“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.” Romans 1:18
Every line of the Bible is important. That said, some are going to be more pressing than others, which is our case today. Why? Because God has, with this verse, diagnosed the human condition. We do well to consider it.
To be clear, the wrath of God is quite a broad subject. We aren’t going to tackle that right now. Instead, we want to narrow our focus for the moment.
In a way of seeing this, we note that God’s revulsion against evil is revealed (that is, clearly shown and visible to all) because of mankind’s ungodliness and ensuing unrighteousness. When people ask why bad things happen in the world as if to throw shade at the Almighty, they admit, unwittingly, that they know the wrath of God. They know, in short, that something is terribly wrong with the world. It’s not just accidents and tragedies either. Millions of people struggle under the suffocating weight of anxiety and depression. Indeed, these are all aspects of God’s wrath made evident to us.
Yes, something is terribly wrong with the world. We do well to properly diagnose the issue. Instead of doing that, however, we tell people that they shouldn’t be afraid. We pour out platitudes. We say it’s all going to be okay. We sing happy songs of optimism for fearful ears. Choruses of vacuous feel-good tunes echo throughout our lives. But the words are empty and the exhortations inane. In all, we prescribe a plethora of drugs to battle all the inescapable anxiety those silly songs fail to chase away.
Actually, though, it won’t. Not unless we turn to Jesus Christ and repent of our rebellion against God.
You see, God’s wrath isn’t arbitrary . It’s the logical outworking of His righteousness and love. Since He is ultimate and this is His world, created by Him and for Him, it’s also His moral universe. Thus, we live and move as derivative beings – not as little gods – in God’s moral world. To shun and/or ignore Him is to cast ourselves into the darkness of ungodliness. This ungodliness, which is to say, to make our own “word” life’s final authority rather than His, leads invariably to moral decay. This is why unrighteousness follows ungodliness. A person who ignores God’s law/word, and insists upon being their own god, or openly worships a false god, will invariably suffer moral degradation.
The path of ungodliness always leads to unrighteousness. Every single time.
When we see America struggling to throw off all remembrances of God’s word from our land, what do we see her embrace in its place? A doctrine of sexual license. You see, sin seeks liberty from God because it convinces itself that He’s preventing us from living the good life. All unrepentant sinners are like recalcitrant children who seethe under the rules of their parents. But this good life we seek is actually a network of deadly vices. The path leads to moral degradation, not true freedom (2 Peter 2:19). When we flee from God and His word we run to the cold and pitiless clutches of death rather than the ineffable embrace of the Lord who died for our sins.
It’s like this always. To run from God isn’t to go up, but down, down, down. The law of reaping and sowing is always in effect precisely because this is God’s world and we are His creation. When we reject Him, no matter our rhetoric or professed spirituality, we become animals, not men and women of God. When we reject Him who made us in His image, we sever ourselves from truth, life and beauty. Cut loose from these, we reject the image of God in others too. Violence and perversion grow and grow as outward manifestations of our disdain for God’s image. Estranged from Him and the truth of the magnificence of what we were created for, we grow, like Adam and Eve hiding in the Garden after the Fall, frightful and anxious.
All of this is indubitably true and happening right before our eyes. It plays out in our politics, sports, entertainment and personal lives. And yet we suppress the truth. We suppress it and this suppression is active. It takes serious and consistent effort to try and shut God out. In schools we can teach homosexuality and transgenderism as virtues but mention of Jesus is almost a crime. Big corporations, schools, universities…wherever we go we’re surrounded by the culture of man, the great Babylon, that tells us to worship pleasure, not God’s Son. It preaches always through the education system and the media. It never stops. Your anxieties will be cured by this new drug, or a bigger house. Your future is yours. Take it. Don’t be bound by morality because no one can tell you what’s true for you.
That’s the spirit of the age.
But if no one can tell you what’s right and wrong, wouldn’t that statement itself be included? Isn’t that telling you what’s right and wrong? Ah, the folly of unbelief. In America up to 13.2% of those over 18 report taking antidepressant medication in the past 30 days. In women over 60 it’s 24.3%. Isn’t this amazing? In a nation so wealthy that poor people struggle with obesity, not starvation, we find ourselves restless, bored, angry, unfulfilled, and struggling with fear.
To raise our children in a spirit of secular humanism, full of sexual license and hedonism, should bring happiness, right? Ah, but the opposite has happened. One estimate says that more than 37 million Americans are on medications like sertraline, escitalopram, bupropion, trazodone, and fluoxetine. Up to two-thirds of the population is either obese or overweight – many of those “self-medicating” with food. In all, this is an unhappy land. Why? Because this is God’s world and we were literally made to know, worship and have fellowship with Him. To fracture that is to cast ourselves into the turbulent seas of sin. To tell a generation that they’re a cosmic-accident and there’s no true meaning to life aside from what they find through personal experience is child abuse. It’s the greatest horror imaginable! In Jeremiah 5:30-31 the Lord says,
“An appalling and horrible thing has come to pass in the land:
The prophets prophesy falsely,
And the priests rule on their own authority;
And My people love to have it so!
But what will you do when the end comes?”You see, the wrath of God against sin is all around us and within us. By insisting on trying to live without Him, by going our own way, by keeping our options open, by being a “free thinker”, we both choose sin and are then victimized by it (law of reaping and sowing…Galatians 6:7-9). This is a course for disaster here and now and it means hell ultimately. We must turn back to the cross and repent, lest we be lost for eternity. The wrath of God and all these evils, great and small, warn us.
Many churches today have renounced their calling and won’t say this. They try to be friends of the world on the world’s terms, forgetting that the Lord says that such is enmity with God (James 4:4). In Jeremiah we hear of Israel, facing God’s judgment, “To whom shall I speak and give warning that they may hear? Behold, their ears are closed (absolutely deaf to God) and they cannot listen. Behold, the word of the Lord has become a reprimand and an object of scorn to them; they have no delight in it. But I am full of wrath of the Lord; I am weary of restraining it (Jeremiah 6:10-11).
To not speak the truth of God from Scripture isn’t loving. It’s hateful. To lie about God’s hatred of sin separates people from God and His grace for us in Jesus Christ. This is the supreme act of evil in the world! Telling people that God doesn’t hate sin and that there will never be judgment is like telling a man that walking along a cliff in the dark is fine, that he’ll never fall. The difference is that outside of God every man will and must fall. Only in Christ do we have life. The attempts at suppression are all around and they are the supreme evil.
The thing to know is that speaking of God’s wrath is truthful and loving/beautiful because only in doing so can we speak truthfully of Christ. To speak of Christ’s love we must speak of the cross. And to speak of the cross we speak of God’s wrath against sin. And, so precious a truth: to speak of Jesus on the cross is to speak of His love for us personally! Do you realize what this means? Have you not heard? The cross is evidence of both God’s wrath and His love. Never make the critical error of confusing God’s wrath (perfect love hates that which is contrary to love) with man’s anger. God’s wrath isn’t a temper tantrum. It’s holy and righteous. This means that He so loves you that He poured that wrath, which you and I deserve, upon Jesus Christ.
Yes, for you. For you. You aren’t alone, child. You are so loved that God died for you in order to bring you back to Himself! This is the cure for all the fears and depressions. This is the cure for all that ails us. This is the answer for death and all evil. It’s Jesus Christ who endured the wrath we deserve. In this way, and in this way only, wrath should be preached.
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