You’re late again. Where have you been! How dare you hit your sister! Go to your room! Hurry up wife, where’s my dinner? That’s the last straw! There’s the door! Don’t come back. Wait till I tell…
We’ve all heard things like this, with an unmistakably angry tone of voice. Perhaps we’ve said some things like this They all express human anger or wrath. We know that human anger is right and proper at times. There is right and proper anger when evil had been done. But we also know that too frequently our anger comes from our sin. Because we are sinful, our anger does not bring about the righteous life God desires.
Well this week we come to God’s wrath. Be prepared to meet the anger of God.
You really know someone when you know what makes them angry! And Paul wants us to know God and his anger.
Last week we saw that Romans is all about the Gospel. And the Gospel is all about Jesus (Romans 1:1-4). Jesus is Lord, Christ, the King, God’s son, the one God raised from the dead. And Paul is proud of this news, this gospel. He is not ashamed of the gospel (Romans 1:16-17).
Why? Because this news, this gospel, is God’s power. It saves everyone who believes. The gospel saves believers because it reveals the righteousness of God. It tells us about who God is, what God has done to save us, and the status of righteousness we need to stand before God on the judgment day.
Now, suppose I say to you: ‘Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. What do you want to hear first?’ Hands up, who wants to hear the ‘good news’ first? OK, who wants to hear the ‘bad news’ first? Most of you here are bad news people. And Paul is basically a ‘bad news first’ guy! Let’s look at verse 18 together.
[For] the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness (NIV)
Verse 17 has given us a little taste of the good news of the gospel. But before we get the good news about the Righteousness of God, we need to hear the bad news about the Wrath of God.
See the phrase, ‘The wrath of God is revealed’ in chapter 1 verse 18? Put one finger there. OK, now flip over all the way to Romans chapter 3 verse 20. Chapter 3 verse 20:
Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather through the law we become conscious of sin (NIV).
Pretty much, everything in between Romans chapter 1 verse 18 and chapter 3 verse 20 is bad news. There are some slim rays of sunshine, some slivers of good news, along the way[1]. But those tiny bits of good news are there to show how bad the bad news is.
It will only be in chapter 3 verse 21 that Paul talks about the good news of the gospel, when Paul again says ‘But now the righteousness of God has been revealed … which comes through faith in Jesus Christ’
Now this begs the question? Why all this bad news, this negative stuff? Don’t I want new people to come to church? Life is sad enough as it is, isn’t it? We all have to carry around enough grief, misery, and sadness. Why talk about depressing things, scary things, like God’s Wrath? It’s all a bit black, isn’t?
But we have to hear how bad the bad news is, so we can know how good the good news is.
Sometimes I pass jewelry shops, I notice they sometimes diamond rings and precious jewels are displayed against a dark background. The dark background highlights and enhances the jewellery.
So it is with the gospel. The magnificent jewel of God’s love, shown in Jesus’ death and resurrection, stands out against the darkness of God’s anger at our godlessness and wickedness.
What is this wrath and anger of God? What does it tell us about God?
The wrath of God is God’s settled and consistent opposition to wickedness and sin. God hates sin and our rebellion against him. God’s hatred and rejection of sin is good, it’s part of his perfection. The problem is our disposition to sin, Verse 18, the last bit.
[For] the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men … (NIV)
God hates godlessness, which is our decision to be godless and without God. Sin is first of all an anti-God movement. Sin is a declaration of autonomy against God. ‘God, I don’t like the fact that you are over us, that you made us, that you have and claim the right of human obedience.’ That’s what human sin does. ‘God, I don’t like you and what you think.’ And God is angry about it.
And why God is opposed about our rebellion is seen in verses 19 to 20:
Since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. (NIV)
God made things. And those things God made, make God known. Our world has God’s fingerprints all over it. Sure, God himself is invisible. No one has ever seen God, except Jesus, God the only Son. But God’s creation is visible. The visible creation points to the invisible God.
So in reality there are no true Athiests. All people really knew and know something about God. But what they are doing is they are suppressing the truth. So humans have to work very hard on their unbelief. All people ‘know God’ in some sense. They know that there really is a creator God and that he is powerful.
Maybe the next time someone says, ‘Sorry, I’m an Athiest’, we could try, ‘Still suppressing the truth, hey! Denial.’ And of course, they will get terribly offended. But Scripture says there is enough in nature to know that there is a creator. Each of us ‘knows God’ in this sense.
Everybody knows God is there, as we look at what is made. Verse 21 again:
For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him… (NIV)
Paul charges humanity with ingratitude. We are a race of ‘spoilt brats’, who take and take from God without a word of thanks. We took God for granted.
Saying ‘thank you’ at one level is cheap. It costs nothing and is easy. But ‘thank you’ at another level is very costly. It says ‘You have done something for me I couldn’t do myself. I need you.’
What role does saying ‘thank you’ to God play in your life? Do you thank him for making you, for giving you life and breath and food and clothing and shelter and everything else? Does the fact that you are still walking this globe with breath in your lungs fill you with thanks? I hope so. Because our ingratitude made God angry in the first place.
Moreover, ignorance is no excuse. The last bit of verse 20:
… so that men are without excuse (NIV)
It just won’t cut it to say to God, ‘Look God I really would have said thanks to you, if I’d known you were there. I’m sure I would have worshipped you. But it’s just that you didn’t make it very clear. It’s your fault, after all.’
Ignorance is no excuse because no one is ignorant. The heavens declare the glory of God (Psalm 19). But with eyes full of evidence and with ears full of fingers, we look up at God and say: ‘I’m sorry, I can’t seem to hear you!’
So now when we return to verse 18 we see why God is angry. Verse 18 again:
The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness… (NIV)
It is our wilful ignorance that God objects to. It is our wicked suppression of the truth. God is angry because we refuse to listen to him. We have ‘so called’ Nelsonian blindness and Nelsonian knowledge.
The story is told about the Great English Admiral, Horatio Nelson, who received a message from his superior, Admiral Parker. He had lost one eye in battle. And in the battle of Copenhagen, he conducted an offensive while the rest of the fleet waited. And Nelson’s superior sent him a message permitting him to leave off attacking the fleet of Danish and Norwegian ships. But Nelson wanted to attack. So he said, ‘You know, Foley, I only have one eye — I have the right to be blind sometimes’. And then, holding his telescope to his blind eye, he said of the message, ‘I really do not see the signal!’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Copenhagen).
What are you talking about God? What is that you are saying? I can’t seem to hear you! God has made it plain, but we don’t want to know about it. We suppress the truth by our wickedness.
And this suppression of the truth takes a particularly religious form. Humans replace the God who is there with their cheap imitation, one they control and who does what they want. Out with the genuine God, in with the artificial, obedient, false god, made in our image. Verses 22 and 23:
Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. (NIV)
Reject God, and you have to fill the vaccuum with something. Ditch the True God, and fill the god-shaped hole in your heart with the false god. Verse 25 reiterates it:
They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator – who is forever praised, Amen. (NIV)
They worshipped created things. Some people still have idols in our world. Go to a Hindu or Buddhist temple and you will see them. Go to Asia and India, and you will see them. They worship at the shrine in their house, or the cow walking past.
But generally, our society has other idols. We Aussies exchange God for things like Money. Paul calls ‘greed’ idolatory. And Jesus says we cannot serve both God and Money. Or Sport. The churches may be empty, but the fields are all full on a Sunday. And we have the Cathedrals, the hallowed turf, where immortals once stood, like the SCG, the SFS, or Homebush Olympic Park. And if you cannot make it there, every Sunday at our local fields child sacrifice is offered in pursuit of sporting glory.
We might have other gods. It might be our bodies, or food, or sex, or our families, or the business, or pleasing the parents, or alcohol, or other substances of addiction, or science. And to make an idol, all we’ve got to do is take God’s good gift, something he has given us, and serve that, and live for that, and worship that, rather than God the giver.
Notice, people know the real God. But they don’t like the true and living God. So they make up their own gods. So religion is not seeking after God, it is running away from him. And having the wrong god will lead to wrong living. We become like what we worship.
Paul says the first thing people exchange, once they’ve ditched the true god, is the true use of sex. Verse 24:
Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. (NIV)
Sexual immorality, sex outside of heterosexual monogamous marriage, tells us that idolatory and rejection of God is happening. Our society is sex soaked. Billboards, movies, magazines, free to air tv, facebook, email, the sides of buses and the back of taxis, even radio: you cannot move without being confronted by a sexual image or listening to smut. None of it is left in the privacy of the marriage bed anymore. And this shows our society has rejected God. Again, verses 26 to 27:
Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. (NIV)
Homosexuality is now being strongly pushed by our media, and in our schools and universities. We are told, ‘Some people are just born that way’. Everyone who says homosexuality is a sin is a bigot and homophobe.
But here Paul takes his culture head on. He speaks about the situation of males having sex with males and females having sex with females. It’s not where the acts happens that matters, like in a pagan temple, but that it happens. He calls those sexual acts ‘unnatural’. He calls the ‘lusts’ ‘shameful’. Both the act and the inclination are sin.
‘Natural’ is not what feels good or right to us, because we are sinful. ‘Natural’ depends on God’s purpose. God intended sex to bind the man to his wife. So Paul talks about homosexual acts as ‘unnatural relations’, though in another sense, it is natural to sin.
There are two errors I think we must avoid. We can think homosexuality, both act and inclination, is not sin. But then we deny Paul and God’s truth. Or we can think homosexuality is worse sin than the sin we ourselves are guilty of. But no, Paul has a long list of sins in chapter 1, and I will be surprised if anyone here leaves this church building innocent.
But you know what’s even worse than us throwing ourselves into these sins? God abandons us to them. God lets people go they’re own way. He gives them the worst type of anger – the cold shoulder.
‘You really want this, after I’ve told you, No No No. Fine, have it, it’s yours, in fact, let me give you a push!’
That horrible judgment is uttered 3 times in our passage. Verse 24, God gave them over to sexual immorality:
Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity
Verse 26:
Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts.
And verse 28, God gave them over:
Furthermore, since they did not think it worth while to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done (NIV)
And then Paul elaborates on what God has given them up to: things we think big, like murder, and God-hating. Things we think little, like gossip, arrogance, disrespecting parents. All of them deserve the death penalty (verse 32).
Say what? The death penalty? Yes, the death penalty. Verse 32:
Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practise them. (NIV)
Verse 32 makes you read verses 29 to 31 more carefully. What is it that deserves death? Lets run a bit more slowly through verses 29 to 31.
They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful. They invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents’ they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. (Romans 1:29-32 NIV)
The death penalty is a bit harsh, isn’t it? I mean, we don’t even execute murderers anymore. But does God really mean death? We don’t think these things deserve death, because we’ve done some of them. Gossiping, disobeying parents, boasting, deceiving, envying: normal, garden variety sins committed week in week out. But God says, they are punishable by death. The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23).
We’ve got two choices, haven’t we, when confronted with such a statement? We can agree with God or disagree with God.
We can agree with God and say, ‘I have gossiped, boasted, been arrogant, and disobeyed my parents. God is right. The wages of sin is death. I deserve to be punished by God.'
Or we can say, ‘I don’t deserve death. I’m really a good person at heart. I’m not a murderer or idolater. I can find some people out there worse than me!’
And soon, we will not only justify ourselves. But we begin to justify this conduct in others. ‘It can’t be wrong. Everyone’s doing it.’ And all of a sudden, we fulfill verse 32:
Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them. (NIV)
So can I ask you to ask God to show you what is true about you, so that you might know yourself. And then can I plead with you to agree with God! You will never understand the good news about Jesus unless you understand the bad news about you. Call sin sin. Confess the truth. There is no-one good, except God. And that truth will set you free for the gospel.
Let’s pray.
[1] For example, Romans 2:29; 3:2