Romanos 1:29

Being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, hateful to God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant-breakers, without natural affection, unmerciful: who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they that practice such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but also consent with them that practice them.

There are several such lists of sins in Paul's writings, 2 Timothy 3:1-8 and Galatians 5:19-21 being two others. In one of these, Paul attributes such conduct to the "corrupted in mind," and in the other to those practicing the "works of the flesh"; therefore, the same type of sinner is in view in all these. The lists are by no means identical, although touching in a number of places. The effort of scholars to organize or classify these lists has been rewarded with little or no success. This writer agrees with Fritsche who recommended that the student:

Not spend his time and ingenuity in arranging into distinct classes words whose meanings, and vices whose characteristics, differ only by a shade from each other.[54]

Griffith Thomas presented as one acceptable classification of these 21 words the following fourfold division of them:

The first four comprehend general descriptions of evil, but with special reference to property; (2) then come eight words which speak of a disregard of proper relationships; (3) these in turn are followed by three words descriptive of general depravity of character; and (4) last of all, there are six words expressive of unprincipled worthlessness of life.[55]

However, after making the above classification, Thomas added:

In any case, the list refers to sins of inward disposition and outward act, to sins of thought, word, and deed, to wrong against self, and against neighbor, as well as against God.

Regarding the last verse of this portion, it was Godet's opinion that "DEATH here denotes death as only God can inflict it";[56] but it is not clear why some believe capital punishment, as inflicted by man, is excluded. The outrageous nature of the evil deeds Paul mentioned is underscored by the fact that certain people not only practiced such things but encouraged and applauded that type of conduct. John Murray probably had the correct view in the following:

The death referred to cannot be reasonably restricted to temporal death. The Greeks themselves taught a doctrine of retribution for the wicked after death, and the apostle must have taken this into account in the statement of that which he credited the nations with knowing. Furthermore, he is here defining that in which the ordinance of God consists, and he cannot, in terms of his own teaching elsewhere, confine it to the judgment of temporal death. Knowledge of God's penal judgment as it issues in the torments of the life to come is recognized, therefore, by the apostle, as belonging to those with whom he is now concerned.[57]

Tellingly, this final verse of Romans 1 makes it clear that a certain minimal knowledge of God remains in the most depraved. The wicked persons who were Paul's subject here were surely at the bottom of the moral totem pole; but Paul here credits them with the inward recognition that God's righteous ordinance against their sins was just, or "righteous." This shows that the most outrageously wicked are aware of the moral contradiction in their deeds and that they inwardly acknowledge them to be deserving of death; and it is a fair conclusion that such people can have only contempt for a society that tries to explain all criminality as "sickness," and excuses the basest of human criminality on the basis that the perpetrator needed "help." Reference is here made to that man who walked into the Houston, Texas, police station, confessed the cold-blooded murder of twin brothers enrolled at Rice University, at the same time commending himself to the tolerance and forgiveness of society upon the premise that he was a man who needed help![58]

Sin is not sickness, at least in the ordinary meaning of either word. The type of sin under view here, by the apostle, is an arrogant and murderous rebellion against God and all righteousness, perpetrated by a bold and vicious enemy of all truth and goodness, who is properly judged only when such a one is recognized as a malignant parasite upon the body of mankind, amply deserving capital punishment in the present life and the suffering of eternal death in the life to come - only with this provision, that if, in the prospect of his deserved earthly punishment, the criminal truly seeks forgiveness in Christ through repentance and obedient faith, the latter and greater of the two penalties might, through God's grace and mercy, be averted. And precisely here is one of the benefits of capital punishment, that the shock of it, as the grim prospect of it is realized by the sinner, may lead to his repentance where all other measures failed.

The whole paragraph of wicked deeds should be understood as characteristic of the type of character Paul had in mind, that is, in a composite sense, the hardened sinner deserving death, being understood as manifesting all these evil qualities, and not merely some of them. The life-cycle of such a man is here presented in its aggregate, beginning with disobedience of parents in his childhood, running the full gamut of evil, and producing at last a man hated by God himself! To be sure, no chronological or other order was observed in this depiction of the death-deserving sinner, the glowing words seeming to tumble over each other in swift succession, like hot boulders out of a volcano.

WHY PEOPLE DO NOT BELIEVE

There is in the world today a vicious and unreasoning disbelief in the word of God, not merely a disbelief of specific doctrines such as the virgin birth or the resurrection, but a rejection of all truth, a kind of unbelief in capital letters, which infidelity is widely subscribed to and advocated, and which categorically refuses to believe in the supernatural, or in the reality of a personal God. Why is this? It is devoutly believed that the answer lies in Romans 1:21, where Paul declared that "Their senseless heart was darkened." An investigation of this subject reveals the essential bias of the unbeliever and startling evidence to the effect that such a one suffers from the punitive blindness inflicted by the Creator. A wealth of material on this subject is found in the scriptures; and it is to those sacred passages that one must go to understand the mystery of unbelief; for, as might have been suspected, the darkened intellect itself would never have fashioned any kind of knife with which to explore surgically the perversity of the fallen intellect. Such a surgical tool is found only in the Bible itself.

"Knowing God, they glorified him not as God, neither gave thanks; but became vain in their reasonings, and their senseless heart was darkened" (Romans 1:21). The plain meaning of this is that in such cases, the mind itself is reduced in capacity, and that truths plainly discernible to the righteous are to the wicked man invisible, not because they cannot be seen, but because he is incapable of seeing them. The agency of Satan has primacy in causing such a condition, but the victim himself must lend his own will to the rejection of God before the punitive hardening takes place; and, without such voluntary acceptance of Satan's influence as a precondition, the mind cannot be hardened.

Paul wrote the Corinthians that "The god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving, that the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should not dawn upon them" (2 Corinthians 4:4). How did Satan get such a power? It came when people forfeited it to the evil one by willfully turning away from God's teachings, thus making themselves God's enemy. Once in the driver's seat, firmly in control of the unbeliever's mind, Satan exerts a fantastic power to prevent his ever having faith in the Son of God. And is such a thing happening today? Men had better believe it! As Charles Hodge expressed it,

The blindness abides in all humanity apart from those who believe and are regenerated, whose minds have been renewed by the Spirit of God.[59]

Satan's blinding of the minds of people is analogous to the influence of any created being over another and is thus perfectly consistent with the free agency and responsibility of the individual. Also, in the revelation here that Satan blinds certain ones, there is the key to how God hardens the rebellious; he permits Satan to have his way with them.

"No longer walk as the Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, being darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardening of their heart" (Ephesians 4:17,18). Paul's teaching also shows that the blinded mind, the hardened heart, the crippled intellect, can be recovered; because in the next chapter of Ephesians Paul wrote to them, "Ye were once in darkness, but are now light in the Lord" (Ephesians 5:8). Paul spelled it out in detail, just how such a wonder came about. He wrote:

And you did he make alive, when ye were dead through your trespasses and sins, wherein ye once walked, according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the powers of the air, of the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience; among whom ye also all once lived in the lusts of your flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest; but God, being rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together in Christ (Ephesians 2:1-5).

This shows that the person willing to do so, through submission to Christ, can overthrow the evil one, reject his domination, and enthrone the Christ upon his lawful place in the heart.

Thus, the fault is in man's will. As long as they will to walk in darkness, there is no power that can recover them. The will has the power to overrule the intellect; and this is the key that explains unbelief as it occurs among learned and intelligent men. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in "Fears in Solitude," gave poetic expression to the same thought:

Forth from his dark and lonely hiding place, (Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism, Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, Drops his blue-fringed lids, and holds them close, And hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven, Cries out, "Where is it?"[60]

Christ himself made unbelief to be, not an act of intelligence, but a choice of evil in the heart:

And this is the judgment that light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light, for their works were evil (John 3:19).

The word "for" in the last clause has the meaning of "because" as in KJV. Thus, Christ himself is authority for the conclusion that no man ever thought his way into unbelief, whereas there have been millions who sinned their way into infidelity.

J. M. Gillis commented that:

Only in Atheism does the spring rise higher than the source, the effect exist without the cause, life come from a stone, blood from a turnip, a silk from a sow's ear, or a Beethoven Symphony or a Bach Fugue from a kitten walking across the keys.[61]

[54] Griffith Thomas, op. cit., p. 53.

[55] Ibid., p. 74.

[56] F. Godet, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1970), p. 58.

[57] John Murray, op. cit., p. 51.

[58] The Houston Chronicle, front page, December 2,1971. top save[59] Charles Hodge, An Exposition of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1950), p. 86.

[60] Frank S. Mead, The Encyclopedia of Religious Quotations (Westwood, New Jersey: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1965), p. 11.

[61] Frank S. Mead, op. cit., p. 11.