Fr. Stephen De Young: So now verse 18: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” We’ll get into that last phrase when we go into the next verse, because the next verse sort of explains it. So the wrath of God is now being revealed from heaven against all the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. That’s something that’s happening now, according to St. Paul. So something has changed. And we last saw this in Acts 17, when St. Paul was preaching in Romans, although he said it a little more positively there. He said, “In the past, when the nations sort of all went their own way, God sort of bore with them and overlooked their sins, in the sense that he dealt with them; he didn’t punish their sins.”

So what’s changed is the Gospel going out to all the nations has this dual effect. There used to be maybe—maybe—an excuse. God had given his Torah, the law, his teaching, to the nation of Israel; he didn’t give it to the Phoenicians, he didn’t give it to the Greeks, he didn’t give it to the Romans, he didn’t give it to the Egyptians: he gave it to Israel. And because he had given that knowledge to them, they were then accountable for what they did with it. And we see in the Old Testament how, when they didn’t follow it, God held them accountable. Israel gets wiped out by the Assyrians, and then Judah goes into exile in Babylon because of it, but he holds them accountable to it.

So St. Paul is saying, “Look, now that the Gospel is going out to everyone, this also means that everyone is going to be held accountable for what they do with it,” because he’s just—by referencing Habakkuk, as we just said, he’s talking about how there was this judgment in Israel among the Jews. Now this same thing is going to happen among the Gentiles. There are going to be Gentiles who hear the Gospel and have faith, and those who reject it And the ones who reject it are going to be in that same category as the ones who shrink back, who face death and the grave.

Q1: I did not notice that the very next verse is about sinful behavior. [Laughter] “The just shall live by faith,” and those who don’t are in trouble.

Fr. Stephen: Well, we’ll see. We’ll see. We’ll get there.

Q1: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: Because he did notice it was about sinful behavior, but we’ll see what he did with that in a little bit here. So now there’s this accountability.

And then the ungodly and the unrighteous are described as—and remember that the unrighteous, the unjust, is the same category as the shrinkers-back. These are people who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. And now he’s going to explain what he means by that.

“Because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes”—now notice that “attributes” is in italics, which means it’s an added word; it’s not there in the original—“are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.” We’ll pause there.

So he says they’re suppressing the truth in unrighteousness, meaning they haven’t been totally without revelation from God. They haven’t had the Torah—they didn’t have this sort of direct communication with God and direct teaching from God that Israel had—but they are living in God’s creation. They themselves are made in the image of God; it’s revealed within them. And in the world around them is all the evidence of who God is. That word “attributes” that is plugged in there: it’s really just “invisible things.” It is a quality of God. God himself is not visible to them until Christ comes. But he’s not visible to them, but who he is as a Creator—his character, what he does, his works—are all around them and inside of them. And so they’re not completely without excuse.

Then he goes on: “Because, although they knew God”—they knew him from…

Q1: From creation.

Fr. Stephen: From creation, from within themselves. “...they did not glorify him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man—and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things.”

So they’re the creation of God. They can look within themselves, they can look outside themselves and see who God was, but rather than giving thanks to God as the Creator of these things and of themselves, they decided to worship and give glory to these other things.

Q1: These are images and animals which…

Fr. Stephen: Right, so he mentions idols that look like a man, like Zeus or whatever. Well, this looks like a human being. You’re a human being. Why would you worship a human being? [Laughter] Then he says: even sillier, animals!

Q1: This is Egyptian religion.

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah.

Q1: You can go to any museum: hundreds of mummified cats that are incarnations of the goddess Bast.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So you’ve taken this glory that’s due to God, you’ve given it to something that looks like you, and what does that imply? That really you’re sort of worshiping yourself! And then, even sillier, to things that are beneath you in the pecking order, some animal.

Now, notice there’s a historical element here, too, because he’s talking about this is what historically—this is what the Gentiles had and this is what you did, because you’re all descended from—biblically, in Genesis, you’re all descended from Noah. So back there far enough, there were people who knew who God was, but now…

And there’s also again, St. Paul is playing off the idea again that you should look within yourself, that human beings are made in the image of God. We’re made in the image of God. Why would you try to make God in the image of yourself? How that’s been reversed. And so the people are taking this upon themselves.

“Therefore, God also gave them up to uncleanness and the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchange the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.”

This is sort of a typical Jewish criticism of idolatry and pagan religion, that you’ve taken—rather than the Creator, you’re worshiping some creature, specifically yourself. And that self-worship has all kinds of moral consequences. And the pinnacle of those, as we’re going to see, as St. Paul continues—and he references here, “to dishonor their bodies among themselves”—the pinnacle of that is seen as sexual immorality. Remember in Acts 15 when they met to say, “Okay, what are the things that are off-limits to the Gentiles?” They don’t have to keep all the food laws and all that, but what things are off-limits? And we talked about how they went back to Leviticus, and in Leviticus there’s a whole bunch of commandments and detailed rules for the Israelites, and then there are just a couple that are aimed at anyone who’s living in Israel, whether they’re an Israelite or not. And those are the ones that are then applied to the Gentiles.

Remember, three of those are basically having to do with idolatry, and then the other one is sexual immorality, because Leviticus says these sort of poison and taint the land itself. This sort of destroys creation around you. So this is typical Jewish, and these things are seen through that idea of self-worship, of being interwoven and connected. And Roman society is Exhibit A of this, of both idolatry and sexual immorality and the way they’re intertwined.

Q1: Especially in the city of Rome.

Fr. Stephen: Right, especially in the city of Rome, but widespread. When they show you Pompeii and Herculaneum in the documentaries and stuff, they leave out the mounds and mounds of sexually explicit art that was everywhere. Everywhere! In public, in private homes…

Q1: Every house had a sex room.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Q1: Where you went to do that, and it was… Walls were painted with inspirational materials, and I’ve seen some of those.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And, again, I don’t want to be graphic or go into too much detail, but you have to remember that pederasty was a social institution in the Roman world.

Q1: Greek world, too.

Fr. Stephen: In the Greek world. What we would call child molestation. And we have records in Greek and Roman authors talking about eight- and nine-year-olds, not talking about it like “this is shameful,” but talking about it like this is good. Plato’s Symposium argues that the truest form of love is between an adult man and a young boy. This kind of thing is deeply immersed in Greco-Roman culture. The reason it isn’t now is because of Christianity. Christians, early Christians, would not use the term “pederasty.” Pederasty literally means a lover of children. They came up with a new term: corrupter of children, or abuser of children That’s how they referred to it, right off the bat.

Q2: This is something they knew…

Fr. Stephen: No. No, it was just acceptable then.

Q2: Oh, it was acceptable.

Fr. Stephen: It wasn’t a crime then.

Q1: It was even sort of socially “in,” fashionable. You were thought better of if you did this.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yeah, because they… In part, it’s because of the way they denigrated women in the Greek and Roman world.

Q1: Yeah, that had a lot to do with it.

Fr. Stephen: I probably said before that Aristotle said that all infants are trying to develop into males, and some of them don’t make it and get born as women. So he literally thought that women were a birth defect! [Laughter] Because they weren’t— So they would say, “Well, how could a man truly love a woman.” They’d say, “To truly love someone, it would have to be an equal.” [Laughter] And so that’s how they viewed it.

Q2: Really!?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! [Laughter] And so that’s why they thought that pederasty and some forms of homosexuality—though not others—were superior—they thought it was superior to the love between a man and a woman in Greco-Roman culture.

Q1: In Sparta, it was really institutionalized.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and it was because of the way— And this is another thing we don’t— People all the time now want to say, “Christianity degrades women” or this or that. It’s like… You need to go to the world before Christianity and see how Christianity improved. That’s why there were so many women in the early Church, because Christianity was about the only place where they were treated as equally human. [Laughter]

Q1: In a well-bred Greek household, the woman never went outside, and there are law cases where it depends on an inheritance case: the man claims his wife is dead and he should be inheriting something. They don’t go to the house to see if she’s there; they argue it out in the court, because she—she’s not to appear; nobody’s to see her.

Q2: She has no voice.

Fr. Stephen: The ancient world was more like Saudi Arabia than Europe in terms of how women were seen.

Q1: And I’ve had Muslims tell me that Muhammad made a big improvement on what had been before.

Fr. Stephen: Than what had been before that, even. But, yeah, and then that was— But the point is, see, when you get away from God as Creator and start to worship yourself, then all of these sexual perversions and things—it becomes about self-gratification, offering worship to yourself, glorifying yourself, and all of these things start to crop up, because it’s about self-indulgence.

And there were Roman moralists who argued against that, but what’s important here was: they had to argue against that. Like, the Stoics had to come out and argue: No, morality is not indulging all of your— Because the cultural view was: that was good. Going out and indulging and finding pleasure for yourself was a good thing. That was the goal of life, was to be happy and indulgent as much as you could. [Laughter] That was it!

And so that kind of got— Christianity did away with that kind of thing, kind of understanding of morality, and then Freud brought it back in the 19th century, where for Freud, pretty much all of your mental problems are a result of your not being particularly sexually satisfied.

Q2: So for people who were trying to make rules for human sexuality, and what we’re seeing now about gays and all that stuff, that’s all against Christianity and all what was taught in the past, and they are trying to bring it back the way it used to be?

Fr. Stephen: Right. Exactly.

Q2: So they are just attacking Christians by these acts. That’s my understanding.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s why Christianity is involved in that at all, is because it’s Christianity that changed that. When they were having the debate about same-sex marriage, one true thing that the one side said in that was, “This whole idea that marriage is between one man and one woman is just a Christian thing.” That’s actually true! [Laughter]

Q2: Really?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. That’s actually true, yes. Jewish communities practiced polygamy until the eleventh century.

Q2: We don’t hear about this stuff!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So that is a Christian thing. The whole morality of marriage and sexuality that informed the Western world came from Christianity, and so as the culture tries to de-Christianize itself, that’s going away, and these things that were acceptable—considered acceptable in the ancient world, they are now being fought to have them become acceptable again.

But St. Paul is saying that those things, those sexual—not just those sexual things: all of these sins, but they’re sort of at the top of the list—all of those sins are symptoms of a disease. They’re symptoms of a spiritual disease, which is that you’re not worshiping and following the true God who created the universe.

Q2: I’m trying to understand then. He’s treating them as a sick person who needs a doctor.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That if you reject—there’s only one God who’s actually God. There’s lots of demons and stuff, but there’s only one God who’s actually God, and if you reject God the Father, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit—if you reject that, then that’s going to— In the same way that, as we said, having faith that the Gospel is true is going to transform the way you live your life, rejecting it is going to transform the way you live your life in a negative way.

Q2: So it reflects on your path.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, how you live is going to be reflected either way. And St. Paul’s going to say this is just destruction bringing about destruction.

Q1: There’s an interesting dynamic here that worshiping an image of yourself, essentially worshiping yourself, means that whatever you want, whatever you feel like, is good. And that’s the morality that we’ve come back to.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, if you’re your own god, you’re your own lawgiver.

Q1: And we have—

Q2: That’s what St. Peter… [Inaudible]

Q1: —in the world today, the saying: “If it feels good, do it.”

Fr. Stephen: That’s why I brought up Freud. Freud’s whole premise is: If you have an appetite or a desire that doesn’t get satisfied, that’s a problem. [Laughter] That’s a problem, and that’s going to cause problems for you—which is turning morality, traditional morality, on its head. Even the Greek and Roman moralists who were trying to fight against this, who were pagans but who were philosophers or something, who were the ones who St. Paul is about to say were looking at creation and looking at themselves and seeing: This is not right. We’re always saying that morality is restraining your desires and not indulging them. That’s what morality is, is self-control and not indulging. Now that’s been turned on its head by the modern world.

Q1: In spite of the symposium, it says that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Q1: I mean, all of the ancient philosophy, its morality is centered on self-restraint, self-discipline. There’s never been, to my knowledge, until the 20th century, a morality that was not based on self-discipline.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that’s a lack of morality, essentially.

Q1: Right. I mean, maybe mistaken ideas of self-discipline, but that concept is always at the center of it.

Fr. Stephen: So St. Paul continues: “For this reason, God gave them up to vile passions, for even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, turned in their lust for one another, men with men, committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of error which was due.” So it says God gave them up; it’s: God let them have what they claimed they wanted. He didn’t stop them. He didn’t come and enforce them to have faith and to live faithfully, to live righteously. He said, “This is what you think you want? You can have it.” And what comes is destruction. What comes is— They experience the consequences of that. And homosexuality is here the example that St. Paul uses, but all of that sexual immorality is included in that.

Q2: But that was for a period time? If God let them experience that, was it for a certain period of time?

Fr. Stephen: Right, this is the flip-side. See, again, St. Paul does both sides. So on the one hand, as we saw in Acts 17, God wasn’t disciplining them and judging them the way he did Israel for violating his teaching, because they hadn’t received his teaching. He was sort of letting them go their own way, as St. Paul says. The bad side of letting them go their own way is the way they went! [Laughter] See, there’s something to be said for that. They didn’t experience the negative consequences that Israel experienced, but when a parent disciplines a child, it’s for that child’s good. So, yeah, the Gentiles didn’t get punished for going and playing in the street, but they went and played in the street and got hit by a truck. [Laughter] So it’s both sides.

St. Paul is trying to say… Because he’s just said, “God wasn’t holding this against you, but now his wrath—now there’s going to be consequences.” But he doesn’t want them to think, “Oh, man, it was so much better before. It would have been so much better if we hadn’t heard the Gospel, because then we could just wander off and get away with stuff.” He’s saying—

Q1: That’s sort of the contemporary view. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: You weren’t getting away with anything. Yeah, God wasn’t sending you into exile, but there were all these consequences of your sin that you were experiencing. You weren’t better off. You’re better off now, hearing the Gospel and accepting it and living a righteous life by faith.

“And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge”—it’s the New King James translation: “they did not like to…” [Laughter] They chose not to. “God gave them over to a debased mind to do those things which are not fitting. Being filled with all unrighteousness, sexual immorality, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil-mindedness”—again, [New] King James translation—“they are whisperers!” [Laughter] Which is gossips—“backbiters, haters of God, violent, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, undiscerning, untrustworthy, unloving, unforgiving, unmerciful.” So here we get the whole list. He’s not just—it’s not just homosexuality and you avoid that, or even sexual immorality. That’s the beginning of the list, but there’s a whole—all of these things come out when you choose to not… And he keeps using this: “of retaining the knowledge of God,” meaning it was out there for them to lay hold of. Just like he said— Remember, in Acts 17 he said it on the more positive side. God was not far from them. He’d left these things so that they might reach out and look for him and perhaps find him. Well, this is the negative part. They could have done that, but hey didn’t; they went off after these things, and so God let them go, let them go and experience what would happen. And all of these things, then, flourished within that, apart from God.

Q1: Do you think God is letting them go today? Is he…? Why and how is God allowing this to come back today?

Q2: Good question.

Fr. Stephen: He’s never been the one stopping them.

Q1: Of course, we have free will.

Fr. Stephen: Right. We have free will. And it so happened that Christendom, both East and West, formed its laws around God’s law, and so even people who didn’t really believe, who weren’t really faithful to God, were compelled to outwardly, in public, conform.

Q1: They lived in a society that was based on…

Fr. Stephen: There’s two sides to that, because that outward conformity is of no value. I mean, it makes for a nicer society to live in, but it’s of no value to the person who’s practicing that outward conformity.

Q1: It has social value, but not personal value.

Fr. Stephen: Right. I back in the early ‘90s experienced this, but I grew up in southern California and then moved to east Texas, to go to college. [Laughter] And it’s very different. In California if you’re a pagan or an atheist, you have a big bumper sticker that says, “I’m a pagan,” “I’m an atheist,” on the back of your car. When I went to east Texas, everyone in town went to church on Sunday. It didn’t matter who they were, what they did for a living, what they did for the rest of the week: everyone was in some church on Sunday.

Q1: That’s the way it was when I was a boy.

Fr. Stephen: And it was divided up more by social class than anything else. The wealthy people went to these churches and the middle class people went to these churches and the poor people went to these churches, but everybody showed up at some church, or synagogue if they were Jewish. And so there are benefits and drawbacks to both. One of them is a more pleasant and Christian-seeming society, whereas the other one is sort of hourly pay. But the other one you know where you stand, and when you go to preach the Gospel to someone, they don’t think they’ve already heard it. They don’t think they already believe it. You don’t get: “Oh, I’m a Christian; don’t worry about it.” And what that actually means, “I’m a Christian,” is sort of like: “Well, I don’t drink that much and I don’t do drugs…” [Laughter] It’s just sort of like: “I’m a nice person” kind of thing. Sort of like in English your Christian name is just your proper name. [Laughter] It just means sort of proper. So, yeah, there’s both of those.

So in one sense, yeah, our society’s becoming a lot more obviously anti-Christian and antagonistic toward Christianity and a lot less pleasant for Christians in many, many ways; on the other hand, a lot of the fakeness and the artifice and everything is being dropped, and people are admitting who they really are and what they really believe and don’t believe and feel, more openly. So there’s a bit of both there.

So then St. Paul finishes this section: “Who”—meaning these Gentiles. “Who, knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them.” So part of what’s included in the knowledge they have is that these things are wrong. And St. Paul can quote a bunch, can point to a bunch of pagan philosophers.

Q1: Oh, yeah!

Fr. Stephen: Who said that this stuff was wrong, who said: Look, from looking, again within themselves, from looking at the world around them— Aristotle talks about, in the Poetics, there’s a “natural right.” “Natural law” comes many centuries later, but there’s a natural right. There are things that are naturally right, that are in accordance with nature, with the way we exist. He didn’t believe we were created, but the way human beings are, there are things that are right for human beings to do, and good, and human beings should do those, pursue those. So that was available to them, at least that much—not all the details, not everything worked out, but that much. That murder, violence—these things on this list were wrong.

But the vast majority of the Gentiles, of the Romans, whom he’s writing to, when they were pagans, not only did these things anyway, even though somewhere they knew they were wrong, but they gave approval, as we were just saying. This society approved of and endorsed these things and these people who were doing these things. And so that’s a sign of how far gone they were.

So this is a good place to stop for this evening. Next time, he’s now gone through… Remember, he started with the Jews and then the Gentiles; he’s been talking to the Gentiles. When we come back next time and start chapter two, he’s going to turn his attention to the Jewish members of the community, lest they start going, “Yeah, yeah, you no-good Gentile, pagan debauchery… bla-de-bla-de-blah!” [Laughter] He’s going to come around and talk to them, too, next time. So thank you, everybody.

Q1: Thank you.