¹³ Gideon answered him, “But sir, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where are all his wonderful deeds that our ancestors recounted to us, saying, ‘Did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt?’ But now the Lord has cast us off and given us into the hand of Midian.”^(A)

²² Claiming to be wise, they became fools, ²³ and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.^(A)

²⁴ Therefore God gave them over in the desires of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves.^{(B) 25} They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.^(C)

²⁶ For this reason God gave them over to dishonorable passions. Their females exchanged natural intercourse^[a] for unnatural,^{(D) 27} and in the same way also the males, giving up natural intercourse^[b] with females, were consumed with their passionate desires for one another. Males committed shameless acts with males and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.^(E)

²⁸ And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them over to an unfit mind and to do things that should not be done.^{(F) 29} They were filled with every kind of injustice, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, ³⁰ slanderers, God-haters,^[c] insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents,^{(G) 31} foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.^{(H) 32} They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die, yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.^(I)

¹⁷ Instead, we will do everything that we have vowed, make offerings to the queen of heaven and pour out libations to her, just as we and our ancestors, our kings and our officials, used to do in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. We used to have plenty of food and prospered and saw no misfortune.^{(A) 18} But from the time we stopped making offerings to the queen of heaven and pouring out libations to her, we have lacked everything and have perished by the sword and by famine.”^{(B) 19} And the women said,^[a] “Indeed we will go on making offerings to the queen of heaven and pouring out libations to her; do you think that we made cakes for her, marked with her image, and poured out libations to her without our husbands’ being involved?”^(C)

None Is Righteous

⁹ What then? Are we any better off?^[a] No, not at all, for we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin,^{(A) 10} as it is written:

¹⁹ Now we know that, whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world may be held accountable to God.^(E)