Given Up: A Survey of Romans 1:18-32

God is angry. In fact, he is furious, and it’s obvious to everyone. That’s the depressing news that Paul offers in Romans 1:18-32. Paul has already marveled, in glowing terms, about the wonderful gospel that is ‘the power of God for salvation,’ freely available to all. Now he is on a mission to show how necessary this gospel is. His end goal is the same: he wants Jews and Gentiles to put aside their quarrels and unite around his gospel.

The first target of attack is the gentile world. The gospel is necessary, Paul asserts, because gentiles are marinating in sin. They are not just deserving of God’s wrath – they actually undergo it in the present. Just as the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel, so the wrath of God is revealed from heaven.

Two Reasons Why God’s Wrath is Revealed (1:19-23)

God is slow to anger, so there must be a reason why his wrath is being ‘revealed from heaven.’ Paul outlines two reasons for this wrath.

The first reason is because what can be known about God is obvious (1:19-20). Gentiles really do have access to the truth, because they live in God’s creation. You can learn certain things about a person just by looking at what they have created. It gives you a glimpse of who they are, without you ever meeting them or having any level of relationship with them. Just consider the difference between the Mona Lisa and a kid’s crayon drawing. You may not know either artist, but you can certainly learn some things from the creations. Paul’s argument is that creation is the canvas, and there is actually a lot that you can know about God without ever ‘meeting’ him or having a relationship with him.

Since God’s character is clear from his creation, anyone who is familiar with creation (and that is all of us, at some level) is ‘without excuse.’ This is a legal term, and it refers to a defendant in a court case who has run out of all remaining excuses. It’s not just that they are guilty – it’s that they don’t even know how to defend themselves anymore. The verdict is clear, and they’ve lost hope of even delaying it. Hence, God is rightly furious: those who sin are doing it in full knowledge of the God that they provoke. No wonder God has wrath.

The other reason behind God’s wrath is that – with full knowledge of his glory – the pagans try to alter God’s glory (1:21-23). Although the fundamental duty of humanity is to glorify and give thanks to God, pagans try to ‘dim the lightbulb’ of majesty.

Paul never denies that pagans have intellectual knowledge of God. Some of them made incredible advances in metaphysical knowledge about who God must be, based on his creation. Nevertheless, the effect of this knowledge is the exact opposite of what you would expect: ‘their foolish heart was darkened.’ In fact, there is an inverse relationship: as their head-knowledge of God increases, their heart-knowledge of God decreases.

The problem with pagans, Paul hints, is that they don’t realize that they are getting dumber. Ricky Gervais said, “Remember, when you are dead, you do not know you are dead. It is only painful for others. The same applies when you are stupid.” That is what the apostle is getting at. Despite claiming to be wise, the pagans are in fact fools – idiots, to put it bluntly.

Why would Paul say that? Because a person is a fool when what they know about God doesn’t influence their actions. Foolishness is not ignorance; it’s when you know about God, but you don’t live in light of that knowledge. The pagans, despite their knowledge, try to ‘dim the lightbulb’ of God’s majesty by representing him like an animal – as if God could be compared to a crow or a cow or a lizard. No wonder God is angry!

Three Ways in which God’s Wrath is Revealed (1:24-32)

But even if it’s clear that mankind is depraved, how is God’s wrath ‘revealed’? What is God doing about this?

The way in which God reveals his wrath is quite different from what we are accustomed to expect. Rather than sending lightening bolts to incinerate the sinners, God shows his wrath by letting the rebels stick their fingers directly in the electrical-socket of sin. He doesn’t even try to stop them. The result is sin everywhere: so thick and goopy that it coats everything, leaving nothing unaffected by its destructive influence.

First of all, God gave the pagans up to the desires of their heart (1:24-25). Unlike what we commonly hear, it’s not a good idea to ‘go with your heart.’ In fact, a person who lives that way is under God’s wrath – because someone who ‘follows their heart’ will find themselves in heaps of trouble.

Since the pagans decided to dishonor God by shaping him with a body, God gives them free rein to dishonor their own bodies. He lets them sink below the level of men, so that they are little more than dishonorable, beastly animals, driven by animal pleasures and passions.

Second, God gave the pagans up to dishonorable passions (1:26-27). It’s bad enough for men to live like animals – lustful, brutish, and perverted. But sadly, it’s not at all uncommon. But it is a special level of depravity when even women (the ‘fairer sex’) begin to live like animals. That’s why Paul puts an exclamation point here – ‘you won’t believe what even the ladies are up to!’ he gasps in a hushed tone.

And what exactly is that they are up to? Paul is brutally clear and painfully politically incorrect: they engage in homosexuality. They get wrapped up in LGBTQ lifestyles. When society starts playing with that, their fingers are deep in the electrical socket.

It’s important to remember that Paul isn’t saying this because he hates gay people, or because he wants them to despair, thinking that God is against them. His whole reason for this argument is to remind people how wonderful the Gospel is. That’s why Paul rejoices in it, and he’s not ashamed of it. We need it desperately, because of how desperately wicked we’ve become. So the purpose – even in this passage – is not to make people despair, but to give people hope that they can be rescued.

Third, God gave the pagans up to a debased mind (1:28-32). Sin affects everything about the pagan. No part of his thinking is left untouched. The result is that every action is marked by perversion. Paul starts to list the sins, and they come gushing out. It’s every imaginable form of outrage, from murder to slander, and from envy to ruthlessness.

The end result is that pagans are left in no doubt about their morality. They know that what they do is wrong – but they have been so abandoned by God that they don’t even care. In fact, they even celebrate it. They holds parades for it. They ‘shout’ their sins. They make a lot of noise about it, and rejoice when others join them in it. They do this, because they know God’s righteous decree – and they have to drown out that still, small voice within them that says, ‘this is wrong and deserving of death.’

And that’s the state of the pagan world. It’s a world that’s already suffering God’s wrath. Only the gospel can turn it around.