The Race To Ruin (Rom. 1:21-25)

Romans 1:21 NKJV

because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

The Race To Ruin

Romans 1:21-32

Thirdly, there is another kind of present disclosure of the anger of God, to which the apostle will devote the rest of Romans 1. It is being revealed from heaven now, he says (18), and he goes on to explain it by his terrible threefold refrain God gave them over (24, 26, 28).

When we hear of God’s wrath, we usually think of ‘thunderbolts from heaven, and earthly cataclysms and flaming majesty’, instead of which his anger goes ‘quietly and invisibly’ to work in handing sinners over to themselves.

As John Ziesler writes, it ‘operates not by God’s intervention but precisely by his not intervening, by letting men and women go their own way’.

God abandons stubborn sinners to their wilful self-centredness,26 and the resulting process of moral and spiritual degeneration is to be understood as a judicial act of God. This is the revelation of God’s wrath from heaven (18).

Let me sum up our reflection thus far on the wrath of God.

It is God’s settled and perfectly righteous hatred toward evil. It is directed against people who have knowledge of God’s truth through the created order and conscience, but deliberately suppress it in order to pursue their own self-centred path. And it is already being revealed, in a preliminary way, in the moral and social corruption which Paul saw in much of the Greco-Roman world of his day, and which we can see in the permissive societies of ours.

In Paul’s exposition of the outworking of the wrath of God, he develops the same logical process of deterioration, according to the principle he has established in verses 18–20.

That is, the general pattern of his argument recurs in verses 21–24, 25–27 and 28–31, ‘repeated with horrifying emphasis’.

First, he asserts the people’s knowledge of God: they knew God (21), the truth of God (25), and the knowledge of God (28).

Secondly, he draws attention to their rejection of their knowledge in favour of idolatry: they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him (21); they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator (25); they did not think it worth while to retain the knowledge of God (28).

Thirdly, he describes the reaction of God’s wrath: he gave them over … to sexual impurity (24); to shameful lusts (26); and to a depraved mind (28), leading to antisocial behaviour.

These are the three stages of the downward spiral of pagan depravity.1

1 John R. W. Stott, The Message of Romans: God’s Good News for the World, The Bible Speaks Today (Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001), 75–76.

1 Intelligent (vs. 21a)

Mankind started out intelligent by knowing God. Remember, God gave us an inner witness, the conscience, that exists. He also gave us an outer witness, the creation, which is “clearly seen” by the eye of sight and the eye of reason.

Now secularists will tell you we started out as nothing (pond scum, monkeys) but over the years we have “evolved” into something magnificent, and we are heading toward utopia because on mankind’s gifts and talents and one day we will achieve perfection.

The bible paints the exact opposite picture. We started out knowing God but we have turned to self-worship and all forms of idolatry. We are not evolving, we are devolving.

Human history is not the story of a beast that worshiped idols, and then evolved into a man worshiping one God.

Human history is just the opposite: man began knowing God, but turned from the truth and rejected God.

Men knew the truth about God, but they did not allow this truth to work in their lives. They suppressed it in order that they might live their own lives and not be convicted by God’s truth.

The result, of course, was refusing the truth (Rom. 1:21–22), and then turning the truth into a lie (Rom. 1:25). Finally, man so abandoned the truth that he became like a beast in his thinking and in his living.

2 Indifference (vs. 21b)

We can reasonably expect that knowing God should lead to honoring him as God and giving thanks. But by nature people neither give him glory for who he is nor give him thanks for what he has done.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus spoke of sun and rain benefitting both the righteous and the unrighteous (Matt 5:45; cf. Acts 14:17). God gives to all the basic requirements for life irrespective of their relationship to him.

The proper response should be gratitude. But people choose to ignore God and come up with their own version of reality.

By rejecting the knowledge of the true God, religion is born. F. J. Leenhardt calls it “the triumph of gods over God.”1

1 Robert H. Mounce, Romans, vol. 27, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1995), 79.

SEE AR

3 Ignorance (vs. 21c - 22)

This is what Satan had actually offered Eve earlier. When she replied to the serpent—the great deceiver—about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, saying that she and her husband were not to eat of it or touch it lest they die, Satan had declared,

“You will not surely die.… For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:4–5). Ah, “like God!”

That was what Eve and Adam wanted to become. God is the sovereign God, and one aspect of his sovereignty is that he makes the rules. Adam wanted to make his own rules.

He wanted to say what was to be true and what was to be false. And yet, in rebelling against God, he became anything but sovereign or wise.

He became the opposite, losing what strength and wisdom he had. Instead of becoming more like God, which Satan had promised the woman, Adam became like Satan.

Instead of rewriting the truth so that it would better suit his own warped desires, Adam began a process in which he and the human race after him turned from the truth of God to lies.1

1 James Montgomery Boice, Romans: Justification by Faith, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1991–), 170.

Man knew God; this is clear. But man did not want to know God or honor Him as God. Instead of being thankful for all that God had given him, man refused to thank God or give Him the glory He deserves.

Man was willing to use God’s gifts, but he was not willing to worship and praise God for His gifts.

The result was an empty mind and a darkened heart. Man the worshiper became man the philosopher, but his empty wisdom only revealed his foolishness.

Paul summarized all of Greek history in one dramatic statement: “the times of this ignorance” (Acts 17:30).1

1 Warren W. Wiersbe, The Bible Exposition Commentary, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1996), 518.

The word “vain” today means “proud.” The Greek word did not have any idea like that. Mataios (Ματαιος) refers to that which is in vain, futile, that which is without result or success.

It refers to the unsuccessful attempt to do something or be something. It refers to that which does not measure up to that which it should be.

Solomon said, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” That is, “futility of futilities, all is futile.” All that he tried was futile, unsuccessful, in giving him complete satisfaction.

Thus, the human race, refusing to glorify God and be grateful, became futile, unsuccessful in its reasonings (imaginations). 1

1 Kenneth S. Wuest, Wuest’s Word Studies from the Greek New Testament: For the English Reader, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 32.

“Became fools” is mōrainō (μωραινω), “to be foolish, to act foolish” (Thayer).

Liddell and Scott in their classical lexicon define mōrainō (μωραινω) as follows, “to be silly, foolish, drivel, play the fool, be stupefied, to become insipid.”

The noun mōros (μωρος) has the meanings of “dull, sluggish, stupid.” Our word “moron” comes from mōros (μωρος).

This will give the reader a better understanding of the Greek word translated “became fools.”

Our ability to think clearly and process what we perceive is perverted by sin. The “heart” in Scripture is not just the feelings but the mental processes as well.

This means our thinking processes became “foolish,” devoid of understanding 1

1 Grant R. Osborne, Romans: Verse by Verse, Osborne New Testament Commentaries (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2017), 41.

See AR

4 Idolatry (VS. 23,25)

Despite this, the Gentiles “claimed to be wise,” and we can see why. The Greeks developed a great concentration of philosophical and medical “wisdom,” but their lifestyle and culture was incredibly depraved.

Worldly wisdom is not the same as divine truth, so in the midst of all their knowledge they “became fools.”

Their pretension to worldly wisdom proved itself to be foolishness, because they worshipped, first, themselves, and second, false gods.

In so doing, they “exchanged the glory of the immortal god for images” (v. 23). “Exchange” (ēllaxan) means to substitute one thing for another.

This explains the foolish nature of idolatry, for it substitutes false gods for the one true God. The “glory of the immortal God” refers to the grandeur and majesty of God on his throne as in Isaiah 6 and Revelation 4.

The kings of ancient empires possessed merely temporary earthly splendor, but the Creator God is eternal and immortal. He alone is worthy of worship.

Paul’s phrase here alludes to Psalm 106:20 and Jeremiah 2:11, both of which have the nations “exchanging their glorious God for worthless idols.”

Rejecting the immortal God, the depraved Gentiles preferred “images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.”

Two things in this phrase stress the inferiority and weakness of idolatrous images. First, “made to look like” stresses the artificial, fallible nature of these idols;

second, “mortal human being” is in contrast with “immortal God,” stressing the perishable nature of these idols.

I think the parallel is the prohibition of the images of human, animal, bird, reptile, and fish in Deuteronomy 4:15–18.

Either way, the emphasis is on the worship of God alone, with idolatry representing sinful humankind’s rejection of God and embrace of the earthly over the heavenly, the temporary over the eternal.

This decline from idols shaped like humans, to images of beasts, and even to creeping things shows that a debased mind gravitates to the lowest possible level.1

1 Robert H. Mounce, Romans, vol. 27, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1995), 80.

Having held down God’s truth and refusing to acknowledge God’s glory, man was left without a god; and man is so constituted that he must worship something.

If he will not worship the true God, he will worship a false god, even if he has to manufacture it himself! This fact about man accounts for his propensity to idolatry.

Man exchanged the glory of the true God for substitute gods that he himself made. He exchanged glory for shame, incorruption for corruption, truth for lies.1

1 Warren W. Wiersbe, The Bible Exposition Commentary, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1996), 518–519.

SEE AR