Romans 1:28-32 – Where Do We Go From Here? (End of the Indignation Series)

 Part II: The Conduct of Humanity

And according as they do not test God, to have Him in recognition, God gives them over to a disqualified mind, to do that which is not befitting, filled with all injustice, wickedness, evil, greed, distended with envy, murder, strife, guile, depravity, whisperers, vilifiers, detesters of God, outragers, proud, ostentatious, inventors of evil things, stubborn to parents, unintelligent, perfidious, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: those who, recognizing the just statute of God, that those committing such things are deserving of death, not only are doing them, but are endorsing, also, those who are committing them.

The list we find in Romans 1:29-31 is typically called a “vice list.” It provides a rapid-fire, intense list of poor actions which humanity employs or condones. This globalizes the guilt, charging each man with something on this list. Make no mistake: no individual escapes the clutches of Paul’s charge here – whether they are under law or not. And, from our perspective, it really doesn’t matter if we’re justified or not, in the sense that we apprehend these actions in ourselves daily. We can’t help but notice all of these play out in delightfully complex world issues. We are all condemned in this great cacophony of rapid-fire transgression, as we see in verse 32.

There are a few different ways to look at the terms themselves. I’ve already gone into great detail on them, so I won’t belabor their individual point, but I figure now is a good time to assemble the pieces, that we may now appreciate the full-fledged pattern!

We may group the vice list as such:

Internal Dispositions

1.    Injustice

2.    Wickedness

3.    Evil

4.    Greed

5.    Envy

Basic Social Violations

6.    Murder

7.    Strife

8.    Guile

9.    Depravity

Harmful External Declarations

10. Whisperers

11. Vilifiers

The Unpardonable Sin for the Eons

12. Detesters of God

Arrogant External Consequences

13. Outragers

14. Proud

15. Ostentatious

16. Inventors of Evil Things

Basic Social Consequences

17. Stubborn to parents

18. Unintelligent

19. Perfidious

External Consequences

20. Without Natural Affection

21. Implacable

22. Unmerciful

You could fiddle with the names above each section a bit, but the point is clear. The first five highlight the seeds of sin, if you will, which bring about the four social violations next considered. We are a shameful race, and this makes us whisperers and vilifiers in regards to the shameful violations considered. This climaxes with the center of the list – a detestation of God and His social agenda. The entire list centers around this singular notice of opposition toward God. The first three sections cover the growth of sin, while the final three sections cover its consequences.

We may safely reason, from the context of the passage, that the structure of this list is a microcosm of Romans 1:18-3:20. We see that God binds the entire passage together at its center with this one major charge. God has taken credit, multiple times in these first few verses, for giving men over to the sin that they commit. There is no special clause given by Him that would indicate that we could escape the sin inflicted upon us – and, as such, we could not rationally escape His judgment of them, found in the final three sections of the vice list.

The final three sections reflect upon the first half. The third section concerned us with mistrustful and dishonest declarations, which detests God’s trustful and honest declarations. Now, here in the fifth section, we see our arrogant, self-exalting attitudes, which detests God’s caring, humble attitude. This, of course, leads to a degradation of social relationships, and culminates in a rotten lack of basic humanity. With the seeds sown, the flesh withers.

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This takes us to the final verse of the chapter (we’ve come such a long way.) Verse 32 portrays the conclusion of the vice list – its only natural, logical outcome, from a righteous perspective. To have God in recognition means you’re also keeping His just statute in recognition. The just statutes of God, when ignored, is unrighteous. If life is deserved for the just, then death is deserved for the unjust.

A brief Greek grammar lesson, here: there are many different uses of “just” in Romans. I will be delineating between each one, and specifically consider each use of just when we consider Rom. 5:17-19. In this instance, the phrase “just statute” is dikaioma, or “JUST-effect.” This is, of course, not solely righteousness, but the effect of being righteous. In this moral context, the CLV has changed the word to “just statute.” This does far more than most other versions in highlighting the actual meaning of the word. The KJV translates this word as “judgment,” which gives us a lopsided and one-dimensional view of the judgment of God. The NASB translates the word as “ordinance,” the ESV translates the term “decree,” but none of these capture the righteous foundation of God’s handling of these effects.

It is well known that God has a strong disdain for the list in Rom. 1:29-31. It is also well known that the effect of this list, righteously, is death. If God so wished, He could immediately take the lives of any who commit these acts. He would be proven righteous, absolutely – but we would not be given a lesson of any sort. The cycle would continue – flawed creatures, unable to live up to flawlessness, getting killed by the Flawless when flaws are made apparent. This would, inevitably, make God unrighteous, as there would be no proven reason for unrighteousness to even exist within His creation.

Note that God tells us what we deserve – and He has appealed to our moral and logistical consciences in order to identify the factual conclusion. It is not a threat, for we are all already dying. That He is slow to enforce the penalty is telling of His patience with us while He demonstrates the lesson (Rom. 9:22.)

We deserve death. As this is the first time in Paul’s presented writings that we see the word “death,” I will take a few paragraphs here to briefly break down the concept. We typically make the assumption that this should be the end of our story, for we are mortal creatures. To us, death is the end. Death is the conclusion. It’s the last straw, right? You go into the ground, and it’s over. There’s nothing you can do about it; your life, taken as forcefully as it was given.

Some go even further than this; many, as we’ve been considering, declare great beliefs in eternal damnation, as well as eternal separation, from God. Many teach an eternal judgment. Many teach of a purgatory. Many religious institutions enforce the notion that, after you die, you are still alive in another location.

The flaw for these beliefs are self-evident. If death secretly means more life, then God did not inflict a proper judgment upon Adam’s transgression. That death is directly juxtaposed with life should highlight the errant nature of “afterlife” beliefs (Gen. 3:18-23.) That we have verses directly telling us that death, by nature, concerns the absence of life (Rev. 20:4,) and sensation (Ecc. 9:4,) should cause us to hesitate in believing our local churches and their individual notions of death. Instead, we may ask:

How does God define “death?”

We find a few texts which fully satisfy the answer for us. The first is found in Genesis, where God first imposes the death state as the penalty for breaking His law in the garden – “From the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you must not eat from it; for on the day you eat from it, to die you shall be dying” (Gen. 2:16.) This verse is later brought to fruition in Gen 3:19, where God enforces His penalty–

By the sweat of your brow shall you eat your bread, until you return to the ground, for from it were you taken. For soil you are, and to soil shall you return.

God describes death here as the body’s return to the soil. More instructive is God’s explanation: “for, from the soil were you taken.” When we return to the creation of man, we read that man is the composite of the body and the spirit. We see where the body goes upon death – but what of our spirit? Where does our spirit go? For many Platonists, this is where the whole “immortality of the soul” idea comes into play, and we get a million different interpretations. God’s interpretation, however, is far more direct. Oberve Ecc. 12:7–

The soil returns to the earth just as it was, and the spirit, it returns to The One, Elohim, Who gave it.

Ah! So to God, there is no interpretive reasoning; He simply says that the spirit returns to Him. This is fitting; we see the body return to its original place, prior to our life, while the spirit return to its original Place, prior to our life. There is no injunction given, here, or concession made for our individual acts. All flesh suffers this tragic cap to their lifespan. Ecc. 3:20 points out to us that “All are going to one place; All have come from the soil, and all return to the soil.”

All of this conveys for us exactly what we deserve – to return to our prior state, where our soul is not functioning, our body is immobile, and our spirit is with The Just One. We are, literally, unable to do any more damage. This is, at its base, a proper judgment, rendering the offender helpless. There’s far more nuance to the matter, but we will observe the different aspects in the second chapter.

This race-wide death penalty is established in Gen. 2:17, and fully enforced at Gen. 3:19. This is before any of the actions that Paul stated in Rom. 1:29-31 had been fully known or understood. Moreover, “death,” at the time, was first displayed in Abel. Because of Adam’s transgression, he witnessed the opposite of life first in a child who, to us, did not deserve such a penalty. Many have often argued: “all Adam did was eat one fruit. What is so bad about this? Certainly, God over-reacted, yes?”

If we had no understanding of the concept of sin and its terrible effects, we would indeed continue to question God’s authority on the matter. But the longer we journey in these corruptible bodies, the more we realize both our shortcomings and our failures, as well as sin’s sheer power. Human history has shown us that every single person falls somewhere within the confines of Paul’s vice list – thus we see that God’s penalty is not merely corrective in teaching Adam and Eve, but a preventative step, to limit Sin’s domain upon the earth. With Sin’s statutes limited to frail, human wills, there becomes a closed loop. A theater – this earth (1 Cor. 4:9) – that God can use to demonstrate Sin’s logistical inaccuracy and inefficiency, that creation ultimately realizes its folly.

This provides a proper purpose to death beyond “an angry God flipping His shit.” This act of relative divine indignation sets in motion a course of events which would ultimately be used to educate immature creatures on righteousness, and how to appreciate life (Gen. 3:10-23, Rom. 5.)

So! We have reached the crisis point of Paul’s argument, with the end of this chapter. The dilemma is clear; God is unjust if He lets any of this go. But He is unjust if He discards any that He caused to fail. Moreover, He cannot punish some for one wrongdoing, based on their personal experience, and not relieve another for a similar wrongdoing. He must remain impartial. George Rogers frames this very well in his Romans study:

“How perilous to follow the lead of men of disqualified mind! The climax and summing up of the wickedness of such minds is seen in verse 32. The darkest count is that these men well know God’s just statute. This is the intuitive and inescapable recognition of right proper to all men. They know that such practices deserve death, a death, of course, that comes as a penalty inflicted after judgment, and, therefore, not the death that is the common lot of all except those who will survive till the Lord’s advent. Yet by persistence in these practices they invite God’s condemnation. They fear to be solitary in their sins, so they heartily approve these practices in others, perhaps finding satisfaction and a false sense of security in the fact that vices known to be wrong are almost universally practiced.”

Whereas our judgments tolerate sin to some extent (that “false sense of security” that Rogers is mentioning,) God’s judgment cannot make such excuses in good faith to Himself and us. He must demonstrate a proper resolution to the issue that can account for this impossible riddle.

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This vice list and its conclusion wraps up Paul’s argument concerning indignation. The second chapter of Romans directly follows this one – highlighting the judgment of God. As such, the list both consummates the purpose of the indignation of God, while establishing the necessity for the judgment of God. This links the two arguments together, in preparation for Paul’s conclusion: the evangel of God.

At the beginning of Romans 2, we will keep in mind this link between indignation and judgment, and begin our series considering the judgment of God!

- GerudoKing