***An extra post today. I was doing some cleaning up on the back end of the blog, and accidentally deleted this post from a few weeks ago. My meticulousness wouldn’t let me leave out this one passage from the series. Good thing I saved it in another place as well. Happy Monday.***

“And because they did not think it worthwhile to acknowledge God, God delivered them over to a corrupt mind so that they do what is not right. They are filled with all unrighteousness, evil, greed, and wickedness. They are full of envy, murder, quarrels, deceit, and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, arrogant, proud, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, senseless, untrustworthy, unloving, and unmerciful. Although they know God’s just sentence — that those who practice such things deserve to die  — they not only do them, but even applaud others who practice them.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Worldview is everything. Belief dictates behavior. Worldview determines belief. Therefore, worldview lies at the heart of every single decision we make, every action we take, every word we speak, even every thought we think. Because of this, having the right worldview is a really big deal. All worldviews, you see, are not created equal. Now, some borrow ideas from other worldviews because their own worldview produces ideas that address not very good. But idea borrowing like this can be an indication of a flawed worldview. Choosing a worldview known to be flawed is a moral decision. It is a moral decision that will be judged appropriately. As Paul wraps up his opening condemnation of sin in light of the Gospel, these ideas are present in his thinking. Let’s explore them.

The trouble with trying to do worldview thinking is that so very few folks actually understand the concept. A bit of explaining sometimes helps, unless they happen to hold a worldview that isn’t very good. Then the explaining tends to fall on willfully deaf ears because who really wants to discover that they believe a bunch of things that lie somewhere on a continuum from not correct to utter nonsense? And yet, even when we don’t care much for sound philosophy, there it sits, governing everything we do anyway. It can be kind of inconvenient like that.

As we have talked about a couple of times already so far in this journey, if we don’t believe the right things, we’re not going to do the right things. Now, this does not at all mean that someone who believes in a few wrongheaded ideas is going to automatically be a complete sociopath. A culture that collectively holds to mostly good ideas tends to help restrain the worst of the fruits of our bad ideas. But if you take away those cultural restraints or if they begin to be themselves infected by bad ideas, the results can get pretty ugly pretty quickly.

This is all what Paul is pointing to here at the end of Romans 1. He starts by framing all of this out in the context of the same passive judgment against sin he has already mentioned two previous times. “And because they did not think it worthwhile to acknowledge God, God delivered them over…” We cannot miss that here. At first our sinful choices are isolated acts of rebellion, but if we persist in them, refusing to heed His calls to repent, eventually God will step back and let us slide down the path we have insisted we are going to take. The bitter fruits of sin are generally their own form of judgment against it.

More specifically, when we set out to pursue a path other than His righteousness, committing ourselves to bad ideas, eventually those ideas begin to corrupt our minds. With minds so warped by bad ideas, we start to follow through on them in ways that are consistent with them. Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have victims.

Paul goes on to list out a whole bunch of different behaviors that can be the result of this embrace of bad ideas. It’s worth meditating for a moment on this list. It’s not exhaustive by any stretch, but it is pretty comprehensive. He starts generally. They (we) are filled with all unrighteousness, evil, greed, and wickedness. When we embrace ideas that are not reflective of God’s character, we start to reflect His character less and less. We start to reflect the brokenness of sin in us and in the people around us more and more. This results in broken relationships (that’s the substance of unrighteousness). It results in evil and wickedness (just look around if you doubt this at all). It results in greed (we start looking out for only ourselves and what we can get for ourselves even at the expense of the people around us).

People who are steeped in broken relationships both horizontally and vertically tend to be envious. When you don’t trust that there is a God who is able to provide for all of your needs as you seek Him first, you are going to be constantly looking for how you can get your hands on what the people around you have who seem to be doing better than you. Broken relationships can lead to murder. That’s physically true, of course, but murder can also happen relationally and emotionally. Plus, we can’t think about murder without Jesus’ warning in the Sermon on the Mount that the person who hates another person is already guilty of the same kind of disregard for another life that can lead to murder. Broken relationships are fertile ground for quarrels (nagging disagreements over silly things for selfish reasons), deceit (dishonesty and its ensuing loss of trust), and malice (a desire to see others experience negative outcomes and to participate directly in those negative outcomes).

Now, if Paul had stopped here, it would have been an ugly list still, yes, but it would have also been a list from which we could find ways to excuse ourselves. I’ve never murdered anyone. I don’t really hate anyone. I’m a pretty honest guy. I’m content with what I have. I don’t think I’m particularly argumentative. On and on we go justifying ourselves in our own hearts and minds. We are remarkably creative when it comes to excusing our behavior no matter how bad it happens to be. I mean, the Nazis who actively worked the death camps all convinced themselves and each other that they were doing something good and right. They were doing the world a great and noble service. If they could convince themselves of that, we can convince ourselves of anything.

But Paul didn’t stop there. He knew we would try to wiggle out from under our just condemnation, so he continued pointing to other fruits of our bad ideas that while we often have an even easier time justifying, we have a harder time escaping the accusation of them. Bad ideas that start from the standpoint of a refusal to acknowledge God as God can result in gossip. Have you ever talked about one person’s problems with someone else who didn’t have any need to know about them and whose view of them was going to be unfairly and negatively impacted by the knowledge? You were a gossip in that moment.

The list goes on, and as it does, the items on it simultaneously seem to become increasingly less consequential (in our opinion), but also increasingly broad in terms of the net of guilt they cast. Slander (speaking poorly of others), hating God (which is fundamentally a failure of gratitude), arrogance (thinking too highly of ourselves), pride (over inflating our self worth), boastfulness (insecurity masked as pride), inventors of evil (finding new, creative ways to do bad things), disobedient to parents (this one is pretty self-explanatory), senseless, untrustworthy, unloving, and unmerciful. For those last three, Paul might as well have simply said, “They’re not like God.”

I’ll be honest, it’s pretty hard not to find at least a few items on this list that are uncomfortably descriptive of me at various times in my life. How about you?

Here at the very end, Paul says something really uncomfortable. It’s like he’s saved the hardest part for last. He argues that people who have given themselves over to bad ideas – a giving, remember, that God eventually allows as its own form of judgment – do this in spite of knowing that it’s wrong. Worse still than this, not only do they do these things in spite of knowing they’re wrong, they encourage others to do them with them. They even celebrate others doing them as well. Once we embrace a path of unrighteousness and evil, we give ourselves over to it remarkably quickly.

There are two other things here that need to be observed because you can see them in the text. First, look at the word Paul uses twice when talking about the behavior of these folks. He doesn’t simply say they do these things. He says they practice them. While it is unavoidably true that a single sin is enough to separate us from God, sin doesn’t ever seem to be a single-instance offense. We do it once, and then we do it again. And again. And again. We sin, and then we gradually start looking for ways that we can be better at sinning. We squeeze the most enjoyment out of it that we can. We get more creative at not getting caught in our sin. We dress it up in attractive clothing to entice others into it with us. We make a practice out of it.

This active practice of sin brings us to the second thing here. Paul says that people who practice sin do it in spite of “knowing God’s just sentence” on sin. Then he goes on to tell us what that is: “That those who practice such things deserve to die.”

Whoa! Hold the phone there! Things were irritatingly uncomfortable before, but now they’ve crossed a line. Who said anything about dying? Sure, there are some nasty things on Paul’s list here, but some of these seem like pretty small offenses. It was just a little bit of harmless gossip. The rumor didn’t spread beyond just a few people. I was only being a little bit boastful, but can you blame me? I mean, look at what I did. Okay, so I didn’t do what my parents wanted me to do, but they don’t really accept who I am in the first place, so really, it’s their fault for not loving me the way I need to be loved. How do any of these things “deserve” death?

Well, for starters, these and other fruits of bad ideas are all direct rebellions against the expressed character of God. They are willful efforts to separate ourselves from the God who created and is the source of all life. When you disconnect from the source of life, the only thing you can produce is death in one form or another. The Greek word being translated “deserve” refers to something that has the same weight as something else. The two things are equivalent. The kinds of things Paul lists out here are the result of walking a path toward death. Therefore, death is the result of pursuing them.

Yet let me not take away too much from the guilt of sin. Remember that this whole section started back in v. 18 with God’s wrath being revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness. Putting all of it together, these things and others like them are the results of people thinking they know what’s right better than God does. They come from a rejection of God’s righteousness in favor of their own. They are the result of worshiping things other than God. This is a path we choose.

Okay, but how do we “know” God’s just sentence on all these things and others like them? Because He’s written it on our hearts. There’s no religious worldview that has given moral approval to any of these kinds of things. Even a secular worldview which borrows practically all of its moral obligations from religious worldviews still doesn’t give moral approval to them. The first time you did one of these things, you felt bad about it. There was that gnawing inside that this wasn’t right. But you wanted it, and so you did it anyway. The fruit was desirable to look at and seemed good for wisdom, and so you took it and ate some. It’s the same sequence of events that have been playing out on repeat since the Fall. If you want more evidence, look at the fact that we try to hide what we have done when we do things like these. We try to justify ourselves. We make excuses to explain away our behavior. These are all indicators that, yes, we know God’s just sentence. We just hope it won’t apply in our case and proceed all the same.

One last thing here: The reality is that it doesn’t have to apply in our case or anyone else’s. God’s just sentence may be that those who do these things deserve to die, but that doesn’t seem to happen very often. Instead, God is patient with us. He extends grace upon grace. He gives us time to acknowledge what we have done and to repent of it. He holds out Christ’s offer of forgiveness to all those who are willing to come and receive it no matter how many things on this list and not on this list they – we – have done. If you have walked a path of sin before (and, let’s be honest, you have walked a path of sin before…you’re probably walking one right now), no matter how far down that path you have traveled, God’s grace is still available for you. His just sentence is being put off because if you are willing to accept it, Jesus has already paid it for you. If all the rest of this is the hard news of the Gospel, that’s the good news. We’ll talk more about it in the days ahead of us, but first, Paul still has some more hard news to work through with us. Stay tuned.