Who being past feeling have given themselves over unto licentiousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.
Read Chapter 4
Ambrosiaster
AD 400
They have lost their moral compass through lack of hope in a future life. Living now as if they had no future, they pollute their own lives with the foulest behaviors. They refuse to submit themselves to the most elementary requirement of faith, which brings their pleasureseeking into accountability in relation to the future life. It is this future life that these people declare to be ridiculous. Hence they pretend to have a right to debauch themselves. They covet the goods of others with ravenous greed, as though there were no life whatever after this little space.
Who despairing, Some take notice that the Greek word may not only signify avarice, or covetousness of money, but any unsatiable desires or lusts. See Chap. v. ver. 3. and 5. (Witham)
If the cause of their licentiousness is ignorance, why reproach them? Why not just inform them? For the one who is ignorant should not justly be punished or reproached but taught what he does not know. But how quickly Paul takes away from them this easy excuse: “They have become callous and given themselves up to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of uncleanness.” … He shows here that the cause of their hardening was their own voluntary way of life. Their way of life arose freely out of their own laxity and lack of remorse. .
Who being past feeling, says he, gave themselves up.
Whenever then ye hear, that God gave them up unto a reprobate mind Romans 1:28, remember this expression, that they gave themselves up. If then they gave themselves over, how did God give them over? And if again God gave them over, how did they give themselves over? You see the seeming contradiction. The word, gave them over, then, means this, He permitted them to be given over. Do you see, that the impure life is the ground for like doctrines also? Every one, says the Lord, that does ill hates the light, and comes not to the light. John 3:20 For how could a profligate man, one more immersed in the practice of indiscriminate lewdness than the swine that wallow in the mire, and who is a lover of money, and has not so much as any desire after temperance, enter upon a life like this? They made the thing, says he, their work. Hence their hardening Ephesians 4:19, hence the darkness of their understanding. There is such a thing as bein...
