"_God gave them up._" So the Scripture says elsewhere. "So I gave them up unto their own hearts' lusts" (Psal. lxxxi. 12); "God turned, and gave them up to worship the host of heaven" (Acts vii. 42); "God gave them up to passions of degradation"; "God gave them over to an abandoned mind"; (below, verses 26, 28). It is a dire thought; but the inmost conscience, once awake, affirms the righteousness of the thing. From one point of view it is just the working out of a natural process, in which sin is at once exposed and punished by its proper results, without the slightest injection, so to speak, of any force beyond its own terrible gravitation towards the sinner's misery. But from another point it is the personally allotted, and personally inflicted, retribution of Him who hates iniquity with the antagonism of infinite Personality. _He_ has so constituted natural process that wrong gravitates to wretchedness; and _He_ is in that process, and above it, always and for ever. So He "_gave them up, in their desires of their hearts_"; He left them there where they had placed themselves, "in" the fatal region of self-will, self-indulgence; "_unto uncleanness_" described now with terrible explicitness in its full outcome, "_to dishonour their bodies_" the intended temples of the Creator's presence, "_among themselves_," or "_in themselves_"; for the possible dishonour might be done either in a foul solitude, or in a fouler society and mutuality: [Sidenote: Ver. 25.] =Seeing that they perverted the truth of God,= the eternal fact of His glory and claim, =in their (τῷ) lie,= so that it was travestied, misrepresented, lost, "in" the falsehood of polytheism and idols; =and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.= He casts this strong Doxology into the thick air of false worship and foul life, as if to clear it with its holy reverberation. For he is writing no mere discussion, no lecture on the genesis and evolution of paganism. It is the story of a vast rebellion, told by one who, once himself a rebel, is now altogether and for ever the absolute vassal of the King whom he has "seen in His beauty," and whom it is his joy to bless, and to claim blessing for Him from His whole world for ever. As if animated by the word of benediction, he returns to denounce "the abominable thing which God hateth" with still more terrible explicitness. [Sidenote: Ver. 26.] =For this reason,= because of their preference of the worse to the infinite Good, =God gave them up to passions of degradation;= He handed them over, self-bound, to the helpless slavery of lust; to "_passions_," eloquent word, which indicates how the man who _will_ have his own way is all the while a "sufferer," though by his own fault; _the victim_ of a mastery which he has conjured from the deep of sin.