The Downward Spiral
A Study of Romans 1:18-32
Our world is in a downward spiral, and can anything reverse the trends?
Last month, António Guterres, the General Secretary of the United Nations, gave an address at the UN General Assembly. He said: “We have entered an age of reckless disruption and relentless human suffering. The pillars of peace and progress are buckling under the weight of impunity, inequality and indifference. The choice before us is stark….”
The most encouraging signs I see right now are pockets of revival among young people, but the overall trends of morality in America and the world are not encouraging. We are in a seemingly irreversible downward spiral.
The Bible anticipated these times. In speaking about His Second Coming, the Lord Jesus said, “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.” (Matthew 24:36-37).
But what were the days of Noah really like? Genesis 6:6 says, “The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.”
Second Timothy 3:1-5 says: “But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness, but denying its power.”
Well, the assumption behind this series is that we cannot understand our world today apart from a grasp of the New Testament letter of Romans.
Romans is the theological epicenter of Scripture. When you begin reading the New Testament from the first page, you begin with the four Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—which tell us the simple facts of the story of the Lord Jesus Christ, including His death and resurrection. The book of Acts continues the story through the history of the apostles.
But then we come to the book of Romans. In this book, the foundational book of the epistles, God interprets for us the meaning of the cross. He explains the significance of the Gospel events. He gives us the story theologically.
As we’ve seen in previous episodes, the first seventeen verses of chapter one are prologue, and this is one of the most powerful prologues to any book ever written in human literature. We don’t have time to review the prologue today, but notice that at the end of the prologue, in Romans 1:16-17, the theme and the thesis of the book is stated.
For I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes—to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in the Gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed….
When this verse says, “For in the Gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed,” Luther helped us understand that Paul was saying, “For in the Gospel, a new way of being declared righteous in God’s sight has been revealed.”
In other words, we can never deal with our shame and sin and failure on our own. We can never become righteous in God’s sight by keeping the law. We can never live a good enough life to redeem ourselves. We can never get to heaven on our own merits. But there is another way for us to become righteous in God’s eyes. It isn’t in keeping the law, but by faith, by trusting what Jesus Christ did for us when He died and rose again. We are not made righteous by our deeds, but by our faith in Him who gave Himself for us. Look at it again:
That’s the theme and thesis of the book of Romans, and that verse concludes the prologue of the book.
The actual body of this book begins in the next verse, with Romans 1:18; and for three chapters the Lord points out the utter hopelessness of our condition before God. He wants us to understand that none of us can be declared righteous in any other way. This section of Romans extends from Romans 1:18 to Romans 3:20, and I call it “No One.” The apostle Paul isolates four different groups of people and He tells us that no one can deal with their own guilt apart from the sacrifice of Christ. Everyone in all four groups is full of sin and shame. No one can get to heaven on his own.
This passage presents the clearest domino theory in the Bible—except it’s no theory. It’s an infallible analysis of how a society spirals into the sewers like bathwater draining from the tub. Paul’s explanation in Romans sets the stage for his classic presentation of the doctrine of justification by grace through faith, which is the theme of the book of Romans and which represents the only hope for the human heart.
From chapter 1, verse 18 to chapter 3, verse 20, Paul presents the case for the universality of evil. No one—not one single person who is alive now, or who ever lived or who will ever live—no one, Jew or Gentile, man or woman, young or old, wise or foolish—no one is sinless, perfect, or pure. No one has the ability to get to Heaven based on the purity of their life or the goodness of their works. We cannot have eternal life on the basis of our own merits.
He gives us nothing but bad news from Romans 1:18 to Romans 3:20, and he does so because we cannot adequately understand what Christ has done for us until we understand how badly we need His grace.
Dr. Douglas Moo said, We must consider 1:18 through 3:20 as a preparation for, rather than as part of, Paul’s exposition of the gospel of God’s righteousness. But it is a necessary preparation if what Paul wants to emphasize about this righteousness is to be accepted by the Romans. For only if sin is seen to be the dominating, ruling force that Paul presents it to be in this section will it become clear why God’s righteousness can be experienced only by humbly receiving it as a gift… by faith.”
Paul presents a downward spiral that happens to every culture, every civilization. And it’s happening to us now in the. Western world. It begins with the rejection of the concept that there is a Creator, a God who made everything that exists, a God who made everything outside of Himself.
Romans 1:18 says, “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”
Paul begins with the concept of the wrath of God. He wrote, “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men….”
This doesn’t mean that God has lost His temper. It means that He is resolved to bring evil and sin and suffering to account. Let me again quote Dr. Moo: “In the Bible, wrath is an aspect of God’s person, as is clear from the many Old Testament texts that make the kindling of God’s wrath the basis for His judgment. God’s wrath is necessary to the biblical conception of God: as long as God is God He cannot behold with indifference that His creation is destroyed and His holy will trodden under foot. Therefore He meets sin with His mighty and annihilating reaction. The Old Testament regularly pictures God is responding to sin with wrath; but particularly in the prophets, the wrath of God is associated with the day of the Lord as a cosmic, climactic outbreak of judgment…. Paul speaks of wrath as a present reality under which people outside Christ stand.”
This is what we mean when we use the term saved. Have you ever heard someone say, “I got saved at the revival meeting”? Or “I was saved when I was seven years old”?
Saved from what?
Save from the wrath of God!
Romans 5:9 says, “Since we have now been justified by His blood, how much more will we be saved from God’s wrath through Him!”
The world is facing something far worse than atomic missiles, global pandemics, and weapons of mass destruction. The whole world is facing the wrath of God. But Paul says here that the wrath of God isn’t simply a future event. It is now being revealed. Romans 1:18 says, “The wrath of God is being revealed….” One more quote from Douglas Moo: “Although God will inflict His wrath on sin finally and irrevocably at the end of time, there is an anticipatory working of God’s wrath in the events of history. Particularly, as verses 24 through 27 suggest, the wrath of God is now visible in His handing over of human beings to their chosen way of sin and all its consequences.”
The Rejection of God as Creator (Romans 1:18-21)
The first turn in the downward spiral happens when a culture rejects the reality of creationism and of a Creator. It all begins with the rejection of God as Creator.
It seems to me that the reality of a Creator is obvious when we study the creation itself—its very existence and its intricate design. John Lennox, the celebrated mathematician, wrote, “The more we get to know about our universe, the more the hypothesis that there is a Creator God, who designed the universe for a purpose, gains in credibility as the best explanation of why we are here.”
John C. Polkinghorne, a theoretical physicist, wrote, “I am convinced that our universe not only contains, but also creates evidence of the presence of God’s mind and purpose in it. … The rational beauty of the universe — the fact that mathematics is such an effective instrument for describing the world — points to more than just blind physical processes. Theism is concerned with making total sense of the world. The force of its claims depends upon the degree to which belief in God affords the best explanation of the varieties, not just of religious experience, but all human experience.”
The astrophysicist Bernard Michael Haisch wrote, “Discoveries in quantum physics point to an underlying intelligence in the universe.”
And yet by law, teachers and professors in the government schools in America cannot present this view. They can only present the atheistic view that the universe came from an exploding speck of unknown origin and all forms of life came from mysterious puddles of primordial sludge, all of it random, accidental, meaningless, unintentional, and haphazard. This comes from the Kitzmiller U. S. District Court decision in 2005, which ruled that Intelligent Design is not science and that requiring it in public-school biology curriculum violated the Establishment Cause of the First Amendment.
Idolatry (Romans 1:22-23)
That leads to the next step. Human beings must construct its own gods. Verses 22-23 go on to say, “21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.”
In the absence of the true God, we must come up with our own gods. That may involve demonized idolatry or it might be our pleasures, goals, ambitions, or possession.
John Stott said, “ “If we fashion a god to suit ourselves, we are not worshiping the God who has revealed Himself but a false god of our own invention.”
Lust (Romans 1:24-25)
The not-so-funny thing is that when we create our own gods, somehow they give us permission to live life whoever we want to.
Paul continues in verses 24 and 25 to say, “Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.”
When God created human beings, Adam and Eve, man and woman, he gave them a tremendous gift. He created them as sexual creatures who could enjoy the pleasure of sex as a part of the process of extending the human race. That no single force in history and so likely to become corrupt as human sexuality. When we reject the creator and somehow come up with our own gods, it results in a flood of sexual immorality. And that leads to the next turn in the downward spiral.
A Sexually-Distorted Society (Romans 1:26-27)
When a culture denies its Creator, erects its own gods, and succumbs to a lust-driven existence, it inevitably becomes sexually distorted. Society becomes sexualized and homosexualized.
Romans 1:26-27 say plainly: “Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.”
Total Moral Chaos (Romans 1:28-32)
This downward spiral leads to the depths of debauchery—to total moral collapse. Notice all the terms Paul uses in verses 28 through 32: “Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. 32 Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.”
The history of the world is littered with the chronicles of cultures who spiraled down this encircling staircase never to return. Go back to the days of Noah. Go back to Sodom and Gomorrah. Go back to Assyria, Babylon, Greece, and Rome. Go back to ancient Israel and Judah.
The Bible says, “For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths” (2 Timothy 4:2-4).
Conclusion
If all of this is depressing to you, remember that Paul is simply giving us the bad news before he gives us the good news. We have to understand the state of the world and the condition of our own heart before we can fully appreciate the grace of Jesus Christ. The Lord Jesus came into the world to save us from all of this, and he does save us from all of this. That’s what the book of Romans is all about. But we have to be realistic about the society and the culture that we are in and we have to determine that in this world however bad it may seem we will be soldiers and servants of him who loved us and came into this world to save us from the descending approaching cataclysmic wrath of God.
Let me jump ahead and give you a few verses from Romans 3: “But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished—he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.
We cannot give in to the pressures of our culture. As my pastor Allen Jackson says our job is not to conform to the culture but to change it. It is the power of the cross of Jesus Christ that lifts us up through the middle of that downward spiral and seats us with Jesus Christ in the heavenly places. That’s why we say we’re not ashamed of the gospel of Christ because it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes.