Romans: The Story of God Bible Commentary

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¹⁸The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, ¹⁹since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. ²⁰For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

²¹For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. ²²Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools ²³and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.

²⁴Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. ²⁵They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator — who is forever praised. Amen.

²⁶Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. ²⁷In 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.

²⁸Furthermore, 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. ²⁹They 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, ³⁰slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; ³¹they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. ³²Although 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.

Listening to the texts in the story: Genesis 1 – 3; 6 – 10; Psalms 19; 98; 106; Exodus 20:4 – 5; Leviticus 18:22; Wisdom of Solomon 13 – 15.

What Paul says now must be placed against the backdrop of a wider story of creation and fall. Paul knows that the world has gone horribly wrong. The intrusion of evil into the world has meant that alienation and hostility exist between God and humanity. Furthermore, as a direct result of the entrance of evil, humans themselves perpetrate the most inhumane acts toward each other. These verses thus echo the scriptural story of Adam and Eve as the impact of their “fall” is now experienced on the entire human race — a story Paul will take up again in 5:12 – 21. In addition, the reference to exchanging the “truth about God for a lie” in Romans 1:25 is definitely allusive to how our primeval parents were seduced by the lie of the deceiver. Romans 1:18 – 25 shows how pagan peoples rehearse Adam’s sin in their own rebellion against God and so extend their exile from God’s presence.¹ Paul is showing what the story of humanity’s descent into wickedness laid out in Genesis 1 – 11 looks like when manifested in downtown Rome.

Paul contends that (1) human wickedness is sourced in a denial of natural knowledge of God (vv. 18 – 23), (2) resulting in a corruption that has infiltrated even into human sexuality (vv. 24 – 27), and (3) he catalogues the moral deviancy of humanity without God (vv. 28 – 32). Sketched out futher, Paul documents how people, when deprived of knowledge of God, enter into a depraved state that combines idolatry, immorality, impurity, and inhumanity. He sees the full plight of people in their most wretched state, where they are deliberately ignorant, darkened in reason, sexually debased, consumed with love for evil, and worthy of condemnation. Tragically, the once glorious children of Adam and Eve have become little more than brutal beasts that seek to shake off the last bridles that hold any form of constraint upon pursuing their pleasures and cultivating their carnality. God has only one response to such a disobedient and destructive creature: wrath!

Paul moves the discussion on with the words, “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness” (v. 18). But how does this relate to what has gone before? How does the revelation of God’s righteousness (v. 17) relate to the revelation of God’s wrath (v. 18)?² The NIV obscures the connection with the preceding verses by omitting the coordinating conjunction gar (“for”). Better is “For the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven” (see ESV, NRSV, and NET). Worse is the NLT, which assumes a contrast between v. 17 and v. 18 with “But God shows his anger from heaven.” It looks to me as if the proximity and parallel between the revelation of righteousness in the gospel and the revelation of wrath from heaven indicate that God’s gospel determines the purpose of God’s wrath. The gospel unveils the “secrets of the human heart,” which Christ will judge on the appointed day (see Rom 2:16; 14:10; 1 Cor 14:25). The gospel spells out human culpability to such a shocking extent that divine justice seems not only inevitable but even morally necessary. It is under the shadow of divine wrath that the good news of God’s grace, mercy, and salvation appears all the more unlikely, entirely unmerited, and even scandalous.³

What is more, a further connection between v. 17 and v. 18 is that the revelation of God’s wrath is itself a manifestation of God’s righteousness. Let us remember that the biblical background for God’s righteousness refers to God’s saving justice for Israel. Yet God would save Israel by entering into contention against her enemies, such as the Canaanites, the Assyrians, or the Babylonians. God’s deliverance of Israel was principally through his retributive judgment of Israel’s enemies, establishing justice over the earth; this was his “righteousness” (e.g., Isa 11:3 – 5; Pss 89:5 – 18; 98:1 – 9). Yet the Israelites also knew that God could enter into contention against them, and they would ask God to pardon them for no other reason than his covenant faithfulness toward them; this too was his “righteousness” (e.g., Pss 51:14; 143:1 – 3; Dan 9:2 – 19). God’s saving righteousness and his punitive wrath are then different aspects of the one event.

Thus, God’s righteousness is a duality containing both a punitive verdict and a pardoning vindication, judgment and justification, retribution and redemption. The upshot is that the shift from v. 17 to v. 18 is a shift from God’s saving justice to God’s retributive justice. As such, v. 18 is not introducing a new topic.⁴ I would paraphrase the verse as, “In speaking of God’s saving justice, we cannot forget his punitive justice against evil either. For the righteous rage of God is even now being revealed from heaven against all who act without recourse to God and who descend into utterly wicked ways.”

What Paul says about God’s wrath here stands in continuity with the Old Testament’s depiction of God’s anger burning against those engaging in evil, whether kings, nations, or even Israel. In Paul’s letters, God’s wrath is normally something reserved for the judgment day (see Rom 2:5, 8; 4:15; 5:9; 9:22; 12:19), but here it is already in the process of “being revealed from heaven.” Heaven is obviously the seat of God’s throne, and Paul has in mind God’s ongoing process of retribution against human evils.⁵ Paul writes here in a prophetic role by stating God’s intention to prosecute his lawsuit against humanity on account of their idolatry and wickedness. The object of God’s ongoing wrath is identified as “all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness.” The point is that God’s anger burns against people who commit vertical sins against God (i.e., godlessness) and horizontal sins against their fellow humans (i.e., wickedness). This behavior derives from a suppression of the truth about God — a keeping down the truth that God is there and that he will treat each according to their deeds. Evidently God’s existence and justice are so traumatic for people who treasure their personal evils that they are left with only one option to cope with such a predicament: denial.

The reason why people suppress the truth about God is given in v. 19 as “since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.” People are universally confronted with God, and that is what they need to suppress. What this knowledge of God is and how it is apparently plain to people Paul does not precisely say, but theologians have sometimes spoken of a twofold natural knowledge of God.⁶ First, an innate knowledge of God is hardwired into human existence — a sense of the divine, or an inherent awareness of God’s being that connects immediately with human existence. Second, a derivative knowledge of God can be inferred from the immensity, order, and beauty of creation itself. Paul arguably refers to a knowledge of God of this order that is manifested, literally, “in them” (en autois) in vv. 19 – 20. As Schreiner comments, “God has stitched into the fabric of the human mind his existence and power, so that they are instinctively recognized when one views the created world.”⁷

Experiencing the wonder of the world around us imparts to us an awareness of a Creator who is distinct from creation and who is also sovereign over its operation. Hence Paul’s words: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made” (v. 20). The visible things of the world point to an invisible Creator who possesses “eternal power” (aidios dynamis) and a “divine nature” (theiotēs). Human beings have been wired up to know him and to believe in him so that when they observe nature, the theater of God’s glory, they instinctively know something of God. Indeed, they may even feel, as Calvin did, ravished by God’s beauty.⁸

The tragedy is that rather than appropriate this knowledge of God as their Creator with worship, human beings instead reason their way away from God. Paul identifies the human response to God’s revelation of himself in nature as issuing in a refusal to either glorify him or thank him. This results in people becoming futile and foolish in their thinking, darkened in their hearts, and exchanging the glory of God for inglorious idols that resemble birds, animals, and reptiles (Rom 1:21 – 23). This is what it means in practice to suppress the truth about God, which Paul mentioned in 1:18. Sin turns people’s minds away from God and even against God.

This is called the noetic effect of sin. Sin does not simply mess with humanity’s moral compass. Sin infects the mind to such a degree that human reasoning assumes a default position that is hostile to God. People prefer to be stupefied by their sin rather than immerse themselves in God’s majesty. People savor the dementia of evil over the joy of worshiping their Creator. Origen said that “those who seemed to exalt themselves as living in the light of wisdom were cast down into the deepest darkness of stupidity.”⁹ At the root of the problem is the idea of exchange. Humanity has “exchanged” the glory of the immortal God for inglorious things made in the image of creatures (see Deut 4:16 – 17). Just as Adam and Eve believed the serpent rather than God, so too has humanity “exchanged” the truth of God for a lie. Humanity has fallen into a downward spiral that progresses from disobedience, to denial, to idolatry, to degrading passions, and to a depraved mind. In this wretched state humanity has become doxologically challenged.¹⁰

God does not shrug his shoulders at human rebellion; instead, Paul says, “Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator — who is forever praised. Amen” (vv. 24 – 25). In sequence, idolatry leads to immorality since depriving God of his glory yields people up to depraved desires. According to Wisdom of Solomon 14:27, “For the worship of idols not to be named is the source and cause and end of every evil.” Or as Moo points out, the whole panopoly of people’s sins that plagues humanity has its roots in the soil of idolatry.¹¹

The “therefore” in v. 24 announces the first divine response to human wickedness. God gives people over to the very desires that serve to alienate them from him. That God “gives them over” (paredōken) most probably means that God takes away his constriction of their depravity, and humanity is thus freed to indulge in its perverse desires. According to Ambrosiaster, “to hand over means to permit, not to encourage or to force.”¹² The results of the unchecked gratification of sinful desires are a polluting and shaming of their own bodies.

Although there is no explicit wording to the effect that the “impurity” and “degrading” is sexual as the NIV states, sexual conduct is probably implied given the following context in vv. 26 – 27. On top of that, Wisdom of Solomon connects sexual immorality with idolatry; hence “the idea of making idols was the beginning of fornication, and the invention of them was the corruption of life” (Wis 14:12). Noticeably, the effects of sin are not spelled out in terms of guilt and debt, but with reference to impurity and dishonor, something familiar to the Jewish and Greco-Roman worldview. The underlying premise for Paul’s remarks is that humans bear God’s image, and the web of idolatry and immorality constitutes a sickening contamination of that image and an offensive misuse of something precious to God. Human sin could be likened to taking a prestigious Oscar statue, vomiting your bacteria-filled stomach over it, and then using it to clean your toilet. Sin is the defilement and dishonoring of little icons of God.

In addition, humans “exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator” (v. 25). Human desires are turned away from God so that the truth about God, his existence, and his attributes is exchanged for servitude to dead, inanimate objects. Humanity, with its debased desires, would rather worship things they have created themselves rather than pay homage to their Creator. Paul’s critique here of pagan religion and pagan behavior is not new. In Isaiah 40, 44, Wisdom of Solomon 13 – 15, and throughout Philo we find similar denunciations of the folly of idolatry by Jewish authors. Speaking of these heretical acts makes Paul shudder, and he interjects a short doxology to the “God who is forever praised” as a deliberate counterpoint to human idolatry (v. 25). Paul praises the God whom pagans ignore or blaspheme. Evidently a key indicator for the spiritual and moral state of men and women can be summed up with the question: Whom do you worship?

Paul next provides a concrete example of the contamination and degradation of the body caused by wicked desires with particular reference to homosexual practices. Paul does not focus on sexual sins because he has some kind of fixation with sex, but because sexual immorality is a type of warning light that signals the moral chaos that follows it.¹³ When Paul says in v. 26, “Because of this,” the antecedent to “this” is probably God’s wrath against human wickedness back in v. 18. Paul restates the point he just made that God, after observing the godlessness and impropriety of people, gave the people “over to shameful lusts.” Paul now gives a precise example of these lusts with mention of homoerotic acts (vv. 26 – 27): “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.” The passage is understandably controversial, especially in light of marriage equality debates and issues pertaining to the ordination of openly gay men and women in some mainline denominations.¹⁴ What the text says and what one should do with it are huge matters for exegetical investigation and pastoral application.

In the Greco-Roman world, generally speaking, same-sex relationships between women were routinely condemned, while homosexual acts between men were regarded as normal under certain conditions. Ancient Greek culture had a long tradition of pederasty between older males and younger boys. In Rome, homoerotic relationships were largely about power since one sexually penetratred a social inferior, such as a freedman, a slave, or a prostitute. It was thought shameful for a citizen to allow himself to be the penetrated partner in a sexual act with a social equal as it meant adopting a position of servility and femininity. In ancient literature one can find philosophical advocates for the superiority of same-sex relationships over heterosexual relationships. Still, other Greek and Roman authors regarded homosexual acts with disdain. Juvenal mocked the drunken debauchery of women that often led to lesbian sexual acts.¹⁵ The Socratic tradition as expressed through Plato and Xenophon condemned homosexual practices.¹⁶

The Old Testament resoundingly prohibits homosexual practices (Lev 18:22; 20:13), and the rejection is continued in postbiblical Jewish literature as well.¹⁷ In keeping with Jewish tradition, Paul too censures homosexual acts in other letters (1 Cor 6:9; 1 Tim 1:10).¹⁸ Looking at Romans 1:24 – 28, Paul appears to be describing Roman and Greek males who lived promiscuous lives with procreative sex at home and recreative sex with others, including prostitutes and slaves, of both genders. Paul expresses the customary Jewish revulsion at the practice as a departure from God’s gift of human sexuality.

It is useful to think about Paul’s remarks about homosexuality here in light of the diverse social location of his audience. First, if many of the Gentile Christians in Rome were slaves, they were open to frequent sexual abuse and exploitation by their male masters. Not only girls and women, but even young boys were captured, imported, sold, and then prostituted into sexual slavery. Christian slaves may have known all too well the degrading shame and physical violation of sexual subjection. A way that masters often teased their male slaves was by reminding them of what they could demand of them, i.e., to get down on all fours.¹⁹ Paul’s remarks represent an introduction to the plight of present and former slaves who resented the sexual exploitation of themselves and their children in a culture typified by an aggressive bisexuality.²⁰ Second, for those Christians who were slave owners and made slaves gratify their sexual lusts, who might have previously participated in symposia (i.e., drinking parties) with homoerotic pleasures, who used male prostitutes, or who engaged in homosexual relationships, they could see their former way of life as an experience of divine wrath, a wrath that they have now escaped by coming under the lordship of Jesus Christ.

Central to Paul’s critique of homosexuality is its unnaturalness as indicated by his use of the word physikos for “nature/natural.” Paul’s phrase para physin is best translated as “contrary to nature” since the natural use of sex organs is exchanged for something else.²¹ He says that women exchanged “the natural use [of men] for what is contrary to nature [i.e., lesbianism],” and that men left the “natural use of women [i.e., in the sexual act]” and instead became “inflamed with lust for one another.” As Robert Gagnon points out, Paul, minimally, is referring to the anatomical and procreative complementarity of men and women as their sexual organs are designed for each other, something not true of gay sex.²²

If we take Romans 1:26 – 28 together with other Pauline texts about the human body (e.g., 1 Cor 7:1 – 40; 11:1 – 16), it is clear that sexuality is intrinsic to human bodily existence and that heterosexuality in particular was part of the divinely created order for humanity. Departures from the norm of God’s creation represent defiance against the Creator and are indicative of a state of lostness. To suppress the truth about the one God who made the heavens and the earth invariably leads to a rejection of God’s design for sex as a means of partnership and procreation between men and women. As N. T. Wright comments: “homosexual behaviour is a distortion of the creator’s design and . . . such practices are evidence, not of the intention of any specific individual to indulge in such practice for its own sake, but of the tendency within an entire society for humanness to fracture when gods other than the true one are being worshipped.”²³

It is important to note that Paul is not dealing exclusively with pederasty, even though it formed a large part of homosexual practice in the ancient Mediterranean world.²⁴ Greek society, even more so than Roman society, accepted a variegated pattern of sexual behavior ranging from the use of male and female slaves as sexual “partners,” through to pederasty, the sexual exploitation of young boys, but it must be remembered that life-long consensual homosexual relationships were not unknown and even same-sex marriages took place. According to Sprinkle, “there was a broad spectrum of sexual relationships available to Paul. We cannot assume that Paul only had nonconsensual and unhealthy relations in view and therefore condemned (only) these types of relations. Paul most probably was aware of at least some consensual, even marital, unions among both men and women of the same gender.”²⁵

Paul’s specification of lesbianism alongside male homosexuality in 1:26 – 27 makes explicit that he is addressing same-sex practice in general and not only pederasty or any variant form.²⁶ Thus Paul makes a strongly egalitarian claim that both male and female same-sex relationships are judged equally even though Greco-Roman society deemed the lesbian relationship as para physin while the male homosexual relationship had some social acceptance. For Paul, men and women were equally at risk of idolatry and falling deeper into the path of dehumanization.

These verses contain a long list of vices that people in their depraved state commit, and Paul makes specific mention of God’s righteous judgment against those who do such things. Paul rehearses what he has already said by adding: “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” (v. 28). God has given people over to the desires of their hearts (v. 24), to their dishonorable passions (v. 26), and to a depraved mind (v. 28). God is allowing people to submerge themselves further into the depth of subhumanity because it is tragically what they want. The result is patterns of behavior that “ought not to be done.”

The morass of immoral behaviors spelled out in vv. 29 – 31 is analogous to the vice lists found in other Greco-Roman, Jewish, and Christian writings.²⁷ Lest we think Paul is overly enthusiastic in his cataloguing of immoral behaviors, I would point out that Philo lists 147 items in one of his vice lists.²⁸ We might paraphrase Paul’s list here as:

And now they are like jugs of sewage filled to the brim with rank injustice, moral rot, insatiable greed, engrossed with envy, plotting murder, engaged in endless wrangling, given to open treachery, a maelstrom of malevolence, loving violence, full of false accusations, haters of anything or anyone to do with religion, resolutely insolent, utterly arrogant, completely full of themselves, architects of evil, parents of perdition. They have become a horde of senseless, untrustworthy, unfeeling, and unmerciful subhuman creatures who have divested themselves of a true humanity.

The climax of the vice list is v. 31, with the claim that people engrossed in wickedness have “no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy.”²⁹ That is illustrative of the fact that sin is fundamentally a negation of humanity; it takes away something of our ability to know, trust, love, and empathize with others. Sin at its worst erodes what is best about our humanity.

Although humans might feign ignorance of God becaue of their suppression of knowledge about him, deep down Paul says “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” (v. 32). The corruption of the human heart becomes such that it denies the fittingness of God’s judgment against wickedness; but not only that, it arrogates itself to approving of what God abhors. The inversion of values is the ultimate evidence that humanity has gone rotten.

To be blunt, reading Romans 1:18 – 32 is like walking down the crack alley of the human soul. Paul documents the irreligious and inhumane depths that humanity descends into when alienated from the Creator God. Paul fittingly expounds the story of a world gone horribly wrong on account of human rebellion against God, and he describes what that story looks like in downtown Rome. Rufus and his house church would resonate with Paul’s words as they recognized his description of moral evils and prevalent idolatry as a state that surrounded them constantly in their daily lives. According to Paul, when Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden of Eden, there was a gradual process of corruption that infected the entire span of human existence. Now in Romans 1:18 – 32, we meet the depths of the Adamic condition in the immorality and idolatry of pagan peoples. Paul’s declaration of the revelation of God’s righteousness in the gospel surfaces as God’s intention to rectify humanity, but it also unveils the vile condition of humanity and the fittingness of divine judgment against them. In sum, we see that “God insists on his rightful claim to be God against the world which denies him.”³⁰

Romans 1:18 – 32 holds many hot-potato topics — things like God and nature, idolatry and false religion, or the essence of sin. But two topics that I think stand out for reflection are God’s wrath and Paul’s teaching about homosexuality.

The “wrath of God” is not a favorite topic of discourse, and many people much prefer instead to mediate on the love of God.³¹ Yet “wrath” at this point in Romans is not meant in the sense of some kind of disproportionate and implacable fit of blind rage that God suddenly spins into because he sees people on earth doing naughty things and because people are not paying him enough attention. No, God’s wrath is the response of his holiness toward moral evil. It is God’s righteous indignation, his rage even, against those who seek to undermine his reign, who gratify the most debasing of desires, or who seek to abuse the most vulnerable of persons. When I lived in Scotland, I heard a shocking news story about a couple who violently beat their four-year-old daughter to death, put her body in a suitcase, and threw her into the River Ness. When I heard the story, I had only one emotion — rage — and an appropriate emotion it was considering the heinous deed. In a world of evil, God’s wrath is good news, for it means he stands against wickedness!

It is unfortunate that some churches and traditions tend to deny or downplay the significance of God’s wrath. The trend began early when the second-century heretic Marcion omitted the genitive “of God” in the “wrath of God” from v. 18 in his edition of Paul’s letters in order to remove God from the notion of wrath. The late C. H. Dodd found the notion of God’s wrath so unpalatable that he described God’s wrath not as a willful action, but simply as “some process or effect in the realm of objective facts,” a process that God is somewhat removed from.³² Also, Rob Bell’s recent book Love Wins wrestles with the question: If Jesus saves us from God’s wrath, how could that God ever be good, or how could that message ever be good news? Bell’s answer is that ultimately God’s love and God’s wrath are irreconcilable and love must win over wrath if God is to be a gracious God. A friend of mine once attended a denominational meeting where the song “In Christ Alone” was played, and he noticed how a significant number of clergy present could not bring themselves to utter the line in the song that says, “The wrath of God is satisfied.” You get the point: God’s wrath is not popular!

Now nobody likes the idea of an angry God. People much prefer a gentler and more sensitive deity, perhaps a friendly and benign old man who lives in the heavens, something along the lines of an Anglican version of Santa Claus. But, in the face of human evil, divine love without divine wrath yields up a “God” lacking a moral spine and incapable of dishing out justice to each as they deserve. Such a morally vacuous “God” suits the proclivity of people uncomfortable with the notion that any recompense remains for their deeds and so they can dispense with the necessity of repentance and satisfy themselves with a “God” who, while disliking sin, has not the stomach to hold anyone accountable for their deeds. The result is that we are given a picture of God that all too candidly resembles the one that H. Richard Niebuhr warned us about: a God without wrath who takes men and women without sin to a kingdom without judgment thanks to the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.³³

In response, we can assert the biblical testimony that God burns with rage against evil; not just the evil that dictators and pedophiles commit, but evil that languishes inside each and every one of us. The human heart is, as Calvin said, a factory of idols. The human heart is, as Ezekiel saw, wicked to its core.

Now is not the time to engage in a treatise on total depravity, but if you ever want to see the evil in the human heart, just permit people the opportunity of acting anonymously. When people think no one is watching or they cannot be caught, you will see what malice people are really capable of and what sinister desires they harbor. Each of us in our own way shakes our little fist against heaven and cries out in arrogance, “I will do it my way.” While we are not as evil as we can be — the goodness of the divine image still resonates within us — even so, evil is a disease that invades our soul or a beast raging inside us that we will not tame. That is why, as Paul says in Ephesians, we were once deserving of God’s wrath (Eph 2:5). It is God’s wrath against our evil, God’s contention against our self-worship, God’s lawsuit against our lawlessness, that deserves judgment. Unless we accept the premise of God’s anger against evil, our evil no less, the gospel loses its gravity. As Katherine Grieb writes: “An evangelist who preaches only God’s love without insisting also upon God’s righteousness against wickedness and evil does not really preach good news.”³⁴

Of course, it is equally possible to misuse the notion of divine wrath and end up with an equally distorted image of God as some type of “rage-aholic.” Let us remember that wrath is not a permanent part of God’s nature; rather, it is something provoked or aroused by human misconduct, not intrinsic to his person. God’s justice is indeed a permanent fixture of his character, and that justice can be expressed as divine wrath when circumstances render it appropriate. Yet God is not in a perpetual state of anger, as if “wrath” was his normal state of mind. As Stephen Travis puts it: “Wrath is not a permanent attribute of God. For whereas love and holiness are part of his essential nature, wrath is contingent upon human sin: if there were no sin, there would be no wrath.”³⁵ If love without wrath yields a morally vacuous God, to preach wrath without mercy is to turn God into a masochistic monster.

Jonathan Edwards’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” was a classic piece of Puritan preaching crafted to bring people to wallow in misery for their sins and to cling to God in his mercy and love. Edwards set forth a vivid image of God’s wrath against sin at one point saying, “God holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like a fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire.” Yet note where Edwards takes his sermon: “And now you have an extraordinary opportunity, a day wherein Christ has thrown the door of his mercy wide open, and stands in calling and crying with a loud voice to poor sinners, a day wherein many are flocking to him, and pressing into the kingdom of God.”

To preach on wrath without mercy will result either in a hatred for God or in a desperate yet ultimately futile attempt to please him with moral striving and religiosity. To preach on wrath in isolation from a well-rounded biblical theology will reduce salvation to buying fire insurance rather than seeing salvation as participating in the very life of God held forth in Christ. When one speaks of divine wrath, it should not be done with an angry voice and with fists pounding a pulpit, but with eyes welling with tears and hands wide open, as if one were begging a suicidal son or daughter to come down from a ledge, recalling as well that God does not delight in the destruction of the wicked but desires all people to be saved. The Lord Jesus does not seek to persuade a wrathful Father to be merciful. For if God was not merciful, he would not have sent his only Son to be a propitiation for our sins. The good news is that God satisfies his own justice and placates his own wrath by expunging our sin through drawing its deadly consequences away from us and taking us into the life of the triune God.

Finally, the message of divine wrath is not just something that explains to lost men and women why Jesus is Savior and what deeds they need to repent of. God’s wrath continues to have an exhortatory function in the church. God’s wrath operates in the spheres of creation and covenant as it presumes God’s intent to put the world to rights and to hold his covenant partners to account. We understand the nature of God, sin, and salvation only when we realize that “all of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath” (Eph 2:3). Only then can we appreciate the big “but” that changes the course of cosmic history: “But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions — it is by grace you have been saved” (Eph 2:4 – 5).

Karl Barth told a story about a man who got lost on his way home one night in a blinding snowstorm. On finding his way, he was horrified when he realized that he had walked across a lake covered only by a very thin sheet of ice.³⁶ In the same way, reflecting on the wrath of God reminds us of the perilous disaster we once faced and how grateful we must be to our gracious God for delivering us by handing over his Son for our transgressions and raising him for our justification (Rom 4:25).

“God hates me,” Roger said. “Whenever the preacher spoke from Leviticus or Romans, that is what I was told. God hates the gays the same way that he hated Sodom and Gomorrah. And since I knew I was gay, I believed that God hated me.”

Roger paused for a moment, removed his baseball cap, and rubbed his face. “I spent so many nights asking, begging, and crying for God to change me, but he never did. And that is when I realized, either he is not there, or else he doesn’t care.”

Roger’s story is one I’ve heard several times. Many men and women in the church who have same-sex desire can feel like God hates them simply for no other reason that they feel attracted to members of the same sex. It does not help when Christian people and Christian preachers talk as if God hates all sin, but he has some kind of special anger reserved for gays and lesbians.

Let me add that I’ve witnessed firsthand the threat of violence that homosexual men and women often face. Many years ago when I was in the army, after a week of maneuvers out in the field, I went on a boys’ night on the town with my unit. Late into the night we walked across a park and passed by two gay men who were holding hands on their quiet stroll. All of a sudden one of the highest ranking soldiers in our group started yelling out all sorts of profanities against the gay couple and had to be physically restrained from attacking them. The soldier in question was not religious, just drunk and prejudiced. The gay couple scurried away in fear. The memory of that event has stayed with me and made me more sensitive to the plight of gay men and women.

So how should we teach texts like Romans 1:26 – 27, given that many gay folks feel unloved by God and rejected by the church, and live with the threat of violence in our streets? Some respond by saying, “Well, Paul is only talking about pederasty, Paul only censures heterosexuals who perform homosexual acts out of power or excessive lust, Paul is unaware of life-long gay relationships, or else Paul does not have the final word on what counts as ‘natural.’ ”³⁷ I am not convinced by these arguments since I think Paul, as someone who lived in the Greco-Roman world, knew about the various expressions of human sexual behavior and also knew what the Jewish Scriptures taught about such things. In Romans 1:26 – 27, Paul demonstrates how human idolatry has resulted in a perversion of human sexuality. He documents instances where human sexuality has gone against what God originally intended.

However, as Ernst Käsemann correctly observed, for Paul sexual perversion is “the result of God’s wrath, not the reason for it.”³⁸ God does not have a special loathing for gays and lesbians. When Paul includes homosexual behavior in his vice lists, he does not make it the pinnacle of sinful behavior; rather, it is just another example of human conduct affronting to God (see 1 Cor 6:9 – 11). The Bible censures homosexual behavior, but it does not condemn people for having what we moderns would call a homosexual orientation. Let us remember that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23), and everyone needs redeeming mercy and transforming grace that is offered us in the Lord Jesus Christ. The gospel of grace is inclusive; it is open to everyone, men and women, Jew and Greek, black or white, Arab or American, gay or straight, bisexual or transsexual, and people may come as they are. But, and this is important, no one is allowed to stay as they are. God does his transforming work in us to change our values, our character, our conduct, and even our sexuality into conformity to the image of his Son.

It can, is, and will be a struggle for Christian men and women with same-sex attraction to live faithfully with the burden that they carry. Ideally they receive the prayer and support they need from a network of family, friends, mentors, supporters, and their congregation. I would even go so far as to say that struggling with same-sex attraction is not a bar to ministry since we all struggle with sin, even sins of a sexual nature. In fact, the best evangelical preacher I’ve heard in the UK, Vaughan Roberts, is the rector of a parish church in Cambridge. He confesses to struggle with same-sex attraction yet still has a vibrant and faithful ministry.

I used to lead an ecumenical Bible study on an army barracks. I remember vividly the small group in question: a fiery Lutheran warrant officer, a meek Pentecostal girl from the transportation corps, a liberal Catholic logistics captain, and a softly spoken nominally Anglican lady working for the Department of Defense. When we got to the subject of the then-recent election of Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury and his views of sexuality, well, the conversation heated up like a furnace. The Lutheran warrant officer earnestly made the point that the Bible condemns homosexuality. The liberal Catholic rebutted that sexuality is genetically determined and cannot be helped, so one should not condemn homosexuals. The nominal Anglican lady said that gay people make such great friends and are great at helping you decorate your house. Meanwhile the meek Pentecostal girl just sat there quietly not saying a thing. The polite conversation quickly became a heated argument with the polemical temperature rising by the second.

Despite my best efforts to moderate the tone and to change the subject, it just got worse. It turned into a yelling match with the Bible-bashing Lutheran trying to shout down the liberal Catholic on the one side and the nominal Anglican lady adding her two-cents every so often. The poor Pentecostal girl sat there very quiet, staring at the floor catatonically, wisely avoiding the melee. Right before I was gonna yell, “Time out, children, time to go home,” all of a sudden the Pentecostal girl loudly interjected with the words, “I used to be a lesbian, but Jesus saved me.” Right after that there was a silence you could cut with a knife. The Lutheran, the Catholic, the Anglican, and the poor Bible study leader had nothing to say. What do you say to that? How do you follow that up? The Pentecostal girl shared her story about her former life in lesbianism. She was clear that Jesus had saved her from that lifestyle and she was happily engaged to a lovely young man from her church. Let me be clear, I’m not saying that her story will be the story of every homosexual man and woman who professes faith. The reasons why people have same-sex desires are complex and range from biology to biography. Some Christians with same-sex desires struggle with it all of their lives in the same way that heterosexuals can struggle with certain desires. I know that there are many ex-gays, but I also know that there are many ex-ex-gays too.

My point is that while we need to affirm that Romans 1:26 – 27 places homosexual behavior under the category of sin, we can offer all men and women, with any kind of sexual struggle, the hope laid out in the rest of Romans, namely, that Christ saves us from the penalty of sin, gradually from the power of sin, and one day from the very presence of sin. The relevance of Romans to the “gay issue” is not some kind of cliché message that sinners must “turn or burn” or even “hate the sin but love the sinner.” The biblical response embodied by Paul is for all people to “believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead” (4:24), to confess that “Jesus is Lord” (10:9), to “clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh” (13:14), and for the church corporately to “accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God” (15:7).

1. On the role of Adam (and Eve) in Romans 1, several scholars think that 1:18 – 32 is at least allusive of Genesis 2 – 3. See Morna D. Hooker, “Adam in Romans 1,” NTS 6 (1959 – 60): 297 – 306; idem, “A Further Note on Romans 1,” NTS 13 (1966 – 67): 181 – 83; A. J. M. Wedderburn, “Adam in Paul’s Letter to the Romans,” in Studia Biblica 3 (ed. E.A. Livingstone; JSNTSup 3; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1980), 413 – 30; Schreiner, Romans, 81; Grieb, Story of Romans, 19.

2. Both verses use the verb apokalyptō, meaning “to cause something to be fully known” (BDAG 112).

4. Mark Seifrid, Christ, our Righteousness: Paul’s Theology of Justification (NSBT 9; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2000), 35 – 47.

5. In 3:5, wrath is something that can be brought against Paul’s Jewish interlocutor in the present time. Also, in 13:4, human governments are “agents of wrath” in their execution of justice and so represent one medium for divine wrath in the present time.

6. On natural revelation and natural theology, see further Bird, Evangelical Theology, 173 – 93.

8. See the exploration of this theme in Belden C. Lane, Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

9. Cited in J. Patout Burns, ed. and trans., Romans: Interpreted by Early Christian Commentators (The Church’s Bible; ed. R. L. Wilken; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 27.

10. Cf. Israel’s own “exchange” in the golden calf incident in Exodus 32; in Psalm 106:20 “they exchanged their glorious God for an image of a bull, which eats grass,” and in Jeremiah 2:11, “my people have exchanged their glorious God for worthless idols.”

12. Bray, Ambrosiaster, 12. Others like Moo (Romans, 111) prefer to see God taking a more active role: “God does not simply let the boat go — he gives it a push downstream. Like a judge who hands over a prisoner to the punishment his crime has earned, God hands over the sinner to the terrible cycle of ever-increasing sin.” The problem is that a “handing over” implies a moment of taking “hands off” the subject and leaving him or her susceptible to a power that God himself is not directly controlling, i.e., sin. Hence the idea of a withdrawal of divine restraint seems better.

14. What follows is heavily indebted to Michael F. Bird and Sarah Harris, “Paul’s Jewish Sexuality in Romans 1:26 – 27,” in Sexegesis: An Evangelical Response to Five Uneasy Pieces (ed. Gordon D. Preece and Michael F. Bird; Sydney: Anglican Press Australia, 2012), 87 – 104.

17. Cf., e.g., Philo, Abraham 135 – 36; Spec. Laws 2.50; T. Levi 14.6; 17.11; T. Naph. 4.1; 2 En. 10.4; Sib. Or. 3.185 – 87, 594 – 600, 763; 5.386 – 433; Josephus, Against Apion 2.25, 199.

18. Cf. the survey of literary ancient views about homosexuality and homoeroticism in Thomas K. Hubbard, Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 2003); Martti Nissinen, Homoeroticism in the Biblical World: A Historical Perspective (trans. K. Stjerna; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 57 – 122. Recommended reading also includes William R. G. Loader, Making Sense of Sex: Attitudes towards Sexuality in Early Jewish and Christian Literature (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013); and Preston M. Sprinkle, “Romans 1 and Homosexuality: A Critical Review of James Brownson’s Bible, Gender, Sexuality,” BBR 24.4 (2014): 515 – 28.

21. Philo and Josephus both refer to homosexual relations as “contrary to nature” (para physin) in several places (Josephus, Apion 2.273; Philo, Spec. Laws 3.38; Abraham 133 – 36). Josephus (Against Apion 2.199) even states that the marriage of a man and a woman is “according to nature” (kata physin) whereas a “mixing” (mixis) of male and male is abhorred by the law and deserving of death. The author of T. Naph 3.3 – 4 considers homosexuality a departure “from the order of nature.” Ovid (Metam. 9.758) refers to a girl who loved another girl, yet she knew that “nature does not will it.” Plato (Laws 1.2 [636 BC]) regarded sexual relations between same-sex couples as “contrary to nature.” Chrysostom wrote: “For which is more pleasurable pray, cohabiting with women or with males? With women or with mules? Yet still we shall find many that pass over women, and cohabit with creatures void of reason, and abuse the bodies of males. Yet natural pleasures are greater than unnatural ones” (Hom. Rom. 9).

22. Robert A. J. Gagnon, The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (Nashville: Abingdon, 2001), 254.

29. The verse is rhetorically powerful in Greek with a dense packing together of similar sounding words (asynetous, asynthetous, astorgous, and aneleçēmonas) to create assonance.

31. On the relationship between God’s love and God’s wrath, see D. A. Carson, “God’s Love and God’s Wrath,” BSac 156 (1999): 387 – 98; idem, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2000).

33. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1937), 193.

36. Karl Barth, “Saved by Grace,” Deliverance to the Captives (trans. M. Wieser; New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 35 – 42, cited by Grieb, Story of Romans, 26 – 27.

37. See James V. Brownson, Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church’s Debate on Same-Sex Relationships (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 223 – 55.