Sermon Tone Analysis
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Scripture reading: John 3:16-18
Last week before we played soccer, we had a brief look at the Gospel in the genealogy of Matthew.
The genealogy tells us that Jesus is an actual person who was born into a family, and this means that the Gospel is good news, not good advice.
Second, we saw that Jesus didn’t shy away from having shameful people in His genealogy, and that means that there is no one so sinful that they cannot turn to Jesus and be saved.
But we must not miss out on one very important thing.
Look carefully at John 3:18.
It says that whoever does not believe is condemned already.
And at this point we might be like, ‘What?
Isn’t that unfair?
What do you mean people are condemned already?’
But the Apostle John spells it out for us in Jn. 3:36.
It says that the wrath of God remains on him.
God’s anger rages over those who do not believe in Jesus.
And maybe you’re thinking, ‘Is God schizophrenic and have a split personality?
Why is He so angry at one moment, and so loving the next?
Does God just do whatever He wants, according to His mood?’
Many people even think that God the Father is the angry one, and God the Son is the kind and loving one.
They say that the God of the Old Testament is an angry God, that the God of the New Testament is a loving and merciful, and that maybe they are different Gods altogether.
But that is not what the Bible tells us.
In fact, in today’s scripture passage we see God’s love and God’s wrath so closely put together.
They’re basically in the same paragraph.
And what this tells us is that God’s love and God’s wrath are not opposed to each other.
They don’t contradict each other.
How God gets angry
What God’s wrath is not.
God’s wrath is not crankiness
God’s wrath is not a bad temper
God’s wrath is not a bias against certain people
When we lose our temper, we often say things that we don’t mean, and we do things we don’t want.
It’s embarrassing, but it happens.
Our human wrath is always derived in response to another emotion.
We get angry when we’re afraid.
We get angry when we’re jealous.
But it always has to do with you.
You’ll never feel as angry about things that don’t have to do with you.
And that’s why God’s anger is different.
Why is God’s anger different from our anger?
It’s because God knows us so intimately.
God knows us.
His anger is the anger of someone who knows you, who knows all the good and bad and funny and stupid things you’ve done, and He loves you.
If you see someone like that do something self destructive, wouldn’t you feel angry?
Don’t you just want to shake them and tell them to realize what they are doing to themselves?
That’s the kind of anger we talk about when we talk about God’s anger.
It’s not an anger that’s opposed to love.
It’s not a anger that contradicts love.
It’s an anger that’s bound up in love, that comes from love.
Look at this example.
Jesus here weeps over Jerusalem because they didn’t realize that God had visited them, and because of that they would be destroyed.
He’s not just angry; He’s sad as well.
So when the Bible talks about God’s wrath, it’s talking about God’s opposition to evil and wickedness.
God’s heart goes something like this: “I hate what Grace has done to herself.
I know her.
I know her family.
I knew her since young.
I watched her grow up.”
God weeps over those who live in sin and refuse to repent.
He doesn’t want condemnation for us.
See, the difference between our anger and God’s anger is that God is angry at you, and for you.
If your best friend tells everyone your secrets, you’d be angry at them for you.
You’d never be angry at them for them, for their sake.
But God sees us in our sin, in the sins that we’ve committed against Him, and He gets angry at us because of His love for us, and so He’s angry at us for us.
An important thing we need to know about God’s wrath is that it isn’t crankiness.
It isn’t an impulsive bad temper.
And we know this because it says in Jn. 3:18 that whoever does not believe is condemned already.
This means that if you sin today, God’s not going to get upset all of a sudden and a flower pot’s going to land on your head tomorrow.
That’s not what the Bible teaches.
The Bible’s saying that God’s anger isn’t impulsive.
It’s compulsive.
It’s ever ongoing until we turn to Christ.
And we cannot truly turn to Christ until we realize the extent of our sin.
So the question is not ‘Why can’t God just forgive me and let me off the hook?’, but rather, ‘What is it about sin that demands such a great response from the almighty God?’
Why God gets angry
We’ve talked about how God gets angry.
But now let’s have a look at why God gets angry.
There are two things here which provoke God to anger: ungodliness and unrighteousness.
The first has to do with our relationship with God.
The second has to do with our relationship with each other.
Ungodliness in Greek is ἀσέβεια (asebeia) and means ‘a lack of reverence for God.’ Basically it means to have a sacrilegious attitude toward anything that might be considered sacred.
Unrighteousness in Greek is ἀδικία (adikia) and means ‘an act that violates standards of right conduct,’ or ‘the quality of injustice.’
It means that you don’t treat others as they should be treated.
And both ungodliness and unrighteousness come naturally to us.
No one had to teach you how to sin.
No one had to teach you to think lightly of God.
No one had to teach you how to be selfish and uncaring.
It’s a natural thing for us.
Why?
Why does sin come so naturally to us?
We need to look to the beginning.
In the beginning there was Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
And at this point they had already received God’s command.
Adam and Eve were to grow up in maturity by learning what it meant to obey God.
God had created them as people who could choose.
But the serpent lied to Eve and tricked her into thinking that selfishness is rewarded, while living in obedience to God’s Word is holding her back.
And so Eve decides to try taking God’s place.
She chose to be like God, rather than to obey God.
Instead of obeying God’s Word, she obeyed the word of the serpent, and ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, instead of eating from the tree of life.
The serpent caused God’s children to hit the spiritual self-destruct button.
Imagine if a fake doctor lied to your children, gave them the wrong medicine, and it led to their deaths.
That’s what the serpent did.
And that’s why God is angry.
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