All you have to do is glance at the headlines to be filled with dismay. It leaves you wondering how anyone can think the way some people do and can make such stupid assertions. I wrote an SW four years ago entitled, “Stupid”. It addressed the ludicrous ideas people advocate. Since then, I’ve kept a database that grows every day. It seems people have lost their ability to think. Why? How does someone reach this point? The Bible cautions that people can move so far away from God they are no longer capable of a rational thought process. In Romans, Paul outlines the descending phases into sin ending with people losing the ability to reason and he forewarns the consequences.
No one begins this way. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse (Rom 1:20). The downward path begins when for even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks. Immediately, it affected their thinking, and they become futile in their speculations (v21). Once an individual starts on this path, it is like a slippery slope with four levels, each plunging to a deeper level of sin. They reach the point they exchange the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures (v23).
Paul reminds and warns about God’s patience towards sinners. He is rich in kindness, forbearance, and patience but offenders should not take it for granted. His patience toward sin will run out. Those who had exchanged His glory had descended to the bottom of the first level. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity (1:24 NIV). Giving them over was not a passive action of God merely turning them loose. Rather it means God delivered these sinners over to the sinful desires of their hearts. One version reads God delivered them over (HCSB). The Message Bible provides the clearest translation, So God said, in effect, “If that’s what you want, that’s what you get.” Now, ruled by the lusts of their hearts to impurity, they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and stopped worshipping their Creator. Again, God’s patience ended, and He gave them over to what they wanted.
What they got was degrading passions that lead to exchanging and abandoning their God designed natural sexual functions to what was unnatural. In this sinful state, they did not think it worth while to retain the knowledge of God (v28 NIV). God’s kindness, forbearance, and patience ended. He gave them over to a depraved mind.
Here lies the reason people appear as if they have lost the ability to think. The reality is—they have lost it! They have slid down the slippery slope until God delivers them to this deepest level of sin and gives them over to a depraved mind. Depraved means a mind unable to stand the test and rejected because of its own worthlessness. Paul plays on this word. Man put God to a test, but He did not meet their specifications so they rejected any knowledge of Him (v28). In turn, they failed God’s test, so He turned them over to a depraved worthless mind unable to understand and acknowledge the will of God. Paul adds they had been filled with twenty-one sins to do improper things.
In just my lifetime, I have witnessed the spiritual degeneration of our society into deeper and deeper moral decay. Increasingly—and rapidly, we see and hear from individuals and groups God has given over to reprobate minds. Now, with a morally dead thought process, they spew out their preposterous rhetoric. Who are they you ask? They are college professors, politicians, Hollywood moviemakers, philosophers, special interest groups, leaders, teachers, and even some ‘professing’ Christian ministers and teachers. You name it and you can find someone unable to think. Just this week someone sent me a graphics card parents received on how the school was teaching Kindergarten students to choose which gender they wanted to be. Only someone, who can no longer think, would question God’s assigned gender. Even remote tribes of uneducated people living in the deepest jungles can look at their child at birth and declare, “It’s a boy,” or “It’s a girl”.
The function of the mind is not only to distinguish between good and evil. It is the means, by which we determine what the will of God is and persuade our will to act upon that. When a person, no longer as the ability to think and reason, they are left on their own to a “cold and calculating mind that no longer distinguishes between good and evil” (Frank Matera).
The lesson for believers, yes, we are living in perilous times when people have fallen away from the faith with many who God has turned over to reprobate minds. However, we don’t have to allow the world to drag us down to its level. We have to ability to think and reason. Paul assures believers the Holy Spirit will continually transform us by the renewing of our mind (Rom 12:2).
Sustaining Word for the Week: The mind set on the Spirit is life and peace (Rom 8:6). Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus (Phil 2:5 NKJV).