Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes Read Online Free PDF Page A

they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind.
    What are the consequences of serving idols? Paul’s answer starts with the inner life: “They became futile in their thinking.” “God gave them up to a debased mind” (Rom. 1:21, 28). The Greek word for mind is nous , but it has a much richer meaning than the English word. It can be translated reason, understanding, or intellectual intuition. (The same word is at the root of the Greek term for repentance, metanoia , which means to change one’s nous —not just the mind but a whole-person transformation.) The church fathers often translated nous as the faculty for evaluating and directing the course of one’s life: “the eye of the soul.” So it is no great stretch to translate the word as worldview, the convictions by which we direct our lives.
    Today the word debased has a primarily moral connotation, meaning wicked or degenerate. But in the original Greek, the word meant counterfeit money. So a debased worldview is one that offers a counterfeit god. It makes false promises. It gives misleading answers to the questions of life. 24
    In the original language, this verse (Rom. 1:28) contains a fascinating wordplay. The word worthwhile in the first clause has the same root as debased . The parallel can be expressed like this: Just as people did not think it worthwhile to acknowledge God, so God gave them up to a worthless worldview. And a worldview shapes not only their thought life but also their actions. “They followed worthless idols and became worthless themselves” (Jer. 2:5 NIV ). Here’s how Paul expresses the connection:
    God gives us up to the consequences of our idols—to “dishonorable” behavior.
    Romans 1:24—God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves.
    Romans 1:26—God gave them up to dishonorable passions.
    Romans 1:28—God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.
    Once again the connection is captured by the word exchanged . First Paul says people “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images” of created things (Rom. 1:23; see also Rom. 1:25). 25 Next Paul shows what this trade-off does to human behavior: “Women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature,” and men did the same (Rom. 1:26–27). At the time Paul was writing, in both Greco-Roman culture and Hellenistic Jewish culture, “contrary to nature” was a standard phrase referring to homosexual behavior. 26
    At the time, the term nature was not used the way people use it today, to mean behavior observed in the natural world. Instead nature meant behavior that is normative for human nature : behavior that fits the way humans were originally created, that accords with God’s purpose for humanity, that matches the ideal standard of what it means to be fully human.
    In this sense of the term, all sin is contrary to human nature, and Paul goes on to itemize a representative sampling: “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” (Rom. 1:29–31). All these behaviors—and more—are contrary to what it means to be fully human.
    In this chapter Paul has unfolded a highly sensitive analysis of the link between mind and behavior. He outlines a clear and calamitous progression: First, “they did not honor him as God” (Rom. 1:21). “Therefore God gave them up … to the dishonoring of their bodies” (Rom. 1:24). “God gave them up to dishonorable passions” (Rom. 1:26). The principle is that those who dishonor God inevitably dishonor themselves and others. To adapt a phrase, idols have consequences.
    Five Strategic Principles
    In Romans 1, Paul has spelled out a fascinating