06/05/2026
The Exchange Beneath the Exchange
There is a connection running through Romans 1 that most readers move past without ever noticing what Paul is actually doing. He repeats the same structural move four separate times in a single chapter, and the repetition is not accidental. He is establishing one of the most important theological observations in all of Scripture, and what he is establishing tells us something about ourselves that the contemporary church has almost entirely lost the ability to see. The sexual condition of a culture is downstream from its theological condition. The brokenness we see in the bedroom is the visible expression of a brokenness that began in the heart's relationship with God. And the only way to understand why we are sexually broken in the ways we are sexually broken is to understand what we have done with God before we ever did anything with our bodies.
Paul lays the foundation in Romans 1:18 to 23. Humanity has been given a witness to God in the creation around us and in the conscience within us. We have not lacked information about the God who made us. What we have done with that information is the problem. "For even though they knew God they did not honor Him as God or give thanks but they became futile in their speculations and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise they became fools and exchanged 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" Romans 1:21 to 23. The exchange is the key word. They had something. They traded it for something else. The trade was not made in ignorance. It was made in preference. They preferred the image to the One who is imaged. They preferred the creature to the Creator. They preferred something smaller and more manageable to the infinite and uncontrollable God who actually exists.
Now watch what happens next. The very next verse, Romans 1:24, begins with the word therefore. The word is doing critical theological work. "Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity so that their bodies would be dishonored among them." The therefore connects the vertical exchange of God for an image directly to the horizontal handing over to sexual impurity. Paul is telling us that the dishonouring of the body is the consequence of the dishonouring of God. The two are not separate categories. They are the same disorder expressed at different levels of the human person, and the dishonouring of the body is what happens when the dishonouring of God has already taken place in the heart.
He repeats the same connection in Romans 1:25 and 26 using a different conjunction but making the same point. "For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed forever. Amen. For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions." For this reason. The exchange of truth for a lie produced the handing over to degrading passions. The sexual disorder is not an arbitrary punishment imposed on a culture from outside. It is the natural unfolding of what happens when a culture refuses the God who defines reality and substitutes its own preferences in place of His revealed truth. The God who tells us what is true also tells us what our bodies are for, and the rejection of His authority over the first inevitably produces the rejection of His authority over the second.
The third time Paul makes the connection is also in verse 26 and into verse 27. The dishonouring continues, the women exchange the natural function for what is unnatural, the men abandon the natural function of the woman and burn in their desire toward one another. The pattern of exchange in the sexual realm mirrors the pattern of exchange in the theological realm. They traded God for an image. They are now trading the natural sexual order for unnatural ones. The same word, the same movement, the same root in the same heart that wanted what God had not given rather than receiving what God had actually provided. The sexual perversion of a culture is the bodily expression of the theological perversion that produced it, and you cannot heal the second without first healing the first.
The fourth time Paul makes the connection is in Romans 1:28. "And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer God gave them over to a depraved mind to do those things which are not proper." Did not see fit to acknowledge. The Greek behind this phrase carries the sense of testing something and refusing to approve it. The culture has examined God and decided He is not desirable enough to retain in their knowledge. The rejection is not intellectual. It is volitional. They could have kept Him. They chose not to. They decided He was not worth the kind of supremacy His actual nature would require, and they handed Him out of their conscious awareness as a deliberate act of preference. The result was the handing over of their minds to depravity, including the sexual depravity that filled the surrounding pagan world and that now fills our own.
This is where Paul reaches the deepest diagnostic statement in the entire passage and it is the diagnostic statement that the contemporary church needs to recover if it is going to understand what is actually wrong with the people around us. Our deepest problem is not ignorance. It is preference. We do not lack information about God. We have suppressed the information we have. Romans 1:18. We have not failed to find God. We have refused to keep Him in our knowledge once we had found Him. We have not been overlooking what is plainly visible in the creation. We have been actively rejecting what is plainly visible because keeping it would have cost us things we wanted more than God Himself. This means the deepest human problem is not solved by giving people more information. It is solved by changing what people want, and only the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit can change what people want at the level where the change actually needs to happen.
This is why Jesus said in John 3:19 and 20 that "the Light has come into the world and men loved the darkness rather than the Light for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the Light and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed." Loved the darkness. The deepest human movement is a movement of love. We love what we love and we are governed by what we love. The natural human heart loves darkness because the darkness conceals what we want to keep doing. We do not reject God because we cannot find Him. We reject Him because finding Him would require us to release what we love more than we love Him, and we are not willing to make that exchange.
This is the framework that explains the sexual revolution of the past several decades with a clarity that no other framework can match. The contemporary world did not gradually discover new information about human sexuality that previous generations had missed. The contemporary world rejected the God who had defined human sexuality, and the rejection produced the predictable result of a culture handed over to its own preferred disorders. The sexual chaos was not the cause of the cultural collapse. It was the symptom. The cause was the prior exchange that placed something or someone else above the God whose existence and authority had been the foundation of the previous moral order. Remove the foundation and the structure built on it will eventually fall, and what we are watching is the falling that necessarily follows the removing.
This also means that the church cannot heal the sexual confusion of its surrounding culture by addressing the sexual confusion directly. The sexual confusion is downstream. It is the visible consequence of an invisible exchange that took place in the heart's relationship with God before any sexual sin was ever committed. The work that needs to be done is the work of preaching the gospel that addresses the root, not the symptoms. We do not call homosexuals to change their sexual behaviour as the primary message. We call them, along with every other human being including ourselves, to repent of the rejection of God that has produced every sin including the sexual ones, and to receive the Christ who alone can heal both the root and the fruit of human rebellion. "Such were some of you; but you were washed but you were sanctified but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit of our God" 1 Corinthians 6:11. The washing addressed the root. The sanctifying addressed the fruit. Both flowed from the same gospel applied by the same Holy Spirit to the same souls who had previously been governed by the same exchange that governs every unregenerate heart.
What this means practically for every believer is that the war against sexual sin in our own lives is not primarily a war fought at the level of behaviour. It is a war fought at the level of preference. The man or woman struggling with sexual sin cannot win the war by sheer effort or accountability software or behaviour modification alone. The war is won by the slow reorientation of the heart's desires, the deepening love for God that displaces the lesser loves, the daily renewing of the mind by the Word that produces in us new ways of seeing and wanting and choosing. "Set your mind on the things above not on the things that are on earth" Colossians 3:2. The setting of the mind is the daily work. The mind that has been set on Christ will produce a body that increasingly reflects the holiness of the Christ on whom the mind is set, because the body follows the heart and the heart follows what it loves and the love is shaped by where we set our minds day by day.
The diagnostic question every honest believer should ask themselves is the question Romans 1 raises before any sexual question is even considered. What have I exchanged God for in my heart? What lesser thing has taken the place that He alone should occupy? Where have I traded the glory of the incorruptible God for an image of something corruptible? Because the answer to the sexual question always lies in the answer to the theological question, and the soul that is healthy in its relationship with God will eventually produce a sexuality that reflects that health. The soul that is sick in its relationship with God will produce a sexuality that reflects that sickness, regardless of what external rules it tries to follow or what cultural pressures it tries to resist. The root determines the fruit. The exchange determines the expression. And the gospel that addresses the exchange is the only gospel that has ever produced lasting change in the area where it most needs to be produced.
May we let the Word do its diagnostic work in us before we attempt any further reformation. May we honestly examine what we have placed in the position God should occupy. And may the Holy Spirit who alone can change what we want at the depths where the change is required do that work in us, drawing us back from every exchange we have made and restoring us to the God whose presence in our knowledge is the only foundation on which a holy sexuality can ever be built. The vertical comes first. The horizontal follows. And the gospel that reaches the vertical is the gospel that finally heals what is broken in every other room of the house.
He, who has ears to hear, let him hear.
Jeremiah Knight
The Reformation Resurgence
