THE LIFE WHICH HAS LEFT GOD OUT OF THE RECKONING

THE LIFE WHICH HAS LEFT GOD OUT OF THE RECKONING

Romans 1:28–32

Just as they have given themselves over to a kind of knowledge that rejects the idea of God, so God has given them over to the kind of mind that all reject. The result is that they do things which it is not fitting for any man to do. They are replete with all evil, villainy, the lust to get, viciousness. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, the spirit which puts the worst construction on everything. They are whisperers, slanderers, haters of God. They are insolent men, arrogant, braggarts, inventors of evil things, disobedient to their parents, senseless breakers of agreements, without natural affections, pitiless. They are the kind of men who are well aware that those who do such things deserve death, and yet they not only do them themselves, but also heartily approve of those who do them.

There is hardly any passage which so clearly shows what happens to people when they leave God out of the reckoning. It is not so much that God sends a judgment on them as that they bring a judgment on themselves when they give no place to God in their scheme of things. When people banish God from their lives, they take on certain characteristics, and in this passage is one of the most terrible descriptions in literature of the kind of men and women they become. Let us look at the catalogue of dreadful things which enter into godless lives.

Such people do things which no one should ever do. The Stoics had a phrase. They talked of ta kathēkonta, by which they meant the things appropriate to human behaviour. Certain things are essentially and inherently part of being human, and certain things are not. As Shakespeare has it in Macbeth:

I dare do all that may become a man;

Who dares do more is none.

Those who banish God not only lose godliness; they lose their essential humanity too.

Then comes the long list of terrible things. Let us take them one by one.

Evil (adikia). Adikia is the precise opposite of dikaiosunē, which means justice; and the Greeks defined justice as giving to God and to others their due. The evil person is the person who robs both other people and God of their rights. People like that have erected an altar to self in the centre of things so that they worship themselves to the exclusion of God and of everyone else.

Villainy (ponēria). In Greek, this word means more than badness. There is a kind of badness which, on the whole, hurts only the person concerned. It is not essentially an outgoing badness. When it hurts others, as all badness must, the hurt is not deliberate. It may be thoughtlessly cruel, but it is not callously cruel. But the Greeks defined ponēria as the desire to do harm. It is the active, deliberate will to corrupt and to inflict injury. When the Greeks described a woman as ponēra, they meant that she deliberately seduced the innocent from their innocence. In Greek, one of the most common titles of Satan is ho ponēros, the evil one, the one who deliberately attacks and aims to destroy the goodness of men and women. Ponēros describes the person who is not only bad but wants to make everyone equally bad. Ponēria is destructive badness.

The lust to get (pleonexia). The Greek word is built up of two words which mean to have more. The Greeks themselves defined pleonexia as the accursed love of having. It is an aggressive vice. It has been described as the spirit which will pursue its own interests with complete disregard for the rights of others and even for the considerations of common humanity. Its keynote is a predatory greed. Theodoret, the fifth-century Christian writer, describes it as the spirit that aims at more, the spirit which grasps at things which it has no right to take. It may operate in every sphere of life. If it operates in the material sphere, it means grasping at money and goods, regardless of honour and honesty. If it operates in the ethical sphere, it means the ambition which tramples on others to gain something to which it is not fully entitled. If it operates in the moral sphere, it means the unrestrained lust which takes its pleasure where it has no right. Pleonexia is the desire which knows no law.

Viciousness (kakia). Kakia is the most general Greek word for badness. It describes someone who is lacking in any of the qualities that make people good. For instance, a kakos kritēs is a judge completely lacking the legal knowledge and the moral sense and uprightness of character which are necessary to make a good judge. It is described by Theodoret as ‘the turn of the soul to the worse’. The word he uses for turn is ropē, which means the turn of the balance. A person who is kakos is someone whose life is tilted in the direction of all the worst things. Kakia has been described as the essential viciousness which includes all vice and as the forerunner of all other sins. It is the degeneracy out of which all sins grow and in which all sins flourish.

Envy (phthonos). There is a good and a bad envy. There is the envy which reveals to people their own weakness and inadequacy, and which makes them eager to copy some great example. And there is the envy which is essentially grudging. It looks at a fine person, and is moved not so much to aspire to that fineness as to resent it. It is the most warped and twisted of human emotions.

Murder (phonos). It must always be remembered that Jesus immeasurably widened the scope of this word. He insisted that not only the act of violence but also the spirit of anger and hatred must be eliminated. He insisted that it is not enough only to keep from angry and savage action. It is enough only when even the desire and the anger are banished from the heart. We may never have struck another person in our lives, but which of us can say that we never wanted to strike anyone? As the thirteenth-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas said, ‘Man regards the deed, but God sees the intention.’

Strife (eris). Its meaning is the contention which is born of envy, ambition, the desire for prestige and place and prominence. It comes from the heart in which there is jealousy. If we can eliminate a sense of jealousy, we have come a long way towards ridding ourselves of all that arouses contention and strife. It is a God-given gift to be able to take as much pleasure in the successes of others as in one’s own.

Deceit (dolos). We get the best sense of the meaning of this from the corresponding verb (doloun). Doloun has two characteristic usages. It is used of debasing precious metals and of adulterating wines. Dolos is deceit; it describes the quality of people who have tortuous and twisted minds, who cannot act in a straightforward way, who stoop to devious and underhand methods to get their own way, who never do anything except with some kind of ulterior motive. It describes the crafty cunning of those who plot and scheme and who are found in every community and every society.

The spirit which puts the worst construction on everything (kakoētheia). Kakoētheia means literally having an evil nature. At its widest, it means malignity. Aristotle defined it in a narrower sense which it has always retained. He said it was ‘the spirit which always supposes the worst about other people’. Pliny called it ‘malignity of interpretation’. The seventeenth-century theologian Jeremy Taylor said that it is ‘a baseness of nature by which we take things by the wrong handle, and expound things always in the worst sense’. It may well be that this is the most common of all sins. If there are two possible constructions to be put upon anyone’s actions, human nature will choose the worse. It is terrifying to think how many reputations have been murdered in idle gossip, with people maliciously putting a wrong interpretation upon a completely innocent action. When we are tempted to behave in this way, we ought to remember that God hears and remembers every word we speak.

Whisperers and slanderers (psithuristēs and katalalos). These two words describe people with slanderous tongues; but there is a difference between them. Katalalos, slanderer, describes the person who trumpets slanders abroad; such a person makes accusations and tells tales quite openly. Psithuristēs describes the person who whispers malicious stories in the listener’s ear, who takes people on one side and whispers a character-destroying story. Both are bad, but, of the two, the whisperer is the worse. It is at least possible to defend yourself against an open slander; but we are all helpless against the secret whisperer who delights in destroying reputations.

Haters of God (theostugeis). This describes people who hate God because they know that they are defying him. God is the barrier between them and their pleasures; he is the chain which keeps them from doing exactly as they like. These people would gladly eliminate God if they could, for to them a godless world would be one where they would have not liberty but licence.

The insolent (hubristēs). Hubris was to the Greeks the vice which supremely courted destruction at the hand of the gods. It has two main lines of thought in it. (1) It describes the spirit of those who are so proud that they defy God. It is the insolent pride that goes before a fall. It is the forgetting that we are all creatures. It is the spirit of those who are so confident in their wealth, their power and their strength that they think that they can live life alone. (2) It describes people who are wantonly and sadistically cruel and insulting. Aristotle describes it as the spirit which harms and grieves someone else, not for the sake of revenge and not for any advantage that may be gained from it, but simply for the sheer pleasure of hurting. There are people who get pleasure from seeing someone wince at a cruel word. There are people who take a devilish delight in inflicting mental and physical pain on others. That is hubris; it is the sadism which finds delight in hurting others simply for the sake of hurting them.

The arrogant (huperēphanos). This is the word which is three times used in Scripture when it is said that God resists the proud (James 4:6; 1 Peter 5:5; Proverbs 3:34). The eleventh-century biblical scholar Theophylact called it ‘the summit of all sins’. Theophrastus was a Greek writer who wrote a series of famous character sketches, and he defined huperēphania as ‘a certain contempt for everyone except oneself’. He picks out the things in everyday life which are signs of this arrogance. The arrogant man, when he is asked to accept some office, refuses on the grounds that he has no time to spare from his own business; he never looks at people on the street unless it pleases him to do so; he invites someone to a meal and then does not appear himself, but sends his servant to attend to his guest. His whole life is surrounded with an atmosphere of contempt, and he delights in making others feel small.

Braggarts (alazōn). Alazōn is a word with an interesting history. It literally means one who wanders about. It then became the word used for wandering quacks who boast of cures that they have worked, and for traders in shoddy goods who boast that the things they sell have an excellence which they are far from possessing. The Greeks defined alazoneia as the spirit which pretends to have what it has not. Xenophon, the historian, said that the name belongs to those who pretend to be richer and braver than they are, and who promise to do what they are really unable to do in order to make some profit or gain. Again, Theophrastus has a character study of such a man—the pretentious man, the snob. He is the kind of man who boasts of trade deals which exist only in his imagination, of connections with influential people which do not exist at all, of gifts to charities and public services which he never gave or rendered. He says about the house he lives in that it is really too small for him, and that he must buy a bigger one. The boaster is out to impress others—and the world is still full of people like that.

Inventors of evil (epheuretēs kakōn). The phrase describes people who, so to speak, are not content with the usual, ordinary ways of sinning, but who seek out new, obscure and subtle vices because they have grown bored and seek a new thrill in some new sin.

Disobedient to their parents (goneusin apeitheis). Both Jews and Romans set obedience to parents very high in the scale of virtues. It was one of the Ten Commandments that parents should be honoured. In the early days of the Roman Republic, the patria potestas, the father’s power, was so absolute that he had the power of life and death over his family. The reason for including this sin here is that, once the bonds of the family are loosened, wholesale degeneracy is bound to follow.

Senseless (asunetos). This word describes people who are fools, who cannot learn the lesson of experience, who will not use the minds and brains that God has given to them.

Breakers of agreements (asunthetos). This word would come with particular force to a Roman audience. In the great days of Rome, Roman honesty was a wonderful thing. As the famous saying has it, a man’s word was as good as his bond. That was in fact one of the great differences between the Romans and the Greeks. The Greeks were born pilferers. The Greeks used to say that if a governor or official was entrusted with one talent—that is, about fifteen years’ wages—even if there were ten clerks and accountants to check up on him, he was certain to succeed in embezzling some of it; while a Roman, whether as a magistrate in office or a general on a campaign, could deal with thousands of talents solely on his word, and nothing ever went astray. By using this word, Paul was recalling the Romans not only to the Christian ethic but to their own standards of honour in their greatest days.

Without natural affections (astorgos). Storgē was the special Greek word for family love. It was quite true that this was an age in which family love was dying. Never was the life of the child so precarious as at this time. Children were considered a misfortune. When a child was born, it was taken and laid at the father’s feet. If the father lifted it up, that meant that he acknowledged it. If he turned away and left it, the child was literally thrown out. There was never a night when there were not thirty or forty abandoned children left in the Roman forum. Even Seneca, great man that he was, could write: ‘We kill a mad dog; we slaughter a fierce ox; we plunge the knife into sickly cattle lest they taint the herd; children who are born weakly and deformed we drown.’ The natural bonds of human affection had been destroyed.

Pitiless (aneleēmōn). There was never a time when human life was so cheap. Slaves could be killed or tortured by their masters, for they were only things, and the law gave the masters unlimited power over them. It was an age pitiless in its very pleasures, for it was the great age of the gladiatorial games where people found their delight in seeing men kill each other. It was an age when the quality of mercy was gone.

Paul says one last thing about these people who have banished God from life. It usually happens that, even if people are sinners, they know it, and, even if they allow themselves to get away with something, they know that it is to be condemned in others. But, in those days, the situation had reached such a level that people sinned themselves and encouraged others to do so. The dramatist and critic George Bernard Shaw once said: ‘No nation has ever survived the loss of its gods.’ Here, Paul has given us a terrible picture of what happens when men and women deliberately banish God from the reckoning; and, in due time, Rome perished. Disaster and degeneracy went hand in hand.