Many times, if not most times, the sin we commit is a punishment for sin. When we sin, we are actually working out God’s punishment for our sin. We are not committing a new transgression every time we sin; rather, the sinful impulses that we harbor, embrace, and and experience in our transgressions are already the result of God’s judgment for our sin. That is what happens in judicial abandonment. God gives us over to our sinful impulses. We become slaves to the things that we want to do.

Paul is not satisfied to speak in generalities, so he gives a detailed description of how those sinful passions are manifested in concrete behavior: For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature (v. 26). This is a text that we will not hear often on television in this day and age. There are two things I need to say about it.

First, when the apostle Paul describes the radical corruption of the human race, he sees the sin of homosexual behavior as the sin most representative of the radical nature of our fall. It is seen here not simply as a sin, nor even as a serious sin or a gross sin, but as the clearest expression of the depths of our perversity.

Second, when Paul introduces the sin of homosexual behavior, he first mentions females. Throughout human history man has been the gender that seems most brutish, most without conscience and godliness. The woman has beenn understood as the fairer sex, but when Paul wants to describe the depth of the fall of the human race, he says that even the women exchanged the natural use for what is contra naturum, against nature, not simply against culture, or societal convention.

In other words, when we become involved in homosexual practices, we are not only sinning against God but against the nature of things. All the debates today about whether homosexual behavior is acquired or inherently genetic can be answered here in this text. The Word of God says that such behavior is not natural. It is against nature as God has created.

Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due (v.27). When men and women eengage in this kind of behavior, there are necessary, divinely appointed consequences. A price must be paid when people go that far to defy the law of God.

The word due has all but disappeared from our culture and vocabulary, but it is one that has a very rich history in ethics. It  goes back to the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle and on down through Western civilization, throughout which ju8stice has been defined not only in the church but also outside the church as giving people what is due them.

When people so act against God’s law and the law of nature, he gives them there due.

R.C. Sproul

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Endnotes: 

[1] R.C Sproul, Romans (St. Andrew’s Expositional Commentary) [Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2009], 50, 51, emphasis his.

See also:

TIME’S UP BRIAN MCLAREN

JAY BAKKER CRITIQUES KEN SILVA AT RELIGION DISPATCHES

WHY NO CONDEMNATION FOR CHRISTIANS WHO ARE HOMOPRESSIVE?