On The Sixth Day #8

Romans 1.24 – 27 Unclean Desires, Dishonored Bodies

Therefore God gave them over in the desires of their hearts to impurity, to dishonor their bodies among themselves. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creation rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them over to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged the natural sexual relations for unnatural ones, and likewise the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed in their passions for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

• The violin & the bow
  
  • separate them & a lot is not understood by one who is not already familiar w/them
    
  • what is each one for – how is it used rightly?
    
  • they were made for each other
    
• Paul has Genesis chapters 1 through 3 in mind throughout this passage
  
• even though a male and a female can be complete in a sense, they were in fact made for each other by God
  
• but human beings have vv. 24-25
  
  • not only broken a law of God
    
  • but they have distorted, twisted & corrupted the created order itself v. 25
    
    • the very first example of this that Paul gives is homosexual relations v. 26-27
      
    • why?
      
      • not simply because he or Jews or God were offended
        
      • not simply because it was/is exploitive of youth
        
      • no, for Paul - and God – it is that:
        
        • this is not why God created human beings
          
        • it is not iconic of a Creator-God
          
        • it violates the very notions of imaging God and being in creational relationship with God
          
        • this is the first sign that the human world is not "set right" with God
          
• "he gave them up to ..." -- when God gives freedom He also gives responsibility vv. 24 & 26
  
  • our choices have consequences
    
  • the consequences are what we as human beings must deal with
    
  • if we chose the idolatry of self – then our true self [God's image] will dissolve
    
  • all individual sins are a consequence of that idolatry where the creature is exalted over the Creator
    
• this [and other places in the New Testament] is not a polemic against homosexuality
  
• it is an identification [by a mirror-like opposite reflection] of what it means to be truly a human being, an image of God
  

(Source material from N T Wright, John Wesley, Martin Luther, ESV Study Bible, Orthodox Study Bible, et al)