Three times in eight verses Paul writes the same words: God gave them over. The phrase falls like a repeated sentence from the bench. This is not God abandoning humanity in a fit of anger and turning His back on the world. The judgment here is more precise and, in some ways, more terrible: God gave men what they had already chosen. The punishment for refusing the Creator is the unrestrained pursuit of the creature, with all the ruin that follows.

The first giving-over concerns the body. "Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them" (Romans 1:24). The reason runs back to the exchange of the previous verse: "For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever" (Romans 1:25). When the soul turns from God, the body does not live at peace. The disorientation runs downward from the mind into the flesh, and what God designed for honor is turned to dishonor.

The second giving-over is more specific. "For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts" (Romans 1:26–27). Paul names these things plainly because the creation order he has in view is plain. God made human beings male and female, designed their bodies and desires to correspond with that design, and the departure from it is Paul's clearest example of what happens when the exchange of the natural for the unnatural runs to its fullest expression. The text does not soften this, and neither should the expositor. Grace is coming — but it comes to the broken, not to those who have been told they are fine.

The third giving-over reaches the mind itself. "And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper" (Romans 1:28). What follows is a catalog: "unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful" (Romans 1:29–31). The list is not arranged to spotlight the dramatic sins and excuse the respectable ones. Envy and gossip and arrogance stand in the same list as murder. The inventory is comprehensive. A reader who made it through the sexual immorality passage feeling superior is meant to find his own name somewhere in this catalog.

The last verse of the chapter is among the most searching in the passage. "Although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them" (Romans 1:32). The knowledge has not been erased. Men still know at some level that these things are wrong. But the cultural celebration of what God has named death is itself a stage in the darkening — the last restraint loosened, the conscience publicly reprogrammed, the approval of sin offered as virtue. When a society moves from tolerating sin to applauding it, something has passed a line that is very hard to come back from.

Paul is not writing this passage to condemn the pagan world from a safe distance. He will say of himself, without embarrassment, that he is "the foremost" of sinners (1 Timothy 1:15), and the grace that reaches the world in this letter is the same grace that stopped him on the Damascus road. But grace cannot be preached to people who do not know they need it. The darkness of these verses is not the final word in the letter. It is the preparation for it. And no one who reads this passage carefully will finish it thinking the gospel is optional.