Eugene Peterson’s, The Message, gives a brilliant paraphrase of Romans 1:23-32: “They traded the glory of God who holds the whole world in his hands for cheap figurines you can buy at any roadside stand. So God said, in effect, "If that's what you want, that's what you get." It wasn't long before they were living in a pigpen, smeared with filth, filthy inside and out. And all this because they traded the true God for a fake god, and worshiped the god they made instead of the God who made them - the God we bless, the God who blesses us. Oh, yes! Worse followed. Refusing to know God, they soon didn't know how to be human either - women didn't know how to be women, men didn't know how to be men. Sexually confused, they abused and defiled one another, women with women, men with men - all lust, no love. And then they paid for it, oh, how they paid for it - emptied of God and love, godless and loveless wretches. Since they didn't bother to acknowledge God, God quit bothering them and let them run loose. And then all hell broke loose: rampant evil, grabbing and grasping, vicious backstabbing. They made life hell on earth with their envy, wanton killing, bickering, and cheating. Look at them: mean-spirited, venomous, fork-tongued God-bashers. Bullies, swaggerers, insufferable windbags! They keep inventing new ways of wrecking lives. They ditch their parents when they get in the way. Stupid, slimy, cruel, cold-blooded. And it's not as if they don't know better. They know perfectly well they're spitting in God's face. And they don't care - worse, they hand out prizes to those who do the worst things best!” 

The ESV says the Gentiles, whom Paul is addressing in this first chapter of the book of Romans, “exchanged” the glory of God and the truth of God for something manmade and that provided points of contact for demon empowered pleasure and perversion. He then reveals what a “bad trade” this was because when they traded the true God for a fake god, and worshiped the god they made instead of the God who made them, worse followed. And then all hell broke loose: rampant evil, grabbing and grasping, vicious backstabbing. They made life hell on earth.

In more ways than not, this is the current condition in my beloved America. It has become the Theater of Absurd, the home of the morally preposterous. Almost every night after watching the news, I say to my wife, “Just when you think it can’t get any more silly, stupid, and insane, it does!”

Why? Because of the bad trade that millions of Americans have made – trading the Truth of God for the Lie of the enemy and believing that we can be our own “truth-makers” rather than “truth-receivers”; our own life-determiners, destiny-makers, and new-world, new-age builders without any help from the one, true and living God.

Larry Taunton was on target when he stated that “We have advanced from the “When does life begin?” stage of moral decline to the Late Empire “What is a woman?” stage. One look at social media, a Disney movie, or corporate branding and “pride” is everywhere. But the pride goes well beyond homosexuality. It is a preening, swaggering pride in drag queens, a sharp rise in abortions, the sexualization of children, and even infanticide.

“Questions these days focus on how seemingly intelligent, even highly intelligent, people could embrace morally absurd propositions like pregnant men, women with penises, and climate alarmism. How could any educated person think socialism and its variants - for example, Marxism, Critical Theory, Intersectionality, etc. - offer anything but ruin or that adolescent sex-change operations are anything but child mutilation and abuse?”

As G.K. Chesterton observed: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

Back to our text in Romans 1, when men did not desire to think God’s thoughts after him, God gave them up to degenerate thinking. They did not value God, and God gave them up to a debased mind (Roms. 1:28). There is a play upon the words, in 1:28, “as they did not approve, God gave them up unto a mind disapproved.

They did not value God (Roms.1:21), and in turn God did not value them; no one is of value, who does not value God. As they thought God to be worthless, God gave them up to a worthless mind. As they cast God out of their minds, God gave them up to an outcast mind. They became of no value when they refused to value God. When they refused to evaluate God, He refused to evaluate them. When they considered God to be worthless, God declared them worthless. Wrong loving (Roms.1:24f) and wrong living (Roms.1:26f) leads to wrong thinking (Roms.1:28-32).

Any system of education that casts God out is an outcast type of education. Education that does not value God is a worthless education. A godless training is a worthless course, and a "wicked study – a study in wickedness. Instruction away from God is not edification. There is no true philosophy that makes an outcast of true, biblical theology. There is no valuable scholarship which casts God out of the realm of values. There is no true science separate and apart from omniscience. And there is no wisdom in the instruction, that is antagonistic to the mind of God.

When man began to feel the tragic consequences of his sins, you would think he would repent and seek God; but just the opposite was true. Because he was abandoned by God, he could only become worse. Man did not even want to retain God in his knowledge! So, “God gave them over” this time to a “debased mind” (Rom 1:28 - ESV), which means a mind that cannot form right judgments. They now abandoned themselves to sin. Paul names twenty-one specific sins, all of which are with us today.

The consequences of the bad trade continues to pay awful dividends. Men not only commit these sins in open defiance of God, but encourage others to follow their lifestyle and applaud them when they do!

Paul was correct by asserting that the person who commits sin is certainly guilty before God, but the one who applauds such acts has even more guilt because that person encourages many others to join in the depraved actions. Charles Hodge says, "This is the lowest point of degradation. To sin, even in the heat of passion, is evil; but to delight in the sins of others shows that men are of set purpose and fixed preference, wicked."

Is there any hope for all the bad trading we are doing? Yes, the gospel of the kingdom of God provides the only hope for the bad trades that sinful man makes. When enough people in a nation – and only God knows how many is enough – recognize their bad trades and are made willing by the Spirit of God to trade up by turning in their trash, trinkets, and truth-suppressing, little-god-playing sins for the King, and his Kingdom Treasure, then “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.” (Habakkuk 2:14)

But if America perishes, you as an individual need not go down with her! True “trading up” or repenting and turning to God as offered in the gospel’s provision, will lead you out from devastation to eternal salvation! TRADE UP!