When God Steps Back

When God Steps Back

In the town hall of Copenhagen stands what many consider the most complicated clock in the world. It took forty years to build. It contains over fifteen thousand working parts. It keeps time so precisely that it loses only two-fifths of a second every three hundred years. It is a marvel of human ingenuity—beautiful, complex, and astonishingly reliable.

And yet, it still drifts.

Which raises a simple but unsettling question: by what perfect standard will it be reset? A clock, no matter how sophisticated, cannot correct itself. It must be measured by something outside itself—something truer, more fixed, more authoritative.

That question doesn’t just belong in a town hall in Copenhagen. It belongs in every human heart.

In Romans 1:24–32, the apostle Paul describes what happens when humanity rejects God as its standard altogether. Not when God intervenes with fire from heaven, but when He does something far more sobering—He steps back. Three times Paul says that God “gave them up.” This is not divine indifference; it is divine judgment. Theologians call it judicial abandonment. God hands people over to the very things they insist on pursuing.

Scripture teaches that every human being has knowledge of God through creation itself. This is what theologians call general revelation. The order, beauty, and power of the world testify that there is a Creator. But that knowledge, Paul says, is not enough to save us. It is enough only to condemn us. Salvation requires special revelation—the good news of Jesus Christ. As Jesus said plainly, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

So why don’t people pursue the God they already know exists? Paul’s answer is strikingly honest: because knowledge of God produces guilt. If there is a Creator, then there is accountability. Conscience bears witness. And rather than submit to that authority, sinful humanity suppresses the truth.

But suppression never leads upward. Man does not evolve spiritually; he devolves. When people refuse to honor God or give thanks to Him, God’s judgment often comes not through sudden catastrophe, but through restraint being removed.

First, there is a loss of restraint. God gives people over to impurity. When the heart turns away from the invisible God, it inevitably turns toward visible substitutes—power, money, sex, control. Worship doesn’t disappear; it transfers. That’s why all sin is religious at its core. Every sin makes a truth claim about reality. Every sin has a functional god. And every sin demands a sacrifice.

Idols promise joy and fulfillment, but they always deliver emptiness. Bodies are dishonored. Relationships are fractured. What God created as good is twisted into something destructive.

If repentance does not come, God gives people over further—to dishonorable passions. This is a loss of design. Paul speaks plainly about sexual sin, including same-sex relations, not as a matter of personal preference, but as a departure from God’s created order. Scripture defines what is natural not by inner desire, but by divine design. From the beginning, God made humanity male and female and joined them in covenant. Any sexual expression outside that design reflects disorder, not freedom.

Yet even here, grace is not absent. Scripture is equally clear that no sin places a person beyond forgiveness. “Such were some of you,” Paul writes—but you were washed. Christ welcomes sinners. But grace always calls us somewhere. It calls us to repentance, obedience, and trust.

Finally, Paul describes a loss of discernment. God gives people over to a debased mind—a mind no longer able to distinguish good from evil. The result is a catalog of social and relational sins, capped by something even worse: not only practicing evil, but celebrating it.

We began with a clock that drifts almost imperceptibly. Romans reminds us that the greatest danger is not immediate collapse, but slow deviation without correction. A drifting soul cannot reset itself.

But the gospel announces astonishing news. God did not leave the clock running until it finally failed. Instead, “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all…” The judgment we deserved fell on Christ. And because He was handed over, we can be restored.

You don’t fix yourself. You are reset by grace. And that grace is available to all who repent and come to Him.