Calling Out Still More Idols
“Nearly all that we call human history…
[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find
something other than God which will make him happy.”
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Scot McKnight has made reading Romans backward fashionable. I’m still working on reading it forward. We have established thus far that idols make God angry, and Rome was a city crawling with idols. Like zombies, they were swarming through their buildings and homes, taking over their roads, and dominating their architecture. Most idols today are, as always, inanimate objects that the human mind animates. 21st century revolutionary zombies tear down statues of dead Confederate generals, displaying their ignorance of history, yet confident they would have made different choices if they had grown up on a 19th century plantation in Georgia. They only repeat the history they repudiate with their own morally superior prejudice, outrage, hate, and destruction. They compound their stupidity when they tear down statues of Washington Irving and Abraham Lincoln. It is very brave to destroy someone else’s property, especially when feckless political leaders have told authorities to stand down and do nothing. It is all so disgusting, it violates all semblance of moral order, established law, and anything having to do with righteousness, justice, or the will of God. [1]
Thus, in our reading of Romans chapter one, God has given society over or abandoned them to do whatever their hearts desired. This was the first step in the decline of western civilization. This is because they insisted on rejecting God revealing himself to them. He gave them over to their foolish and darkened minds. [2] And what did they choose to do? It could be called the sexual revolution (this is discussed in earlier columns). It is the destruction of human sexuality as God intended for what has transpired from the 1960s to circa 2000.
Then it got worse. Culture went further so God abandoned them to their shameful ways.[3] The culture then took a fateful plunge.
The Confusion of the Sexes
“Even women turn against the natural way to have sex and instead indulged in sex with each other. And the men, instead of having normal sexual relations with women, burned with lust for each other. Men did shameful things with other men, and as a result of this sin, they suffered within themselves the penalty they deserved.”
- Romans 1:26,27
I am amused by the growing number of very astute, “woke” exegetes who pensively asks, I wonder what Paul meant here? If there is a passage in Romans that doesn’t require a commentary, this is it. God once again lifted his hand and say, “Okay, it all yours. Let’s see how this turns out.”
Oh yes, I’ve read the articles, the thick commentaries, and can read the Greek New Testament. I’ve listened to the debates and am aware of all the “new” discoveries that have been unearthed after 2,000 years. It is amazing how so many serious students find exactly what they are looking for, truths that have been hidden for many years. When the society insists, they find them just in time. Otherwise, you will be called bigots, haters, and homophobes. You learn about homosexual love verses homosexual lust. And did you know that Paul wasn’t bothered by the homosexual practices of loving couples, but only the abuse of young boys? You can read about it in… hmmmmmm, where? Nowhere. What you can read is a reconfigured narrative written by a modern scholar who will be glad to fill in missing data, provide cultural expertise, and modern wisdom to read back into ancient documents the “real story”.
It is painfully obvious that Paul was calling homosexuality practice a sin. He was not making any allowance for it. It is equally obvious that the phrase, “…as a result of this sin, they suffered within themselves the penalty they deserved” is about venereal disease. I am not even sure how this is debatable.
He didn’t say that homosexuals go to Hell. He didn’t say that homosexuals can’t be Christians. Being born homosexual is not a sin. Every homosexual is a sinner like every heterosexual is a sinner. You don’t go to Hell for being homosexual and you don’t go to Heaven for being heterosexual. It has been debated for many years whether a person is born homosexual, or it is acquired via environment of choice. The issue remains unresolved genetically, but there is agreement that both can be true. Some seem to be born that way, others choose it because of circumstances, and others are confused, bi-sexual. Transsexualism, and other forms of general dysphoria or dysfunction, is a subject that requires more space than this column can hold. The bottom line in the larger context of God’s anger, God’s turning them over to sexual decadence, is that they have rejected God’s ways and have made an idol of their own freedom and choices that leave society unprotected from its own destruction.
This gets us to the C.S. Lewis quote at the beginning of this article:
“Nearly all that we call human history…
[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find
something other than God which will make him happy.”
Lewis knew the struggle from atheist to theist to Christian. For him it was a long painful journey that began in the blood-soaked trenches of the Maginot line in World War I and ended in the sidecar of his brother’s Warne’s motorcycle. His life then began to make sense. Nancy Pearcey put it this way, “If you do not start with God, you must start somewhere else. You must propose something else as the ultimate, eternal uncreated reality that is the cause and source of everything else.” [4]
That something else is looking grimmer every day. Moral confusion is “gay.” Freedom is federal funding to abort innocent children. Chaos, looting, and violence in the streets is “the right of peaceful assembly.” Intellectual honesty is the erasure of history and then rewriting it. Freedom of speech is freedom to say what the thought police (media and the intellectual elite) says it is. If not, shut up; you are cancelled, fired, marginalized, kicked to the curb.
Here is what we must do: find the biggest megaphone you can, get on the highest hill, and shout at the top of your lungs, “God visited us in the person of Jesus the Christ. Listen to him and do what he says, and you will live.”
