God abandons unrepentant Homosexual!
Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness.… to vile passions.… to a debased mind (Rom. 1:24–28).
How does God reveal His wrath against sinful human beings in the here and now? The answer is simple, Paul says—He abandons them. He simply lets them do what they want to do. The irony, as Dr. James M. Boice points out, is that “this is precisely what man has been fighting for ever since Adam’s first rebellion in the Garden of Eden.
How does God reveal His wrath against sinful human beings in the here and now? The answer is simple, Paul says—He abandons them. He simply lets them do what they want to do. The irony, as Dr. James M. Boice points out, is that “this is precisely what man has been fighting for ever since Adam’s first rebellion in the Garden of Eden.
Man has been wanting to get rid of God, to push Him out of his life.” God’s response is to give man what he wants. But things do not work out quite the way man plans. “Instead of happiness we find misery [apart from God],” Boice writes. “Instead of freedom we find the debilitating bondage of sin.… When we run away from God we think our way will be uphill, because we want it to be so. But the way is actually downhill. We are pulled down by the law of moral gravity—when God lets go.”
Paul outlines three stages of the human descent into depravity. First, God abandons people to “uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves.” All the restraints on people’s sinful desires—laws, traditions, family mores, and so forth—are tossed aside so that sin may be given full rein. Paul could have mentioned many specific sins here, but he singles out sexual immorality, a most common expression of unbridled sinful lust.
Paul outlines three stages of the human descent into depravity. First, God abandons people to “uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves.” All the restraints on people’s sinful desires—laws, traditions, family mores, and so forth—are tossed aside so that sin may be given full rein. Paul could have mentioned many specific sins here, but he singles out sexual immorality, a most common expression of unbridled sinful lust.
It brings a particular degradation of the body as people pursue promiscuity in violation of God’s command that sex be confined to monogamous marriage. This lust is a form of idolatry, worship of creatures rather than the Creator. Second, God abandons people to “vile passions,” so that they give up “the natural use” for practices that are “shameful.” Simply put, Paul is speaking of homosexuality. Boice notes that fornication and adultery (the sins in view in v. 24) are “natural” sins in the sense that they involve the proper function of the body.
But homosexuality is unnatural; it uses the body in ways the Creator never intended. Third, because people have no use for the knowledge of God, He gives them over to “a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting.” Boice explains that Paul is speaking here not just of a mind that is foolish but of one that considers bad to be good and good to be bad. The person thus falls into all sorts of sins that violate God’s holiness.
