_MAN GIVEN UP TO HIS OWN WAY: THE HEATHEN_
ROMANS i. 24-32
[Sidenote: Ver. 24.] =Wherefore God gave them up, in the desires of
their hearts, to uncleanness, so as to dishonour their bodies among
themselves.=
There is a dark sequence, in the logic of facts, between unworthy
thoughts of God and the development of the basest forms of human
wrong. "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God:--they are
corrupt, and have done abominable works" (Psal. xiv. 1). And the folly
which does not indeed deny God but degrades His Idea, always gives its
sure contribution to such corruption. It is so in the nature of the
case. The individual atheist, or polytheist, may conceivably be a
virtuous person, on the human standard; but if he is so it is not
because of his creed. Let his creed become a real formative power in
human society, and it will tend inevitably to moral disease and death.
Is man indeed a moral personality, made in the image of a holy and
almighty Maker? Then the vital air of his moral life must be fidelity,
correspondence, to his God. Let man think of Him as less than All, and
he will think of himself less worthily; not less proudly perhaps, but
less worthily, because not in his true and wonderful relation to the
Eternal Good. Wrong in himself will tend surely to seem less awful,
and right less necessary and great. And nothing, literally nothing,
from any region higher than himself--himself already lowered in his
own thought from his true idea--can ever come in to supply the blank
where God should be, but is not. Man may worship himself, or may
despise himself, when he has ceased to "glorify God and thank Him";
but he cannot for one hour be what he was made to be, the son of God
in the universe of God. To know God indeed is to be secured from
self-worship, and to be taught self-reverence; and it is the only way
to those two secrets in their pure fulness.
"_God gave them up._" So the Scripture says elsewhere. "So I gave them
up unto their own hearts' lusts" (Psal. lxxxi. 12); "God turned, and
gave them up to worship the host of heaven" (Acts vii. 42); "God gave
them up to passions of degradation"; "God gave them over to an
abandoned mind"; (below, verses 26, 28). It is a dire thought; but the
inmost conscience, once awake, affirms the righteousness of the thing.
From one point of view it is just the working out of a natural
process, in which sin is at once exposed and punished by its proper
results, without the slightest injection, so to speak, of any force
beyond its own terrible gravitation towards the sinner's misery. But
from another point it is the personally allotted, and personally
inflicted, retribution of Him who hates iniquity with the antagonism
of infinite Personality. _He_ has so constituted natural process that
wrong gravitates to wretchedness; and _He_ is in that process, and
above it, always and for ever.
So He "_gave them up, in their desires of their hearts_"; He left them
there where they had placed themselves, "in" the fatal region of
self-will, self-indulgence; "_unto uncleanness_" described now with
terrible explicitness in its full outcome, "_to dishonour their
bodies_" the intended temples of the Creator's presence, "_among
themselves_," or "_in themselves_"; for the possible dishonour might
be done either in a foul solitude, or in a fouler society and
mutuality: [Sidenote: Ver. 25.] =Seeing that they perverted the truth
of God,= the eternal fact of His glory and claim, =in their (τῷ)
lie,= so that it was travestied, misrepresented, lost, "in" the
falsehood of polytheism and idols; =and worshipped and served the
creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.= He
casts this strong Doxology into the thick air of false worship and
foul life, as if to clear it with its holy reverberation. For he is
writing no mere discussion, no lecture on the genesis and evolution of
paganism. It is the story of a vast rebellion, told by one who, once
himself a rebel, is now altogether and for ever the absolute vassal of
the King whom he has "seen in His beauty," and whom it is his joy to
bless, and to claim blessing for Him from His whole world for ever.
As if animated by the word of benediction, he returns to denounce "the
abominable thing which God hateth" with still more terrible
explicitness. [Sidenote: Ver. 26.] =For this reason,= because of their
preference of the worse to the infinite Good, =God gave them up to
passions of degradation;= He handed them over, self-bound, to the
helpless slavery of lust; to "_passions_," eloquent word, which
indicates how the man who _will_ have his own way is all the while a
"sufferer," though by his own fault; _the victim_ of a mastery which
he has conjured from the deep of sin.
Shall we shun to read, to render, the words which follow? We will not
comment and expound. May the presence of God in our hearts, hearts
otherwise as vulnerable as those of the old pagan sinners, sweep from
the springs of thought and will all horrible curiosity. But if it does
so it will leave us the more able, in humility, in tears, in fear, to
hear the facts of this stern indictment. It will bid us listen as
those who are not sitting in judgment on paganism, but standing beside
the accused and sentenced, to confess that we too share the fall, and
stand, if we stand, by grace alone. Aye, and we shall remember that if
an Apostle thus tore the rags from the spots of the Black Death of
ancient morals, he would have been even less merciful, if possible,
over the like symptoms lurking still in modern Christendom, and found
sometimes upon its surface.
Terrible, indeed, is the prosaic coolness with which vices now called
unnameable are named and narrated in classical literature; and we ask
in vain for one of even the noblest of the pagan moralists who has
spoken of such sins with anything like adequate horror. Such speech,
and such silence, has been almost impossible since the Gospel was felt
in civilization. "Paganism," says Dr F. W. Farrar, in a powerful
passage,[15] with this paragraph of Romans in his view, "is protected
from complete exposure by the enormity of its own vices. To shew the
divine reformation wrought by Christianity it must suffice that once
for all the Apostle of the Gentiles seized heathenism by the hair, and
branded indelibly on her forehead the stigma of her shame." Yet the
vices of the old time are not altogether an antiquarian's wonder. Now
as truly as then man is awfully accessible to the worst solicitations
the moment he trusts himself away from God. And this needs indeed to
be remembered in a stage of thought and of society whose cynicism, and
whose materialism, show gloomy signs of likeness to those last days of
the old degenerate world in which St Paul looked round him, and spoke
out the things he saw.
=For their females perverted the natural use to the unnatural.=
[Sidenote: Ver. 27.] =So too the males, leaving the natural use of the
female, burst out aflame in their craving towards one another, males
in males working out their unseemliness--and duly getting
(ἀπολαμβάνοντες) in themselves that recompense of their error which
was owed them.=
[Sidenote: Ver. 28.] =And as they did not approve of keeping God in
their moral knowledge,[16] God gave them up to an abandoned mind,= "_a
reprobate, God-rejected, mind_"; meeting their _disapprobation_ with
His just and fatal _reprobation_ (δοκιμάζειν, ἀδόκιμος). That
_mind_, taking the false premisses of the Tempter, and reasoning from
them to establish the autocracy of self, led with terrible certainty
and success through evil thinking to evil doing; =to do the deeds
which are not becoming,= to _expose_ the being made for God, in a
naked and foul _unseemliness_, to its friends and its foes;
[Sidenote: Ver. 29.] =filled full of all unrighteousness, wickedness,
viciousness, greed; brimming with envy, murder, guile, ill-nature;
whisperers,= [Sidenote: Ver. 30.] =defamers, repulsive to God,
outragers, prideful, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to
parents,= [Sidenote: Ver. 31.] =senseless, faithless, loveless,
truceless, pitiless; people who (οἵτινες) morally aware of
(ἐπυγνόντες) God's ordinance, that they who practise such things are
worthy of death, not only do them, but assent and consent with those
who practise them.=
Here is a terrible accusation of human life, and of the human heart;
the more terrible because it is plainly meant to be, in a certain
sense, inclusive, universal. We are not indeed compelled to think that
the Apostle charges every human being with sins against nature, as if
the whole earth were actually one vast City of the Plain. We need not
take him to mean that every descendant of Adam is actually an
undutiful child, or actually untrustworthy in a compact, or even
actually a boaster, an ἀλαζὼν, a pretentious claimant of praise or
credit which he knows he does not deserve. We may be sure that on the
whole, in this lurid passage, charged less with condemnation than with
"lamentation, and mourning, and woe," he is thinking mainly of the
then state of heathen society in its worst developments. Yet we shall
see, as the Epistle goes on, that all the while he is thinking not
only of the sins of some men, but of the sin of man. He describes with
this tremendous particularity the variegated symptoms of one
disease--the corruption of man's heart; a disease everywhere present,
everywhere deadly; limited in its manifestations by many circumstances
and conditions, outward or within the man, but _in itself_ quite
unlimited in its dreadful possibilities. What man is, as fallen,
corrupted, gone from God, is shewn, in the teaching of St Paul, by
what bad men are.
Do we rebel against the inference? Quite possibly we do. Almost for
certain, at one time or another, we have done so. We look round us on
one estimable life and another, which we cannot reasonably think of as
regenerate, if we take the strict Scriptural tests of regeneration
into account, yet which asks and wins our respect, our confidence, it
may be even our admiration; and we say, openly or tacitly, consciously
or unconsciously, that _that_ life stands clear outside this first
chapter of Romans. Well, be it so in our thoughts; and let nothing, no
nothing, make us otherwise than ready to recognize and honour right
doing wherever we see it, alike in the saints of God and in those who
deny His very Being. But just now let us withdraw from all such looks
outward, and calmly and in a silent hour look in. Do we, do you, do I,
stand outside this chapter? Are we definitely prepared to say that the
heart which we carry in our breast, whatever our friend's heart may
be, is such that under no change of circumstances could it, being what
it is, conceivably develop the forms of evil branded in this passage?
Ah, who, that knows himself, does not know that there lies in him
indefinitely more than he can know of possible evil? "Who can
understand his errors?" Who has so encountered temptation in all its
typical forms that he can say, with even approximate truth, that he
knows his own strength, and his own weakness, exactly as they are?
It was not for nothing that the question was discussed of old, whether
there was any man who would always be virtuous if he were given the
ring of Gyges, and the power to be invisible to all eyes. Nor was it
lightly, or as a piece of pious rhetoric, that the saintliest of the
chiefs of our Reformation, seeing a murderer carried off to die,
exclaimed that there went John Bradford but for the grace of God. It
is just when a man is nearest God for himself that he sees what, but
for God, he would be; what, taken apart from God, he is, potentially
if not in act. And it is in just such a mood that, reading this
paragraph of the great Epistle, he will smite upon his breast, and
say, "God, be merciful to me the sinner" (Luke xviii. 13).
So doing he will be meeting the very purpose of the Writer of this
passage. St Paul is full of the message of peace, holiness, and the
Spirit. He is intent and eager to bring his reader into sight and
possession of the fulness of the eternal mercy, revealed and secured
in the Lord Jesus Christ, our Sacrifice and Life. But for this very
purpose he labours first to expose man to himself; to awaken him to
the fact that he is before everything else a sinner; to reverse the
Tempter's spell, and to let him see the fact of his guilt with open
eyes.
"The Gospel," some one has said, "can never be proved except to a bad
conscience." If "bad" means "awakened," the saying is profoundly true.
With a conscience sound asleep we may discuss Christianity, whether to
condemn it, or to applaud. We may see in it an elevating programme for
the race. We may affirm, a thousand times, that from the creed that
God became flesh there result boundless possibilities for Humanity.
But the Gospel, "the power of God unto salvation," will hardly be seen
in its own prevailing self-evidence, as it is presented in this
wonderful Epistle, till the student is first and with all else a
penitent. The man must know for himself something of sin as
condemnable guilt, and something of self as a thing in helpless yet
responsible bondage, before he can so see Christ given for us, and
risen for us, and seated at the right hand of God for us, as to say,
"There is now no condemnation; Who shall separate us from the love of
God? I know whom I have believed."
To the full sight of Christ there needs a true sight of self, that is
to say, of sin.
[15] _Darkness and Dawn_, p. 112.
[16] So we venture here to render ἐπίγνωσις, a knowledge deeper than
that of merely logical conclusion.