Abandonment Issues - Our Own

Romans talks about the gospel as a display of God's righteousness (Rom 1:16-17) and then launches into the disturbing statement that God's wrath is being revealed (Rom 1:18). Paul describes the sequence. God reveals Himself in creation (Rom 1:19-20). Man rejects Him (Rom 1:21-23). And then it gets bad. Three times it says, "God gave them up ..." (Rom 1:24, 26, 28). And that's a bad thing. Describing the revelation of God's wrath, Paul refers to this process of abandonment. When God gets really angry, He leaves us alone. And that's not good.

The progression is clear. 1) God gave them them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity (Rom 1:24). That is, they had lusts in their heart and God removed the guards, released the restraints. "You want to go there," He said, in effect, "so go there," where "there" was "impurity." The first step in this sequence was dishonoring their bodies with each other. As a result, they "exchanged the truth about God for the lie" (Rom 1:25). It didn't get better. They worshiped the creature instead of the Creator. Like today. 2) "For this reason" God gave them up to "dishonorable passions" (Rom 1:26). The next stage of God withdrawing was "dishonorable passions." Vile, reproachful, shameful abiding desires. Moving from dishonoring their bodies, God turned them loose to abandoning the natural function in sexual relationships. That's an interesting phrase. Fornication and adultery are sinful (dishonoring the body), but not unnatural. They misuse the natural functions, but they are natural functions. This next step leaves the natural for the unnatural. And while it is part of a second judgment from God -- His second abandonment -- it incurs penalties of its own. They were "receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error" (Rom 1:27). Homosexual behavior is sinful, but it is also a consequence of sin and has its own specific consequences. 3) Finally, since they continued to refuse to acknowledge God, He gave them up "to a depraved mind" (Rom 1:28). There is a play on words here. It says "they did not see fit to acknowledge God." "Did not see fit" is δοκιμάζω -- dokimazō. It refers to a test. It says, essentially, that in their minds God failed the test. So, it makes sense that "depraved" is actually the word ἀδόκιμος -- adokimos. That's the negative of "see fit." It means that they cannot rightly test or evaluate. It means that they can't rightly examine and come to the correct conclusion. It means that they might see a man and think, "That might be a woman" because God gave them up to a mind that was not capable of thinking properly. In fact, Paul described a few things as a result of the first two "gave them up," but this has 4 subsequent verses of "do those things which are not proper" listing some 23 items as examples of "things which are not proper." The final "gave them up to" is a mind that doesn't work right anymore and suggests that it only gets worse -- continues to decay -- from there.

These are our own "abandonment issues." They are a product of our own refusal to submit to what God has revealed about Himself. Refusal. Paul says we "know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death" (Rom 1:32), but we press on. We deny God His glory and He responds in wrath by letting us go. It's not a good place to be. It is not peace or grace or being kept safe (Num 6:24-26). It is disaster. There is a solution. It is repentance and faith in Christ. It is being "transformed by the renewing of your mind" (Rom 12:2). It is not hopeless, but it is dire and anyone who suggest it isn't does so as a product of refusing to submit to God.