The Dark Exchange

Romans 1:18-32 Why Are We The Way We Are?

I've stolen (ahem, borrowed) my title, The Dark Exchange, from John Piper, who is one of the few who have written about what I consider the heart of this passage. There is a spiritual decision that every human being makes, not less than rational but beyond reason, in the deep and hidden places of the soul. We have all turned away from God in that deep place, and unless we respond to God's gracious calling we will grow darker and worse from that point onward.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The apostle Paul says that we EXCHANGE the glory of God for something less. Three times Paul will march through the same basic outline here in Romans 1:

1. The Dark Exchange (1:23, 1:25, 1:28a)

2. God gave them up (1:24a, 1:26a, 1:28b)

3. Disorder results, usually evidenced in sexual disorder (1:24b, 1:26b-27, 1:28c).

What fascinates me...and I can't find anyone who really deals with this at length...is the almost economic nature of this spiritual "trade." It seems to be such a major Biblical theme; Eve, in the garden, trades away her relation with God for the fruit. Esau trades away his birth right for a bowl of stew, which is basically a Biblical type of our spiritual sin. We give away the eternal for the immediate, and regret it as soon as the stew is gone. Jesus warned us about giving our souls away in an attempt to gain the world.

Is reality some kind of "let's make a deal" game show, where Monty Hall offers us what's behind curtain number three (usually a donkey) in exchange for our vacation in Hawaii? Is the devil Monty Hall? What exactly are we trading away, and what do we think we will gain?

According to Paul, we trade away the very glory of God. We break the first commandment, and choose a false god in God's place; we give away our future glory, our hope of sharing God's glory. We think we see things more beautiful than God; we are wrong. In Jeremiah 2, God accused the Israelites of exchanging Him, the fountain of living water, for a broken cistern that could not hold water. We lose everything worth having and gain nothing worth keeping in this trade. What a tragedy!

Verse 21 outlines the flow of this movement:

From this inner spiritual choice...

To a refusal to honor or thank God

To flawed, pointless thinking (our reason gets poisoned)

To darkened hearts (our spirits are blinded)

And finally into a terrible list of evil behaviors which fill the closing verses of the chapter.

Yuck. Is this really us? Well, looking at history, yes.

But it all flows from that horrible spiritual decision to turn our backs on God because we think we've found something better.

Verse 22: The Sophomores

We should remember this word means "wise fool." Thinking they were so wise, they actually became fools. No one makes a trade they think is a bad deal from the outset; we trade God away because we think we're so smart! And once we make this terrible deal, well, we have to keep justifying it, because who wants to admit we've just been duped in the greatest con of all time? No, we LIKE living without God! At least, we pretend that we like it...

Read Isaiah 5:20-21 and ponder the connection of intellectual arrogance with moral blindness.

I won't detail the verses here...they are terrible. Paul himself gets so upset in the middle he has to break out into praise, as if he's trying to clear the air with some hallelujahs. The thing to see is the flow...from our smarty pants rejection of God, the next thing that happens is on God's side. God lets us go...he gives us our way. The father lets the prodigal head off for the far country, into hunger and misery and emptiness (surely in the hopes that the boy will learn his lesson and come home!). And then, since we are out of alignment with our Maker, the most fundamental aspect of human life, sexuality, gets out of alignment. Yes, Paul talks about homosexuality as a consequence of this brokenness at the heart of things. This is not the way God meant life to be for us. It is not God's best plan for human happiness. But it's all part and parcel of our losing our relation with God.

The really horrifying thing is the way the chapter ends. Not only do we live in unrepentant sin ourselves, we actually applaud and affirm sin in others. We become spiritual Dr. Kervorkians, helping others to destroy themselves too. Is it possible for a human soul to become less Christ-like than this? Isn't this the most we could become like the the evil one?