Please open your Bible to Romans chapter 1. Romans chapter 1. This evening we come to the bottom. of Romans chapter one, and I use that word bottom because these verses describe a pagan culture that has reached rock bottom, both spiritually and morally. These verses describe a culture that has cast off all moral restraint, a culture where anything goes. Kind of sounds like the culture in which we live, doesn't it? Romans 1, beginning at verse 28. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness, They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 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. Let's pray. Our Father, as we look into this passage of scripture, we realize that we're looking into an accurate description of the culture in which we live. We can see the moral and spiritual decline that has taken place in our society. And we can see the incredible accuracy with which Romans chapter one describes what we see. And Lord, as we look into this, I pray that you will give us insights into your word tonight. Help us as believers to understand what happens when a culture abandons you. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, how does a culture become so overrun by evil? How does a culture reach such a rock-bottom state of moral and spiritual depravity? Well, in this part of Romans 1, Paul is tracing the downward decline of a culture that rejects God and thus opens itself up to the wrath of God. And Paul's chain of thought begins all the way back in verse 18. Look again at that verse. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. This is where the downward slope into the pit of depravity begins. It begins when a culture suppresses truth, God's truth, the truth of God, and they suppress it by their unrighteousness. Now let's kind of review because we've taken a few weeks to work our way through this section of chapter one. Let's review Paul's chain of thought here. Paul describes a degrading, step-by-step decline in the spiritual and moral condition of humanity. Contrary to what humanists and evolutionists say, things are not getting better and better. Things are getting worse and worse. A culture that suppresses the truth does so by rejecting the witness of God within the human heart, that would be the human conscience, and the witness of God's truth in creation. And having suppressed this truth, they then reject God himself. They rob God of the honor and the gratitude that is due unto him. They turn to futile quests for wisdom that just takes them deeper and deeper into spiritual darkness. They turn to false wisdom. the philosophies of men. They turn to false gods, idols made by human hands and idols in the heart. And so we come then to verse 24 and Paul says, therefore, therefore God gave them up. God withdrew His restraining and protective hand. and allowed them to pursue their downward descent into moral and spiritual depravity, into the abyss of sin. The culture took a step away from God, and so God took a step away from the culture. He allowed them to gratify their degrading, immoral lusts. And this resulted in an over-sexualized culture that pursued every illicit form of sexual gratification. And then we come to verse 26 and we see the next step in the downward progression. Verse 26 says, for this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For the second time, we encounter this phrase, God gave them up. They took another step away from God, and God took another step away from them. He turned them loose to pursue dishonorable passions, homosexuality, and other lewd and shameful acts that offend the Creator. Can it get worse? Indeed, it can get worse. Verses 28 through 32 show us that a culture that totally rejects God spirals into total depravity. Verse 28 describes this final downward step as total rejection of God. It says in verse 28, they did not see fit to acknowledge God. Did Not See Fit translates a single Greek verb that implies that they examined theism and they consciously rejected it. They willfully determined to remove God from their conscious thought. In other words, they became atheists. Leon Morris writes this, their ignorance of God was not due to a lack of opportunity to know him, but due to their deliberate refusal to know him. You see, people are not born atheists. They become atheists. They become atheists by suppressing the self-evident truth that there is a God. They suppress that truth. Now sadly, atheism is growing in America. A 2023 poll by the Pew Research Center found that 4% of people in the United States self-identified as atheists, and that is an increase from 3.1% just nine years earlier. In the 18 to 29 age group, 6% self-identify as atheists. And so there's a lot of atheism in our culture, in our country, and it's growing. There's a lot of agnostics on top of that, people who just can't really come to a conclusion whether there is a God for sure. Many atheists who have rejected God. One day Terry and I were out visiting new neighbors like we do every first Saturday of every month. And we went up to a home, knocked on, actually we didn't get a chance to knock on the door, they were actually outside. And we told them who we were and where we were from, Grace Baptist Church. And as soon as we said that, this woman looked at us and said, I'm a happy atheist. She kind of staked out her ground. Now she smiled when she said that, okay, she smiled. And maybe she's sincere that she's really happy with her atheism. But I say to that, ignorance is bliss. She gave no thought to the possibility that there is a God whom she will face in judgment. Hebrews 9.27 says it is appointed unto man once to die and after that the judgment. Atheists are not prepared for what happens when they die. Hebrews 10.31 says, it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Many atheists are not content to simply be atheists. They see it as their mission in life to remove any reminder of God. All reminders of God from their lives and from the culture at large. Three anti-Christian organizations have made this their mission. The American Atheists, the American Humanist Association, and the Freedom From Religion Foundation. And you can go out and you can do some searches and see some of the things that they've done. For example, they are fighting to remove the Jesus statue from the World War II memorial. They want to ban all college football team chaplains. They want to remove, in God we trust, from our U.S. currency. They want to put a stop to the National Day of Prayer and all prayer proclamations that are made throughout our country. They want to put a stop to all invocations at all public events. They want to remove Bible verses, crosses, and other Christian symbols in public places, such as the Ground Zero cross at the 9-11 Memorial Museum. And they want to remove all nativity scenes in small towns throughout America. And that's just an abbreviated list of what they're up to. Why are they so determined to do these things? Because they want to erase all reminders of God They want to put God out of their minds. They want to put God out of existence if they could. They do not want to retain God in their knowledge because they have totally rejected God and they want the entire culture to join them in that. A culture that totally rejects God spirals into total depravity. Verse 28 begins with the total rejection of God, which leads to the total depravity of mind. Look again at verse 28, it says, since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind. This is now the third time, and the final time, that we encounter this phrase, God gave them up. In verse 24, God gave them up to the lusts of their hearts. Verse 26, God gave them up to dishonorable, we might say degrading passions. In verse 28, God gave them up to a debased mind. Now the Greek word behind the English word debased is a challenging word to translate. Some translations render it with the word reprobate or depraved or worthless. And I think one reason for the difficulty in translating this Greek word is that Paul is using a little wordplay here that we can't see in the English. A little wordplay with the earlier verb, did not see fit. And so the literal idea here is that their thinking is examined and found to fail the test. By God's measure their thinking is worthless. And I like how John Stott attempts to express the wordplay that's there, and he does so this way. One might say that since they did not see fit to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to an unfit mind. We come back to this idea of what exactly is a depraved mind. Well, it is a mind so warped by the world and so corrupted by sin that it becomes unable to form proper thoughts about spiritual and moral matters. Let me say that again. A depraved mind is a mind so warped by the world and so corrupted by sin that it becomes unable to form proper thoughts about spiritual and moral matters. That is a depraved mind. To put it another way, it is a mind lacking all spiritual and moral sense. It's a mind that lacks sense. It is a senseless mind. Truth becomes a lie, and lies become the truth. Good becomes evil, and evil becomes good. As I say that, Genesis 6, 5 immediately comes to mind. And this is in the days preceding the global flood. In Genesis 6, 5 it says, the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. That's it. Their mind is just depraved to the point where they can't even form a good thought. They think of only evil continually. The depraved mind cannot think God's thoughts after Him. In fact, it cannot even think about God at all. Psalm 10, verse 4 says, in the pride of His face, the wicked does not seek Him, God. All His thoughts are, there is no God. It's almost like they have to keep saying that to themselves to convince themselves of this. There is no God. There is no God. Apart from the grace of God, the depraved mind cannot perceive spiritual truth. We know this from 1 Corinthians 2.14, the natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God for they are folly to him and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. So without the assistance of the Holy Spirit, the natural person cannot understand spiritual things. Moreover, the depraved mind is antagonistic to the truth. 2 Timothy 3.8, just as Janus and Jambres opposed Moses, so these men, Paul says, also oppose the truth. Men corrupted in mind and disqualified regarding the faith. And the worthless thoughts of a depraved mind are an offense to God. Proverbs 15, 26 says, the thoughts of the wicked are an abomination to the Lord. John MacArthur sums all this up for us in this way, quote, in relation to God, the rejecting mind becomes a rejected and thereby becomes spiritually depraved, worthless, and useless. The mind that finds God worthless becomes worthless itself. It is debauched, deceived, and deserving only of God's divine wrath." So a culture that totally rejects God spirals into total depravity. Verse 28 begins with the total rejection of God, and this leads to the total depravity of mind, which leads to total depravity in behavior. Look again at verse 28. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They did things not fitting or proper. They did things that were morally reprehensible. And really, if you stop to think about it, this outcome makes perfect sense because thoughts lead to actions, don't they? And so the thoughts of their depraved mind led to depraved behavior. Maybe you'd like an example. Would you like an example? How about 21 examples? Because that's what we see here in this list of 21 traits of depraved behavior. And so we're gonna work our way through this catalog of 21 traits of depraved humanity. Now some refer to these as vices or traits, whatever you wanna call them. And it's a long list, but there does seem to be some partitioning of the list according to the Greek grammar. So I'm going to give you three groups. We're going to look at these in three groups. Group number one, four traits of depravity in general. Group number two, five traits of depravity in relationships. And group number three, 12 traits of depravity in character. Now there's some overlap and there's not any precision to all of this. A lot of these are overlapping terms. In fact, as we go into group one, depravity in general, these are very broad in general terms that are used here. Now this group begins with the phrase, they were filled with, in verse 29. They were filled with. Filled here implies an overflowing abundance, we could say they were filled to the brim with these things. Now our text says they were filled with all. In most translations, render the Greek word with just the English word all and leave it up to the reader to determine what is meant by that word all. Well, it does not mean that every person in the world is as evil as they possibly could be, that they've done all the sins that possibly could be done. That's not what we mean by that word all. That's not what we mean by total depravity. Instead, the word all expresses the idea that one's whole person is depraved, and the result is that all manner of evil is expressed in that person's life, a wide variety of evil. And that's exactly how the ESV has rendered it. They were filled with all manner of. Now in this first group of traits, Paul uses four nouns with very broad and overlapping meanings. And so let's look at these. The first one here is unrighteousness. To put it very simply, this means not doing right by God's judicial standard. Instead, they do what is not right. So that would be a simple definition of that term. Second term that's used here is another very broad term, evil. This is a broad and comprehensive term. It refers to wickedness that is within the person. That is to say evil intent and in many cases viciousness as it's expressed toward others. Now some New Testament manuscripts insert the word fornication before this word and fornication is certainly one category of evil. And then the third term that's used here is covetousness. This is greedy desire. One Greek lexicon defines it as, quote, a disposition to have more than one's share. Well, that starts early in childhood, doesn't it? Always wanting the biggest piece of cake. That's covetousness. The term is sometimes rendered greed or avarice. 1 Timothy 6.10 declares that the love of money is the root of all sorts of evil. And we may add to that that covetousness is at the root of the love of money. And then the fourth term used here is malice. The Greek word has the idea of being a bad person, someone who is full of ill will, someone who has malicious intent. You might think of this in terms of a troublemaker, someone who is a perpetrator of evil. Malice takes the evil intentions of the heart and acts upon them. So we have this first group. Unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice, describing depravity in general. Second group, depravity in relationships. This group has five traits beginning in the middle of verse 29 with the words full of. So you can see a break there, full of. Now this word goes beyond the idea of being full to the brim. This word has the idea of being stuffed full, of bursting at the seams, that kind of full. And the grammatical construction here conveys the idea of being full of something in the sense of being constantly preoccupied with it. I mean, it's like that person's whole life revolves around these things. Leon Morris says these terms, filled with and full of, both indicate, quote, the people being described were not half-hearted about their sin. Rather, they were wholly given over to it. They just launched headlong into these things. And so let's look at the five terms that are in this group. First, we have the word envy, envy. This is jealousy over the good success of someone else, envy. And then murder. Of course, we understand this is the unjust killing of another human being. But it's not just first degree premeditated murder that we're talking about here. This would include abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, and genocide. All of those are forms of murder. And then we have this word strife. This would include all forms of contentious rivalries and quarrels, strife. Then in the word deceit, the Greek word literally refers to bait for fish. I think I've mentioned that before. It's kind of the idea of, you know, baiting someone, deceiving them until they bite on that deception and then you hook them. So that's the idea behind this term. It means treachery, deception, fraud. And then maliciousness, spitefulness, just being mean to be mean. And we can see that in our culture. There are people out there that are just mean to be mean. You know, just a random attack on somebody walking down the street. You've seen these videos probably. Some old person walking down the street of New York and some random individual just comes up and attacks them. Not to rob them, but just to knock them down. Being mean just to be mean. So that's group two, depravity in relationships. And then we come to group three. This is depravity in character. Now this is the biggest group. There are 12 traits in this group. And this group puts labels on the depraved. So they're called these things. They are called, first of all, and at the end of verse 29, they're called gossips. The King James uses the word whisperers. And that's a good term because this word refers to those who speak evil of others in private. Gossips. I mean, that's what gossip is, is it not? You know, it's all this juicy stuff about somebody else and, hey, did you know that so-and-so and this and that? And that's what the very nature of gossip is, is to speak evil of others in private. And then we go to verse 30, slanderers. King James uses the word backbiters. These are those who defame and speak evil of others in public. See the difference there? In public. And then we have this term, haters of God. It's a single word in the Greek. It literally means those who detest God. Those who mock Him. those who defame his name and use his name in vain, those who would swear against God, those who would speak evil against God, haters of God. And then we have the word insolent. This is the Greek word hubristes, from which we get our English word hubris. It's an attitude of superiority resulting in the mistreatment of and violence against others. Insolent. And the next word is haughty. An arrogant, proud, boaster. A haughty person. And of course, we come to that word boastful, overlapping somewhat in meaning. This word has the idea of being an empty pretender. I like what A.T. Robertson says of this term. It refers to swaggerers and braggarts. Boastful. And then inventors of evil. Is this not amazing? The word inventor has the idea of being a contriver, coming up with new ways to do evil, new ways to sin. This describes those who devise new ways to do what is wrong, new ways to offend a holy God, new ways to harm somebody else, new ways to commit a crime, inventors of evil. And then notice this one. Disobedient to parents. This is a contempt for God-ordained authority within the family. Disobedient to parents. Of course, we have those commands of Scripture. Children, obey your parents and the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother. It's the first commandment with promise. And so we're to do those things as children rather than being disobedient to parents. We see that in our society, do we not? We see the disintegration of the nuclear family in our culture. We see children who rebel against their parents at an early age. We see school systems that support the idea of children doing things in secret and lying to their parents and even school officials who will lie to the parents of the children. Disobedient to parents. It's becoming entrenched in our culture. And then verse 31, we have these four terms in rapid succession, just like it is in the Greek, foolish. Without understanding in a moral sense, we might say senseless. Leon Morris says, those who act stupidly and wickedly because they have rejected God. People just go out and do foolish things, don't they? They get themselves into trouble. Trouble with the law, but they're really in trouble with a higher authority. They're in trouble with God. And then we come to this next term, faithless. Now, in my view, this is not the best translation of the Greek term. The Greek term has the idea of being a covenant breaker. That's how it's rendered in the King James. That's a very good literal rendering. It describes those who go back on their word, those who break their promises, and therefore prove themselves to be untrustworthy. You know, you can't take them at their word. They're liars, they're deceivers, they're covenant breakers. And then the word heartless. Very interesting word. It refers to lacking natural affection. and especially toward family members. It's a compound in the Greek and it has the idea of the natural affection that we ought to have toward members of our own family and it's the absence of that. And if you just look at the news, you can see this in the news headlines all the time. You see abuse taking place in the home. You see murder taking place of family members. You know, children murdering their parents, husbands murdering their wives, wives murdering their husbands, wives hiring hitmen to kill their husbands, all of this kind of stuff. That all fits this term, heartless. And then finally, ruthless. This is a person that shows no pity, no mercy, no compassion, They're not going to just slug you. They're going to kill you. They're going to beat you to death and show no mercy. They are ruthless. These last four traits describe the loss of something, the loss of all sense, of honor, of all affection, and all pity. And we see these things in our culture. A culture that totally rejects God spirals into total depravity. That's what we see in these verses. This has been a downward decline ever since verse 18. They didn't accept the truth. They suppressed it in their unrighteousness, and they rejected God, and God just allowed them to pursue their lusts. They took a step away from God. God took a step away from them. He said, okay, go ahead. Go ahead and break your marriage vows. Go ahead and have relations outside of marriage. Go ahead, do those things. And so they went ahead and did those things. And they continued in their pursuit of those evil things in defiance of God. They took another step away from God. God took a step away from them and said, okay, go ahead and do all of these gross things. Homosexuality and other unspeakable things. And they continued in their sin, in their rejection and defiance of God. And they took another step away from God and God said, okay, I'll just turn you loose. I'll let you do whatever you want to do. I'll let you sin in whatever ways you want to sin. And we can see where it leads here in verses 28 to 32. Total rejection of God. leads to total depravity of mind, which leads to total depravity of behavior. We come to verse 32, and it kind of provides a summary of what Paul's been talking about here. Verse 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. They know what they're doing is wrong in their heart of hearts. Something inside them tells them that God isn't going to let them get away with their sin. But they suppress the truth. And they dull their conscience. And they take comfort in the fact that, well, everyone's doing it. Everyone's doing it. Why can't I do it? I don't see anything wrong with it. Everyone's doing it and supposedly that makes it okay. And they even revel in their sin. It's like a badge of honor that they went out and got drunk and had a hangover the next morning. They revel in their sin and they applaud those who join with them in it. says they give approval. I think the New American Standard says hearty approval to those who do those things. A culture that totally rejects God spirals into total depravity. Lower and lower they go, farther and farther away from God, removing every reminder of God from their lives. Their only hope of escape is the grace of God that brings a person to salvation. Their only hope is found in Jesus Christ. Let's pray. Our Father, as we think about the world in which we live, we can see all of these things in some measure. We can see a culture that has turned its back on you by and large. We can see a culture that has made every effort to erase all the reminders that there is a God, that you did send your son, that he was born in a manger. They want to remove all reminders of the fact that on Easter Sunday he rose again. They want to remove all crosses that remind people that Jesus died on the cross to pay for the sins of mankind. And we see where it has led. We can see all of these sins manifest in our culture, a culture that is really spiraling out of control, a culture that would have absolutely no hope if it were not for your grace. And oh, how great your grace is. Lord, we thank you that your grace is so great that no one is beyond the reach of your grace. Not even someone who has done all of these things. Not even someone who is self-identified as an atheist. They also are within the reach of your grace. And I pray, Lord, that you will help us to reach the lost, to share the gospel with them, because their only hope is found in Christ. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.