The Daily Audio Bible

Humans reject God and embrace corruption

¹⁸ For the anger of God is unveiled from heaven against all the ungodliness and injustice performed by people who use injustice to suppress the truth. ¹⁹ What can be known of God, you see, is plain to them, since God has made it plain to them. ²⁰ There are, of course, things about God which you can’t see, namely, his eternal power and deity. But, ever since the world was created, they have been known and seen in the things he has made. As a result, they have no excuse: ²¹ they knew God, but didn’t honor him as God or thank him. Instead, they learned to think in useless ways, and their unwise heart grew dark. ²² They declared themselves to be wise, but in fact they became foolish. ²³ They swapped the glory of the immortal God for the likeness of the image of mortal humans—and of birds, animals and reptiles.

Unclean desires, dishonored bodies

²⁴ So God gave them up to uncleanness in the desires of their hearts, with the result that they dishonored their bodies among themselves. ²⁵ They swapped God’s truth for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed forever, Amen.

²⁶ So God gave them up to shameful desires. Even the women, you see, swapped natural sexual practice for unnatural; ²⁷ and the men, too, abandoned natural sexual relations with women, and were inflamed with their lust for one another. Men performed shameless acts with men, and received in themselves the appropriate repayment for their mistaken ways.

Darkened mind, darkened behavior

²⁸ Moreover, just as they did not see fit to hold on to knowledge of God, God gave them up to an unfit mind, so that they would behave inappropriately. ²⁹ They were filled with all kinds of injustice, wickedness, greed and evil; they were full of envy, murder, enmity, deceit and cunning. They became gossips, ³⁰ slanderers, God-haters, arrogant, self-important, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, ³¹ unwise, unfaithful, unfeeling, uncaring. ³² They know that God has rightly decreed that people who do things like that deserve death. But not only do they do them; they give their approval to people who practice them.