When People Become Vain in Their Own Reasoning...

Beloved brothers and sisters, welcome to our study concerning homosexuality and the biblical position on this subject. I want to begin by directing your attention to verse 1 of Romans chapter 20, where Paul says: “For the invisible things of God, His eternal power and deity, have been clearly visible since the creation of the world, being understood through the things that have been made, so that they are without excuse.”

As we saw in the previous segment, nature itself speaks about the will of God. The psalmist says: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims the work of His hands.” In other words, anyone with eyes to study nature sees a God of love, a generous God, a holy God, a benevolent God of justice, consistent, with principles, with purpose, who acts in a very well-planned way, consistent in all its parts.

We can see many such things in general terms about God’s character through nature. If you study the work of a great artist, you quickly get a sense of the artist’s personality, beliefs, and even the time in which the artist lives by looking at that artist’s creative works. Likewise, by observing the divine creation, we too can observe much of God’s character.

God created the world to protect life; God created the world with well-organized, well-balanced laws. The world is governed by these laws and is made to preserve life. And so we can clearly understand that God’s character demands equally holy conduct from His creatures.

Certainly lust, homosexuality, violence, violently and cruelly attacking another human being, and disregarding human dignity are not things that reflect God’s conduct as His creation reveals it. And therefore, in a sense, at a basic level, we can.

If we did not have the revelation of Scripture, we could see many things simply by looking at nature. Paul says that there are people—or rather, all humanity, and he is referring especially to those times of idolatry in Rome, in Greece, among pagan nations and cultures—where gods are portrayed as lustful, cruel, and arbitrary; gods that take the forms of serpents, dragons, birds, and four-footed animals. And Paul says: it is impossible for God to be like that, because the God nature shows us is a beautiful God, a holy God, a God with purpose and a thinking mind, benevolent and merciful, very different from those cruel gods portrayed by idolatry.

We also know, according to biblical doctrine, that those supposed gods presented to us by idolatry are actually demons, and it is clear that the idolatrous character of those idolatrous gods reflects demonic and diabolical behavior instead.

Paul says that this idolatry, this representation of God using animal forms and forms that are so arbitrary and cruel, deeply offends the heart of God. And that is why God has shown His judgment on humanity: instead of seeing God as He truly is—loving, gentle, and consistent—they have distorted His character and portrayed Him as the exact opposite, haven’t they? Impure, cruel, inconsistent, unpredictable—and that is a violation of divine dignity.

So Paul says: “Having known God, people did not glorify Him as God or give Him thanks, but became vain in their reasoning, and for that reason their foolish hearts were darkened.” First came rebellion against God; after that came the attempt to make God into a corruptible, animal, limited image; and after that comes the wrath of the Lord against a humanity that represents Him in a very unjust and mistaken way.

Paul says something else interesting: “People became vain in their own reasoning.” Instead of looking to God, giving thanks to God, and humbling themselves before that holy and perfect God, what they did was shut themselves inside the confines of their own reasoning. We see this today: humanity is using science, sociology, psychology, and biology as its starting point for drawing its own moral conclusions, rejecting what the Word of the Lord says and preferring its own moral and ethical conclusions. That is why God is so offended by humanity.

And then Paul says that the consequence of this—of that attitude of ungodliness and unrighteousness we saw earlier—is that the minds of people, their reasoning, become darkened; that is, obscured. So instead of their perception being bright and clear, it becomes a kind of dark perception. The amount of light that human reasoning can shed is now reduced to a minimum because God has set them aside and abandoned them, and the light they have for analyzing the world is very, very deficient.

And this means that these people, these scientists, these sociologists, these philosophers, although they profess to be wise, as verse 22 says, actually become fools and see God through a very imperfect and deficient lens. That is the terrible diagnosis the apostle Paul makes of a blind, hardened humanity that resists the glory of God and now has a mind that functions in a tremendously deficient way.

In our next study, we will continue with the apostle Paul’s analysis of homosexuality. May the Lord bless you, and may His grace be with us all.