God Gave Them Up

For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believes... For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness... Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts... who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only to do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.

Why was Paul so passionate about the gospel — willing to be counted a fool for Christ's sake? Part of the answer is what the gospel reveals about us.

Not Ashamed of the Gospel

Paul says, "I am ready to preach the gospel to you that are at Rome, and I am not ashamed of the gospel." He was not merely unashamed of it; in his letter to the Galatians he declares that the only thing he boasts in is the cross of Christ (Galatians 6:14). The gospel is the very power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, and in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith — "as it is written, the just shall live by faith," Paul says, citing Habakkuk 2.

In 1 Corinthians 15 he states that gospel message succinctly: Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, was buried, and rose again the third day, seen alive by more than five hundred witnesses. Because Jesus is alive, He is able to raise to newness of life all who come to Him by faith. That was Paul's boast wherever he went — Lystra, Derbe, Antioch, Philippi, Berea, Thessalonica, Athens, Corinth, Ephesus. Though the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing (1 Corinthians 1), Paul still preached it boldly, even at the center of the empire: "I'm ready to preach it at Rome, among those who count it foolishness, among those who will put someone to death for proclaiming it. I'm ready, because I'm not ashamed."

God's Evaluation of Humanity

Why was Paul so passionate about the gospel? Many answers come quickly to mind: because it is true; because God commissioned us; because God's love is displayed in it. The apostle John tells us God's very nature is love (1 John), and that love compels those who have received Him to speak the gospel forth.

But how does Paul himself answer the question? Part of the answer is in Romans 3:10. There Paul begins, "As it is written" — directing us back to the inspired Word, largely the Psalms:

There is none righteous, no, not one. There is none that understands; there is none that seeks after God... Their throat is like an open tomb; with their tongues they have used deceit... Their feet are swift to shed blood; destruction and misery are in their ways; and the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes.

It is crucial to recognize what this is. Romans 3:10-18 is not man's opinion about man; it is God's evaluation of fallen man. This is what God sees when He looks at the condition of humanity: none righteous, none who seek after Him, none who understand. That is a heavy verdict.

Why We Resist the Verdict

The problem is, we don't really believe it. We look at seven billion people and assume that surely someone has gotten it right. We do see wickedness in the world, but we view it through an external lens: that could never be us. So we soften the verdict — "people aren't all bad, they just do bad things." We might concede that some people are bad, but the whole of humanity, none righteous? That is a hard pill to swallow, because to say it is to count ourselves in it.

We have even built an alternate reality where humanity is inherently good — born good, corrupted only by outside influences. My response to that is simple: if you really believe it, come babysit my kids. Or sign up for the toddler ministry here at the church, and you'll see very quickly that children are not inherently good. They're sweet to look at, but they are still fallen. We all have a broken, sinful nature.

That same instinct says a thief steals only because of poverty and inequality — purely external pressure. But Scripture reveals that stealing originates in the heart as covetousness, and that covetousness compels the hand. The behavior starts within.

The Gospel Confronts Our Lostness

Here is one of the glories of the gospel: it not only announces God's good news of salvation, it also brings humanity back to a correct perspective on our collective lostness. It shows God's way of justifying sinners, and it brings us to recognize that we need to be justified.

Why does this matter? Verse 18: "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness." A day is coming when the wrath of God will be poured out. Because God is, by nature, holy and just, that day must come — and knowing it will come, He wants to bring people to recognize their lostness so they will lay hold of salvation. The wrath of God is the vindication of God's justice. We'll see next week, in Romans 2:5, that wrath is being stored up for the day of wrath against all who continue in ungodliness.

Upon whom will that wrath fall? Paul makes it clear: upon all ungodliness and unrighteousness. Ungodliness is irreverence for God — disregarding Him. It shows itself in unrighteousness, which is behavior that violates God's perfect standard. And God's perfect standard is His own holy character. Sin originates in an ungodly heart and is then manifested in the life, and all of it suppresses the truth of God.

Two Cultural Problems

As Paul makes this case, we run into two problems in our cultural mindset — problems that are not new.

First, we live in a culture that disregards explicit standards of right and wrong. Second, we live in a culture that questions whether truth even exists. Two thousand years ago it was the same. When Jesus stood on trial before Pontius Pilate and spoke of truth, Pilate's response was, "What is truth?" (John 18:38) — and he didn't even wait for an answer.

We assume we are utterly different from people who lived two thousand years ago, because we point to our advances in science, medicine, and technology. But philosophically we are very much the same. In fact, in the twenty-first century we have reverted to a first-century Roman mindset. (Many of those very advances, I'd suggest, have roots in the spread of the gospel, which unleashes human creative potential by revealing that we are made in the image of a creative God.) Our tools have progressed; our worldview has not. We live, in the modern West, in an atmosphere of relativistic, pragmatic existentialism.

Relativism, Pragmatism, Existentialism

Relativism is the belief that right and wrong, good and bad, truth and falsehood are not absolute but shift from culture to culture and situation to situation. You may meet it this week at the Thanksgiving table, when you share what God is doing in your life and someone says, "I'm so glad you have your truth. I have mine." That is relativism on display. But is there a true standard of right and wrong? C.S. Lewis makes the case beautifully in Mere Christianity that there must be. Consider: most of us would say it is wrong for a man to beat his wife — yet other cultures say it is not. If your truth is your truth and mine is mine, who is to say? That is the problem with relativism.

Pragmatism evaluates truth by what works. It can be summed up in a sentence: if it works, it's good. As long as it works for you and gives your life meaning, that's all that matters.

Existentialism says the universe has no intrinsic meaning, so each person must create his own, beginning from individual experience. Your purpose is not given to you from on high by the God who made you; you are solely responsible for inventing it.

All of this is wrapped up in a humanistic worldview, where we are the center of reality and we decide what is good, bad, right, wrong, true, or false. We may never articulate this philosophy, but it overshadows every decision we make. We filter all of life through a worldview we often can't even name.

Why It Matters

Because of this framework, we do not accept the truth of Romans 3:10: "There is none righteous, no, not one." Knowing this, Paul crafts his letter to lead his readers to that very recognition. Romans 3:10 is the conclusion he is building toward.

To deny it is to stand in the middle of the train tracks, insisting there is no such thing as a train, while the train bears down. The train is the appointed wrath of God. To disregard "there is none righteous" is to stand on those tracks denying the danger — and it is absolute foolishness.

Three Groups Paul Addresses

From Romans 1:18 through 3:9, Paul masterfully confronts three kinds of people, leading each to Romans 3:10 ("there is none righteous") and Romans 3:23 ("all have sinned and come short of the glory of God").

• The hedonist (1:18-32) — the overwhelming majority in a city like Rome. He lives for pleasure and passion, by no governing standard, doing whatever feels good. He is the practical existentialist. - The moralist (2:1-16) — the person with a set of moral standards he tries to keep, and by which he judges everyone else. He is right because he keeps his code; others are wrong because they don't. - The self-righteous (2:17-3:9) — primarily the religious person who follows a prescribed set of rules and trusts in his rule-keeping.

To all of them Paul says the same thing: hedonist, moralist, self-righteous — all are guilty before God. Before you can reach the justification and sanctification of Romans 4-8, before you can hear "there is therefore now no condemnation," every person must first come to the place of saying, "I have sinned. I am unrighteous. I cannot save myself. I need God to demonstrate His love toward me — that while I was a sinner, Christ died for me" (Romans 5:8). But you cannot get there without first walking through Romans 1, 2, and 3.

How God Has Revealed Himself: The Conscience

How has humanity come short of the glory of God? Look at verse 19: "because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God has shown it unto them." God has made Himself known, and man has rejected it. The first way God reveals Himself is through the conscience.

God created every human being with a hardwired moral code — the very thing Lewis writes about in Mere Christianity. It is the moral lawgiver's law at the foundational level, the inner caution that says don't do that or do that.

Think of the freeway: thousands of cars hurtling along at high speed, each independently driven, two-thousand-pound steel boxes — and somehow it works. Why? Because drivers obey a prescribed law. When someone disobeys it, you get a wreck. To prevent cataclysmic accidents in life, God has hardwired into us a conscience.

"But some people seem to have no conscience," you say. Not because God withheld it, but because, as Scripture says, they have seared their conscience as with a hot iron. War against your conscience long enough — do the very thing it forbids, over and over — and you callous it, until the sense of I shouldn't is gone. That is a frightening place to be. God can still transform it: when a person comes to Him, He gives a new heart with His law written upon it and renews the mind. But apart from that transforming power, the calloused conscience is in a desperate place.

How God Has Revealed Himself: Creation

The second way God has revealed Himself, verse 20, is through creation: "the invisible things of Him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen... even His eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse."

As the psalmist said, "The heavens declare the glory of God... There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard" (Psalm 19). Across every people group and every language, creation cries out to humanity of the Creator. Francis Schaeffer titled one of his books He Is There and He Is Not Silent. God is independent of His creation, but He has left His fingerprints all over it.

It is reported that Napoleon Bonaparte, walking with his generals one night as some of them denied God's existence, looked up at the night sky and said, "Sirs, if you are going to get rid of God, you will first have to get rid of those" — and pointed to the stars. And Bertrand Russell, one of the great atheist philosophers of the twentieth century, was asked near the end of his life what he would say if he died and found himself standing before God. He answered, "I will tell Him He didn't give me enough evidence."

But the evidence is everywhere. Imagine I told you I was reading in my living room, heard a boom in the garage, and found that a smartphone had simply assembled itself on the floor — every multi-touch sensor, the proximity sensor that turns off the screen at your ear, the accelerometer, the GPS, all the engineering and software — it just happened. You'd think I was insane. Yet the brain between our ears is vastly more complex than any phone. You have to check your intellect at the door to conclude that no one designed it. As the Psalms say, "The fool has said in his heart, there is no God" (Psalm 14; 53). You have to become foolish to believe He is not.

Suppressing the Truth Into Idolatry

Verse 21: "when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were they thankful; but they became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools."

God has made Himself known through conscience and creation, but man, in his unrighteousness, suppresses the supreme truth — that God is. Humanity made a deliberate decision to cast off God's restraint: "We don't want God over us. We won't glorify Him or thank Him." And what happens then? They "became vain in their imaginations" — or as the New Living Translation puts it, "they began to think up foolish ideas."

Why foolishness? Because Jesus is revealed in John 1:1 as the Word of God — the Greek logos, from which we get logic. All thought, reason, and understanding originate in Him. Unhook yourself from the source of logic, and the only possible outcome is foolish thinking. We won't admit we're fools, so we profess our wisdom, pointing to our advances and saying, "Look how amazing we are" — when every bit of that creative ability is God's common grace, because He made us in His image.

So, verse 23, we "changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image." This is how we come short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). And note: the departure from God is never a departure from worship. We were not only coded with a conscience; we were programmed to worship. So when we refuse to worship God, we do not stop worshiping — we worship something else. Reject God, and you will always revert to idolatry, to misplaced worship: the creature instead of the Creator, "four-footed beasts, and birds, and creeping things."

God Gave Them Up

What does God do in response? Verse 24: "Wherefore God also gave them up." That phrase — gave them up — appears three times in this passage.

The best way to understand it is a glass of milk left out on the counter. Leave it there, especially if it's warm, and it spoils. With three small kids still drinking from sippy cups, I know this one well — a cup gets kicked under the couch, and you don't find it until it starts to smell. It spoils because no one intervened. "God gave them up" means He did not intervene; He left them to their own vices. They said, "We don't want You," so He let them go — and because the heart is desperately wicked, they moved toward uncleanness, acting on the wicked desires of their hearts and dishonoring their own bodies.

Verse 26, the second "God gave them up": "For this cause" — idolatry — "God gave them up unto vile affections." He allows them to spoil, no longer connected to the source of life. Paul highlights one such affection here (he will list twenty-three more shortly): "their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature; likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust toward one another." When humanity disconnects from God and is left to its own passions, sinful error follows — and one error he names is homosexuality.

It's important to see this in context. In the first-century Roman world, homosexuality was common and not regarded as abhorrent; among the Greeks before them it was even woven into the upbringing of children. The deeper point is this: idolatry in the heart always ends in immorality. All sin begins in the heart. So when we see sinful behavior in the world, it is the symptom of a worship disorder. Paul does not exalt this sin above others — he files it among twenty-three more in a few verses. The symptoms are not what ultimately destroys a person or a nation; they are the byproduct of misplaced worship. As John Piper opens his book on missions, Let the Nations Be Glad: "Missions exist because worship doesn't."

Verse 28, the third time: "even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things that are not convenient" — those things that are not helpful. People given to idolatry and immorality don't want to be reminded of God, because the reminder brings conviction. So they try to scrub Him away — the cross off the hilltop, the Ten Commandments from the public square, the church confined to its building — anything that recalls the God they've refused. But because God has hardwired a knowledge of Himself into us, the attempt to erase Him leaves only a "reprobate mind," a broken brain, producing the unhelpful things Paul now lists.

A Worship Disorder

Verse 29 gives the catalog: "being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful."

Twenty-three of them — and every one is the symptom of a worship disorder. Has someone ever broken a vow to you? A worship disorder. Disobedient children? A worship disorder. People who are unmerciful, malicious, adulterous? Worship disorders, all. We said, "We won't glorify Him or thank Him," and so we default to idolatry, because we were made to worship — and from idolatry flows immorality.

So what makes things right? Corrected worship. You can try by sheer religious effort to stop being covetous, malicious, or envious — but the only way those things truly disappear is to place your affections back on God. Worship Him, and it transforms your entire being.

The Danger of the List

Verse 32: those who do these things, "knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death." The word commit means practice. Paul says the same in Galatians and in 1 Corinthians 6.

Here is the danger. The moralist and the self-righteous read a list like this, look out at the world, and say, "Yes — those people are worthy of death." In the wrong hands, this passage becomes a weapon. So Paul immediately turns the corner in chapter 2, verse 1: "Therefore you are inexcusable, O man, whoever you are that judges; for wherein you judge another, you condemn yourself; for you that judge do the same things." How? Because sin begins in the heart, and even the moralist and the self-righteous have a sinful heart. They may not practice the listed sins, but they are condemned all the same, because there is none righteous, no, not one.

Notice how verse 32 ends — I only read part of it earlier: those who practice such things are worthy of death, "not only [those who] do the same, but [those who] have pleasure in them that do them." The most common reading is this: the moralist who doesn't practice these sins still takes pleasure in them. First-century Romans who would never murder entertained themselves watching men killed by gladiators in the coliseum. They didn't practice it, but they took part by delighting in it. They prized the theatre and its spectacles, and even when they didn't partake of the passions displayed, they shared in them by finding pleasure in them — and that pleasure revealed the same sin resident in their own hearts.

This confronts us directly. We can sit in the moralist's seat and say, "I'm not like that — I don't do those things, I'm righteous." But we feed ourselves on entertainment that takes pleasure in the very things this passage names. This is not said to condemn us; it's said to bring us to God's verdict: there is no one righteous, no, not one. To lay hold of the gracious gift of salvation in Christ, every one of us must first admit we are counted among the "none righteous."

The Whole Counsel of God

Paul's work in these verses is not to condemn but to reveal our guilt before a holy God — to prepare us for the wonders of grace in chapters 4 through 8. The gospel is not only the good news of salvation in Christ; it is also the bad news of our complete lostness. The two belong together.

A gospel that proclaims only God's goodness and love, to the exclusion of His justice and wrath, is an unbalanced message — and that, sadly, is much of evangelism in our culture today. The love and grace of God are gloriously true, but they cannot be preached to the exclusion of the whole counsel of God: that He is also just, also holy, and that an appointed day of wrath will come upon all ungodliness and unrighteousness.

Just as a church was being established in dark first-century Rome, a church is still being established in the darkness of this world — and the light shines brightest in the dark. May God make us as passionate as Paul, ready to bring His Word to those who are, as Romans 2:5 says, "storing up for themselves wrath for the day of wrath." That is a sobering reality, and it should compel us.

Closing Prayer

Father, keep us mindful of these things. Help us to recognize the importance of sharing the whole counsel of Your Word — to give it in fullness, to hold nothing back, to be ready to preach the gospel as Paul was, unashamed, because it is Your very power to bring salvation to everyone who believes. Work in us this week, even as we gather with family and friends, to have boldness to share the truth. In Jesus' name, amen.