God gave them up

From this point until chapter 3 verse 19 the apostle brings forward three main witnesses ‘that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God’. He looks back to world history before Calvary and sees that man’s need of a righteousness from God is demonstrated by the fact that man consistently acted against the light that God gave him.

The first of the witnesses Paul calls in God’s courtroom is the creation. Creation reveals to man the eternal existence and power of God. This is not mere intelligent design but God showing to man things that are eternally true of Him by means of that which He made. This is one reason why creation is in the form it is; and it should have resulted in man glorifying God and being thankful, v. 21, and worshipping and serving Him, v. 25. Such is the evidential power of creation that man is without excuse and the fact that he acts contrary to that evidence, by becoming vain in his imagination and dark in his heart, shows that however wise man professes himself to be he is, in fact, a fool to suppress that knowledge of God that He has revealed.

It should be noted that this passage is not teaching that if man had believed in the eternal existence and power of God he would have been saved. Rather, it teaches that the guilt of man is established by the fact that man acted contrary to the clear evidence that creation gave him.

The deliberate exclusion of the eternally existing and powerful God from the mind and heart of man leads, inevitably, to corruption and perversion. Where there is no absolute reference point for morality there is no right and wrong; all is mere opinion. The morally squalid history of the world shows this and gives evidence for God’s judgement on man by ‘giving him up’ to ‘uncleanness’, ‘vile affections’, and ‘a reprobate mind’. Man practised that which is unclean and dishonourable, v. 24; vile and unnatural, v. 26; unseemly and erroneous, v. 27. Modern man, too, with all his boasts of being progressive and diverse, is no better morally than ancient man. He glories in his shame, given up to a mind that cannot determine that which is right and wrong, and filled with every kind of sin.