According to Paul, a people committed idolatry, God took provisions to allow for homosexuality to become prevalent hoping that they would give up their idolatrous ways, and the people refused to be corrected. God responded by releasing the inhibitions even more, giving them over to a reprobate mind, which resulted in much worse sin.

        The Jews of Paul's time considered homosexuality to be a gentile problem. In practice, that was true. In Jewish society, homosexuality was so repressed that homosexuals were firmly entrenched in their closets. A Jewish homosexual would be lucky to be aware of two or three others like himself. Yet, in Greek society, homosexuality was out in the open. Plato provided an explanation for it in The Symposium. The Greeks definitely understood a homosexual orientation. They may not have understood it as well as we do today, but they were aware of it and they accepted it Also, bisexuality was so prevalent that many men received sexual favors from both their male lover and their female wives.
        Paul's idea that homosexuality was a symptom of idolatry was not new with him. The Jewish Talmud presents the same idea. While the Talmud was not written until after Paul passed away, tradition holds that the Jewish sage who made these comments lived long before Paul did.
        Paul was not only a Jew. He was also a Pharisee, a member of the religious fundamentalists of the first century. He was trained under Gamaliel, a man held in such high esteem that to mention his name was to share in his respect. His status would be like one trained under C.I. Schofield, D.L. Moody, Sperry Lewis Chafer, Bob Jones, or any of the other great founders of the fundamentalist movement. Or, for those not familiar with the history of Christian Fundamentalism in this country, Paul's credentials would be like a musician who was trained at Juliard Academy of Music, or an engineer trained at MIT Given this background, it would be amazing if Paul did not pick up this disdain for homosexuality.
        The Jews saw homosexuality as a symptom of idolatry, and here in lies the reason they condemned it. For the first century Jew, idolatry was synonymous with rebellion. In primitive society, where the survival of that society depended on every person doing what they were required to do, rebellion could cause grave problems. Rebellion was considered much more devastating than insubordination is in the military today. Rebellion was considered so evil that if parents in primitive Israel had a rebellious child they were required to take that child outside the camp and allow the entire community to participate in stoning that child to death.
        For the first century Jew, idolatry was also synonymous with adultery. Adultery posed grave problems for the primitive society, as well. The adulterous wife could never be trusted to bear only children of her husband. This meant that the husband could never be sure if he was passing the inheritance down to his own children, or the children of another man. For this reason, the son of an adulterous relationship, that is the bastard, and his heirs, were excluded from the religious community until after nine generations had passed and the stigma of the illegitimate birth had passed.
        By the time of the first century, the reasons for condemning rebellion and adultery were no longer important. However, the Jews, and especially the Pharisees, were extremely conservative. Consequently, both rebellion and adultery continued to be condemned. Since homosexuality was seen as a symptom of idolatry, which was the spiritual equivalent of both rebellion and adultery in the eyes of the first century Jew, it was only natural that homosexuality would suffer the same stigma as both rebellion and idolatry. Also, homosexuality was seen as rebellion against the natural order of things, or against God's creative purpose for sexuality, which in the eyes of the first century Jew, was reason enough to condemn this behavior.
        It is true that Paul was a religious revolutionary. He fought for the right of the Gentile Christians to be accepted on an equal basis with the Jewish Christians. He argued that the Gentile Christians should not be required to accept circumcision, like the converts to the Jewish faith. He fought for the right of the Gentile Christians to eat food that was considered unclean by Jewish standards. He even had the audacity to say that eating food previously sacrificed to false gods was not a sin. But, Paul did continue to see homosexuality as rebellion against God's creative purpose for sexuality. This is clearly demonstrated by his discussion of the issue in the passages we have considered.
        Was Paul right? If Moses could be wrong, if both Isaiah and Jesus could find fault with Moses, isn't it also possible that Paul could be wrong? Certainly, we believe that Paul was wrong about the place of women in the church, whether we acknowledge this belief or attempt to cover it with scriptural side-stepping. Would it be so incredible to declare that Paul was wrong in this issue as well?