Lessons:

The Good and Beautiful Life, Lesson #1
The Good and Beautiful Life

The Good and Beautiful Life, Lesson #2
The Gospel You May Not Have Heard

The Good and Beautiful Life, Lesson #3
The Grand Invitation

The Good and Beautiful Life, Lesson #4
Anger

The Good and Beautiful Life, Lesson #5
Lust   

The Good and Beautiful Life, Lesson #6
Honesty

The Good and Beautiful Life, Lesson #7
Bless Those Who Curse You

The Good and Beautiful Life, Lesson #8
Learning to Live Without Vainglory

The Good and Beautiful Life, Lesson #9
Learning to Live Without Avarice

The Good and Beautiful Life, Lesson #10
Learning to Live Without Worry

The Good and Beautiful Life, Lesson #11
Learning to Live Without Judging

The Good and Beautiful Life, Lesson #12
Living in the Kingdom

In Romans 1:18–32, Paul describes how a human life spirals into ruin. Written nineteen centuries before the advent of modern psychology, Paul’s assessment of the human person remains the most brilliant depiction of soul destruction I have ever read. Perhaps you will want to read Romans 1:18–32 in your own Bible, in its entirety, but for now I would like to summarize his ideas in what I call “The Six Steps of Ruin: The Process of Becoming Nothing.”

1. The turn away: I want to be God. The first step toward ruin is to refuse to let God be God. To be more specific, it is refusing to give honor and reverence to God. Paul writes, “though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him” (Romans 1:21).

2. The mind darkens (contra reality). Now, if there is a God, as Christians suppose, then that God is the creator of all, the only being that exists without a first cause, a perfect and powerful being. In short, if there is a God, we ought to honor and give thanks to God. Therefore, refusing to do that (step 1) is a step away from reality. It goes against the truth of the universe. Therefore, our minds, which thrive on truth and reality, become dimmed. Paul observes: “they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:21–22)

3. Idolatry: We must have a god. If we reject God, then something must take God’s place: “Nature abhors a vacuum.” Someone or something must take the place of God. We would like a god who would do a lot of good for us and ask very little in return. The solution: create an idol. Paul describes the next step downward: they “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles” (Romans 1:23). Idols do not have to be little images; they can be anything we invest our lives in, in order to gain pleasure, happiness and a false sense of purpose. Here is the key: the idol serves us by giving us our desires, and we serve it by sacrificing our life energy to it.

4. God leaves us alone: Wrath. Unless we discover the futility of this existence and turn back to God, we are forced to push forward in our idolatry. Being rejected, God has no other choice. Paul delivers what I consider to be one of the most frightening verses in Scripture: “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity” (Romans 1:24). God simply lets us be. God’s wrath is his righteous stand against sin*, which he cannot endorse.

5. Pleasure is pursued at all costs. Disconnected from reality and on our own, we must find a way to find fulfillment. Though temporary, the easiest route is through our bodies. Lust and gluttony are shortcuts to happiness. But the “high” that comes from our bodies (through drugs, alcohol, food, sexual encounters, pornography) has a constantly diminishing effect. Each time we engage in these activities, the pleasure decreases, thus requiring greater frequency or greater quantities to match the level of pleasure sought. Paul puts it this way: “For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions” (Romans 1:26). The initial “lusts of their hearts” has now turned into “degrading passions.”

6. Sin reigns. The final step is the worst and is a natural conclusion to the previous five steps. Sin and wickedness become normative, automatic behavior. When we reject God and consequently try to replace God with things that cannot satisfy, we naturally begin to reflect everything that stands against God, namely, sin. Paul offers a list that, though ancient, is descriptive of many today:

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done. They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. (Romans 1:28–31)

How have you seen this downward spiral in others or experienced it in your own life?

Each day when I pick up the newspaper I see Paul’s depiction of the downward spiral lived out in the modern world: politicians using their power improperly, rape, murder, arson, runaways, gangs, drug dealers, prostitution and so on.

It all starts with that fatal first step, the same step by which Adam and Eve fell from God in the Garden: refusing to show respect and thankfulness to God. That step begins a movement away from a good and beautiful life, and ends in a life of sin and ugliness.

James Bryan Smith, The Good and Beautiful Life: Putting on the Character of Christ, The Apprentice Series (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2009), 15–16.

Check out our Bible Study on The Good and Beautiful Life by James Bryan Smith.

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