The Second Cycle and Shameful Lusts
They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. Romans 1:25-27
When God gives humans responsibility, He means it. The choices we make, not only individually but as a species, are choices whose consequences God allows us to explore. He will warn us. He will give us opportunities to repent, to change course, but if we choose idolatry we must expect our humanness, bit by bit, to dissolve. When you worship the God in whose image you were made, you reflect that image more brightly and become more fully and truly human. Equally and opposite, when you worship something other than the living God, something that is itself another created object and so subject to decay and death, you diminish that image-bearingness, that essential humanness.
By rejecting the one true God humanity has cast itself into an abyss it cannot now escape from. True to His nature God has responded in anger against the sin of humanity. But His wrath has not come in immediate, final, destructive judgement. 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 His 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.
Following this principle Paul follows this process of deterioration in three sections, each adding to the one before
· firstly he notes the people’s knowledge of God
· secondly he draws attention to rejection of this knowledge in favour of idolatry
· thirdly he describes the reaction of God’s wrath
The first section was in 1:21-24. We come now to the second section (1:25-27)
· their knowledge of God: ‘the truth of God’ (1:25)
· their rejection of that knowledge: ‘They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator’ (1:25)
· the reaction of God’s wrath: ‘God gave them over to shameful lusts’ (1:26)
Paul now explains the sexual sin in terms of homosexuality. He mentions both men and women to underscore the divine creation of human beings into these two categories and the implications of godly sexual conduct that flow from that distinction. The emphasis is on the natural order. Women ‘exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones’ (1:26) and men ‘abandoned natural relations with women’ (1:27). These ‘natural relations’ are the ones God ordained for humanity in His creation.
Paul is outlining how humans have violated, not just a law given at some point in human history, but the very structure of the created order. Paul assumes there is a structure and that creation is not random or ordinary. Taking Genesis 1 as his foundation, he sees humans created in God’s image and given charge over the non-human creation. They are commanded to be fruitful. They are to celebrate, in their complementary relationship as male plus female, the life-giving capacity of God’s good world. They are charged with bringing God’s order to the world, acting as stewards of the Garden and all that is in it. Something deep within the structure of the world corresponds to the coming together of male and female. God created humanity male and female. God instituted marriage as a heterosexual union and what God created we have no freedom to change. The only context in which He intends for the ‘one flesh’ experience is heterosexual monogamy. A homosexual partnership, no matter how loving and committed it might claim to be, is against God’s intended order and so can never become in His eyes a legitimate alternative to marriage.