Take a moment to read Romans 1:18-32 before reading the devotional below.
As we read Romans, it is important to remember that Paul is building a cohesive theological argument. We are breaking the reading up into smaller sections, but we cannot rip them out of their context. You may want to go back each day and review the previous day’s devotional in order to keep the flow continuous in your mind. Recall that Paul already has made the basic case that Jesus is the Messiah and he fulfilled the Old Testament Scriptures. Our main point yesterday was that faith is the key to freedom — and today we see what happens when we do not put our faith in God.
God’s presence has been made apparent to everyone. I don’t know a person who is not amazed by a beautiful sunset or the vastness of the ocean. Obviously people attribute those natural phenomena to a variety of causes, but here Paul is saying that God’s presence is abundantly clear. We have an innate hunger for God, but sometimes we replace God with other things like idols or our own desires. When we want to go our own way, God lets us, and we are pretty creative when it comes to finding ways to sin. We bicker with our loved ones, we disobey our parents, we hate and judge people, and we break our promises. No matter what you’ve struggled with in your flesh, it’s in this list. And of course the very first thing we are tempted to do with this passage is point to all the people doing all the stuff we’ve never even thought about and say how horrible they must be.
Here’s your freedom for today: you don’t have to do God’s job. Evaluating the hearts of people is God’s job, not mine or yours. We do not need to cherry pick the Bible to find verses that make us out to be the “good guys” and others the bad ones. The point of this section of the letter to the Romans is that every single one of us finds a way to be depraved without God. If it hasn’t been done yet, we’ll make up new ways to turn from him. We can’t make any conclusions about this yet because Paul is just getting started in establishing the foundations of his argument. As we go along in the coming days and weeks, we’ll need to keep asking ourselves why. Why is he writing this? Why did God want to reveal this to us through this letter? What is the main point and what does it mean for my own spiritual growth? Keep your eyes on you through that process so that you can go deeper with God.