Paul opens his description of God's wrath with people who suppress a truth they already have. What can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. He points to creation itself, God's eternal power and divine nature clearly seen in everything he made, so that no one who ever lived under an open sky can say they had no evidence. This revelation was always enough to leave everyone 20"without excuse." It was never enough, on its own, to save anyone.
They knew God and did not honor him as God. 22"Claiming to be wise, they became fools." They were made to bear his glory and traded it for images of animals and crawling things. Every attempt to improve on what God revealed ends up smaller than what it started with.
Three times in the verses that follow, the same phrase tolls like a bell. 24"God gave them up." It comes again at 26"God gave them up" and again at 28"God gave them up." Each time it follows the same pattern, knowledge stated, then rejected, then the giving up. They knew God and would not glorify him, so God gave them up to impurity. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, so he gave them up to dishonorable passions. They did not see fit to acknowledge him, so he gave them up to a debased mind. This is wrath as withdrawal, God stepping back and letting people have what they have been reaching for. The most severe judgment in this passage is what happens when God finally lets a person become what they have already chosen to be.
Once the exchange has happened, the corruption spreads. A wrong view of God produces a wrong view of everything else, and the list of vices that closes the chapter reads like a floodgate giving way. The last line names what makes this wrath. 32"Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them." Suppressing the truth was never the end of the story. Applauding the suppression is.
Anyone reading this in Paul's day would have recognized the standard Jewish case against pagan idolatry, territory that let a righteous reader nod along. Paul is not finished. Like Amos with Israel's neighbors, he lets the hearers cheer each indictment until his next chapter turns the same charge on them. No reader is left standing outside looking down.
The word "gave up" appears once more, later in this letter, and there it means something very different. God "did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all" (Romans 8:32). The same word used three times here for God handing sinners over to what they chose is the word Paul uses for grace, God handing his own Son over to what we deserved. The act of giving up that reads as wrath in chapter 1 becomes, in chapter 8, the shape of love.
Ask where you have made your own exchanges, and where you have held down what you knew. Then hear the rest of the letter, that the hands that could have let you go were stretched out to give up his Son in your place.
Prayer
Father, we confess how easily we suppress what we know about you, trading your truth for smaller and safer things. Thank you that the last word is grace, that you gave up your own Son in our place. Keep us from reading this chapter as a verdict on someone else, and turn us back toward the truth we were made to hold. In Jesus' name, amen.