God Gave Them Over
Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. Romans 1:24
Paul has previously written about God’s wrath, His settled and righteous antagonism to evil. It is directed against people who have some knowledge of God’s truth through the created order, but deliberately suppress this knowledge in order to pursue their own self-centred path. His wrath is already being revealed, in a preliminary way, in the moral and social corruption which Paul saw in much of the Greco-Roman world of his day and which we can see in the permissive societies of ours.
When we think of God’s wrath we tend to think of flaming retribution from heaven, thunderbolts destroying massive communities in a moment. But Paul will explain how he sees God’s wrath being outworked by the phrase ‘God gave them over’ (1:24,26,28). God’s anger works quietly and often invisibly by God handing sinners over to themselves. It operates, not by God intervening, but by Him not intervening, by letting men and women go their own way. God abandons sinners to their stubborn self-centredness. Humanity chooses to do what they are finally unable to avoid. The lost “enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded and are therefore self-enslaved” (C. S. Lewis: The Problem of Pain). The result is spiritual and moral degradation. This is ‘the wrath of God … revealed from heaven’ (1:18). God consigns people to the consequence of their actions.
The ‘therefore’ at the beginning of the verse shows that God’s handing over of human beings is His response to their rejection of the knowledge of Himself that He has made generally available (1:21-23). Paul’s use of the verb ‘gave them over’ to describe this retribution has its roots in the Old Testament where it is regularly used in the formula of God ‘handing over’ Israel’s enemies so they can be defeated in battle (Exodus 23:31; Deuteronomy 7:23). In an ironic role reversal, the same formula is used when God hands over His own people to another nation as punishment for their sin (Leviticus 26:25; Joshua 7:7). Similarly, Paul says here God has ‘given over’ people to uncleanness. This doesn’t mean God impels people to sin. The qualifying phrase ‘in the sinful desires of their hearts’ shows that those who were handed over were already immersed in sin. Paul’s purpose is to highlight the divine side to the cycle of sin, but it must be balanced with the human side. In Ephesians 4:19 Paul says Gentiles ‘have given themselves over to sensuality’ leading to ‘every kind of impurity.’
Like a judge who hands over a prisoner to the punishment his crime deserves, God hands over the sinner to the cycle of ever increasing sin. The depth of sin in which the idolater is plunged is designed to awaken him to the awful seriousness of his situation.
Sexual sin is highlighted here as an example of the ever increasing cycle of sin. The NIV rightly interprets the general word ‘immorality’ as ‘sexual impurity’. In keeping with a widespread Jewish tradition that Paul is adapting in this passage, he shows how the sin of idolatry leads to the disruption of God’s intention in sexual relationships.
It is nigh impossible to find any society on earth that, having rejected God, have not found themselves increasingly immersed in sexual sin. The good news is that it is equally nigh impossible to find any community that has whole-heartedly embraced the gospel, that has not found sexual sin in their midst diminish. Christ sets us free from all sin, including sexual sin.