25 Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. 26 For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: 27 And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. 28 And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; (Romans 1:25-28 KJV)
William Burkitt’s Commentary
Here Apostle Paul proceeds to give a particular and distinct account of the abominable idolatry and unnatural filthiness he had charged the Heathens with in the preceding verses.
As to their idolatry, he had told us in the 23rd verse that they had made false and unworthy representations of the ever-blessed God: worshipping God in and by the creatures. In the 25th verse, they are charged with a false object of their worship, giving divine honour to a creature: They changed the truth of God into a lie; that is, the true God into an idol, called a lie because it deceives men as a lie does by seeming to be that which indeed it is not; it seems in the idolater’s fancy, to have something of divinity in it, when, in reality, it is but wood or stone. Every image of God is a false and lying representation of God.
Secondly, As to their uncleanness, he shows that they were so given up to the ravings of lust for sinning against the light of nature, that they forsook the order of nature, and were more brutish than the very brutes.
Learn hence, That when men provoke God finally to forsake them, and judicially to give them up to their own heart’s lusts, they will not stick to commit such monstrous and unnatural uncleanness, as the very brute beasts abhor. Here men and women burnt in worse than beastly lusts towards those of their own sex.
Lord, if we are not more vile than the vilest of thy creatures, we owe it all to thy sanctifying, or, a least, to thy restraining grace. As by the grace of God, we are what we are; so by his grace, it is that we are not what we are not.