ROMANS i. 24-32
[Sidenote: Ver. 24.] =Wherefore God gave them up, in the desires of their hearts, to uncleanness, so as to dishonour their bodies among themselves.=
There is a dark sequence, in the logic of facts, between unworthy thoughts of God and the development of the basest forms of human wrong. "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God:--they are corrupt, and have done abominable works" (Psal. xiv. 1). And the folly which does not indeed deny God but degrades His Idea, always gives its sure contribution to such corruption. It is so in the nature of the case. The individual atheist, or polytheist, may conceivably be a virtuous person, on the human standard; but if he is so it is not because of his creed. Let his creed become a real formative power in human society, and it will tend inevitably to moral disease and death. Is man indeed a moral personality, made in the image of a holy and almighty Maker? Then the vital air of his moral life must be fidelity, correspondence, to his God. Let man think of Him as less than All, and he will think of himself less worthily; not less proudly perhaps, but less worthily, because not in his true and wonderful relation to the Eternal Good. Wrong in himself will tend surely to seem less awful, and right less necessary and great. And nothing, literally nothing, from any region higher than himself--himself already lowered in his own thought from his true idea--can ever come in to supply the blank where God should be, but is not. Man may worship himself, or may despise himself, when he has ceased to "glorify God and thank Him"; but he cannot for one hour be what he was made to be, the son of God in the universe of God. To know God indeed is to be secured from self-worship, and to be taught self-reverence; and it is the only way to those two secrets in their pure fulness.
"_God gave them up._" So the Scripture says elsewhere. "So I gave them up unto their own hearts' lusts" (Psal. lxxxi. 12); "God turned, and gave them up to worship the host of heaven" (Acts vii. 42); "God gave them up to passions of degradation"; "God gave them over to an abandoned mind"; (below, verses 26, 28). It is a dire thought; but the inmost conscience, once awake, affirms the righteousness of the thing. From one point of view it is just the working out of a natural process, in which sin is at once exposed and punished by its proper results, without the slightest injection, so to speak, of any force beyond its own terrible gravitation towards the sinner's misery. But from another point it is the personally allotted, and personally inflicted, retribution of Him who hates iniquity with the antagonism of infinite Personality. _He_ has so constituted natural process that wrong gravitates to wretchedness; and _He_ is in that process, and above it, always and for ever.
So He "_gave them up, in their desires of their hearts_"; He left them there where they had placed themselves, "in" the fatal region of self-will, self-indulgence; "_unto uncleanness_" described now with terrible explicitness in its full outcome, "_to dishonour their bodies_" the intended temples of the Creator's presence, "_among themselves_," or "_in themselves_"; for the possible dishonour might be done either in a foul solitude, or in a fouler society and mutuality: [Sidenote: Ver. 25.] =Seeing that they perverted the truth of God,= the eternal fact of His glory and claim, =in their (τῷ) lie,= so that it was travestied, misrepresented, lost, "in" the falsehood of polytheism and idols; =and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.= He casts this strong Doxology into the thick air of false worship and foul life, as if to clear it with its holy reverberation. For he is writing no mere discussion, no lecture on the genesis and evolution of paganism. It is the story of a vast rebellion, told by one who, once himself a rebel, is now altogether and for ever the absolute vassal of the King whom he has "seen in His beauty," and whom it is his joy to bless, and to claim blessing for Him from His whole world for ever.