The Contemporary Scene
THE CONTEMPORARY SCENE
ROMANS 1:26-32
Paul vividly describes sinful human behavior.
Paul was writing during the rule of the young profligate Nero when Roman society had sunk in hideous vice. We now have again on the stage nudity and open sexuality which scandalized the more sober writers of Nero’s day. At about the same time as Paul, the Roman satirist Petronius wrote a piece of fiction which has partly survived. It concerns the base doings of three Greek scamps in the sea-ports of Campania, and is dark confirmation of all Paul here writes. Anyone who seeks evidence in support of the apostle’s grim description can read Petronius’ Satiricon, Seneca’s Letters, Juvenal’s Satires, Tacitus’ historical works, and Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars. Paul was writing to those who lived in Rome, some of them “of Caesar’s household” (Philippians 4:22), who had all this before their eyes.
The close of this chapter is a warning to all peoples and all ages. To read it in our own permissive society is to encounter a challenge to be strong in faith, determined in our commitment to God, urgent in our evangelism. Paul is describing a society which had abandoned God. He is diagnosing the malady from which Rome was to die, for no great nation has ever yet been destroyed by an enemy from outside which has not already destroyed itself by corruption inside. Such sin carries its own penalty, its own condemnation. The time is here when Christians must show, as they were called upon to do in Rome, by word, act and manner of life, their difference.
The last verse expresses ultimate rebellion. Sin falls under four heads. First stands fleshly sin, so obvious, so disreputable and also, at times, so pitiable. Secondly comes spiritual sin, pride, vanity, lust for power and the like, respectable, yet treacherous, too often well concealed. Thirdly follows diabolical sin in which evil becomes an object of love for its own sake, sin’s judgment on itself, the final fruit of unrepentant wickedness. Finally comes blasphemy, that conscious hostility to God which the Bible defines in its final consummation as the “sin unto death,” and which finds no repentance because it is never committed until all desire for repentance has been willfully rejected.