Father of Wrath
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Intro
Intro
Today we will wrap up our study in the series titled “Who we worship”
Our goal has been to take a look at the scriptures and to identify attributes of God as He has revealed Himself to us.
I hope that you have found this study as beneficial as I have. I can honestly say that I am coming out of my time in this study with a renewed spirit and a deeper knowledge of the God that we serve.
I hope you recall that we began this series looking at , which records a conversation and events that took place between God and Moses, it records that:
The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”
Me
Me
We
We
We understand that we face this question as Christians, but we need to know that this question is not new.
Marcion - sought to remove the Hebrew scriptures from Christianity.
More recently, a famous preacher, Andy Stanley said that
“Christians need to unhitch the Old Testament from their faith.”
So much of this line of thinking comes from a misunderstanding of the wrath of God.
God
God
What was read this morning came from
An oracle concerning Nineveh. The book of the vision of Nahum of Elkosh. The Lord is a jealous and avenging God; the Lord is avenging and wrathful; the Lord takes vengeance on his adversaries and keeps wrath for his enemies. The Lord is slow to anger and great in power, and the Lord will by no means clear the guilty. His way is in whirlwind and storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet. He rebukes the sea and makes it dry; he dries up all the rivers; Bashan and Carmel wither; the bloom of Lebanon withers. The mountains quake before him; the hills melt; the earth heaves before him, the world and all who dwell in it. Who can stand before his indignation? Who can endure the heat of his anger? His wrath is poured out like fire, and the rocks are broken into pieces by him. The Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; he knows those who take refuge in him. But with an overflowing flood he will make a complete end of the adversaries, and will pursue his enemies into darkness. What do you plot against the Lord? He will make a complete end; trouble will not rise up a second time. For they are like entangled thorns, like drunkards as they drink; they are consumed like stubble fully dried. From you came one who plotted evil against the Lord, a worthless counselor.
The scripture leave no doubt that God’s wrath is real. It is as real as His love and his grace and his mercy.
Defining Wrath
The two words used in the OT translated as wrath is ‘ap and Khay-maw
‘ap is an interesting word because it actually is related to the noes/ specifically the nostrils. The idea is that of passion or rapid breathing through the nose, flaring of the nostrils.
Khay-maw is the idea of Heat, wrath, anger, indignation, or Hot Displeasure.
In the greatness of your majesty you overthrow your adversaries; you send out your fury; it consumes them like stubble.
the whole land burned out with brimstone and salt, nothing sown and nothing growing, where no plant can sprout, an overthrow like that of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim, which the Lord overthrew in his anger and wrath—
Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you.”
For I was afraid of the anger and hot displeasure that the Lord bore against you, so that he was ready to destroy you. But the Lord listened to me that time also.
Therefore he said he would destroy them— had not Moses, his chosen one, stood in the breach before him, to turn away his wrath from destroying them.
New Testament the word for wrath in the Greek is orge
Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.
Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”
Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming.
The first point is that the wrath of God is absolutely real and spoken about in both the New and Old testaments. God is unchanging in His righteousness and what he has revealed about himself in the Old Testament, still holds true in the new.
But of critical importance is to not attribute our anger to being equivalent to God’s.
Perhaps the closes we can get is in the relationship we have with our children.
We love them, we care for them, we are interested in them, and we want them to be good citizens and great servants for Christ.
of Course that means when they mess up, we discipline them, and sometimes this involves a preceding emotion of anger, that Satan can use to twist discipline into sinfulness if we let him.
But we discipline out of love, to correct, to help them get back on the right track.
It seems to me that this is love is what motivates the wrath of God.
For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.”
HIS WRATH, HIS ANGER, HIS INDIGNATION IS OCCASIONED BY MANKIND PARTAKING IN EVIL AND REJECTING HIS WAYS.
THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE MISS! GOD’S LOVE SERVES AS THE PROPER CONTEXT TO UNDERSTAND HIS WRATH.
THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE MISS! GOD’S LOVE SERVES AS THE PROPER CONTEXT TO UNDERSTAND HIS WRATH.
Where so many people such as Marcion and others see God’s wrath and his love as mutually exclusive, they are actually mutually inclusive!
God’s wrath and anger are not subject to our human passions, and are not equivalent to revenge.
As long as we try to force our emotion of anger and wrath onto God, Our understanding will always be skewed and will result in our trying to change the scriptures or a rejection of God himself
People will say, if God is all loving then why does He punish people by sending them to Hell?
A better question is ho
But it comes from God’s Holy Righteousness as an outpouring of his Justice and his requirement to judge sin.
God is righteous, He is the most perfect and Holy Judge. He is Just and fair.
If he chose to overlook sin and be indifferent to it He would no longer be fit to be called the righteous judge.
Story out of Virginia of 19 year old who assaulted a 14 year old and recieved no jail time.
Read the comments and the theme that is repeated over and over is that the Judge is not fit to serve on the bench.
Why? Because justice was not served.
In the same way, God must be Just as the judge of over all things.
He can not, will not, and never will be impartial when it comes to evil and our role as humans in it.
This combined with the love that he has for us makes him the Father of orphans ans widows, the one who stands on the side of the oppressed, the Father who suffers due to the steadfast love that he has for us.
Sin invokes God’s wrath.
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.
Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming.
So God is righteous and just and he is the father of steadfast love. He desires a relationship with us, He wants to forgive us of our trespasses, so what did he do?
He showed us in the most personal, wonderful way possible what he was willing to do to reconcile mankind back to himself.
THE CROSS - Wrath fulfilled
THE CROSS - Wrath fulfilled
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come.
All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
God sent Christ, and Christ came willingly, to endure the punishment for the sins of the world so that His Justice could be fulfilled and that we could be reconciled back to him.
This is called in an unspeakable or indescribable gift.
But what really proves that this was the work of God is the resurrection of Christ.
If Christ had died and stayed in the tomb, then as Paul says “our faith would be in vain and we would be of all most to be pitied.” We would have no hope.
But Christ was raised out of that tomb, and sits today at the right hand of God, having paid our debt in enduring the wrath that we deserved.
The event of the Cross shows us that divine wrath and divine love are intertwined. That God so loved and so loves the world that He made a way for those who choose can be reconciled with him.
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You
That’s the good news of the Gospel.
The question that I have for you this morning is “Have you accepted God’s free gift of Grace?”
Scripture tells us repeatedly that God is slow to anger, that he is patient, that he waits for those to come to Him.
Is he waiting for you this morning?
There is a time coming when the time fo
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