God Gave Them Over

A pastoral note before we begin: The subject matter ahead is weighty and sensitive. Before reading further, take a moment to examine your heart. Come not with a spirit of judgment or self-righteousness, but with humility, compassion, and reverence for God’s Word. These truths are offered in love, for the redemption and restoration of every soul.

“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 shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error. Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them” (Romans 1:26-32 NIV).

God’s giving over sinful mankind has a dual sense. First, in an indirect sense, God gave them over simply by withdrawing His restraining and protective hand, allowing the consequences of sin to take their inevitable, destructive course. Sin degrades man, debases the image of God in which he is made, and strips him of dignity, peace of mind, and a clear conscience. Sin destroys personal relationships, marriages, families, cities, and nations. It also destroys churches.

Humanity is not concerned about sin itself but only about the pain from the unpleasant consequences sin brings. “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life” (Galatians 6:7-8 NIV). Someone has well said that sin would have fewer takers if the consequences were immediate.

However, in a second, direct sense, God gave over rebellious mankind by specific acts of judgment. The Bible is replete with accounts of divine wrath being directly and supernaturally poured out on sinful men. The flood of Noah’s day, for example, was not an indirect natural consequence of sin but was an overt supernatural expression of God’s judgment on gross and unrepented sin. God often allows men to go deeper and deeper into sin in order to drive them to despair and to show them their need for Him.

The verb “abandoned” is in the aorist tense, speaking of effective action at a moment in time, and in the active voice, meaning these men made a deliberate, conscious choice of their will to abandon the natural for the unnatural. In essence, they jettisoned their God-given attraction to the opposite sex. This is a vivid picture of personal choice, which all began when they refused to acknowledge God as Creator. They forsook their God-given natural role. God having created man with the direct instruction to be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 1:22, 28). How ironic that if they had obeyed God they would have brought forth life, but in disobeying Him, the result was death. “Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death” (James 1:15 NIV).

Not only is homosexuality a willful choice, it is one that completely reverses the natural order of creation. It is thoroughly unnatural, or literally against nature. Men and women have to deliberately repress the way God made them in order to practice homosexuality. Homosexuality was common in first-century Rome and is often spoken of without a sense of shame by Roman writers. Homosexuality was prohibited neither by religion nor law, and was acknowledged without shame. “Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is set on earthly things” (Philippians 3:19 NIV). At times the Roman Empire specifically taxed approved homosexual prostitution and even gave boy prostitutes a legal holiday. Same-sex marriage was legally recognized, and even some of the Roman emperors married men.

At the very time Paul was writing, Nero was emperor. He had taken a boy named Sporus and had him castrated. He then married him with a full ceremony, brought him to the palace with a great procession, and made the boy his wife. Later, Nero lived with another man, with Nero himself taking the role of wife. The parallels to our own cultural moment are not difficult to see.

More than anything else, homosexuality is a willful choice. No one can say, “I was born that way.” You can speak of genetics, of absent fathers, of over-protective mothers, of early sexual confusion, and even of sexual abuse. Some of those things may indeed create a predisposition to this particular sin. But the fact remains: every act of homosexuality, whether in word or deed or in lustful thought, is a personal moral choice.

Temptation is not the issue, because temptation in and of itself is not a sin. “Each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death” (James 1:14-15 NIV). Giving in to temptation, whether mentally, verbally, or in actual deed, is a sin and a moral choice for which God will hold every person 100% accountable. We cannot blame our choices on biology. We cannot even blame our fathers for their failures to be there when we needed them.

As a society moves away from Father God, one mark of its drift into judgment is widespread acceptance of that which He has declared unnatural. The tragic fact is that this is exactly where America is today. I find it impossible to avoid speaking plainly on this, for there is no way of avoiding offending guilty consciences by silence, and silent we cannot be because of God’s command.

The idea is this: something pertains to that which is in accordance with the nature or character of that thing. Thus it is natural for both men and women to desire heterosexual relationships. This is not a cultural preference or a religious tradition. It is the design of the Creator, woven into the very fabric of what it means to be human, established in the beginning when God created them male and female and commanded them to be fruitful and multiply.

When a society abandons that design, God does not chase it with further pleading but gives it over to the consequences of its own choices. This is not cruelty. It is justice. And it is a warning. A culture that approves of those who practice what God has declared shameful has moved beyond individual sin into collective endorsement of judgment. The final verse of this passage is perhaps the most sobering of all: they not only do these things, but they give hearty approval to those who practice them.

Yet even here, the gospel reaches. The same Paul who wrote Romans 1 also wrote that some of the Corinthians had been exactly these things, and then added these words: “But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:11). No one is beyond the reach of grace. No sin is beyond the reach of the blood of Christ. The warning of Romans 1 is not the final word. The gospel is. And it is offered to every person, without exception, who will come to the One who made them and receive the redemption He alone can give.