Romans 1:24

Wherefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts unto uncleanness, that their bodies should be dishonored among themselves: for that they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.

There was nothing passive in God's giving up those ancient people, and the clause will bear the translation, "God handed them over,"[52] a statement that occurs three times in the remaining verses of this chapter (Romans 1:24,26,28). These dreadful words, thrice repeated with increasing intensity, are a kind of litany of the doomed, showing how dreadful is the fate of them that are given up of God, that is, handed over to the consequences of their rebellion.

Paul had already mentioned the various idolatries of those ancient rebels against God's authority, idolatries which were marked by all kinds of promiscuous relations between the sexes, all such excesses forming a standard part of the worship of ancient idols, of which things the Lord says it is a "shame" to speak (Ephesians 5:12), hence no catalogue of them is entered here. In a word, idolatrous worship consistently produced in people the kind of conduct that might be expected of beasts; but a far lower form of degradation is the subject of these verses, "the uncleanness" here mentioned being a reference to such conduct as no beast was ever guilty of. Homosexuality is included in this but does not exhaust the meaning. Unmentionable perversions, masochism, sadism, and other degenerate practices were among the types of behavior to which God handed over the pre-Christian world. And why did God so do? The answer is in Romans 1:25; it was because "They changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature, rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen."

God gave them up ... means more than the mere removal of the restraining hand of providence from the lives of wrongdoers, for there is included a conscious requirement of God that the sinner thus judged shall be compelled to continue upon the shameful path he has chosen, just as in the case of Judas who received the sentence from Christ, "What thou doest, do quickly" (John 13:7), in which case Satan had already entered Judas' heart, and he had been given up by Christ to commit the treacherous deed already committed in his heart. Another example of the same thing is the case of Balaam who, when he would have turned back from a wrong course, was commanded of God, "Go with the men" (Numbers 22:22). Once people have consciously put God out of mind and allowed Satan to have dominion in their thoughts, they have at that point entered the downward road, and God himself will see to it that they go all the way to the end of the road they have deliberately chosen, or, to borrow an old proverb, lie in the beds they have made. This is not to say, however, that God causes people to do wrong; far from it. Lenski pointed out the difference thus:

This is more than permission to fall into uncleanness, and it is less than causing this fall. God's action is judicial. At first, God always restrains by moral persuasion, by legal and other hindrances; but when God is completely cast off, when the measure of ungodliness overflows, his punitive justice hands the sinners over completely to their sins in order to let the sins run to excess and destroy the sinners.[53]

Thus, from God's treatment of the ancient Gentile world, it might properly be inferred that when the present world has reached a certain degree of rebellion against God, he will loose Satan upon humanity for the same purpose, which could indeed be why such an event as the "loosing of Satan" should be included in the divine plan (Revelation 20:3,7).

We cannot leave this passage without repeating the emphasis upon the truth that the reprobacy of the pre-Christian world was essentially an apostasy, wherein the people exchanged the truth of God for a lie. Refusing to honor the Father, they found themselves upon a downward escalator, moving them inexorably to lower and lower levels of depravity. The pagan idolatry and reprobacy into which those people plunged were not primitive or primeval, but exactly the opposite, being the terminal condition resulting from their rejection of the one true and Almighty God; and a major deduction from this that appears inevitable is that man did not rise by his own bootstraps through depravity and idolatry to a conviction of monotheism; but that, on the other hand, he descended from the privilege of prior knowledge of God to the foolishness and immorality of paganism. The so-called "savage" is therefore not primitive or original, as to his moral condition, but is the natural descendant of the people who dishonored God and turned away from following him, despite the fact that they knew him.

As people contemplate the wretched condition of the ancient Gentiles that came about by their apostasy, they should find the incentive to examine themselves continually, and to draw ever nearer and nearer to God. If a disaster similar to that which overwhelmed ancient Gentiles is to be averted from the posterity of present enlightened populations of the earth, men must employ themselves wholeheartedly in the service of God, striving constantly to know the Truth, and beholding in it, as in a mirror, themselves as they appear in the eyes of God. Only by the most faithful adherence to God's truth in Christ, as revealed in the Bible, can it ever be possible to avoid a repetition of the historic moral catastrophe which debauched the pre-Christian era.

[52] C. K. Barrett, op. cit., p. 38.

[53] R. C. H. Lenski, op. cit., p. 108.