“Therefore God delivered them over in the desires of their hearts to sexual impurity, so that their bodies were degraded among themselves. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served what has been created instead of the Creator, who is praised forever. Amen.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Thanks to a few hundred years’ worth of pop culture, when we think about the judgment of God, we imagine fire and brimstone. We picture great floods and earthquakes. We imagine something dramatic and terrible. We imagine God’s actively doing something to punish us for our sins (or, better yet, them for theirs…we usually give ourselves a pass). Yet so much of the judgment we encounter in the Scriptures doesn’t look like that at all. Instead, it takes the form of God simply stepping back and letting the consequences of our sin play themselves out naturally. Paul describes something like that here. Check this out with me.

Yesterday we talked about the fact that part of the natural judgment that comes from refusing to know God as God is the diminishing of our ability to think and reason rationally. When we start giving our greatest and highest devotion to things that are created and not the one who created them; when we start to worship things that are not themselves rational (or irrational, for that matter), but are merely reflections of the one from whom all rationality flows, our ability to be rational gradually erodes. Ideas which when properly grounded would be easily recognized as terrible suddenly appear to be reasonable and even good to pursue.

The trouble here, as we also talked about then, is that when we work ourselves into such a position, we become so convinced of our rightness thanks to our prideful self-confidence that we cease to be able to see and recognize what is true any longer. There are generally only two things that can successfully call us from our delusions back into the warm embrace of reality. Either our ship of fantasy crashes into the rocks of truth, or someone loves us enough to put in the work to convince us of our deluded state of mind.

What I want to clarify here, though, and as Paul makes clear in these next couple of verses, is that this drift into fantasy is not a morally neutral affair. In many cases it is a deliberately chosen state of affairs. It is not uncommon, for instance, for students raised in the church and in a generally conservative moral environment to go off to college and return home after a few months declare themselves officially unencumbered by any notions of the faith of their parents. Often they’ll cite a variety of reasons for this “deconversion,” but when pressed, will often acknowledge they’ve joined in the party scene and the hook up culture prevalent on most college campuses. It quickly becomes clear in these situations that whatever “reasons” the student offers for their supposed loss of faith were arrived at subsequently to their embrace of a lifestyle whose morality was rather directly at odds with that of their rearing. The reasons merely provided what seemed to be the sufficient justification to support their moral choices. That is, they chose to worship something created (alcohol, partying, sex, campus popularity, etc.) instead of the Creator they were raised to know. Their unbelief was a willfully embraced situation.

But even in situations in which the delusion is one they were raised with because of the unbelief of their parents, there is still Paul’s observation that all those who claim to not know God are without excuse in their unbelief. His existence, nature, and basic character traits are clearly seen for all those who are aware enough of their surroundings to notice what the world is like. The point here is that unbelief is ultimately intentional. That is, unbelief itself is a sin.

And sin brings judgment. Some of that judgment is what we see Paul’s talking about here. That’s the intent of the language, “Therefore God delivered them over…” Yet what sounds like an active move by God is far more passive on His part than it appears. When God delivers us over to something, He’s really just allowing the natural consequences of the sin of unbelief to play themselves out. This is consistent with so much of the judgment we see in the Scriptures. Living apart from the righteousness of God does not bring anything good to our lives. Quite the opposite, it unleashes all sorts of chaos in and around us. It is the source of an endless variety of pain and heartache, of frustration and futility. We will eventually come to hate our sin even as we keep drifting back to it because of the weakness of our wills. Given all of this, the natural consequences of our sin are generally judgment enough to satisfy God’s justice. He doesn’t have to do anything more than to let us sin and reap the bitter rewards.

One of the natural consequences of sin that God uses as a kind of judgment is the degradation of our mental facilities. That is, our minds pay the price. Paul identifies here a second kind of judgment: the degradation of our bodies with sex. God created sex and it is both powerful and powerfully good. But the most powerful goods become the most devastating evils when they are corrupted. Because sex is such a powerful good, we are naturally drawn to it. And this makes sense. God commanded for us to be fruitful and multiply. It would not have made sense for Him to give such a command and then make the process of being fruitful and multiplying anything less than exceptionally enjoyable. Yet precisely because it is so enjoyable, when our mental facilities become degraded by our embrace of sin, we reason that if sex is good, then it should be good all the time. It should be good whenever we want. It should be good however we want. We ignore the restraints God gave us to preserve the goodness of His gift (namely, marriage), and pursue it on our own terms. Thus we have sexual immorality and impurity. The results of this have never, ever been good.

We’ll spend a bit more time talking about this tomorrow as Paul gives his attention to one particular form of this corruption of sex, but for now we’ll suffice to say this: Sex is good, but it has a context. Enjoyed within that context, it is one of the highest and best goods we can experience. And the boundaries for our enjoyment of God’s gift within that context are remarkably broad. Remove it from its proper, God-designed context, though, and all of its goodness becomes something far less than that. While the physical pleasure of sex is generally going to be there in whatever context it is pursued, the emotional and relational good it was intended to bring erode quickly until they are gone entirely. They turn from something life giving to agents of chaos, chaos that can quickly make many other things in our lives and in the lives of those around us far more difficult than they would otherwise be. And what is the context God designed for sex to be pursued and enjoyed? Marriage. Within the context of marriage, sex can be fully the good gift God designed it to be. Outside of that context it will cause pain and heartache. Not immediately, but eventually.

Finally here, v. 25 finds Paul bringing our attention once again back to the cause of this chaos: misplaced worship. When we refuse to acknowledge and worship God for who He is, no good will ever come from that. The cause of our misery is, as Paul puts it, that we “exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served what has been created instead of the Creator, who is praised forever.” Who or what we worship will shape who or what we become. If we worship someone or something that is not inherently good, is not a source of goodness or wisdom or justice or righteousness, we will not move in the direction of any of those things. And when you take those things away from a person, and eventually a whole society, the results become very much not good very quickly.

If you want proof, just look at the chaos and pain and evil that misplaced sex has wrought on our culture. You don’t even need data to accept the proof here. You just need working eyes and ears. The good news, though, is that this isn’t how things have to be. There’s always a choice and help to make the right one. We simply need to be willing to receive it.