For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged their natural use for what is against nature. Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.
Romans 1, 26, 27.
This passage states for the second time that God gave those who turned away from Him over to their sinful passions. They had “exchanged the truth of God for a lie” (v.25), and even now they “exchange” the practice of the “natural” sexual act for what is contrary to nature.
If any civilisation goes astray by abandoning the Creator, crude moral confusion ensues. God’s order in creation, that which is “natural”, is soon abandoned. What God granted the human race in marriage between man and wife for their satisfaction and joy becomes a source of disaster. Eventually the family, the germ-cell of society; with its natural function of providing domestic warmth, security, and protection falls by the wayside. The sin of turning away from God with consequential sins receives its recompense already here on earth.
The principle of seed and harvest applies: “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap” (Galatians 6, 7). In this way the heathen nations degenerated step by step. So, too, has the civilisation formerly known for its Christian values floundered in a whirlpool of sin, from which there is no total escape. God’s grace, however, still appeals to the individual in order to rescue him from perishing.