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God’s Wrath against Sinners
Romans 1:18–32
Outline
- The Revelation of God’s Wrath (1:18)
- The Reason for God’s Wrath (1:19–21)
- The Results of God’s Wrath (1:22–32)
Objectives
After reading this chapter, you should be able to
- Appreciate the reality and nature of God’s wrath.
- Define and give examples of God’s revelation in nature.
- Trace the manifold nature of human sin to its roots.
After the wonderful announcement of God’s good news of salvation through God’s righteousness in 1:16–17, we would expect Paul to dwell on the nature and blessings of that salvation. What a shock, then, to read about wrath, sin, idolatry, degradation, and judgment. But Paul has made no mistake. He knows that we cannot appreciate the good news until we thoroughly understand the bad news. Only when we have really come to grips with the extent of the human dilemma will we be able to respond as we should to the answer to that dilemma found in the good news about Jesus. An evangelistic strategy that used to be popular is called “The Romans Road” because it is based on the structure of Paul’s argument in Romans. No single evangelistic approach will fit every situation, but getting people to take the gospel seriously will often require us first to get people to take their own dilemma seriously. This is Paul’s strategy in Romans.
The Revelation of God’s Wrath (1:18)
The notion of “the wrath of God” is not a welcome one, even among many Christians. We prefer to dwell on God’s love and grace. But we will never understand God or the work he accomplished for us in his Son until we appreciate the reality of God’s wrath. As presented in Scripture, God’s wrath is no capricious emotion but the necessary response of a perfect and holy God to violations of his will. Paul usually associates God’s wrath with a coming day of judgment (e.g., Rom. 2:5). Here, however, he announces that God’s wrath “is being revealed” in the present. This might mean simply that God makes clear to people that his wrath is a reality to be reckoned with. But “reveal” here probably has the active notion of “manifest” or “accomplish.” God will inflict his wrath on sinners in a climactic way in the last day. But even now, in ways that verses 19–32 will make clear, God is punishing human sin with his wrath. Noting the parallel between verses 17 and 18, some scholars suggest that the revelation of God’s wrath is part of the revelation of his righteousness. But this is unlikely. God’s righteousness, as I argued earlier, is a saving activity. God’s wrath is the reason why God’s righteousness is needed, but it is not part of that righteousness.
Verse 18 stands as the heading for the entire argument of 1:18–3:20. In the rest of this section Paul will detail the ways in which God’s wrath is inflicted and, especially, the reason why he inflicts that wrath. The first part of this argument, in the rest of chapter 1, concerns people generally, as they are confronted with the truth that God reveals to all people in the world that he has created.
The Reason for God’s Wrath (1:19–21)
The end of verse 18, though easily overlooked, furnishes the clue to the direction that Paul’s argument now takes. God’s wrath, Paul has said, is visited upon people who “suppress the truth.” Think for a moment about that word “suppress” and what it implies. People cannot suppress something that they do not have. So Paul implies that people have access to the truth. In verses 19–21, Paul therefore elaborates this point and shows that people have not responded as they should have to the truth that God has revealed to them. Paul makes three basic points.
First, God has manifested his truth to all human beings. God has “made it plain to them” (v. 19). To be sure, the text does not explicitly claim that the antecedent to “them” is all human beings. But the “them” picks up the “people” of verse 18 who are ungodly and wicked and who suppress the truth. And Paul makes clear that all people are included in this category (e.g., 3:9). In theological terms, Paul here is teaching about natural revelation. By contrast, special revelation includes God’s direct acts of speaking and acting, recorded, for instance, in Scripture. Not everyone, of course, has access to special revelation. But God also reveals truth about himself in a general, more indirect way, in the created world itself. The fascinating and intricate web of created things in the world around us speaks of the existence of a powerful and intelligent Creator. Since Paul is talking here about natural revelation, many interpreters think that he is speaking only of gentiles, because Jews, of course, have been given special revelation, and Paul will speak to their condition in chapter 2. However, while what Paul teaches here undoubtedly is most relevant to gentiles, he never so restricts his analysis. And we must remember that Jews also have access to natural revelation. It is best, then, to think that verses 19–32 speak of the condition of all human beings faced with God’s natural revelation.
Second, the truth contained in natural revelation is limited. In verse 20, Paul spells out just what information God has “made plain” to human beings. In an ironic apparent contrast (called an “oxymoron”), Paul claims that “God’s invisible qualities . . . have been clearly seen.” Specifically, he lists God’s “eternal power and divine nature.” From what God has revealed in nature, people can know that a god exists and that that god is powerful, but of course they cannot know about the specific requirements of God’s law or about the plan of God or about the culmination of this plan in the cross of Christ.
Third, precisely because natural revelation is so limited, it cannot mediate salvation to sinners. Paul hints at this conclusion at the end of verse 20. The purpose of God’s revelation in nature, Paul affirms, is that people might be “without excuse.” They cannot claim ignorance when God visits his wrath upon them, for (note this transitional word at the beginning of v. 21) people actually “knew God.” This language in Scripture often refers to a saving relationship with God. Here, clearly, that is not the case. It is Paul’s way of making the point that people do have some knowledge about God. The problem, as the rest of verse 21 makes clear, is that they do not respond appropriately to that knowledge. Rather than glorifying or giving thanks to God, they have hearts that are darkened and thinking that is perverted.
What Paul says in these verses is critical to our assessment of the situation of people who do not have access to special revelation. The current climate of pluralism and tolerance makes it especially important to listen carefully to Paul here, for he makes it clear that natural revelation, by itself, cannot rescue people from their sinful state. People have enough information about God in the world around them to be justly condemned, but not enough to discover the good news that is the only path to salvation. To be sure, God can graciously use natural revelation as a means of stimulating people to look for further information about the God who created the world around them. And so, in keeping with the approach of Paul in his speech to the Athenians in Acts 17, natural revelation can become the springboard to the gospel.
The Results of God’s Wrath (1:22–32)
In the remaining verses of chapter 1, Paul describes the devastating effects of the universal human decision to spurn the God who reveals himself in the natural world. Paul pictures human beings making an exchange, to which God responds by giving people over. Three times Paul depicts this pattern and its tragic consequences:
“[They] exchanged” . . . “Therefore God gave them over.” (vv. 23–24)
“They exchanged” . . . “Because of this, God gave them over.” (vv. 25–26a)
“Their women exchanged” . . . “[God] gave them over.” (vv. 26b–28)
In each case human beings put aside the truth God has revealed in nature and put in its place their own perverted notions and activities. Paul focuses on two kinds of sins in this passage: idolatry (vv. 23, 25) and sexual perversion (vv. 24, 26–27). These are precisely the sins that the Jews often attributed to the gentiles as evidence of the gentiles’ estrangement from God. But Paul also follows Jewish custom in providing a broad list of sins that result from people’s refusal to worship God (vv. 28b–31). The passage ends with a final verdict on the perverse pleasure people find in encouraging rebellion against their Creator (v. 32).
God responds to people’s decision to exchange the true God for idols by condemning people to the consequences of the sins they have chosen for themselves. This giving people over is not an entirely passive matter—as if, as one commentator puts it, God simply ceases “to hold the boat as it was dragged by the current of the river.”1 Rather, we should view this action as a positive, judicial decision on God’s part, whereby he sentences people to the very sins they have chosen for themselves. Especially instructive for the sequence of Paul’s teaching here is Wisdom of Solomon 11:15–16: “In return for their [the gentiles’] foolish and wicked thoughts, which led them astray to worship irrational serpents and worthless animals, you sent upon them a multitude of irrational creatures to punish them, so that they might learn that one is punished by the very things by which one sins.” And so the downward spiral of sin that we see in the world around us comes about. Although Paul does not explicitly say so, we probably are justified in thinking that this giving over of people to sin is one of the ways in which God is now revealing his wrath.
In the first “exchange . . . give over” sequence (vv. 22–24), Paul focuses on the root sin of idolatry. It is one of the marks of sinful human beings that they dress up their descent into foolishness as the very height of wisdom. People seek to justify their rejection of the only true God by speaking of advances in knowledge, the maturation of human intellect, and the like. But any truth that is put in the place of the truth of God is idolatry. Paul uses traditional language to portray this idolatry in verse 23. Note Psalm 106:20, “They exchanged their glorious God for an image of a bull, which eats grass,” and Jeremiah 2:11, “Has a nation ever changed its gods? (Yet they are not gods at all.) But my people have exchanged their glorious God for worthless idols.” Interestingly, both texts describe the idolatry of Israel, confirming the suggestion that Paul has all human beings, not just gentiles, in view in these verses. Equally traditional is the portrayal of idolatry in terms of the worship of created beings. This was the form that idolatry typically took in the Old Testament period. Paul heightens the distinction between God and the created world by imitating the language of the creation story itself: “birds and animals and reptiles” (cf. Gen. 1:20, 24). We should keep in mind that idolatry is not restricted to worshiping an image on an altar. Anything that we put in place of God—sex, money, power, hobbies, ministry—is an idol. Jewish sources often made a connection between idolatry and sexual sin. Thus it is not surprising that Paul would portray God’s reaction to people’s idolatry as giving them over to “sexual impurity.” We should note that God does not therefore initiate a sin that was not present before. Paul makes clear that people already had “sinful desires.” And the teaching of a text like this must be balanced with the human side of the matter: “Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed” (Eph. 4:19).
The second “exchange . . . give over” sequence (vv. 25–27) covers the same ground in a bit more detail. Again it is idolatry that initiates the sequence: “They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator.” God again responds by giving people over, this time to “shameful lusts.” In this case, however, Paul elaborates on these lusts in terms of homosexuality (vv. 26b–27). Paul follows typical Jewish teaching in labeling homosexuality as being “unnatural” or “against nature” (para physin). Some contemporary apologists for homosexuality have tried to interpret this language to mean that only sex conducted against the nature of the individual person is sinful. If a person is heterosexual, sex with people of the same sex would be against that person’s nature and therefore wrong.2 But Paul holds no such individualized notion of “nature.” He uses the word, following Jewish custom, to refer to the natural order as God has made it.3 Following the Old Testament (e.g., Gen. 19:1–28; Lev. 18:22; 20:13; Deut. 23:17–18), Paul sees in homosexual activity a particularly striking manifestation of the way in which human beings have twisted God’s created intention into something quite different from what God ever intended.4
Those who engage in homosexual activity, Paul concludes, receive “in themselves the due penalty for their error” (end of v. 27). It has become popular in our day to think that AIDS might be a particularly clear manifestation of this penalty. This is possible, but we must quickly remind ourselves that all kinds of physical diseases are direct (e.g., cirrhosis of the liver for those who abuse alcohol) or indirect consequences of sin. And Paul himself almost certainly is not thinking only of physical consequences to sin (particularly when we remember that AIDS was, of course, nonexistent in his day). What Paul does want to emphasize is that the flouting of God’s creation will in sexual matters brings God’s rightful judgment.
The third “exchange . . . give over” sequence is not as clear as the first two. In fact, the “exchange” part is buried in Paul’s discussion of homosexuality at the end of verse 26, while the “give over” part does not come until verse 28. Moreover, the giving over is not directly tied to the exchange but is said to be the result of people not thinking it “worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God.” The Greek here features a wordplay that is difficult to preserve in English translation. The best we can do is the awkward “Because people did not approve [edokimasan] God in their thinking, God has given them over to minds incapable of approving [adokimon] what is right.” We should emphasize that the fall into sin affects not just our affections and our actions but our thinking as well. Human beings now have minds that are incapable of consistently thinking about divine things in an accurate way.
In verses 29–31 Paul provides us with a list of representative sins, as he elaborates “do what ought not to be done” at the end of verse 28. The three sentences into which the NIV divides these sins accurately convey the structure of Paul’s list. He begins very generally, moves on to the cardinal sin of envy and its consequences, and concludes with a wide spectrum of sins. The focus throughout is on what we might call “social sins”—the evil that we do to one another. Idolatry may be the root sin, and sexual perversion one of its key consequences, but Paul does not want us to forget the many forms that our rejection of God’s truth has taken. None of us reading such a list can come away without a sense of conviction.
Paul wraps up his description of the results of God’s wrath in human history with a general indictment. Again he reminds us of natural revelation: people know that certain actions deserve death, that God justly punishes people who sin in these ways. Thus, not only do people know about God’s person and power from the natural world, but they also have some kind of inbuilt recognition of good and evil and sense that God is just when he punishes wrongdoing. Paul will say more on this matter in 2:14–15 as he describes the “natural law” to which all people have access. In condemning, at the end of the verse, those who commit sin as well as those who approve of those who commit sin, Paul may again be echoing Jewish teaching (e.g., Testament of Asher 6.2, “The two-faced are doubly punished because they both practice evil and approve of others who practice it”). But Paul goes further. His “not only . . . but also” construction in verse 32 implies that he views those who approve of sinners as worse than the sinners themselves. Paul is not minimizing the seriousness of sin. He is implying that people who label sin as good or natural or noble are doing great damage to the morals of a society, for eventually it becomes an acceptable behavior and people are no longer conscious of their sin.