In this passage Paul treats men and women as wholly responsible in spite of the fact that they possess a fallen human nature. The body is designed quite obviously for sexual union between male and female as our own bodies teach us. Furthermore our emotional systems tell us the same thing until they are deliberately mistreated and reprogrammed to stimulate perverted desires. When Adam and Eve came together they were taught to do so by their own desires. There were many things which God did not teach them, but which they learnt from the way God had made their bodies and their emotional systems. In this way nature became their teacher, and those lessons are still present with us today. God also taught from the beginning that sexual union was only to be in the context of marriage, of lifelong faithfulness to one another. We honour God when we allow that original good nature to teach us how to live, for sufficient remnants of it are still within us to make us responsible for how we live.
What does Paul mean by ‘against nature’? Surely it is not against nature when I find certain desires welling up from within me. We must be clear that the nature he is talking about here is the original created nature that God put in man, which he declared to be good. That nature was an instructor to mankind. He is not talking about the fallen nature that came into existence when Adam disobeyed God, and sin took up residence within him, and which we all inherit from Adam. He would have recognised that that sinful nature was a distortion of the nature he had originally been given. That nature is not guide at all, but is cut off from God and without understanding and in darkness.
Are any born homosexual? Can any claim that it is impossible for them not to behave in this way? The commandments of God, universally given to mankind, deny it. Paul calls these ‘vile affections’. Those who do these things try to justify their deeds by the strength of their feelings, but how can they have missed the clear teaching of Scripture that our feelings are not be trusted because they have been corrupted. We are not called to be led by our feelings, however strong, but by God’s commandments. In fact we are to recognise our lusts as sinful , and to deny them, to put them to death, to wage war against our fallen nature, not to justify its every inclination. Can the men and women be expected to put up a fight against their own desires? Yes, they most certainly can. It is not as if we live without a conscience which makes continual judgements about our own thoughts and desires. If we judge ourselves, how much more will God judge us! If his law forbids a certain practice, then the desire to do that thing is also forbidden. So then, far from our desires justifying us, they condemn us in that they are there at all. Some speak of love in this context, but there is such a thing in the Bible as ‘inordinate affection’, or evil craving, lustful desire. Fallen human beings are poor judges of their own emotional responses. It is possible by persistent sin for us to pervert our own natural desires and train ourselves to love what we once hated. There is enough of our original nature still left in us for us to be responsible when we try to overthrow it. By God’s commandment we are made responsible for our conduct, however strong our fallen inclinations may be. Certainly, sin manifests itself differently in different people, and different people have different besetting sins, but the presence of a sinful nature is not a justification for giving way to it.
The church is to welcome all who repent and trust in Christ into its midst. Who can question the Lord in his choice of who he will pardon and cause to be born again? The church in Corinth included among its number those who previously had been guilty of homosexuality – ‘Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, 10 Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God’ (1 Corinthians 6:9-11). Regardless of what we have been, conversion to Christ means that we all belong to the family of God. But let none try to say that this is not sin, and to defend their refusal to repent. To such God says that he ‘will by no means clear the guilty; [but will visit] the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation (Exodus 34:7)