Romans 1:18-32

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.  For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.  Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles (Romans 1:18-23) 

Romans 1:18-32 are some of the most interesting verses to me in all of the Bible because those verses speak of when God abandons a nation.  When a nation rebels against Him over and over again He allows them to be consumed by all of the wicked things they desire.  God removes His restraining grace and allows those people to destroy themselves.  The Bible says that God has made Himself known to them but they suppress the truth in wickedness.  In other words, because they want to do evil things and love their sin, they lie to themselves and say their is no God or they create a god in their own image who supports all of the evil things they love.   

Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.  Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones.  In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error (Romans 1:24-27).

As we can see from the above verses, His wrath comes in an order.  He first turns a nation over to sexual immorality.  Next He turns a nation over to homosexuality.  Both of these branches on the tree of lust destroy the family unit which God Himself put into place.  Both of those sins also bring about the destruction of those who commit them.  Millions have died because of sexually transmitted diseases which could be what is meant by "and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.  Lastly (verse 28), He turns them over to a depraved mind.  It means a mind that is literally found worthless.  When a nation gets to this point they can't even turn around because they no longer have the ability to think properly.  Their end is in sight.

So what can we do to avoid this slippery slope that ends in destruction and has happened a countless number of times throughout history?  Preach to Gospel!  Take the Gospel to everyone you can and pray for God's mercy.  Teach others the truth, that if they repent and put their trust in Christ, they will be saved.  God's word never returns void so witness to everyone possible while there is still time.