Exposition on select Bible verses: Romans 1:18-19
[Romans 1] Verse 18: Wrath revealed from heaven—
This is the tenor of all Scripture as to God’s attitude toward defiant sin.
“Jehovah rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from Jehovah out of heaven,”
we read in Genesis 19:24. We know that
“God has appointed a day in which He will judge the world” (Acts 17:31)
; that He will “visit with wrath” at that time (Rom. 3:5).
However, in the thrice-repeated “God gave them over” of verses 24, 26 and 28, there is to be seen the character, the beginning, and the working of God’s wrath in this world, in His judicial handing over of rebels to go further into rebellion. But the awful arraignment of humanity in Chapters One, Two, and Three; together with the particular account of their apostasy and lost condition, however terrible it be, is not a description of the finally damned, but of the at-present-lost: and,
“The Son of man came to seek and to save that which was lost.”
“Such were some of you,”
says Paul to the Corinthians, after an enumeration of those who “shall not inherit the kingdom of God” (I Cor. 6:11). “Effeminate, and abusers of themselves with men,” the very kind of sinners described in our chapter, are in this enumeration. Let us admit, therefore, the judicial “delivering over” of humanity which has “exchanged the glory” of the God they knew for horrid idolatrous conceptions,—a present judicial action of God on earth, where and when He “lets men go their own way.” But let us distinguish this apart from the day of the revelation of the righteous judgment of God from Heaven. At the Great White Throne of Revelation Twenty there will be no liberty left to the creature to indulge his lusts as in this present world. The lusts, indeed, will remain, and probably intensify forever: “He that is filthy, let him be made filthy yet more”; but the ability to indulge lust will be eternally removed, and the damned placed under the visitation of Divine anger.
Thank God, we may still cry with Paul,
“Now is the acceptable time; now is the day of salvation!”
Grace is still ready to reach the worst wretch on earth!
Note that ungodliness is direct disregard of God, which to the Jew would connect itself with the first table of the Law, the first four commandments; while unrighteousness has reference to wickedness of conduct, in itself and toward other men. Note further that it is distinctly said that the human race, in order to live an unrighteous life, held down the truth. The meaning of the verb translated “hold down” is seen in its use in II Th 2:6: “Ye know that which restraineth,” referring to the present restraining of the sin and wrath of man by the Spirit of God. It is also true, turning this about, that man in his wickedness restrains the truth he knows. (See also same word in Luke 4:42, “would have stayed Him.”) Almost all men know more truth than they obey. They call themselves “truth seekers”; but would they attend a meeting where Paul preached the facts of this first of Romans?
Verse 19: That which is known of God is manifest
. . . God made it evident—Noah’s father, Lamech, was for over fifty years a contemporary of Adam. Knowledge of God was held and imparted by tradition from the beginning. The fact that the “world that then was” became so corrupt as to necessitate destruction (Hebrew, “blotting out,” Gen. 6:7, margin), only supports the awful account. Not only was the world bad unto judgment at the time of the Flood; but the world after Noah became such that God called out His own (from Abraham on) to a separate, pilgrim life. Sodom, and later the Canaanites, again filled up iniquity’s measure and were “sent away from off the face of the earth” (Jer 28:16). Utter uncompromising, abandonment of hope in man is the first preliminary to understanding or preaching the gospel. Man says, “I am not so bad; I can make amends”; “There are many people worse than I am”; “I might be better, but I might be worse.” But God’s indictment is sweeping: it reaches all.
“None righteous; all have sinned; there is no distinction.”
And the first step of wisdom is to listen to the worst God says about us, for He (wonderful to say!) is the Lover of man, sinner though man be. You and I were born in this lost race, with all these evil things innate in, and, apart from the grace of God, possible to us.
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and is desperately wicked.”
Only redemption by the blood of Christ, and regeneration by the Holy Spirit, can afford hope."
