Every sin is a challenge to God’s absolute right to reign over His creation. In this sermon, R.C. Sproul considers the defiance of sin and the withdrawal of God’s protection and restraints on rebellious people.

This evening, we turn our attention again to Paul’s letter to the church in Rome. As we continue to study the first chapter, I will back up a couple of verses to where we ended last week, and we will look at Romans 1:22–32. I would like to ask the congregation to stand for the reading of the Word of God:

Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things.

Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.

And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting; being filled with all unrighteousness, sexual immorality, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil-mindedness; they are whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, violent, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, undiscerning, untrustworthy, unloving, unforgiving, unmerciful; who, knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them.

The Word of God for the people of God, thanks be to God. Be seated. Let us pray.

Our Father, as we direct our attention to this text of sacred Scripture, we pray that we will be duly persuaded of the weightiness of its truth, as the verdict it gives of our estate comes not from pollsters but from You, from Your very mouth. Give us ears to hear what Your Word is saying. For we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Humanity’s Desperate Condition

The passage I have just read is one of the grimmest we find anywhere in sacred Scripture. Yet for reasons I find somewhat strange, when people look at the first chapter of Romans, they tend to regard these verses almost as a postscript to the main body of the text and move over these verses rather quickly and superficially. But the assessment of our human condition found in this text is radically different from what we encounter every day in terms of humanity’s self-evaluation. As a result, we need to hear this text again and again so that we might be fully persuaded of our desperate condition apart from the mercy and grace of God.

When we started looking at Romans 1, we saw that the thematic statement in the first chapter was the announcement of the revelation of the righteousness of God, which is by faith. I mentioned last week that Paul seems to abruptly detour from that central theme of announcing God’s revelation of the gospel to speak about the revelation of God’s wrath. That wrath is set forth against all humanity, which is universally guilty of suppressing and repressing the knowledge of God that He makes clear in and through creation. As we saw last week, enough knowledge gets through and is received by the creature to leave every person without excuse.

We are told that the fundamental sin of fallen humanity is refusing to honor God as God and failing to be grateful. Paul goes on to talk about the dreadful exchange we make as fallen creatures, in which we trade the glory of almighty God, the sweetness of His excellence, and exchange that truth for a lie we prefer. In this exchange, we began to serve and worship the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever.

Mercy’s Limits

Last week, we noticed in verse 24 that Paul said, “Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie,” and so on. In verse 26, we read, “For this reason God gave them up to vile passions,” and then in verse 28, “And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind,” or a reprobate mind. In the closing verses, I emphasized the exchange of the truth of God for a lie, but I skipped over lightly for the sake of time that first reference, that God, because of this willful idolatry of fallen humanity, gave them over. Three times in Romans 1 we read about God’s giving human beings over to their vile passions, to the lust of the flesh, and to their reprobate minds.

We need to pause and look at what Paul is saying here because this is dreadful, dreadful stuff. When God judges people according to the standard of His righteousness, He has declared that He will not strive with mankind forever. There is a concept we hear regularly in prayers, hymns, and sermons that talks about God’s infinite grace and mercy. I always cringe when I hear an expression about God’s infinite mercy.

God’s mercy is infinite in so far as that it is a mercy bestowed upon us by a being who is infinite. But when the term infinite is used to describe God’s mercy rather than His person, I have problems with that. The Bible makes it very clear that there is a limit to God’s mercy. There is a limit to His grace, and He is determined not to pour out His mercy on impenitent people forever.

Judicial Abandonment

There is a time, as the Old Testament repeatedly reports, particularly in the book of the prophet Jeremiah, that God stops being gracious to people, and He gives them over to their sin. The worst thing that can ever happen to a sinner is to be allowed to go on sinning without any divine restraints placed upon him.

At the end of the New Testament, in the book of Revelation, when the description of the last judgment is set forth to us, we hear that God will say on that day of judgment, “He who is unjust, let him be unjust still” (Rev. 22:11). He gives them over to what they want. He abandons them to their own sinful impulses, removing His restraints, and saying, “If you want to sin, go ahead and sin.” This is what we call in theology the “judicial abandonment,” when in God’s dispensing of His just judgment, He abandons the impenitent sinner forever.

Let me talk briefly about how people in biblical history experience a sense of being abandoned by God and what it does to them in provoking the most horrific darkness in their souls. I think of Job for example in the Old Testament, who was not fully and finally abandoned by God at all, but for a season was exposed to the evil one.

You might remember how Job’s story opens in the first chapter. Satan comes into the courts of heaven after having walked to and fro upon the earth and brags to God how everyone on earth belongs to him, they all willingly follow his devices. God says by way of rebuke to Satan, “But have you considered My servant Job, who is upright, devout, and faithful to Me?” In his worst cynicism, Satan says to God: “Does Job serve thee for nought? You’ve blessed him above all creatures. You’ve made him the richest man in the world. He has everything a human being could possibly want. You’ve built a hedge around him. I can’t fire my fiery darts against him. Let me at him, and he will curse You.” That is how the drama begins. For a season, God removes the hedge, and He lets Satan do his worst to Job.

Can you imagine being exposed to the unbridled assault of Satan with no protection from God, to be placed in that kind of vulnerable position? The worst expression of exposure to that kind of satanic attack came to our Savior in the Judean wilderness, where after forty days of solitude and of hunger, He was for a season abandoned and exposed to the hostility of Satan. Yet our Lord withstood everything that Satan could throw at Him.

After the forty days, Satan left for a season, and the Scriptures tell us that the angels came and ministered to Christ. Then when Christ began His public ministry, He called His disciples to Himself, and they came to Him on one occasion and said, “Lord, teach us how to pray.” He gave them the model prayer of the Lord’s Prayer, and in the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, He said, “When you pray, say, ‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’”

That is a bad translation, by the way, because it is a parallelism, and the word for “evil” there is in the masculine, not the neuter gender. The proper translation would be, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” Jesus was saying: “Pray that you may never be placed in the arena where you are tested and not protected from Satan. Pray that the Father will never give you over to sin, because the worst thing that could happen to anyone is to experience judicial abandonment.”

Divine Excommunication

There is a function in the church that mirrors the predicament of judicial abandonment. We recognize it in Christian history as the discipline of excommunication. The only thing worse than to be excommunicated from the body of Christ is to be sent to hell in the final judgment. To be cut off from the body of Christ is the worst thing that could happen to someone in this world. There is only one sin for which a person is excommunicated, cut off from the body of Christ and the means of grace, and that sin is what? Impenitence.

There are many sins that can begin the process of church discipline, where you may be censured or barred for a season from the Lord’s Table. All the intermediate steps of discipline are designed to curb your sin, bring you to repentance, restore you to fullness of fellowship in the church, and guard your soul from utter ruin. But if you remain consistently hardhearted and impenitent, after all the intermediate steps, the final step is to be excommunicated.

People often do not take excommunication seriously. I remember a case several years ago in Florida where a woman left her husband for another man and improperly sought to divorce her husband so she could be free to marry her lover. Church discipline was brought against her, each consecutive stage of that discipline, and every step along the way she refused to repent.

I remember going to see her on the eve of her excommunication. I pled with her. I said: “Please, don’t take this last step. Do you realize what it is? If you get excommunicated, the church is delivering you to Satan, handing you over, in the name of Christ abandoning you to your sin. Don’t do that.” She said: “I never thought about it like that. That’s ghastly. I hope you’re wrong, but I’m in love with my lover.” She divorced her husband, married her lover, and later on, divorced him. What so terrified me was how cavalier that woman was about excommunication. In our culture and in the church today, church discipline does not appear to mean much.

Last week, we took in new members, and every new member made vows. One of the vows they made was to submit themselves to the discipline of the church because that is one of the responsibilities God gives to the church, as Paul makes clear in his first epistle to the Corinthians.

In our text in Romans, God is excommunicating the whole human race, at least for a season. He pronounces His judicial abandonment on all mankind for their refusal to respond to the clear revelation of Himself that God gives. Because by nature we repress that truth, God delivers us to our sin.

Sins Against God and Nature

Here is a thought that maybe you have not considered often, but one of which you need to be cognizant: sometimes, maybe even most times, the sin we commit is a punishment for sin. Let me say it again. Most of the time, when we sin, we are working out God’s punishment for our sin. It is not like every time we sin, we commit a new transgression. Rather, the sinful impulses we harbor, embrace, and experience in our actual transgressions—those impulses we harbor in our hearts—are already the result of God’s judgment for our basic sin. That is what happens in judicial abandonment. That is what happens when God gives us over to our sinful impulses so that we become slaves to the very things we want to do.

Paul is not satisfied to speak in generalities in this text. He gives a detailed description of how those sinful passions are manifest in concrete, human behavior. Let us look in verse 26: “For this reason”—that is, for exchanging the truth of God for a lie—“God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature.” Here is a text that you will not hear often on public television. There are two things I need to say about it.

First, when the Apostle Paul describes the radical corruption of the human race, in order to paint that corruption as vividly as he possibly can, he sees homosexual behavior as the sin most representative of the radical nature of our fall. This is seen not simply as a sin, not simply as a serious sin, not even simply as a gross sin. Rather, it is described in the first chapter of Romans as the clearest expression of the depths of our perversity.

Second, notice that when Paul introduces the sin of homosexual behavior, he first mentions it with respect to females rather than males. I find that somewhat interesting, and I have to ask, Why do you suppose the Apostle says that even the women become involved in this sort of thing? Well, as long as there has been human history, it has always been the male who seems to be most brutish and sinful, without regard for conscience or godliness, much more so than the woman, who is always understood to be the fairer sex.

When Paul wants to describe the depth of the fall of the human race, he says, “Even the women.” “Even the women exchanged the natural use for what is contra naturum.” Not against culture, not against societal convention, Paul is saying that these actions are contra naturum, against the created nature itself. When we become involved in homosexual practices, we are not only sinning against God, but we are against the nature of things. All the debates that go on today about whether homosexual behavior is acquired or inherent genetically can be answered in this text right here: the Word of God says this behavior is not natural. This behavior is against nature as God has created it. I realize that when I say that in our culture, I am a voice crying in the wilderness. You know that as well as I do. But we have to deal with this. We cannot just skate over what the text says. But let us go on.

Paul continues, “Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.”

In this text, Paul is saying that when men and women engage in this kind of behavior, there are necessary, divinely appointed consequences. There is a price to be paid when we go this far to defy the law of God that He has established. They received “in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.”

There word “due” in that verse that has all but disappeared from our culture and our vocabulary. It has a rich history in ethics, going back to the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle and on down through Western civilization, wherein justice has been defined not only in the church but also outside the church as giving people what is due them, what is owed them. God is saying that when people so act against His law and the law of nature, He visits upon them their just deserts. He gives them what is their due.

A Debased Mind

If you are thinking, “Those terrible homosexuals—I am I glad I’m not one of them,” then fasten your seat belts, because this is just one sin Paul describes here. If you can make it through the whole list without feeling any pangs of conscience, you are likely a psychopath.

Paul says, “And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind,” a reprobate mind, a mind that does not focus attention on whatsoever things are true, pure, lovely, true, or just. A debased mind is filled with impurities, the desires of the flesh, lust, jealousy, hatred against people, a mind that is in love with the lie and flees from the truth. Your basic nature as a fallen human being and my basic nature as a fallen human being is this: “I don’t want to receive the knowledge of God in the first place, and when it does penetrate into my mind, the last thing I want to do is keep it there. I don’t want to retain it.”

Once again, God uses judicial abandonment: “If you don’t want Me in your thoughts, if you want a mind fixed on debauchery, you can have it. I’m giving you over to the mind of the reprobate who has no time for the things of God in his thinking.”

This morning, I spoke with one of our members about tonight’s Sunday evening service. I said to him: “I can’t get over how many people are coming out to the evening service. I’m amazed that they will sit still for fifty minutes or so for me to give a sermon. Most of the time, people don’t want anything more than twenty minutes. That’s their attention span. So why would they sit here for fifty minutes?”

Do you know what he said to me? He said: “I can’t believe there are not five times that many people here. I believe that if at the end of fifty minutes, you said, ‘Let’s take a ten-minute break and then come back for another fifty-minute sermon on the Word of God,’ most of the people wouldn’t stay.” He added, “But I would stay because I want to hear the Word of God.”

Do you realize how rare it is among human beings to have a taste and a love to hear the Word of God? Do you realize that if you have any affection in your heart tonight to hear the things of God, that is only possible if God the Holy Spirit has already rescued you from this condition Paul is describing that is basic to all humanity? If you have a desire to learn the things of God, then something has happened to plant that desire in your heart, because at one time in your life, you had the mind of a reprobate and did not want knowledge of God to stay in your mind.

Filled with Unrighteousness

“And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting”—how’s that for an understatement—“being filled with all unrighteousness.”

If you go out in the street and ask people if they think man is basically good or basically bad, do you know what the answer will be ninety-five out of a hundred times because of the impact of humanism on our culture? The answer will be this: “We’re basically good. Nobody’s perfect, we know that. We all do things wrong from time to time. But those mistakes we make are at the periphery of our existence. They don’t penetrate to the core, to the heart of our humanity. They’re external things, peccadilloes, as it were, nothing to be all that concerned about, and certainly nothing to seek religion over.”

I do not know how many times people have said to me, “I don’t need Jesus.” Boy, I wish I could say I did not need Jesus. The reality is, there is nothing I need more in all of the world than Jesus, and there is nothing you need more than Jesus. But as long as you tickle your own imagination and say that you are basically good, basically good people do not need Jesus.

It is people who not only are tainted by unrighteousness who need to hear this gospel that Paul is going to open up to us in the letter to the Romans, it is people who he says are filled with unrighteousness. That is how he describes us in our natural condition. We are not merely mildly affected by error, bad habits, or mistakes. Rather, we are filled, saturated with unrighteousness. Would you describe yourself that way, that in your natural condition, you are saturated with unrighteousness?

Sexual Immorality

Unrighteousness is a general term, and Paul wants to get more specific. So, he begins to elaborate the kind of unrighteousness that fills us as fallen creatures, beginning with “sexual immorality.” Elsewhere the Apostle writes to the church, “Let not fornication ever be named among you, as befitting saints.”

A recent poll by Gallup said that the incidence of fornication and adultery among born-again Christians has no measurable difference from unconverted pagans in America. I remember John MacArthur, when he heard that, said: “That’s just not true. The only way you can come to that conclusion is by how you phrase the questions in the poll and how you define an evangelical Christian.”

I know that true regenerate Christians fall into these sins, do not get me wrong. But when they do, it should be a radical exception to Christian behavior, not something that is generally accepted. People get their cues today for their behavior not from what God says is acceptable to Him but from what the culture says is acceptable.

Some people say: “Aren’t you a little old-fashioned? Haven’t you lived through the 60s? Don’t you know you’re on the other side of the sexual revolution?” So, we end up with Christian parents giving their daughters birth control pills. What is the message they are conveying? They are conveying that sexual immorality is okay. But this is right at the top of the list to describe the degree of our corruption. Sex is a beautiful thing, a divine creation given to God’s people. But He gives a context for it, and He is jealous that it be reserved for that context.

Whisperers of Depravity

Paul goes on, talking about “wickedness,” which is still general, and “covetousness.” Covetousness is the sign of a person who does not want God in his thinking. When you covet somebody else’s property, prestige, or job, you are saying, “God is not just in giving that person that benefit and not giving it to me.” When that is the case, God is not in your thinking. The minute you are envious, jealous, or covetous of another person, you have banished God from your mind.

Recently, I read a book on a phenomenon called the “emergent church,” which I hope is another passing fad that will go away as fast as it came. One of the gurus of the emergent church boasted that in the last ten years of his preaching, he has never once mentioned the word sin. He did not want to destroy people’s self-identity or self-worth, their ego. I have mentioned the word sin more tonight than that man has in his lifetime. You cannot read a page of sacred Scripture without dealing with the fundamental problem of our humanity.

I am a Calvinist, and I read all of the complaints against Calvin, how he was a grouch who had such a negative view of human beings in teaching the total depravity of sinners and so on. I challenge people about that. I say, “John Calvin, as far as any theologian I know in history, had the highest view of human beings I’ve ever seen.” They say: “What? When Calvin goes on and on about depravity, it doesn’t sound very high to me.” I answer: “The reason Calvin takes sin so seriously is because he takes people so seriously.” The reason God takes sin so seriously is not because He’s a bully or a killjoy and doesn’t want His creatures to have any fun. Rather, God knows how destructive sin is to the world, to relationships, friends, family, and marriages. God has a better idea for what humans are to experience, and His ultimate plan of redemption will banish sin from His world altogether.

Paul continues describing the unrighteousness of which he speaks as “covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil-mindedness; they are whisperers.” They whisper their plans because they cannot speak out loud. Even in a fallen world their plans are so evil that the world will reject them. So, we whisper.

Paul then talks about “backbiters.” Have you ever had anyone ever bite you in the back? Has anyone ever talked about you behind your back? Has anyone ever slandered you? Why should they not? Think of how many people you have bitten in their back, how many people you have slandered, how many people you have talked about behind their back and said things that were not nice. This is not a problem for pagans only. This is our humanity. We are given to this sort of behavior.

Invention of Sins

Look at the next one: “haters of God.” Who will admit that they actually hate God? He continues with “violent, proud, boasters.” Here is one: “inventors of evil things.” As if there were not enough temptations and sins to arouse our vile passions, we like to think up new ways to sin.

Several years ago, when Bennett Cerf was still at Random House Publishers, he commissioned a series of books on the classics and had famous people write critical introductions to the reprints of these classics in literature. Rod Serling from The Twilight Zone was commissioned to write the critical introduction to Saint Augustine’s classic, the Confessions. Serling was quite cynical about it. He said that he didn’t understand how Augustine’s Confessions was ever regarded as a classic, because Augustine went into great detail about how remorseful he felt as an adult for being involved in a childish prank by stealing pears from somebody’s orchard. Serling asked, “What kind of a man would have conscience pangs as an adult because he stole pears as a child?” I thought, “Rod Serling, you must be from the twilight zone. You have no comprehension of what Augustine is talking about.”

I can relate. I was just thinking about this the other day when someone inadvertently put an onion on my plate. I hate onions. Onions hate me. When I was a child, I used to go to Nick Green’s orchard and watch Nick go down one row harvesting his grapes. As he was on one row, I made sure I was on another row with a big paper bag stealing his grapes. I could afford to go to the store and buy the grapes, but it was more fun to steal them. I stole grapes from Nick Green’s orchard. I stole pears from his pear tree. I stole apples from his apple trees, but at least I liked apples, and I liked pears, and I liked grapes. But the first time I was grounded for two weeks was when I was caught raiding a neighbor’s garden and pulling up every onion from her onion patch. She saw me, and she called my mother. My mother grounded me for two weeks.

I was thinking about that the other day when somebody put that onion on my plate. I thought: “I’m still paying the price for that. I understand why Augustine was so remorseful. He stole pears when he didn’t like pears, just like I stole onions when I didn’t like onions.” You know why I stole onions? For the sheer pleasure of destroying somebody else’s property. What kind of a person would do that? This kind. I was not satisfied with the garden-variety sins. I had to invent one by stealing someone’s onions.

A Partial List

The next phrase on Paul’s list is “disobedient to parents.” Young people, pay attention to that. When you are disobedient to your parents, you reveal that this is your natural condition. The next word is “undiscerning.” Notice all these negative terms: “undiscerning, untrustworthy, unloving, unforgiving, unmerciful.”

Do you know the scary part about this list? It is only partial. It is merely representative of our corruption. If Paul were to enumerate all the sins the Bible spells out, he would have to take up the rest of the book of Romans and then some. Instead, he gives us a representative list that should be enough to stop every mouth and convict every conscience. Surely, there are things in Paul’s list that you recognize as a part of your own experience.

If you want to do an interesting experiment, go home and write down this list. Then tomorrow morning, open up your newspaper and see how many of these things are featured prominently in the news of the day as we continue to find ways to destroy each other as people.

But the worst indictment in the chapter is not found on this list of heinous crimes against God.

Worthy of Execution

In the conclusion of Romans 1, Paul says of the people who practice all of these things, “who, knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of death.” Paul says that we as fallen human beings not only do these things, but we know.

If we have never read the Bible, if we have never read the Old Testament—and we will see this later on in Romans—we still know that God has planted a conscience in the mind of every creature made in His image that can discern the difference between good and evil. Even Immanuel Kant understood the universal character of the categorical imperative. We call people who have no conscience “sociopaths” or “psychopaths”—that is, they are sick. But a normal person, a normal fallen person, a person whose normal behavior is the abnormality of sin knows that those who do these things are worthy of death.

Young people, when you disobey your parents, do you really think that God would be just in taking your life for doing that? God commands you to honor your parents, and if you dishonor your parents, you do not just dishonor your parents; you disobey God. God commands me not to covet, and if I covet, I am worthy of execution because I have committed an act of cosmic treason.

Every time I sin, I challenge and defy God’s right to reign over His creation, God’s right to impose obligations to me as a creature made in His image. Who am I to tell God that He has no right to restrain my behavior? But you see, we have declared our independence. Because we declared our independence, God has abandoned us by nature to judicial abandonment, and we thought that was God’s setting us free. But we still know the sinfulness of sin.

Approval of Sin

It gets worse. Not only do those who do such things and practice things know the righteous judgment of God that they deserve death, but listen to this: “but also approve of those who practice them.” There is honor among thieves. Misery loves company. If I have a guilty conscience, rather than repenting, if I can entice you to join me in my sin and get enough people to join me in my sin, we can get rid of the taboos. We can then have a whole new ethic.

If you do not think that this accurately describes human beings, I challenge you to watch television for the next three months and listen to the rhetoric. I recall listening to a television program having to do with a Supreme Court justice nominee, and there was a woman on the program from one of the organizations favoring abortion. She was concerned that the nominee would take away women’s reproductive rights—the right to kill their offspring and to be sexually involved without being concerned about the consequences. She was demanding her rights and hoping to ensure by law that people might have the right to sin when and where they please. The very word right has been redefined in our culture to mean that everyone has a right to do what they want to do with impunity.

God does not give us that kind of right. But when we act against Him in defiance, we marshal all the support we can get in the culture to lessen our guilt and gain allies in our revolt against heaven. That is the Word of God about our estate.

The Coming Gospel

Thanks be to God, Romans does not end at the end of chapter 1. The gospel is coming. The good news is coming, and people who do not care about the good news perhaps will care if they digest the bad news first and realize what it is that our Savior has done, what He has saved us from, for, and unto, to be conformed to His image, to love the things that He loves, and to hate the things that He hates. Let us pray.

Our Father, the indictment seems harsh. It sounds severe, until we think about it for even a moment. We know that we cannot escape this indictment. O Father, do not ever abandon us to our sin or expose us to Your judgment. For we ask it in the name of Christ. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.