we are not free to just decide for ourselves what is and isn’t going to be true. Having forsaken God and the Bible, we have done exactly what humans have always done – we exchanged the truth of God for falsehood. We have embraced falsehood as our way of life. Now it is “politically correct” to say things we all know aren’t true and death to anyone who dares to actually say anything that is true. We have the “fake news,” precisely because they need to tell people what they want to hear, regardless of whether they literally have to make it up to begin with.

But then back to us. Can we let these thoughts remind us this is exactly why it is so important for us to be in our Bibles? Jesus said, “I am the truth” and His truth, the only real truth, is recorded for us in the Bible. We are just as vulnerable as anyone else to embrace lies because they’re delicious – and then suffer for it, just like anyone else. If no one else today is striving to know and live the truth, it ought to be us, but it will only happen if we are reading and studying the Bible ourselves and participating in a church group where there is a God-gifted pastor teaching it to us.

Maybe I’m different than others but I feel like this is exactly the battle I’ve been fighting my whole Christian life. My head is packed full of ideas, priorities, standards, expectations, etc. that simply are not true. Some of it probably is just a matter of being born a sinner but then we all grow up in a world that teaches us a completely twisted, contorted, downright deceptive view of reality. When I came to know Jesus, one of my great hopes was that He would help me understand life. He has certainly done exactly that, and I am so thankful for every little tidbit of truth He teaches me. That is why I study the Bible. It seems like He rarely goes more than a week before He drops some atom bomb of truth in my heart and radically changes how I see my world. I love it.

But, again…back to all of us…He can’t teach us if we aren’t listening, and listening starts with attention to His Word. We were born with hearts which had already exchanged the truth of God for the Lie. Let us sincerely seek to let Him restore His truth to its rightful place on the throne of our hearts.

As Paul here interjects: May He be blessed/praised into the ages!

Romans 1:25 “The Lie”

As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

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.

This verse is of course continuing the context started back at least at v.18 and referring to those who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. These same people knew God but refused to acknowledge Him or be thankful to Him. They claimed to be wise but rather were made fools and exchanged the glory of God for idols. Because of all of this, the Lord allowed them to fall into sexual immorality and degrade themselves.

“Such ones” begins verse 25.

I can’t help but noticing even in the English that the Lord seems to be repeating Himself in these verses. At first glance, it seems like v.25 is just repeating what He has already said, particularly in v.23. This is one of those places where years ago I noticed that somehow the logic of the Bible is something different than ours. Rather than a nice, neat Roman numeral outline, it seemed to repeat itself, first saying things one way, then another. I now know it is written predominantly in fractal logic, the logic of repeating patterns, which is actually the logic of life itself. What is particularly fun and instructive is that usually, if we can see the pattern, it is instructive in itself.

Once I’ve studied through this, I’ll have to look more closely at the order. It wouldn’t surprise me if this is written in a chiasm or even chiasms within chiasms. Just wouldn’t surprise me. These verses are describing the very essence of life on a fallen earth and it won’t surprise me if it is written more as a painted picture than as a logical thesis.

Our verse is repeating the accusation that man in his wickedness turned from God to idols. In particular, in this verse it is described as “Exchanging the truth of God for the lie.” It is interesting to me that in the Greek, it is particularly “the” lie. It seems more natural in English to translate it as “a” lie: “exchanged for a lie.” To call it “the” lie, at least in my English brain, begs the question, “What lie?”

Frankly I’m not sure what to do with this. Often in Greek, as in English, the article “the” is used like “that,” so we might translate it “Exchanged the truth of God for that lie.” In such a case, it is called “the article of previous reference” and refers back to something said or established earlier. In English, we might get into “a” boat, but from then on it becomes “the” boat. Same thing here. In v.23, the Lord has already described how man exchanged the glory of God for images of men and creatures. Perhaps that is “the lie” or “that lie.” Throughout the OT, idolatry is often called a lie, so such language would not be at all odd to people familiar with the Scriptures.

I’m not sure that is the case here. It is interesting to note in II Thes. 2:5-12, we have a text describing the devolution of the Last Days which one will note very closely follows the same pattern (fractal) of Romans 1. There we have people who “refused to love the truth” so “God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie…” Notice there too it is literally “the” lie. That passage is describing Satanic deception related to the AntiChrist, so “the” lie, might be “that” lie, but I have to wonder. Maybe from God’s perspective, looking down from heaven and seeing all of human history from beginning to end, the Lord sees it all as Satan’s Edenic lie, “You shall be as gods.” Perhaps everything to Him is either truth or “the” lie – the lie that we don’t need Him, that we can ignore Him, that we can give our worship to anything we please, that we can live anyway we want.

I am tending to believe the latter. Sometimes we need to back up and be reminded what matters is how God sees the world, not us. Part of coming to the Bible is exactly that, to have Him raise me above my meager myopic perceptions, and to show me instead the wide vista of reality – of what He sees. What He sees is the truth. Too often, even my grasp of truth is limited to very small corners or edges of reality.

Perhaps we’d all be better off to see our choice as either to worship the true God or to believe “the lie.”  Makes me wonder if somehow “the” lie doesn’t camouflage itself by becoming a seemingly endless variety of “lies,” so that we think we have many choices, rather than seeing it as, in the end, a simple “either/or.”  

Even as I type, I’m leaning to the latter. I’m thinking perhaps it is a big deal to see the world, my world, this way. Needs to be pondered. I think I’ll pause here, ponder a while, and then come back to this verse. It obviously has more to say, but only after a little pondering on these thoughts.

Hmmmmm.

Romans 1:24 “If Only...”

As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

²⁴Therfore, God gave them up in the desires of their hearts into uncleanness of the dishonoring of their bodies among them.

I’m still stewing over my questions from my last post, but this verse I believe teaches us a lot about the Lord Himself. The verse is in the middle of this larger passage about God’s wrath being revealed from heaven against all the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. It’s about the wrath of God. It’s about judgment. The very subjects conjure up images of an angry God furiously throwing lightning bolts at pathetic fleeing sinners.

But is that what this verse teaches? Yes, there is such a thing as the wrath of God. He does judge sin. He is a God greatly to be feared. But stop again and look closely at what this verse teaches. Notice it says “God gave them up…” What does that mean but that He was previously holding them back? Like a loving parent He was holding them back. He wouldn’t let them plunge ahead and get hurt. I’ll never forget taking our quite young children to see Niagara Falls. It was a wonderful trip and the Falls are a sight to behold…but to even be near them is terrifying. And then to have small children that could run off at any second and be sucked over those terrible Falls struck terror in this father’s heart. Their mother and I held their hands tightly.

And so with our Heavenly Father. Even with people who are ignoring Him and unthankful for His blessings, He is holding them back – holding them back from plunging to their own self-destruction. But again, like a loving parent, sometimes that obstinate child has to simply be allowed to plunge ahead. Perhaps his obstinance does stir the anger of his parent’s heart, but still, it is in love the parent finally decides this is the only way he’ll ever learn.

Listen to God’s heart in Psalm 81:11-16:

But My people would not listen to Me;
    Israel would not submit to Me.
So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts
    to follow their own devices.

If my people would only listen to Me,
…how quickly I would subdue their enemies
    and turn my hand against their foes!
…you would be fed with the finest of wheat;
    with honey from the rock I would satisfy you.

Do you see the same thing happening here? The Lord is “giving them up,” but even as He does, He’s lamenting their stubbornness. He’s saying His heart longs instead to bless them and do them good.

Where is the “angry God furiously throwing lightning bolts at pathetic fleeing sinners?” Do you see to think that is to totally misunderstand the Lord? Even when human beings push Him to the point where He must judge, His heart never stops loving them.

I even see love in the judgment itself. What does He give them up to? He gives them up “to the desires of their hearts.” As I said in my last post, the word “desires” means only that. It can be good or bad. In this case, it is clearly bad, so we translate it “lusts” or “evil desires” – but it is their desires. It is what they want. It is what they have chosen. Up to this point, the Lord has been very mercifully restraining them. He has been very kindly preventing them from pursuing their desires – like us holding tightly our children’s hands lest they get too close to Niagara’s raging torrent.

But therein is great love. From the beginning, God gave each of us the freedom to choose for ourselves the path we would follow. I have said before I consider that to be the supreme dignity of a human being – the freedom to make personal and moral choices. Butler said, “…the Lord compels no one to virtue.” He did not make us robots or senseless animals. Knowing our “wanters” are broken, He kindly restrains us from much that we might choose that would harm us, however, there is a point when He grants to a person the dignity of following the path they have chosen – even if it leads straight into hell.

In this case, where does it lead? In this verse, it leads into sexual immorality. When we cast off moral restraint and “go for it," we very evil human beings think we have found freedom. We thought as young people we were discovering freedom when we could follow our lusts right into a bed. As I bemoaned in my last post, I’m not so sure I’ve entirely purged such thoughts from my heart of hearts. We think it a freedom, but what does the Lord call it? He calls it, “uncleanness of the dishonoring of their bodies among them.”

He calls it “uncleanness.” It is dirty and filthy in His eyes. He calls it “dishonoring of their bodies.” The word “dishonoring” could be translated “degrading.” Somehow, outside of its proper place – married love – sex becomes in God’s eyes a horrible, ugly business that somehow degrades the bodies we live in. We should insert here the clear assertion that inside marriage, sex is a beautiful thing in the eyes of the Lord. We see it expounded in the Song of Solomon and in verses like Proverbs 5:15-19: “Drink water from your own cistern…May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth. A loving doe, a graceful deer – may her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be captivated by her love.” That last phrase says literally something like, “…may you ever be intoxicated by her lovings.” Inside marriage sex is a beautiful thing.

But outside of marriage, it is actually a form of self-destruction. We can see it become degrading in the sexually transmitted diseases. While some can be treated, there are still those which cannot.

The Lord knows all of this and kindly restrains us from plunging into such willful self-destruction. But what we see here in Romans 1:24 is that there is a point when He will finally withdraw that restraint and let us “follow our hearts” and literally follow them into hell.

Can anyone else see how far this is from the “angry God furiously throwing lightning bolts at pathetic fleeing sinners?” Oh, yes, He is angry. Yes, He is judging sin. But He is doing it all as a loving Father, finally giving us the freedom to choose for ourselves the death and destruction we deserve.

As He said of Israel, “If only…”

If only you and I would draw near to Him, not pull away. If only we’d embrace Him and trust Him and long to live close to His heart, He would feed us “honey from the rock.” He would bless us and our children for a thousand generations.

May we each see that the choice is ours…and choose wisely.

Romans 1:24 “Scary”

As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

²⁴Therfore, God gave them up in the desires of their hearts into uncleanness of the dishonoring of their bodies among them.

This verse is yet another bombshell of truth for us to ponder. Once again, as I sit looking at these words I feel like I ought to take off my shoes and spend a few hours just wondering at our God.

First of all, I want to note what is happening. As the Lord looks down on the human race, He sees that they refuse to acknowledge Him and are unthankful and instead choose to fabricate idols to worship. And what is His judgment upon these sins? He allows them to fall into sexual immorality. In this verse itself, we see what He gives them up to is the “desires of their hearts.” The word translated “desires” can simply be that and can be good or bad. When we believe “bad” is intended, we translate it “lusts” or “evil desires,” which I believe would be totally justified in this passage. I’ve left it “desires” in my literal translation above only to remind myself the actual word is just that.

So the vehicle, so to speak, which He abandons them to is their own (evil) desires, and where those lead is to what is called “uncleanness” and the “dishonoring” of their bodies with each other. This and the rest of Romans 1 is where we begin to see that clearly we’re talking about sexual immorality.

The bombshell, I believe, is to see that sexual immorality is a judgment. I think any of us would naturally think that, if people are immoral, God will judge them, and it does say in Hebrews 13:4, “Adulterers and the sexually immoral God will judge.” But notice here in Romans, the sexual immorality is the judgement. “God gave them up to sexual immorality!” That, for me, is a complete twist in my brain for understanding how the Lord is working in our world. We all can look out at what our America has become and fear the judgment of God on such a grossly immoral nation – but, if we understand Romans 1, we can add to our horror the realization that the immorality is our judgment!

Here He exposes a place where we see the vast gulf between the Lord’s heart and ours. Just to be kind, for now I’ll limit the discussion to my own. What I mean is that, way down deep underneath it all, I don’t really see sexual immorality as being that bad. Oh, I can quickly exclaim, “It’s wrong!” but in my heart of hearts I don’t see what’s so bad about it. If the Lord was to announce tomorrow that He’s decided it’s okay, I’m afraid what I’d think in my heart is, “Cool. Now we don’t have to worry about it being something bad. Especially young people can ‘sow their wild oats’ and life goes on.” Underneath it all I’m thinking, “As long as people are careful and don’t accidentally make babies, what’s the harm?”

Again, it is horrifying to my heart to realize I am totally missing God’s heart in all of this. To God, sexual immorality is “uncleanness” and “the degrading of their bodies with each other.” In fact it is so bad, it is not just something to be judged, it is the very judgment itself! If you’re following me, what I’m recognizing is that, once again, there is a huge gulf between my heart and God’s. When it comes to this issue, obviously, I am not seeing the world through His eyes.

If I may now be allowed, can I bring this back to all of us? I rather suspect I’m not alone. Have we as Christians become so engulfed in this culture of immorality that we’ve lost the ability to see it for the horrific, ugly, body-degrading sin God says it is?  I fear we have. If I am right, does it not reveal in us an awful Satanic blindness? If the Bible says it’s black and my heart of hearts thinks it’s white, what else can that be but a Satanic blindness?

And if it is, should we not all be asking the Lord to heal it? Jesus said to the Laodiceans, “You do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy from Me…salve to put on your eyes, so you can see” (Rev. 4:17,18). The ancient prayer was “Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of Thy Word.” And may I add again, Jesus’ wonderful promise, “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free!” To truly see all of this through God’s eyes would be some sense of freedom we are not now enjoying. We need to see the truth!

There is more I’d like to note about this verse, but this possible business of blindness is serious enough I need to pause and ponder on it a while.

Scary.

Hmmmm. Time to climb in my Father’s big lap and tell Him all about it. He’ll know what to do. He always does.