Romans – A Treatise
Chapter One
THE FALL OF MAN
Scripture Reading: verses 21-25 (Darby translation)
BECAUSE THAT, WHEN THEY KNEW GOD, THEY GLORIFIED HIM NOT AS GOD, NEITHER WERE THANKFUL; BUT BECAME VAIN IN THEIR IMAGINATIONS, AND THEIR FOOLISH HEART WAS DARKENED. PROFESSING THEMSELVES TO BE WISE, THEY BECOME FOOLS, AND CHANGED THE GLORY OF THE UNCORRUPTIBLE GOD INTO AN IMAGE MADE LIKE TO CORRUPTIBLE MAN, AND TO BIRDS, AND FOURFOOTED BEASTS, AND CREEPING THINGS. WHEREFORE GOD ALSO GAVE THEM UP TO UNCLEANNESS THROUGH THE LUSTS OF THEIR OWN HEARTS, TO DISHONOR THEIR OWN BODIES BETWEEN THEMSELVES: WHO CHANGED THE TRUTH OF GOD INTO A LIE, AND WORSHIPPED AND SERVED THE CREATURE MORE THAN THE CREATOR, WHO IS BLESSED FOR EVER. AMEN. THEIR IMAGINATIONS, AND THEIR FOOLISH HEART WAS DARKENED.
As we pursue this solemn subject, let us remember that it is a legal document, setting forth the reasons for God’s dealings with His creatures. In this passage we have the tragic indictment of the natural man in his departure from God down the dark declivity of sin and unbelief.1
We are living in an age when it is thought profitable to constantly say nice things to each other. Courtesy is certainly a primary Christian grace. Therefore, it comes as somewhat of a shock to read the candid truths of such verses as these. Today, it is plausible to speak in high-sounding phrases of the upward climb of man toward godlike greatness, but God’s Word recognizes no such theorizing. The Spirit of God speaks to us through the Divine record in words of candor and clarity, so that the wayfaring man, though a fool, may not err in the way.
Paul has set forth the mighty testimony of the visible creation to both the power and the Godhead of the Creator. The Creator of the universe is the Lord Jesus Christ, the Person who died on Calvary’s Cross. Such a claim is made for Him over and over again both in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. The very beginning of Isaiah's prophecy presents Him in no uncertain terms: “Unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given: and His Name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.” Then, as we travel through that Hebrew Bible prophecy, the prophetic arrow narrows down to a point of unmistakable exactitude in the fifty-third chapter: “He shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: He hath no form nor comeliness . . . there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.”2 He is “led as a lamb to the slaughter,” “numbered with the transgressors,” and He “bears the sins of many.” Thus the Hebrew Bible prophet designates the coming Messiah as none other than the Man of Calvary.
The theme is taken up in the New Testament. John tells us this Person who died on the Cross is called the Word, the Logos; He is the eternal God and “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”3 In Luke’s Gospel we see the child born. In John’s Gospel we see the Son given. Thus, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament intertwine to declare that this Person, called the Word of God, the Son of the Living God, is the Creator of the universe. John says: “By Him were all things made and without Him was not anything made that was made.”4 Thus, by being brought nigh to the Lord Jesus Christ, we stand in the very presence of God Himself. Those in the light of the Gospel have no excuse for unbelief. Why then, with all these advantages of Divine revelation, is the world steeped in unbelief?
The answer is found here in the first chapter of Romans. Having the testimony of the Creator set forth in colors of unmistakable grandeur in the visible creation, man, impelled by a fallen nature, chooses to glorify himself rather than the God who made him. So God says:
Because that, when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up.5
Are we now living in a world upon which God has given up? Is this a tragic truth? If so, it is not that every individual in the world has been abandoned by God. On the contrary, we can still say, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” If God has given up, it would be on the world system. And if He has given up, then as an economy of man’s machinations it is headed for doom – for the pit. How can we escape from the destiny of so tragic a condemnation? John tells us in unequivocal language: “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life; he that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him.” Again he says: “He that believeth on Him is not condemned, but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.” A sinful world is doomed – it is totality under the judgment of God. We may escape only by placing confidence in the Lord Jesus Christ as Redeemer who died to save us.
But let us look again at the sorrowful moral declension outlined in this passage. First of all, having the opportunity to know God in the visible creation, men turn their backs on Him. They do not glorify Him. They make light of God. They drag His Name in the mire and murk of sin and shame. Their first indictment: they belittle the God who made them; the second, they are not thankful; the third, they are vain in their imaginations; the fourth, their foolish heart is darkened; the fifth, professing to be wise they become fools; the sixth, they go headlong into idolatry, worshiping images to corruptible men, to birds, to beasts, to creeping things.
As a result of all that, God has given them up.
After the flesh, man is a ruined creature. As he came from the hand of God he was a majestic being of spirit, soul, and body – his spirit the highest part. By that spirit he communed with God. His soul was the seat of his affection and emotion, a glorious entity of beauty and unspeakable bliss. His body was the vehicle by which he could move within the orbit of God’s desired plan for him. Then in the Garden of Eden, man, this majestic being, fell. He was like a three-story structure, built in ordered grandeur, his spirit on top, his soul second, and his body on the ground floor. When he fell, not only was he separated from God, but something radical took place in his being. The third story literally fell into the basement. His body became the predominant entity for lust and self-gratification. His soul took second place, making him predominantly an emotional being, and his spirit became subjugated to his feelings and desires. That is the man depicted in Romans chapter one. Does he sound familiar? Only the grace of God can reconstruct that majestic being, and it is done by the new birth on the basis of the redemptive work of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Footnotes:
1 This verse must be looked upon as the coffin and grave of any theory that the human race progressively worked its way upward in religion. The Bible teaches that paganism was not original, but was itself an apostasy from a more noble condition preceding it. In other words, heathenism is not the primeval religion, from which man might gradually have risen to the knowledge of the true God, but on the contrary is the result of a falling away from the known original revelation of the true God in His works. It is a frightening and sober thought that all of the carnal debaucheries and gross vulgar conduct revealed a little later in this chapter, marking the wickedness of those ancient Gentiles, should have begun with so mild and apparently innocuous a thing as neglect of worship and failure to give thanks to God. What a powerful warning to Christians of the present generation who regard neglect of giving thanks as a casual and minor omission of duty. All people should take this to heart; because forsaking worship or neglecting the giving of thanks might be compared to the pebble cast from the top of a mountain that becomes a roaring avalanche crushing everything beneath it. The refusal or neglect of worship and the thanksgiving properly due to Almighty God led at once to a flurry of “reasonings;” but human reason, cut off from the source of all true light, led quickly to innumerable vanities. The ancient Gentiles were a people who closed their two eyes (worship and praise) for seeing and knowing God, and turned their backs on the light to walk in their own shadow. An expressive change of voice is noted in the last clause, where the active voice records the negative action of the Gentiles in refusing to glorify God or give thanks, but the passive voice was used to describe what happened afterward. “Their senseless hearts were darkened.” The soul which turns away from the knowledge of God is active in the turning away, but passive in the resultant descent into vanity and darkness. In time, such a defector from the light becomes sub-human because that part of the brain with which he should honor and glorify God becomes atrophied, hardened, and insensible. This accounts for the blindness which is the chief characteristic of many so-called intellectuals who have turned away from faith in Christ. Having closed the eyes of their minds with which they might have seen the invisible things of God, such persons eventually find themselves in a state of total disability in the perception of spiritual realities. How sad is the state of people like that, perhaps with the highest academic degrees, occupying positions of trust and honor. They may be considered by their contemporaries as the wisest and ablest of people, but the light has gone out of their minds, and the knowledge of God has faded. Despite their worldly excellence, those are the living dead.
2 It is peculiarity that in these three verses one word in each of the three is quoted in the second half of each verse. Thus: in (1), the word is “who,” “whom”; in (2) the word is “he”; and in (3) the word is “despised.” In this paragraph, the surpassing glory of the Lord Jesus Christ is hidden behind obscurity, poverty, humiliation, misery, and shame; and this is the great example that “God’s thoughts and God’s ways are as much higher than those of men as the heavens are higher than the earth,” as Isaiah would more fully elaborate in chapter 55, verse 8. In Isaiah 53:1, the language suggests that “no one” believed the report, or hearkened to the Word of God; but the apostle Paul’s word shows that the statements here are hyperbole; for he said, “Not all hearkened to the good tidings” (Rom. 10:16). Those who hearkened were the apostles of the New Testament Church and those who followed their leadership. Nevertheless, the small percentage of the Old Israel who believed and obeyed the Son of God fully justified the hyperbole. A similar use of this figure of speech is seen in Luke 7:29-30, as compared with Matthew 3:5. “As a tender plant, and as a root out of dry ground ...” (Is. 53:2). Here are given the conditions of Jesus’ earthly environment which seem to be revealed as the reason why He had no comeliness or beauty that would cause Him to be desired by men. We cannot believe that the physical unattractiveness or ugliness of the Son of God are meant by the lack of beauty or comeliness on His part. The tremendous attractiveness of Jesus for the great women of that era who knew Him absolutely denies any denial of the power and magnetism of His personality (Luke 7:37,38; 8:1-4, etc.). Likewise the appeal that Jesus had for the rugged fishermen of Galilee, and the authority of His strong right arm with the whips when He drove the money changers out of the temple; none of these facts will harmonize with an unattractive countenance or any form of personal “ugliness.” No, what is meant is that none of the trappings of wealth, office, social status, or any other such things which are so honored among men, belonged to Jesus. “As a root out of dry ground ...” (Is. 53:2). What is the “dry ground” mentioned here? Surely this refers to a corrupt age and nation, and the arid soil of mankind. Both the nation of Israel and all of the nations of the pre-Christian Gentile world were at this time judicially hardened by God Himself; and nothing could have seemed more impossible to the citizens of that dissolute age than the fact that God’s Holy Messiah would be born to humble parents in some obscure village, and that the salvation of all the world would be available through that Child alone. The lack of beauty and comeliness spoken of here has been the occasion of all kinds of derogatory statements about Christ. But the emphasis on the lack of beauty and comeliness does not refer to the physical appearance of Jesus except during those terrible scenes of Holy Week, during which He was denied sleep, beaten unmercifully by a Roman chastisement, mocked some six times in all, crowned with a crown of thorns, tortured to death on the Cross, compelled to carry the cross till He fainted, being struck in the face with a reed, reviled and spit upon. This was the time when His visage was marred, and the last vestiges of His physical beauty perished under the venomous, inhuman treatment of Satan and his sons who put Him to death. “Despised and rejected of men ...” (Is. 53:3). In other words, our precious Savior lacked men of distinction as his supporters. This harmonizes with the fact that a tax collector and common fishermen were among His apostles, whereas distinguished persons like the rich young ruler turned away from Him. Men still persist in avoiding facing the “real Jesus,” preferring what they call “the historical Jesus” who would not trouble them with the Cross.
3 The Greek word [logos] from which "Word" is translated was widely known in the world of John"s day, being found some 1,300 times in the writings of Philo, a Hellenistic Jew of Alexandria (30 B.C. to 40 A.D.). However, John owed nothing to Philo, who taught that "the absolute purity, perfection, and loftiness of God would be violated by direct contact with imperfect, impure, and finite things" (Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 17, p. 740). He even went so far as to say that “God could not be conceived of as actively concerned with the multiplicity of individual things” (Ibid). Philo’s [logos] had no hard identity of any kind, being called the “reason of God” in one view, and in another, “a distinct individual, or hypostasis, standing between God and man.” Philo’s [logos] did not create anything, for he viewed matter as eternal; and it is impossible to form any intelligent harmony out of Philo’s writings on the [logos], described in the Encyclopedia Britannica as “self-contradictory.” It was the inspired genius of the apostle John which seized upon this word, applied it to Christ, and gave it a meaning as far above anything that Philo ever dreamed as the heavens are above the Nile Delta where Philo lived. The Word, as applied to Jesus Christ, is found only four times in the New Testament, twice in this prologue (John 1:1, 14), in 1 John 1:1, and in Revelation 19:13. John’s use of “Word” [Greek: logos] for Christ Jesus might have been suggested by Psalm 33:6, “By the word of Jehovah were the heavens made,” a passage which, according to Hendriksen, represents the Word of God as a person (William Hendriksen, New Testament Commentary, p. 70). Whatever the source of the thought that led John to so designate Christ, it was truly inspired by the Holy Spirit and perfectly appropriate. A word, in the primary meaning of the term, is a vessel for the conveyance of an idea; and Christ was the vessel which conveyed the true idea of God to humanity. As Jesus stated it. “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9).
4 Other New Testament passages which attribute the creation of the universe to Jesus Christ are: “For in him were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through him, and unto him; and he is before all things, and in him all things consist” (Col. 1:16-17). “Yet to us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we unto him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we through him” (1 Cor. 8:6). “[God hath] spoken unto us in his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the worlds ... [And of the Son he saith] Thou Lord, in the beginning didst lay the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the works of thy hands” (Heb. 1:2,10). Some seek to make a point of the fact that creation is not directly attributed to Jesus in the synoptics, claiming a "]”contradiction.” The point fails in light of the fact that Matthew represented Jesus as having twelve legions of angels, that is, some 75,000 angels, at His command (Matt. 26:53), quoting His words that “All authority in heaven and upon earth” were His (Matt. 28:18-20). One wonders just how such an accumulation of power in Jesus’ hands is any less than the power of God. Mark 5:6 represents Jesus as having authority over the entire demonic creation; Luke 10:19 plainly presents Christ as a being capable of creating all things – hence, there is no conflict. Added to this is the fact that each of the synoptics records instances of Jesus raising the dead – an act fully equal to the creation of the world in that only God could have done it. Also, the synoptics are filled with Jesus’ promises of eternal life, which, again, is just as wonderful as creation, or even more wonderful, since the creation itself is not eternal. Those who wish to open a conflict between John and the synoptics must do it upon other grounds than this. Regarding creation: throughout the Bible, creation is declared to be an act of God and Christ, or God through Christ; and this Biblical explanation of how the universe came into existence is the only reasonable and intelligent explanation ever given. The conclusion of this brief consideration of the creation might be summed up by the Lord’s word: “The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God” (Ps. 14:1). With characteristic clarity and emphasis, the apostle stated the truth of John 1:3, first positively, and then negatively, to avoid any possible misunderstanding.
5 There was nothing passive in God giving up those ancient people, and the clause will bear the translation, “God handed them over,” a statement that occurs three times in the remaining verses of this chapter (Rom. 1:24, 26, 28). These dreadful words, thrice repeated with increasing intensity, are a kind of litany of the doomed, showing how dreadful is the fate of them that are given up of God, that is, handed over to the consequences of their rebellion. Paul had already mentioned the various idolatries of those ancient rebels against God’s authority, idolatries which were marked by all kinds of promiscuous relations between the sexes, all such excesses forming a standard part of the worship of ancient idols, of which things the Lord says it is a “shame” to speak (Eph. 5:12), hence no catalogue of them is entered here. In a word, idolatrous worship consistently produced in people the kind of conduct that might be expected of beasts; but a far lower form of degradation is the subject of these verses, “the uncleanness” here mentioned being a reference to such conduct as no beast was ever guilty of. Homosexuality is included in this but does not exhaust the meaning. Unmentionable perversions, masochism, sadism, and other degenerate practices were among the types of behavior to which God handed over the pre-Christian world. And why did God do so? The answer is in Romans 1:25; it was because “They changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature, rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.” “God gave them up” ... means more than the mere removal of the restraining hand of providence from the lives of wrongdoers, for there is included a conscious requirement of God that the sinner thus judged shall be compelled to continue upon the shameful path he has chosen, just as in the case of Judas who received the sentence from Christ, “What thou doest, do quickly” (John 13:7), in which case Satan had already entered Judas’ heart, and he had been given up by Christ to commit the treacherous deed already committed in his heart. Another example of the same thing is the case of Balaam who, when he would have turned back from a wrong course, was commanded of God, “Go with the men” (Num. 22:22). Once people have consciously put God out of mind and allowed Satan to have dominion in their thoughts, they have at that point entered the downward road, and God Himself will see to it that they go all the way to the end of the road they have deliberately chosen, or, to borrow an old proverb, lie in the beds they have made. However, this is not to say that God causes people to do wrong; far from it. R.C.H. Lenski (The Interpretation of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, p. 108) pointed out the difference: “This is more than permission to fall into uncleanness, and it is less than causing this fall. God’s action is judicial. At first, God always restrains by moral persuasion, by legal and other hindrances; but when God is completely cast off, when the measure of ungodliness overflows, his punitive justice hands the sinners over completely to their sins in order to let the sins run to excess and destroy the sinners.” Thus, from God’s treatment of the ancient Gentile world, it might properly be inferred that when the present world has reached a certain degree of rebellion against God, He will loose Satan upon humanity for the same purpose, which could indeed be why such an event as the “loosing of Satan” should be included in the divine plan (Rev. 20:3,7). We cannot leave this passage without repeating the emphasis upon the truth that the reprobacy of the pre-Christian world was essentially an apostasy, wherein the people exchanged the truth of God for a lie. Refusing to honor the Father, they found themselves upon a downward escalator, moving them inexorably to lower and lower levels of depravity. The pagan idolatry and reprobacy into which those people plunged were not primitive or primeval, but exactly the opposite, being the terminal condition resulting from their rejection of the one true and Almighty God; and a major deduction from this that appears inevitable is that man did not rise by his own bootstraps through depravity and idolatry to a conviction of monotheism; but that, on the other hand, he descended from the privilege of prior knowledge of God to the foolishness and immorality of paganism. The so-called “savage” is therefore not primitive or original, as to his moral condition, but is the natural descendant of the people who dishonored God and turned away from following Him, despite the fact that they knew Him. As mankind contemplates the wretched condition of the ancient Gentiles that came about by their apostasy, they should find the incentive to examine themselves continually, and to draw ever nearer and nearer to God. If a disaster similar to that which overwhelmed ancient Gentiles is to be averted from the posterity of present enlightened populations of the earth, men must employ themselves wholeheartedly in the service of God, striving constantly to know the Truth, and beholding in it, as in a mirror, themselves as they appear in the eyes of God. Only by the most faithful adherence to God's truth in Christ, as revealed in the Bible, can it ever be possible to avoid a repetition of the historic moral catastrophe which debauched the pre-Christian era.
