Foolish Choices

Romans 1:21-32

²¹For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened.

²²Claiming to be wise, they became fools,

²³and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

²⁴Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves,

²⁵because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

²⁶For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature;

²⁷and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

²⁸And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.

²⁹They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips,

³⁰slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents,

³¹foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.

³²Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.

I have to admit I knew this passage was coming for today and considered taking a pass and tackling it on Monday. But it wasn’t going to any easier on Monday. Herein lays the problem with this type of Bible study. When you go verse by verse, you’re going to run into verses you would rather not have to deal with because the truth can be painful. So, we’re going to forge ahead, rip off that bandage, and see where it takes us.

First, let’s look at the passage globally. It’s about our sin and that can be defined as any practice that God finds unholy and wrong. And because we tend to think of others as sinners but not ourselves, the list of things that we get ourselves involved in is long; none of us can exclude ourselves by saying, “Well, I don’t do that.” Every one of us can find our names next to something on the long list above.

Now let’s look at the detailed progression of sin in this passage.

• Paul begins with idolatry. We exchange the worship of God alone to bow down to things that we have created ourselves. That idolatry tops the list – for all of us.
• Then the list moves next to sexual sins. Yes, homosexuality is on the list but I believe that “dishonorable passions” can also include adultery and fornication. Anything sexual that happens outside of marriage between a man and woman is sin – pure and simple. It can’t be any plainer than that even though the culture would have us redefine all of that.
• Then the list becomes all inclusive and goes from murder to gossip, picking up everything in between along the way. Even disobedience to parents makes the list. 
•  Finally the Word points out that not only do we participate in these sins, we encourage and are encouraged to “give approval” to these practices. If you’ve never seen that happen you’ve never watched TV or gotten on the internet.

Once again it’s tough to find the Gospel in this passage. This is pure Law. If you find yourself relating to any sin on this list you stand condemned before a holy God. So we have to take the Scriptures as a whole and remember that the thrust of the Word is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He came into the world just because our names do appear next to the sins on this list. We are indeed condemned. But He died for all of those sins and paid the just punishment for them – all of them. There is no one sin on this list that is worse than the others. I’ll let you make what you will of that statement. Because of His blood shed on the cross we are forgiven for these sins – all of them. So when we relate to this list and see ourselves described in these words we take heart because Jesus has conquered eternal death and hell. Those who believe in Jesus will not pay the price for these sins because He already has.