Contrary to Nature

Gracious heavenly Father, as we come to your Word, our earnest prayer is that we would not be hearers only, but also doers. So, help us to receive with humility, repentance, and faith the word that you have for us. We ask for your help in Jesus’ name. Amen.

If you’re visiting here this morning, I want you to know what we do, week after week, is we go through books of the Bible verse by verse. This is the seventh sermon in Paul’s letter to the Romans. So, we’re probably going to have a lot of these. This is sermon number seven, and Lord willing, next week we’ll be in the next verses. And one of the good things about a church that goes through the Bible like that is the Bible gets to set the agenda for us. God gets to tell us in his Word what he wants us to think about, what he wants me as the preacher to talk about, what he wants us to consider. And that means that this morning’s sermon is about homosexuality and the sinfulness of homosexuality.

Let me make two preliminary comments before reading our text. First, I want you to know what this sermon is and what this sermon is not. This is not a systematic theology lecture. I like those. I do those. Those are good. So, I’m not touching on marriage, gender, sexuality, anthropology, Christology, salvation, and covering the waterfront. This is not a one-on-one counseling session. Those are really good, too. And in a counseling session, the counselor would ask a lot of questions, try to understand what you’re feeling, what you’re thinking, your fears, your hopes, your struggles, offer personal correction and encouragement. Obviously, that’s not this setting. This is not a cultural and political commentary. This is not an opportunity for the pastor to give his hot take on what’s going on in the world or what legislation or court decisions need to come about. This is also not an ethics seminar where we have time to explore lots of important questions. What should you do if you’re invited to a gay wedding? How should you handle if your lesbian daughter and her partner returns home and wants to stay in the same room? What do you do with these many difficult questions? These are all important, legitimate questions.

But I want you to know what you should be listening for. This is a sermon on these four verses in Romans chapter 1. And my task is to communicate the meaning and the mood of these verses. You may think there’s lots of other things I wish you would talk about, and what about this? But my task is to communicate the meaning and the mood of these four verses. And there’s no way around it. The mood is one of serious warning, which leads to a second preliminary comment. If you are already prepared to dislike this sermon or maybe some months or days or weeks or years from now, you’re finding this sermon online and listening to it, and you’re already prepared to dislike this sermon, can I urge you to have in your mind three questions, and start with the first one? What do these verses teach? If you could somehow remove yourself from the equation – now, you don’t want to do that ultimately, but at the beginning – and you could think to yourself, if I was just encountering another piece of ancient literature – of course, the Bible’s so much more than that – but if you were just encountering another piece of ancient literature, and you came to these couple of paragraphs, what would you think they were meaning to communicate? So, try as best as we can to have the intellectual honesty to start with that question – before we think about your experience, your friends, your family – ask if I didn’t have a dog in this fight, what would I think these verses were teaching?

Second question to have in your head is, “Am I a Christian?” Now if you just are prepared to say I’m not a Christian – I think that’s a tragic decision – but you could have intellectual honesty and say I’m simply not a Christian. This has some curiosity to me, but I’m not a Christian. I don’t believe it. The third question, if you are a Christian, is to say will I submit myself entirely – that is, my head, my heart, my will, my desires – to the word of God? I’m going to give you some quotations later in the sermon from non-Christian – in fact, LGB – scholars who see very plainly what Paul is saying. Now they say, “I don’t like it, and I don’t agree with it, and I don’t live under it,” but they can see, often more clearly, what this text is saying as opposed to professing Christians who want very much for these verses to say something else. Now if you simply say, “I am not a Christian. Here the verses. I don’t like them. I don’t live my life by him,” that’s tragic, but there’s at least some consistency. If, however, you profess to be a Christian, certainly to be a Christian is to be someone who says, “The Lord Jesus Christ is my savior and my God, and I listen to him, and I submit to him, and he knows what is best for me.” And if you are a Christian, my urging at the beginning of this message – if you say, “Yes, I’m a Christian. Yes, I want to live my life by the Bible,” and you identify as LGBTQ or you’re an ally, a supporter, of LGBTQ – would you keep an open mind that the Bible might teach something that your heart is not yet, but hopefully might be later, prepared to receive? And if you do not like what the Bible says, my exhortation is that you bring that to God. Do not blame the church or your pastor or your parents, however imperfect they all might have been, but you can take it up with God with a humble heart. God’s a big God. You say, “God, I don’t think I like what this says here. Would you help me to understand it and to know it? And if you have something for me, even if I don’t like it, would you help me to live according to your perfect word?”

Here are the verses for this morning. Romans chapter 1:24-27.

“Therefore, God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. For this reason, God gave them up to dishonorable passions, for their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature. And the men, likewise, gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.”

Let me remind you of the flow of this passage. You look at verse 22, “claiming to be wise, they became fools” – Paul, from Romans 1:18 through chapter 3:20, is pouring upon his readers this argument about the universality of sin. And here in particular in chapter 1, it’s about sins in the Gentile world. Now, not the Gentile world alone. There’s a reason that the Mosaic covenant had rules about homosexuality, because it was known even in that part of the world, but chiefly about the Gentile world – that they have known God, that they have this divinely implanted awareness, communicated through general revelation, they know something about God, and they suppress that. And so, some of the smartest people, most learned people, most philosophically sophisticated people, claiming to be wise, they become fools. And then following that, in verse 22, there are three sets of exchanges. Verse 23, “They exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images.” And then in verse 25, “They exchanged the truth about God for a lie.” And then the third exchange, in verse 26, “For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature.” So, the result of this moral folly is a series of three exchanges.

Now interspersed, interlocking, with those three exchanges, we have three times this language that God gave them over. So, look at verse 24. After each exchange, there is a giving over. Verse 24, “God gave them up in the lusts of their heart.” And then in verse 26, “For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions.” And then in verse 28, “God gave them up to a debased mind.” It’s not strictly a chronological sequence. There’s a lot of overlap, but there’s a definite pattern. Claiming to be wise, they became fools. Three exchanges and three times God gave them up. That’s the flow of Paul’s argument.

So, go back to verse 24: “Therefore, God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity.” That word, to be “given up,” is used often in the Old Testament for God giving the Israelites over to their enemies or giving the nation over to the sword. It is a handing over as a punitive act of judgment. I said a few weeks ago the analogy of you’re holding a barking, yelping, foaming dog on the leash, and finally you let go. You give him up to his desires, and he runs out into the traffic. And that that fits in a way. It gets the aspect that God is giving people over to the desires of their heart, however destructive they may be. But there’s another element to it. It’s not just a passive “there you go.” It is a judicial act of handing someone over. So, to use another analogy, you think of it as a captain who has a soldier in his ranks who very much wants to go to the other side. He is a rebellious soldier. He is in rebellion against the orders of his commanding officer, and he has given himself over. In all of his lust and his passions, he wants to fight for the other side. And so, as an act of discipline and justice and judgment upon this rebellious soldier, the captain walks him over to the enemy, and he hands him over to the other side. Now, someone may be thinking, well, yes, and so what? He goes over to the other side. That’s where he wanted to go, and he is made a commanding officer in the other army, but that’s not what Paul says happens. He doesn’t get handed over to his lusts and his impurities, to his enemy, and then become with celebration some high-ranking commanding officer with fanfare and celebration. No, he is handed over that he may immediately be placed as a POW, where he will be mistreated, oppressed, abused, and that’s what he wanted. You see the result in the second half of verse 24, “God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity.” He says, as an act of earthly judgment, “You want to do these things. You want to be awash in these impure thoughts and desires and actions. So be it.” And the result is that they dishonor their bodies among themselves.

One of the principles in Romans 1, and it’s throughout the New Testament, is that we become what we worship. That’s why the most important thing about you, A.W. Tozer said, is what you think about when you think about God. Is he pure and good and lovely and holy and righteous and just? You become the God that you worship. And what’s happening here in the folly of this exchange – they exchange the truth about God for a lie, and they worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator, and so they become something far less than they ought to have been. Everything in your life is connected to God. What you think about God, whether you fear God, whether you worship God, whether you serve God, he is the blessed one. Paul can hardly contain himself by adding this doxology. The implication is if you want to have a blessed life, fix your gaze upon the blessed one. But if you exchange the truth for a lie, you will become like the false worship you engage in. You become less like the God in whose image you were made. That’s who you are. That’s who you were made to be, to reflect in your moral character and your dominion on the earth, in your relationship to God, to reflect his image. And when we worship falsely, we become less like that God and more like the things we worship. And for these Gentiles, Paul says, it’s animals. It’s creeping things. They become like the animals they worship. That’s the argument he’s making. I give you over to these lusts, devoid of reason, lacking self-control. How can I put this delicately? They become like animals in heat. Not going to paint a picture of what that is like, but you ever – you have an animal, all it can think about is satisfying a desire. Almost anything that moves, satisfying a sexual urge, satisfying that desire. If you could get into the psyche of that animal and were able to communicate with human language, it would talk very eloquently about all these things it was feeling, all these desires, all these things that the animal felt were very important to its self-expression. All it can do, devoid of reason, lacking self-control, is satisfy animal passions. You live your life to satisfy sexual desires. The world calls that freedom. The Bible says that’s animal servitude. You’re bound over. You’re handed over to these desires. You do not become more human. You become less human.

And we come, then, continuing this argument to verse 26 and 27, which will give an explanation of these impure desires and activities. These are the two most controversial verses, at least in Romans 1 – there are going to be a lot of controversial verses in Romans – certainly in Romans chapter 1. And I say controversial, but you need to realize that for most of church history, these two verses were not controversial. Just want to spend three minutes here so we understand that we live in a very unique cultural moment. I’m reading about 15-20 Romans commentaries as we go through my study. And what’s striking is most of them hardly talk about verses 26 and 27. Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Hodge – they have hardly anything to say about it. One, I suspect, because no one disagreed, and two, because it was considered unseemly to even speak of these things – uncouth. Interestingly, the one commentary I’m reading that does say a lot about this is Chrysostom, who’s a famous preacher – early church father – from the 4th century, and that makes sense because he’s living at the time of transition between the Roman Empire when it be is going to become a Christian civilization, and so these sins are still very prevalent and widespread. And so, he talks quite a bit about verses 26 and 27. You’ve heard me mention Martyn Lloyd Jones, who preached these sermons in the 1950s and 1960s in London. You can get the multi-volume set of the sermons. On verses 1 through 20, Martyn Lloyd Jones preached 28 sermons. I’m zipping, zipping along. 28 sermons. More than one sermon per verse. You want to know how many sermons he preached on verses 21-32? One. And you look in the bound volume, and it says 21-24, verse 32. He hardly even touches on verse 26 and 27, except to just quote it in the scope of his sermon. It wasn’t a point of contention, and it was considered uncouth to even talk about it.

Just want you, especially young people (and the older I get means there’s more young people all the time), I want you to realize – if you feel like, well everyone I follow, and you don’t know, you’re 48, you’re ancient, you don’t know what it’s like to be 18 or 15 or 28. That’s right. I don’t anymore. But just want you to get some perspective for the cultural moment we live in and what a blip it is in human history. Some of you, my age and older, will remember this. Those of you who are much younger, you may not even be aware of this. In 2008, lo 18 years ago, there was a Proposition 8 – added an amendment to a state constitution reading, “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized.” That passed the legislature in that state, and it passed a statewide referendum in 2008. That was added to the constitution in the super red state of California. That was California. That was 18 years ago. In the same year, there was a presidential candidate who said, “I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I’m not in favor of gay marriage.” Who was that in 2008? Maybe it was – who was it? Was it Mitt Romney? Was it Mike Huckabee? It was Barack Obama. Now, later I think it became clear that he didn’t quite mean what he was saying, but the fact that he felt cultural pressure, only 18 years ago, to say that he did not agree with gay marriage just tells you that we live in a unique moment that has come upon us quickly. And who’s to say it doesn’t disappear quickly?

Here’s my point before we dive into these two verses, to young people in particular: do not throw away your faith because we live in a moment of time that is barely a blip on the radar screen of history. Barely a blip. From 2014 to 2022, the percentage of 18 to 24-year-olds identifying as LGB increased from 7% to 20%. 20%. Now, you just have to say “I identify” to some pollster or some online survey. 20% – an almost 300% increase in 8 years of young people identifying as LGB. Did you know, however, that since 2022 that figure is starting to crater? It has dropped by 21%. It peaked in 2022. History, except for God – he’s written it for the rest of us. We’re living it out. Don’t think, “I don’t want to get on the wrong side of history.” You don’t know where history is going, except you know what God says and where he’s going. It’s dropping, and almost all of the increase in that number and almost all of the decrease – the rise and fall – is almost entirely from young women identifying as bisexual. There’s still something of a stigma for young men if they were to say they were gay. Less so among women, who tend to be much more affirming and accommodating to your face. And so, there’s more widespread acceptance. And all the studies suggest that the experience of lesbianism is very different from the experience of being gay for men. For men, there’s a visceral, visual, there’s attraction. It’s very sexual. For women, it’s a combination of all sorts of other things – what psychologists may call codependency, or maybe a relational intimacy that then becomes something else. And so almost all of this rise and all of this fall are young women who are saying – a kind of social contagion – “Yes, I think I’ll be bisexual for a time, but it need not be forever.”

My point here is to get some sense of perspective. We’re like the proverbial fish in the water. You don’t even know that it’s wet. You don’t even know what we’re living in. I want you to look at these two verses. Three questions to ask. Number one, what is the sin Paul is condemning? What is the sin Paul is condemning in verses 26 and 27? The sin he is condemning is being inflamed with passion for someone of the same sex and engaging in sexual activity with someone of the same sex. Both the passion and the action he considers to be an affront to God’s created order. Now, the most common way to try to say that these verses say something other than what they seem to be saying very plainly is to suggest that Paul is only talking about pederasty. That’s the fancy word – and sorry to talk about unseemly things – that’s the fancy word for man-boy homosexuality. In the Roman Empire, there was a massive double standard for men and for women. Women were supposed to be virgins before marriage. Women were supposed to be chaste within marriage. Massive double standard. It’s actually one of the attractions of Christianity, that it just eliminated that double standard. But for men, it was believed that no man – man had so much pent up sexual energy, you could not expect a man – certainly you couldn’t expect him to be a virgin when he gets married, and then within marriage, you couldn’t expect that just with one woman that would satisfy all of his sexual desires.

So, it was considered, for many Romans, hardly worth mentioning that a man might expel some of his sexual energy with a young boy or with a female slave. For many, it was considered just a natural outlet. So, it’s true. That sort of sexuality was rampant in the Roman world. However, it was far from the only kind of homosexual activity. I have a 558-page book in my library. I don’t recommend you read it. It does not make for very enlightening, or rather very edifying, reading, but it’s by a non-Christian classics professor, Thomas K. Hubbard. 558 pages. It’s called Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Source Book of Ancient Documents. So, any of you could, I don’t recommend you do, but any of you could, right there in English, in black and white, you could look at 558 pages of source documents of what homosexuality was like in the ancient world. And what you’ll find is that there was every kind of activity. Grown men with grown men, grown women with grown women. Some were even lifelong companions. You’ll also find that this was contentious in the Roman world. Yes, many people thought nothing of acting out homosexual desires. And yet, other philosophers, often the Stoics, were opposed to it. It was a divisive issue in the Roman world. So, there’s nothing in the Roman world itself to suggest that Paul only has in mind one kind of bad homosexuality. And more importantly, there’s nothing in verses 26 and 27 to suggest, well, Paul’s only thinking about pederasty. The sin he wants to talk about is not abuse or exploitation. Of course, those are horrible sins. But notice he explicitly references men committing acts with men, men with men, and saying that they are consumed with passion for one another. So, this is not one person abusing and exploiting another, but these are men, grown men with men, inflamed with passion. That’s what Paul is talking about. He condemns all homosexual desires and every kind of homosexual activity. That’s the first question. What is the sin Paul is condemning? We cannot “rescue Paul” by saying he’s only talking about a certain kind. He’s talking about the passions and the action.

Second question: how does Paul describe this sin? We can deal with this very quickly. He gives three words. The sin is dishonorable. It is unnatural. And it is shameless. Dishonorable. Unnatural. Shameless. He has hard words to say about this sin. He wants to depict it with dark, ugly colors, because he believes that it is an ugly offense. That’s the reality of these verses.

Here’s the third question for these two verses. Why? Why is homosexuality a sin? So, we don’t want to just say, “We got the conclusion.” There’s a moral logic, because one of my fears is that people can grow up in good, conservative environments. They can go to a Christian school or be homeschooled. They can be in a good church, a good Sunday school, a good youth group. And they got the conclusion, and they never get the middle premise. They never see the moral logic of it. And so, they think that sometime later to simply untether themselves from that conclusion is no big deal. Not much really has to change in their faith. I want you to see the why.

The moral force of Paul’s argument is found in the second half of verse 26 and the first half of verse 27: “Their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature, and men likewise gave up natural relations with women.” So, the key term here – this is the moral logic – is that homosexuality is contrary to nature, para physin in the Greek. He does not say contrary to my nature. That’s the way some revisionist scholars try to read this: “Well, Paul’s just saying if you have a heterosexual orientation and you act in homosexual ways, then you’re out of accord with your nature. But if you have a homosexual orientation, you need to act in accord with your nature.” To read that into the text is completely anachronistic. Paul does not have these categories of orientation. He is not thinking “what is natural to me,” but using a very common philosophical phrase. He is referring to the natural order of things. In fact, this phrase para physin, contrary to nature, is used as a reference to homosexual practice in writers as diverse as Plato, Plutarch, Philo, Josephus. A popular philosopher around the time of Paul, Musonius Rufus, condemned sexual activity “of men with men, because it is a monstrous thing and contrary to nature.” He is using the lingua franca of his day. This was a very common expression to refer to that sexual union which is in contradistinction to the order of things.

Let me give you a quotation. This is from a scholar. He’s died since this book in 2003. His name is Louis Crompton. He was a gay man, a pioneer in queer studies. His 2003 book – Homosexuality and Civilization – it’s a massive book, major contribution to this field. Here’s what he writes: “Some interpreters, seeking to mitigate Paul’s harshness, have read the passage in Romans 1 as condemning not homosexuals generally, but only heterosexual men and women who experimented with homosexuality. According to this interpretation, Paul’s words were not directed at bonafide homosexuals in committed relationships. But such a reading, however well-intentioned, seems strained and unhistorical. Nowhere” – keep in mind, pioneer of queer studies, gay man. This is what I said about intellectual consistency. He’s just going to say, here’s what the Bible says. He doesn’t believe it, but here’s what he says it says – “nowhere does Paul, or any other Jewish writer of this period, imply the least acceptance of same-sex relationships under any circumstances. The idea that homosexuals might be redeemed by mutual devotion would have been wholly foreign to Paul or any Jew or any early Christian.” That’s what he says.

The argument that Paul’s making is an argument based on creation design. Think about it, if you’ve been here for these sermons over the past month. All of the creational clues in these verses. Verse 20, he references the creation of the world. Verse 25, the Creator. Verse 23, the language of animals, birds, and creeping things. That mirrors the language in Genesis 1, that God made birds and animals and creeping things. The Greek in verse 23 – “image” and “likeness” – the same two Greek words used in the Greek version of the Old Testament for the creation story, that God made us in his image and his likeness. And then, notice in these verses the language of “a lie” in verse 25, “shame” in verse 27, and next week “a sentence of death” in verse 32. What does that sound like? A lie that leads to shame that leads to a sentence of death: Genesis 3, the fall. All of that to say, Paul is clearly writing in the conceptual orbit – he is thinking entirely about creation. He is saying that the sin, writ large in the world, is a kind of redux of the same fall that happened in the garden. So, he has in his mind para physin, contrary to nature. He is thinking about God’s creational design. How did God make us? That language, “natural relations,” is about the fittedness of the male body for the female body. Only a man and a woman can fulfill the creation design. You think, “It is not good for the man to be alone.” That’s not really about he was just lonely. He needed companions. You’ve heard me say before, God could have made him a gaggle of golden retrievers, man’s best friend. He could have made a whole bunch of bros to live in their literal man cave and just watch March Madness. He could have done that. That’s not what it means, “it’s not good for the man to be alone.” What he means is the man, by himself, apart from a woman, cannot fulfill the creational design. The natural relations. Why is man and wife one flesh? I’ve said this before. If you give somebody a wet willie, thankfully you’re not married. Aren’t you one flesh? Didn’t you stick one thing in another thing? No. The one flesh is because together the man and the woman fulfill one organic purpose in their union – the biological relationship that, apart from the effects of the fall (we all know that, sadly, the fall affects the ability to do this), but should we not be affected by the fall – that union of husband and wife produces children. That’s why Paul can say “the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves” in verse 24. That’s the result. They dishonored God, and the result is that they dishonored their body. It’s hard to describe this in 1500 people, time running out, that doesn’t sound unseemly. But here’s the lie the world tells us. It’s my body, and I can do what I want with my body. And God says, “No, you can dishonor God with your body, and you can dishonor your body with what you do with your body.”

You use the analogy – this is what Chrysostom says again, thinking of the enemy – if you were to be overrun by an enemy, as happens in war sometimes, and the enemy does the most heinous things to a conquered people, and they ravish the women and make the women engage in random sexual unions, or the enemy violates and humiliates men by sodomizing them. We would all say, “What a vile, what a shameful thing. Oh, how they dishonored those men and women.” And here’s the argument Paul’s making. As much as we may not like to see it, it’s the argument he’s making. You are doing this – the Gentile world is doing this to themselves. When you sleep with partner after partner after partner, or when you give yourself over to, how shall I put it, self-pleasuring. When men have sex with men, and to put it delicately, join the organ that is meant to implant life with the part of the body that expels waste, it is a dishonoring of the body. Verse 24 says, “among themselves.” You say, well, as long as they’re consenting adults who can say what’s right and wrong?  God. The sin is not just the failure to honor God, but that in this exchange of natural relations for unnatural relations, they have not honored themselves as being made in the image of God. Chrysostom says the very treatment the enemies would have shown them, this they do to themselves.

Your body has a maker and has a telos. That means an end, a purpose, a design. For most of human history, here’s how the moral logic went: I have a body, and my body tells me my sex, and it tells me something about how to engage rightly in sex. Now, in recent years, instead of saying the body informs my feelings, we have said our feelings are so sacred that the body is now malleable. Feeling sacred, body malleable. The logic of Paul is exactly the opposite. You have a body made, fashioned, by a Creator, with a telos, with an end. The purpose, that the union of a man and a woman in marriage is for the propagation of children. Your body tells you something about who you are and about how sex is meant to be enjoyed.

One more quote. This is from a woman, Bernadette Brooten, who has written the most important work on lesbianism in antiquity, published by the University of Chicago Press. These are highly respected books. She is herself a lesbian. Here’s what she concludes: “I believe that Paul used the word ‘exchanged’ to indicate that people knew the natural sexual order of the universe and left it behind. I see Paul as condemning all forms of homoeroticism as the unnatural acts of people who turned away from God.” Now, her conclusion, then, is Paul’s a misogynist. She can see what Paul says. In Paul’s logic, men and women who engage in same-sex sexual behavior have suppressed the truth of God in unrighteousness. They have exchanged the fittedness of male-female intimacy for that which is contrary to nature. And you say, “But pastor, love is love.” You don’t believe that. You don’t really believe that. I hope you don’t believe love between a 40-year-old and a nine-year-old, love is love. You don’t believe that. You believe there are some forms of sexual intimacy that are inappropriate. God is love, and he tells us what relations and what activities are a proper expression of love and will promote and uphold love. That’s the truth. The bumper sticker is a lie.

And the language, notice, is even more emphatic for men in verse 27 than for women in verse 26. Not only did they exchange natural for unnatural, as the women did, but they were consumed. I think Paul understands something of the male psyche, different from the female. They were consumed with passion. They abandoned. You see that? They gave up natural relations. It would be one thing if there were no women around. Well, that would still be a sin, a sin of desperation. But he says they knowingly – “they gave up natural relations with women for those that were contrary to nature, committing shameful acts.” And so, verse 27, “they have received in themselves the due penalty for their error.” Now listen, this is not a reference to AIDS or sexually transmitted diseases. That would be to read into the text modern concerns. Rather, think of the context – the three times God gave them over. Those statements – we are right to understand that the shameful practice is their penalty. Sin is the punishment for sin.

One more quote from Chrysostom: he says, “Yet you may say they found pleasure in it.” See how contemporary this is? Writing in the 4th century, preaching. He says, “Well, how could it be a penalty?” You say, “But they enjoy it. They don’t experience it as a penalty.” He continues, “They found pleasure in it? You tell me what adds to the vengeance. For suppose I were to see a person running naked, with his body besmeared with muck and mire, and yet not covering himself, but exalting in it, I should not rejoice with him, but should rather bewail that he did not even perceive that he was doing so shamefully.” The presence of men and women given over to LGBTQ desires ought to arouse our pity much more than our anger. Just as the knowledge of God was plainly communicated in the things that have been made, so Paul’s argument here is that the right order of sexual intimacy has been plainly communicated in the way God made male and female. To live with such a foolish exchange is, in itself, an expression of God’s wrath. What the world calls freedom, God calls punishment – that just about the worst thing that could happen to a man or woman on earth is that you would live your life to fulfill the lusts of an unregenerate heart.

Talk to an addict who just hates what he or she does and yet cannot be free from it. And you say then, is there no hope? Am I confined to this prison? Is this handing over? Is this “giving over” a final judgment? Am I bound to this with no hope of release? The same verb Paul uses three times, “hand over, hand over, gave up, gave up,” he uses again in Romans 8:32. “He who did not spare his own Son” – here it comes – “but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” Do you see what that means? It means that the act of giving up – God gave up his Son – a judicial activity, gave him up, reckoned as a sinner, gave him up to punishment and death. And yet it was not the end of the story for Jesus. And that giving up does not have to be the end of the story for you or anyone you love. There’s forgiveness. There’s power that raised Christ from the dead. You think these desires, you think this lifestyle, you think the lies of this world are a match for the God we’ve already encountered, for the gospel that is the power of God unto salvation? No, friends, there is another exchange available for you. The exchange of 2 Corinthians 5:21, that “God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God,” that exchange is available now for all of you. Prayer, then, is that we might learn to hate the futility of the lie, the refusal to glorify God, to live in the fear of God. Do not live in the fear of your friends, in the fear of your boss, of your Fortune 500 company. Do not live in the fear of our culture’s disapproval. No one was confused about these verses for 1,900 years. They are not hard to understand. They have become hard to accept. There’s a reason the Bible says it is the fear of the Lord that’s the beginning of wisdom. You will never be wise, as the Bible understands wisdom, unless you start with God. There’s a good God, a holy God, a just God, a righteous God, and I stand in fear of him, and he has offered unto me in this great exchange that I need not believe the lie anymore. Remember where it started in verse 21: “They did not honor him as God or give thanks.”

Here’s where some of you and the ones you love – this is what some of you, where you need to start. Can you give thanks for the body God has given you? I know our bodies are affected by the fall, and we have things that don’t work right. I hate these Coke bottle glasses. I’ve had them since I was in third grade. And you have worse ailments, I know. Yeah, our bodies are affected by the fall. But can you thank God that he made you a male, or he made you a female, and he gave you a body? And that body tells you something, and it has a purpose, and it has a design. May our story be that story of 1 Thessalonians 1:9 where Paul writes, “You turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God. It doesn’t have to go in just one way. You can turn from idols and serve the living and true God. Turn, turn, turn, and Christ will be there with open arms. Let’s pray.

Our Father in heaven, we give thanks for your holy Word, inspired and inherent. Shape our lives by it. Give us ears to receive it and hearts to believe, in Jesus’ name. Amen.