Today’s Passage: Romans 1
Paul opens not with himself but with the gospel: promised long beforehand, concerning God’s own Son, descended from David and declared the Son of God by His resurrection from the dead. He is writing to a church he has never met, and after greeting them he sets down the great thesis that the whole letter will unfold. He is not ashamed of the gospel, he says, because it is the power of God for salvation. Yet the same gospel that reveals God’s righteousness also lays bare why that righteousness is needed. Already the wrath of God is being revealed against those who suppress the truth, who trade the Creator for the creature, and who are handed over to the very desires they chose. The chapter descends on purpose, step by step into the dark, so that when mercy comes a few chapters on it will land with all its weight.
As you read, hold this: The gospel is God’s power for salvation because humanity has already suppressed the truth.
Context The world of Romans 1
Unlike most of his letters, Romans is written to a congregation Paul did not found and had not yet met (1:13). Rome was the capital of the empire, and its church, made up of Jewish and Gentile believers together, was of great importance to the spread of the gospel. Paul writes to introduce himself and the message he preaches before a visit he has long planned, and because he hoped that Rome might send him on farther west (chapter 15). So he begins by laying his foundation carefully, stone by stone.
To a reader in that first century, the words “promised beforehand through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures” (1:2) settled a great deal. The gospel is no novelty and no invention of yesterday. The God who gives it is the same God of Abraham and Moses and the prophets, and He had been promising this good news all along.
The line Paul quotes in 1:17 comes from Habakkuk 2:4. In its first setting the prophet had been told that the proud would not endure, but that the righteous one would live by trusting God in the middle of catastrophe. Paul hears in that single sentence the whole of the gospel: life comes not by our achieving but by our believing.
The long descent of 1:18–32 follows a path the Jewish teachers had walked before him when they exposed the folly of idol worship, but Paul presses it further, toward a verdict that leaves no one out. This is not simply the tale of the pagans far away. It is the anatomy of any human heart the moment it turns from God. Chapter 2 will turn the pointing finger back on the reader who felt safe. Romans 1 builds its case against everyone, so that the mercy of chapter 3 can be for everyone.
Three times over Paul says that God “gave them over” (1:24, 26, 28). The wrath he speaks of here is not yet fire falling from heaven. It is something quieter and more terrible, the withdrawal in which God lets people have exactly what they have demanded. The handing over is itself the judgment. And it stands as a warning to every reader against the slow hardening of a heart, which begins not in some great scandal but in the small and daily refusal to honor God and give Him thanks.
Romans 1:1–7 (BSB)
¹ Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, and set apart for the gospel of God— ² the gospel He promised beforehand through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures, ³ regarding His Son, who was a descendant of David according to the flesh, ⁴ and who through the Spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God by His resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord. ⁵ Through Him and on behalf of His name, we received grace and apostleship to call all those among the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith. ⁶ And you also are among those who are called to belong to Jesus Christ. ⁷ To all in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Notice that Paul names himself a servant before he ever names himself an apostle. The gospel is the gospel of God, His own to give and no invention of men, for it was promised long beforehand. Then Paul sets down its content in two balanced lines. The Son was “a descendant of David according to the flesh,” truly human and truly Israel’s promised Messiah, and He was “declared with power to be the Son of God by His resurrection.” Fully God and fully man, one Person, the same truth John labored to guard is settled again here. The whole weight of this long letter rests on a Person, and on the fact that He was raised from the dead.
His commission is to call the nations to “the obedience that comes from faith,” a phrase that will frame the whole letter and return again in chapter 16. Faith is not the opposite of obedience but its living root, the soil out of which real obedience grows. Then Paul gathers his readers into his arms, and before he makes a single argument he names them for what they are: “loved by God.”
Romans 1:8–15 (BSB)
⁸ First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is being proclaimed all over the world. ⁹ God, whom I serve with my spirit in preaching the gospel of His Son, is my witness how constantly I remember you ¹⁰ in my prayers at all times, asking that now at last by God’s will I may succeed in coming to you. ¹¹ For I long to see you so that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you, ¹² that is, that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith. ¹³ I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, how often I planned to come to you (but have been prevented from visiting until now), in order that I might have a harvest among you, just as I have had among the other Gentiles. ¹⁴ I am obligated both to Greeks and non-Greeks, both to the wise and the foolish. ¹⁵ That is why I am so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are in Rome.
Here is the warmth that lies beneath all the theology. Paul thanks God for a church he has never so much as met, and he prays for them without ceasing. He longs to come to them, and then, almost in the same breath, he corrects himself: not only to give them something, but to receive something in return, “that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith.” The great apostle fully expects to be strengthened by ordinary believers he has not yet laid eyes on.
Often he has planned the journey, and often he has been prevented. He speaks of his ministry as a debt he owes, obligated to Greek and non-Greek, to the wise and the foolish alike. The gospel was never his private possession to keep for himself. That is where his eagerness comes from, and it leads him straight into the great thesis of the letter.
Romans 1:16–17 (BSB)
¹⁶ I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, first to the Jew, then to the Greek. ¹⁷ For the gospel reveals the righteousness of God that comes by faith from start to finish, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”
Here is the thesis of the whole letter. In a city that prized power and polished speech, a crucified Jewish carpenter was an absurd thing to go about preaching. Yet Paul is not ashamed, and he tells us why. This news is “the power of God for salvation,” not a theory about power but power itself, at work to rescue “everyone who believes.” The door is faith, and it stands open to all, “first to the Jew, then to the Greek.” What the gospel unveils is the dikaiosynē, pronounced dee-kai-oh-SOO-nay. Strong's G1343, righteousness, being right with God and living rightly. This is the great banner-word of Romans, and 1:17 is where Paul first unfurls it. Dikaiosynē means rightness, justice, all that conforms to what is right, but Paul holds together two things a dictionary would keep apart. It is God’s own righteous character, and it is also the right standing He freely gives to everyone who believes. God is righteous, and God makes righteous. Here Paul says that this righteousness “is revealed,” not climbed up to but unveiled from above and received “by faith from start to finish.” The word will return in 3:21–26 as the very hinge of the gospel. Here, at the letter’s opening, it is sounded for the first time. of God, given by faith from start to finish, just as Habakkuk had written long before: “The righteous will live by faith.” From the first day to the last, the Christian life is lived by trusting God.
Romans 1:18–23 (BSB)
¹⁸ The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness. ¹⁹ For what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. ²⁰ For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from His workmanship, so that men are without excuse. ²¹ For although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him, but they became futile in their thinking and darkened in their foolish hearts. ²² Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools, ²³ and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images of mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.
Now the hinge turns. Righteousness is revealed, and wrath is revealed, both of them spoken in the present tense, both of them happening now. And the whole indictment rests on one foundation: the truth about God is not hidden away. Creation itself puts His eternal power and divine nature on open display. So the verdict against humanity is not cruelty but plain justice, for people are left “without excuse.” The trouble was never a shortage of evidence. It is the active pushing down of what is already plainly known.
The descent begins at the root of things. “Although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks.” The first sin is not some lurid scandal. It is a failure of worship and of gratitude, and from that quiet refusal the darkness spreads outward. Thinking turns futile, hearts grow dark, and those who boasted of their wisdom become fools. Then comes the great exchange: they traded away the glory of the immortal God for images of mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. That is what idolatry is, the trading of the Creator for some thing He has made. The mind does not go dark because God is hard to find. It goes dark because the heart will not bow to Him.
This is not the place to turn Paul into a lecture on science, for he is not settling questions of chronology here. He is saying something simpler and weightier: the made world leaves every human being without excuse, and the human story begins with a real turning away from a real Creator. We do not accept an unguided evolution that would crowd the Creator out of His own creation. But origins come up here only far enough to say the one thing Paul means to say, that there is a Creator, and that we have exchanged Him for lesser things.
Romans 1:24–27 (BSB)
²⁴ Therefore God gave them over in the desires of their hearts to impurity for the dishonoring of their bodies with one another. ²⁵ They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is forever worthy of praise! Amen. ²⁶ For this reason God gave them over to dishonorable passions. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. ²⁷ Likewise, the men abandoned natural relations with women and burned with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
Here the sober word falls at last: “God gave them over.” This is wrath that works not as fire but as withdrawal, God handing people over to the desires of their own hearts. The abandonment is itself the judgment. And once more Paul names the engine driving it all: they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator. Even in the middle of so dark an indictment, Paul cannot so much as mention the Creator without breaking into praise, the One “who is forever worthy of praise! Amen.”
The pattern repeats itself, and Paul points to disordered desire as one outworking of a humanity that has first disordered its worship. This is sober Scripture, and it should be read the way Paul writes it. It sits here between the idolatry above it and a long list of common sins below it. It is not singled out as a special target, and it must not be made into one. The very same word that governed the idolatry of verse 23 governs it here, the word exchanged, a turning away from the order God gave toward a substitute of our own.
On this the Scriptures do not speak out of both sides of the mouth. Biblical sexuality is settled ground. Human beings are created man and woman. Marriage is the covenant of one man and one woman, and Scripture holds out two good and life-giving paths, that covenant or a chaste single life. The acts named here belong to the great exchange, not to some rival good standing beside it. Where the text teaches this, we teach it plainly, and the text teaches it here. The word should be clear without ever being cruel, spoken with no appetite for a culture war, and never sharpened into a weapon aimed at any one reader. For the weight of the passage does not rest on any single sin. It rests on the whole movement of the human race away from God, and Paul is about to make sure that not one reader walks away from it feeling safely exempt.
Romans 1:28–32 (BSB)
²⁸ Furthermore, since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, He gave them up to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. ²⁹ They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed, and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, and malice. They are gossips, ³⁰ slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant, and boastful. They invent new forms of evil; they disobey their parents. ³¹ They are senseless, faithless, heartless, merciless. ³² Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things are worthy of death, they not only continue to do these things, but also approve of those who practice them.
The third “He gave them up” arrives, and now the list widens out until no one at all is left standing outside it. Envy and strife, deceit and gossip, arrogance, disobeying one’s parents. These are not the exotic sins of pagans in some distant land. They are the ordinary furniture of every human heart, and that is exactly the point. Paul has built a catalogue broad enough to sweep in the respectable reader who felt quite safe through the earlier verses. The root of it all was named back in verse 28: they did not see fit to acknowledge God. And the last dark note is that they not only do such things themselves but approve others who practice them. The case is finished now, and it is universal, which is why the very next words will turn the pointing finger back on the one who sat in judgment, and why, only three chapters on, the mercy of God in Christ will come as such impossibly good news.
Study notes Going deeper
The thesis of 1:16–17 rests upon Habakkuk. Living by faith was never a New Testament novelty. It has been the heartbeat of the whole Bible from the beginning.
"Look at the proud one; his soul is not upright — but the righteous will live by faith." Habakkuk 2:4 (BSB)
Faith, which is simply trusting God rather than trusting oneself, has always been the way the righteous live. What Paul now makes plain is what that faith was reaching toward all along, the righteousness of God given to us in Christ.
The argument of 1:19–20 is that creation itself testifies so plainly to its Maker that no one can honestly plead total ignorance.
"The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands." Psalm 19:1 (BSB)
The witness of the made world is enough on its own to leave humanity without excuse. The problem was never a lack of evidence but the suppression of it. People do not simply fail to find God. They take the truth in hand and push it down.
The engine of the whole descent is one small word: exchange. They exchanged the glory of God for images, and they exchanged the truth of God for a lie.
"For My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living water, and they have dug their own cisterns—broken cisterns that cannot hold water." Jeremiah 2:13 (BSB)
Sin at its root is not the breaking of rules but the breaking of faith, the forsaking of a living fountain for a cracked cistern that holds no water. That is precisely why the gospel is power and not mere advice. The truth has already been suppressed, the fountain already abandoned, and only God can now give back the righteousness we threw away.