The Wrath of God

Introduction

Romans 1:18 “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;”

What comes to your mind when I ask you what is God like?

When you think of God, you probably think of a nice, kind, always forgiving even if we don’t ask, merciful kinda guy, but do you think of the word wrath. We make a mistake to assume that that is all that God is is the nice, comfortable things. Modern Christianity has drifted from a biblical view of God because it is uncomfortable. Phil Schuller, Norman Vincent Peale and Joel Osteen have made their mark on the general conscience of Christianity today. But vs 18 introduces an attribute of God that shocks our system. God is a God of wrath.

The verse starts out with the word for which connects our verse to the context which was just about the necessity of the gospel. Verse 18 continues that thought. If we are being technical, God’s wrath is not part of the gospel rather it is the reason we need the gospel. The gospel is good news and wrath is not good news. But to truly receive the good news we need to know the bad news.

Ray Comfort is famous for using this illustration.

Imagine you have boarded a plane to fly from OKC to LA. Your going to Disney Land be a child again for a day. You buckle up your seat and you sit through the safety demonstration. You know the one we all ignore. Anyways, the plane takes off your all good. Most accidents do happen during take off and landing after all. The plane has been in the air for 30 minutes when the stewardess comes and hands you a parachute. You look at her and say “what is this for?” Well, if you put it on you’ll have a better flight.

You think she is crazy but you were raised to be obedient so you put it on. After awhile you begin to look around you and no one else is putting theirs on. This thing is bulky, awkward and it makes sitting in your seat unenjoyable. You begin to think the stewardess lied to you. She said it would make you flight more enjoyable; so you tear it off and throw it away.

Now imagine instead, she had come to you and said, “Here take this parachute, the plane is going to crash.” Would you have taken the life vest off? You are going to cling to that thing eagerly. Even if no one else is wearing their parachute, you will keep it on.

In order to understand why we need the gospel, we need to understand the danger that we are in. According to the verse we are going to look at today, we are all sinners facing the wrath of God. Paris Reidhead is once said about the gospel:

It wasn’t trying to convince a GOOD MAN that he was in trouble with a bad GOD! But that it was to convince BAD MEN that they had deserved the wrath of a GOOD GOD!

So we are going to ask three and a half questions of just the first half of this verse: What is God’s wrath, what makes God angry and when and how is God’s wrath revealed.

What is God’s Wrath?

God’s wrath, in perfect harmony with all of his divine attributes, is the holy action of retributive justice towards persons whose actions deserve eternal condemnation.- (Gospel Coalition- Schrock)

An emotion of God

The wrath of God is an emotion of God. We see a glimpse of the emotional life of God in the person of Jesus Christ. Mark 3:1–5 “And he entered again into the synagogue; and there was a man there which had a withered hand. And they watched him, whether he would heal him on the sabbath day; that they might accuse him. And he saith unto the man which had the withered hand, Stand forth. And he saith unto them, Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath days, or to do evil? to save life, or to kill? But they held their peace. And when he had looked round about on them with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts, he saith unto the man, Stretch forth thine hand. And he stretched it out: and his hand was restored whole as the other.” We cannot make a complete distinction between how God feels and what he does in his wrath.

We have a hard time picturing God being like this because when we see angry people it is almost always a bad thing. When we get angry we are often:

irrational - We stop thinking logically about what is going on. It isn’t always about the truth but about how I feel. I acknowledge that our feelings are real, but that doesn’t make them right. Have you every gotten angry about something and then you found out you were wrong? I remember one time getting on to the kids in anger because their was a lot of noise coming from the living room. I chewed out the whole group of them, but in the end, I found out it was just two of them. I wasn’t being fair and just in my anger. I wasn’t being rational.

When our blood begins to boil and we have strong emotions, the prefrontal cortex of our mind is bypassed as the lymbic system responds sometimes irrationally. God’s wrath is never irrational. God never stops being omniscient and wise at any moment of anger.

uncontrolled- Our anger can also be uncontrolled. Anger is by nature a desire to squash something that is hurting what we love. What we love might be our own pride, or comfort, or our children. But Anger rises up to destroy a threat. The problem with anger is it is often a tank rolling through rather than a surgical strike. We are having an argument with our spouse and our kids walk up and ask us a question. We yell at them. We aren’t angry at them, they just are the collateral damage of our anger. God’s anger is always applied exactly where and how it should be to each situation.

Motivated by pride- Our anger is often motivated by pride. We think we deserve better or we should be treated differently. God’s wrath does come from a refusal to give him glory, but we must know two things about that if we are to understand it properly. First, God deserves glory as the creator, as God. Man does not. Second, God’s desire for His own glory is also a desire for our good because what brings Him glory is also for our good.

Knee-Jerk reaction- God doesn’t react in anger. His emotions are not slaves to man’s actions. You can’t be like that kid in the back of the classroom saying “Hey watch this as he throws a paper airplane at the teacher expecting to make her angry.” Everything God does, He chooses to do.

Spiteful- God is not spiteful. I have often felt like this is the version of God that some fundamentalists worship. “If you leave our church, your kids are going to be bitten by rattlesnakes” they say. God’s wrath is not like our of spite.

We struggle with viewing God as wrathful because we think that wrath is the opposite of love. Notice how love and hate are put together in Romans 12:9 “Let love be without dissimulation. Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good.” The opposite of love is not anger but apathy. Think about your children. Do you stop loving your children if they become a drug addict or murderer? No, but you hate and are angry at what they have become. Love hates that which destroys the relationship.

BB Warfield wrote:

He who loves men must needs hate with a burning hatred all that does wrong to human beings and that in point of fact, Jesus never wavered in his consistent resentment of the special wrongdoing that he was called upon to witness.

God loves you but he is angry at your sin at the same time.

An act of God

Psalm 7:11 “God judgeth the righteous, And God is angry with the wicked every day.”

God’s wrath is more than a mere emotion of God. He isn’t just sitting on the sidelines angry but unable or unwilling to do something about it. God’s wrath is parallel to His judgment in the verse we just looked at. So when we say that God is angry or we talk about the wrath of God, it is both an emotion of God and God’s act of judging sin.

Your sin offends a Holy, perfect God and because of that sin, you will face an eternal judgment. Hebrews 9:27 “And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment:” The reason the gospel is so necessary is because your sin will face the wrathful judgment of God.

What makes God angry?

The object of wrath is is clearly stated to be sin in this verse. Sin is described as:

ungodliness- speaks of our relation to God

unrighteousness- speaks of our relations to men

This is a two part outline that Paul will use to develop the rest of the chapter.

Lost people do not have a relationship with God

John 17:3 “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.”

Salvation, eternal life, deliverance from the wrath of God can only be found in a relationship with Jesus Christ and yet we have chosen to reject him. Oh, maybe you haven’t consciously said I don’t want God, but you have ignored him your entire life, you have chosen other things over him or instead of him. You chase after things that hurt him.

It’s kinda like one of those love stories from the 90’s where guy and girl grew up together as best friends, but the girl never took an interest in him. Though he continued to show his love for her by being there for her, helping her, getting her things she always went after the cool guys. She was oblivious to true love and in actuality rejected it. She rejected it by ignoring him.

We are going to see how mankind has rejected a relationship with God in the verses that follow in later messages, but a rejection of God can be as simple as ignoring His existence and His efforts to draw you to Himself.

Lost people have broken relationships with other men

Because they have lost their mooring in a relationship with God, mankind has selfishly pursued their own desires or what the bible calls lusts. These lusts in Romans 1 are not neutral. They are called vile affections and they drive man to depravity. So what happens when I live only for what I want? Relationships break down.

I start treating people like trash, using them in the pursuit of my selfish goals. All of mankind has been affected by this at some level. And because of that marriages aren’t what they should be. Friendships starve to death. Interactions with our bosses are strained. We treat strangers as an enemy and the poor as if they are throw aways. Every problem in relationships can be traced back to sin somewhere which can be traced back to a rejection of God as He truly is.

We have all heard it said that God hates the sin but not the sinner. This is not completely true because sin is perpetrated by men. Notice the phrase of men. You and your sin cannot be ultimately separated. People say this phrase because they don’t understand how you can love and hate at the same time or love and be angry at the same time. Hopefully from the illustration above, you see that it is possible even in men let alone in a perfect God.

When and How is God’s wrath revealed?

I have combined the next two questions into one because they both deal with the revelation of God’s wrath. The first question we need to ask is when will I experience God’s wrath. The bible does teach in Romans 2:5 “But after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up unto thyself wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God;” There is coming a day of future wrath, but that is not what Paul has in mind in this text.

Notice the word is revealed. The verb is in the present tense. We experience it now. Sinner, you are not just facing a day in the future where God is angry at you and will judge you; you are under God’s wrath right now. He may be patient Acts 17:30–31 “And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent: Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.” But you are under God’s wrath even now. He is even judging you right now.

The second question is how is God’s wrath revealed? You might be skeptical that God is judging you now because your life seems to be alright, but that isn’t how God is judging you. Paul is going to go on and teach that because God is angry at sinful men He gives them up. We see this in verses 24, 26,28.

The Message of Romans

We usually think of ‘thunderbolts from heaven, and earthly cataclysms and flaming majesty’, instead of which his anger goes ‘quietly and invisibly’ to work in handing sinners over to themselves. - John Stott

God’s wrath shows up not in God intervening in the world, but by him refusing to intervene.

Have you ever been so angry at someone who wouldn’t listen to you, you just walked off and said “fine, do it your way”. Rather than trying to stop them from reaping the consequences of their actions, you let them go and fail and suffer. This is a judgment of God.

Letting man do whatever he wants. Lifting the restraints is present judgment on our sin.

Why does this judge our sin? Sin always produces death. It always has consequences. You lie and cheat, people will learn not to trust you. You steal and maybe you get caught but what if you didn’t. There is still a consequence for sin. All you have to do to believe this point is look at how broken our world is.

The disharmony, wars, pain, suffering of this world all find their root in sin, sin some way or another. And the more we heap up sin, the greater our judgment will be on the judgment day.

Conclusion

There are two applications to this message. Sinner, today you stand judged. You stand under the wrath of God but there is hope. There is salvation from that judgment. There is a light at the end of the tunnel if you will turn from your sin and place your faith in Jesus.

Christian, this is just another motivation not to be ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ. There is one thing all men have in common. They are all sinners facing the judgment of God unless they receive God’s gift of salvation. Will you renew your zeal to get that gospel to the lost? 2 Corinthians 5:11 “Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men; but we are made manifest unto God; and I trust also are made manifest in your consciences.”