Romans 1:26, commentary and pictures

The whole first chapter of Romans must be read, weighed, grasped in its particular meaning, and given in its full force, and this verse stands among what is specified about the wrath of God revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men and women who hold the truth in unrighteousness. The chapter sets forth a true experience that all families claiming to be sons and daughters of God, fathers and mothers especially, must read and take to heart. It belongs to the account of lustful sins practiced by the heathen that brought judgment upon them, and its specific subject is women changing natural sexual relations for relations contrary to nature.

The passage of Romans 1:18-32 gives a true description of the world just before the second coming of Christ. The vile affections are vile, corrupt habits of self-abuse that destroy health in this life and forfeit salvation in the next, and the only hope for those who practice them if they value health here and salvation hereafter is to leave them forever. Long indulgence in corrupt lust destroys self-control, brings body and mind into subjection to Satan, and makes resistance require determined effort to refuse corrupt indulgence. It can go so far that God leaves the person to work his own ruin and does not hear prayer for deliverance when the person asks God to do what is in his own power to do and breaks repeated vows while continuing in corrupt lust. Those who destroy themselves by their own acts will never have eternal life, the purity of heaven will never be marred with their society, and those who continue to abuse the health and life given by God would not make right use of health and immortal life in God's everlasting kingdom.

God giving them up means that when people persist in sin and reject His mercy, warnings, and invitations, disregard the light given, let go their hold on God and act in their own strength, and refuse opportunity to reform, He withdraws His restraint and His Spirit and abandons them to blindness and its consequences. They are left to follow the carnal promptings of their own minds and their own ways and self-will to their own ruin, leaving their evil passions uncontrolled and exposing them to Satan's malice. Satan strengthens their stubbornness and secures their ruin, and they are filled with their own doings. God gives people up by removing His restraining power in measure from the agencies of evil and permitting events to take their natural course, so that a train of circumstances arises in which sin is punished with sin. When parents or rulers neglect the duty of punishing iniquity God Himself takes the case in hand in this way, as when David as king and father neglected to punish Amnon, Amnon continued two years in sin after great guilt though God bore long with him to give opportunity for repentance, and God did not restrain Absalom but let Amnon be cut down by death with his guilt upon him to await the awful tribunal of the Judgment.

God leaves a man to vile, debased passion when indulging stimulants and gratifying appetite and passions not held under control of reason, which sacrifices reason, dishonors his own body, dishonors God's cause, lowers him to the level of the beast, and brings him very near utter ruin, yet God has not wholly left him and he deserves pity. Those who have had instruction from youth have no excuse for irreligion and for strengthening Satan's temptations by leading each other away from truth, purity, and holiness, and by placing themselves in the way of temptation through continuing an association that does not help morals or strengthen spirituality. Unless they greatly humble their souls at the foot of the cross and learn meekness and lowliness of heart and are thoroughly converted, the Spirit of God leaves them and they become weaker and still weaker in moral power. The verse calls ministers who preach the Word to be sanctified through belief of the truth, churches to have a thorough work done in them, and every family to conversion. It exposes a work greatly neglected in churches and homes and charges fathers and mothers to seek the Lord and awaken to responsibilities strangely left out of home religious experience, which they cannot neglect and be guiltless. Since it is declared to those who have failed to obey the truth in righteousness, it shows a class needing to become cleansed from every species of iniquity, whose mere knowledge of the truth will not cleanse them without the work of sanctifying grace in the home because they claim to believe the truth while in works they deny the practical truth that would sanctify the heart of the receiver.