"THE SEVERITY OF GOD’S WRATH MAKES US APPRECIATE OUR SALVATION THE MORE."

Scripture Reading:
Ephesians 2:1-10
Romans 1:18-32

Singing:  (Psalms and Hymns are from the "Book of Praise" Anglo Genevan Psalter)
Psalm 5:3,4
Psalm 77:5
Hymn 24:4
Psalm 75:1,2,3,4,5,6
Psalm 103:3,4

Beloved Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ!

The world in which we breathe today is infected with New Age thinking. Part of New Age thinking is that God is not the sovereign and holy Creator who inhabits heaven. Instead, New Agism says that earth and god are put together so that there is no difference between the two. One hears of Mother Nature, and in New Age thinking this is the deity, this is god in this world, this is the goddess caring for and developing her world from within. God is not ‘out there’; no, god is in the animals of the field, in the trees of the forest, in rocks of the hills, and in your own heart. There’s something divine in all things….

I tell you this because this very modern (and very heathen!) religion has a direct bearing on the material of our Lord’s Day. In Lord’s Day 4 the Christian repeats after God what he has heard God say in Scripture about His wrath and His justice. But today’s world doesn’t have room for considering seriously the wrath and justice of God, simply because our world insists that this earth is god –god is in the flowers and the birds and the stones and the people- and would god be angry with himself?!

We live in this society, and so it’s no surprise that weeds from society’s thinking grow in our mental gardens. No, not that we deny the reality of God’s wrath; we know only too well that the Bible does speak of God’s wrath. But it is very tempting to put God’s wrath at a far distance from the goings on of communal and national and international life as we experience it daily. As we in our thinking put the wrath of God at a distance from daily life, the doctrine of God’s wrath against sin becomes vague, something that doesn’t have a place in our day to day thinking…. The result is that we don’t rightly know what to do with our Lord’s Day.

Yet the Christian wants to live and die in the joy of the comfort of belonging to Jesus Christ. To rejoice in this comfort the Christian has to know "first how great [his] sins and misery are." To be delivered from little misery does not move to joy and thankfulness as much as deliverance from great misery does. And the wrath of God is so severe, says Scripture, that deliverance from that wrath makes one exceedingly joyful.

I summarize the sermon with this theme:

Lord’s Day 4 continues the train of thought laid out in Lord’s Day 3. In Lord’s Day 3 the Christian confessed that God had created him good and in his image. In Adam and Eve, though, we fell into sin, broke our bond with God, joined the devil. The result is, says Question & Answer 7, that "our nature became so corrupt that we are all conceived and born in sin." To say it in the words of Eph 2: we became "dead in trespasses and sins" (vs 1).

Given that depravity, the demand of Lord’s Day 2 becomes more oppressive. For there we’d confessed that God wants us to obey His law. Specifically, He wants us to love God with all our heart and soul and mind, and our neighbor as ourselves. But we’re corrupt, we’re dead in sin. And the dead, we know, can’t obey, let alone love…. Hence the first question of Lord’s Day 4: "does God not do man an injustice by requiring of him in His law what man cannot do?" Isn’t God unfair when He demands the impossible?

We’re inclined to answer with Yes, that’s unfair, certainly unreasonable. You find a dead cat on the road, and you can tell it as often as you want to move, you can shout at it and insult it, but it’s not going to obey – simply because it’s dead. To demand the dead to obey is simply unfair, certainly unreasonable. So we’re persuaded that the Lord God too is unjust in demanding of us in His law what He knows we cannot do.

But as it is, brothers and sisters, the comparison with the dead cat is invalid. For the fact of the matter is that in the beginning the Lord God made us in His image, and that includes that we were responsible. You can never hold a cat responsible – neither when it’s dead nor when it’s alive. A better example to use would be the news that on Wednesday you get a science exam, and since you can’t be bothered to study you throw your books out the window, and on Wednesday you tell your teacher that you can’t write the exam because, well, so and so…. We all understand: the teacher would be most just in demanding that you write the exam regardless. There’s the point in relation to Lord’s Day 4: back in Paradise, at the instigation of the devil, we threw out the notes God gave us at creation, we robbed ourselves of the God-given ability to obey His law. So God is most just in demanding perfect obedience to His law.

But that perfect obedience we cannot supply. Since God is the just and holy God He is, He responds to our failure with His divine wrath. Question & Answer 10: "Will God allow such disobedience and apostasy to go unpunished?" In a society that doesn’t know that to do with the notion of God’s wrath, we echo Scripture emphatically: "Certainly not," we say; God "is terribly displeased with our original sin as well as our actual sins. Therefore He will punish them by a just judgment both now and eternally…."

With this statement, brothers and sisters, we reject as untrue the doctrine our society has adopted. God and creation are not one; God is not in creation so that any outpouring of wrath against people or animals or forests or oceans is in fact an outpouring of God’s wrath against Himself. No, the Creator and the creature are very different, must be carefully distinguished and separated, and so room is left for expressions of the Creator’s wrath in His creation.

What, now, does the Bible say about God’s wrath? It is true that the Bible nowhere says that God is anger. I say that because I want to point out that while the Bible says that "God is love" (I Jn 4), there is no parallel text that says that "God is anger". It’s a point to which I’ll return later. The absence, though, of a statement in Scripture that "God is anger" takes nothing away from the fact that God is angry. That’s a statement we do find in Scripture. David says it in so many words in Ps 7: "God is angry every day" (vs 11). The point is that the creature made so uniquely on the sixth day and given that high status in God’s creation has given himself to sin, and that reality provokes God’s anger every day anew.

The question is now: is this wrath of God something to get worried about? You know how people are. When the one person is angry, you do well to stay out of his path. But the next person’s anger is no big problem; a kind word will calm him down. How about God’s anger?

Scripture makes clear that Yes, God’s anger is something to get worried about. Consider Israel’s experience in the desert. When they muttered and complained, "the wrath of the Lord was aroused against the people" so that the Lord struck the people with a very great plague (Num 11:33). That happened not once but more often (Num 12:9f; 16:22ff; 25:4ff). The people felt it in their lives: God’s anger is real, God’s anger is deadly; they perished by the thousands.

The prophet Nahum gives us a picture of the intensity of the anger Israel tasted. Listen: "Who can stand before His indignation? And who can endure the fierceness of His anger? His fury is poured out like fire, And the rocks are thrown down by Him" (1:6). We cringe at the thought: imagine a pot of fire being poured out on top of you; how shall one escape?! Behold God’s anger! Or imagine walking through the field and God rains His rocks upon you. This is not small stuff! There is no helmet that will protect you from that!

The Lord Jesus Christ knew the Old Testament so well, knew also how terrible it was to fall into the hands of the living God. He knew also that on the cross of Calvary God would pour out His fury on Him like fire. But note, then, congregation, how Jesus –true God though He was!- how Jesus agonized at the prospect of that wrath! Mt 26: Jesus went into the Garden of Gethsemane with three disciples "and He began to be sorrowful and deeply distressed" (vs 37) – so much so, Luke adds, that His sweat became as great drops of blood (Lu 23:43). Why the anxiety? Listen to His prayer: "O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me" (vs 39). Cup: the term appears in the Old Testament as a symbol of God’s wrath. I think of Ps 75: "God is the Judge…. In the hand of the Lord there is a cup…; It is fully mixed, and He pours it out; Surely its dregs shall all the wicked of the earth Drain and drink down" (vs 8). With Jesus’ use of the word ‘cup’ in the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus captures the bitterness of God’s wrath, captures the horrors of having this cup of divine fury poured onto Him, and that’s why He looks up against it so much – to the point of being "deeply distressed". And when Jesus some hours later tasted the heat of God’s anger in deeper depths still, the weight of the wrath of God tore open His parched lips so that on the cross He cried out His hurt as God’s fury was poured out upon Him like fire; "My God, My God," He shrieked, "why have You forsaken Me?" He felt in His person how horrible a thing it is to fall into the hands of the living God! See in His experience on the cross, beloved, an indication of how terrible the wrath of God really is. If Jesus - true God!- cringed so much under the weight of that wrath, how shall you or I ever survive when we come face to face with that wrath!

Does that wrath as described by Nahum and experienced by our Lord Jesus Christ have a face today? Do we see that wrath in daily life, or must we consider it to be far removed from the daily lives to today’s people – a bit of a paper tiger?

No, beloved, in no way are to consider the wrath of God as far removed from daily life. Listen to Paul in Romans 1: "the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men," he says (vs 18). Note it well: Paul words this statement in such a way as to make clear that this wrath of God is an ongoing reality. That wrath is continually being revealed. In the verses that follow Paul interweaves answers to two questions about this wrath. The first is the question of why God’s wrath is revealed and the second is how God’s wrath is revealed.

Why does God reveal His wrath? Because, says the apostle, people turn a blind eye to what God has revealed of Himself in creation. "The heavens declare the glory of God," and so do the flowers and the trees and the storms and the sunshine; all by virtue of their existence declare the greatness of the Creator. But people refuse to acknowledge the Creator, decide instead to worship the creature. In Paul’s day people did that by worshiping idols made by human hands from created things as wood and stone as if these idols had created the world and supply the needs of their worshipers. Today people commit the same sin by worshiping Mother Nature. Look, we’re told today, at how marvelous Mother Nature has made her world over the millions of years of evolution. Though God displays His greatness and power in the things He made, people refuse to acknowledge Him as Creator, and God responds by pouring out His wrath. How He displays His wrath? Vs 24: "God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves." Notice: dishonoring the body is a curse from God, expression of His wrath. How do people dishonor the body? Idolizing the body, muscle-building, trimming the fat: we see it around us, we get used to it, but congregation, it is expression of God’s holy wrath! People worship the creature, the body, instead of the Creator, and so God blinds their eyes –wrath!- so that all they can see is the creature, the body. The emphasis that displayed in the sports pages of your newspaper on the body –we’re so used to us- is itself an expression of the wrath of God! Fix it in your minds, beloved: God’s wrath is not far removed from daily life, but –says Paul- it’s there under our nose. But our depravity hinders us from tuning in to it as expressions of divine wrath….

Paul continues. Because people don’t bend under the weight of that wrath in repentance, the Lord reveals His wrath in stronger measures still. Vs 26: God gives people up to vile passions, so that people give themselves to homosexual behavior. Our land no longer sees homosexual activity as a crime, our state government has just lowered the age of consent for homosexual behavior. We say: this development must bring the wrath of God on our land, and that’s true. But Paul would have us know, congregation, that this development is itself an expression of the wrath of God! That’s why I say: we can’t think of God’s wrath as something far away, something vague that doesn’t touch daily living. No, the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, and the expressions of God’s wrath include things like God giving people over to idolizing the body, God giving people over to homosexual activity. And because people still do not repent under the weight of these expressions of God’s wrath, such activity earns more wrath from God. Vs 27: homosexuals receive in themselves the penalty for their error – and one can think of plagues like AIDS, and one can think too of the loneliness that must creep upon the homosexual in his older age when he has no children to love him…. Yet even that is not the full extent of the wrath of God. Look at the attitudes described in vss 29f: no society can survive when its members are "filled with all unrighteousness, sexual immorality, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil-mindedness." Society must collapse upon itself when people "are whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, violent, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, undiscerning, untrustworthy, unloving, unforgiving, unmerciful…." This is more of the wrath of God being revealed from heaven against all wickedness and unrighteousness of men. And make no mistake, beloved: these attitudes abound in our society – evidence all of the wrath of God! So you get events like the horrors of September 11; driven by hatred people kill in the name of their idol… - more expression of the wrath of God. And you get a rise in the divorce rate of the land, and proponents for euthanasia; driven by love of self people are cold to others – and it’s all expression of the wrath of God on the disobedience of the human race.

Is the wrath of God far removed from the events of our daily lives? Are we to see the wrath of God only in earthquakes and wars? Let your eyes be open, brothers and sisters, to the reality of God’s wrath as it presses down day by day on today’s society! God is terribly displeased with [man’s] original sin as well as our actual sins. Therefore He will punish them by a just judgment both now and eternally. The future will not get better; the expressions of God’s wrath we encounter in society today foreshadow the eternal weeping and gnashing of teeth that characterizes hell – there’s where it will all end up.

It sounds so ominous, beloved, and it is. Let no one living on the earth since the fall into sin think little of the wrath of God! But now the thing is: is this wrath of God for everybody? That’s our final point:

Certainly, everybody is worthy of this wrath. I draw your attention to the passage we read from Eph 2. At the end of vs 3 the apostle says of himself and the saints of Ephesus that we "were by nature children of wrath, just like the others." Notice how Paul tags all people with the same horrible label; we and they, everybody, are by nature "children of wrath" – God’s wrath.

But see now: in relation to himself and the saints of Ephesus Paul uses the past tense! We "were", he says, we "were by nature children of wrath. But not anymore! Why not? Because –vs 4- "God is rich is mercy." What characterizes God is not His wrath (terrible though it is), but His mercy. Think back to Paradise. When Adam and Eve admitted to God that they had sinned, God’s response was not to drop on them the eternal weight of God’s holy wrath. No, God first had a word with the serpent, told the serpent that its seed would be crushed through the seed of the woman. God spoke those words to the serpent, yes, but in the hearing of Adam and Eve! That is: before He uttered a word of wrath to them, He let them overhear first some words of mercy! For what characterizes God is not His wrath but His mercy. So Paul, in full agreement with the words God spoke to the devil in the hearing of Adam and Eve, could declare that God has "made us alive together with Christ" (Eph 2:5). And he can tell the Galatians that "Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law" because Christ "became a curse for us" (3:13). That is: the wrath we deserve has been poured out on Jesus Christ so that we might go free, might have no curse, no judgment, no wrath left on us!

I draw your attention to a remarkable and well known text in the Gospel of John that has direct bearing on this material. The Holy Spirit says this at the end of John 3:

I refer now especially to the last few words, "the wrath of God abides on him." The word ‘abides’ means to stay, to remain; "the wrath of God stays on him." The implication of that expression is that the wrath of God was on him in the past and it will remain on everyone who does not believe. For the unbeliever, then, there is continuity; he’s by nature a child of wrath, God’s wrath was one him from birth, remains on him and will continue to press on him. But for the believer there is discontinuity! To say it in Jesus’ words in John 5:

Note again those last words: he "has passed from death into life." He who believes is a child of wrath no longer, and so shall not come into judgment; he has passed to a new stage in life, passed from death into life itself. And why? Because the wrath we deserved was poured out on Jesus Christ on the cross! That hellish agony He endured, the weight of God’s wrath on Him that pressed out of Him the bloody sweat in the Garden of Gethsemane, is what I deserved but did not and will not receive! Ever!

Then, yes, things in my life may go differently than I wish, there can be so much adversity. But God says that the believer is no longer a child of wrath but a child of God’s love, and therefore I must accept that the difficulties of my life are not expressions of God’s wrath against me anymore; my Father in Jesus Christ has other reasons to put affliction on my path – even if they are afflictions that the human eye sees as identical to the expressions of wrath my God pours out on unbelievers. The words of Lord’s Day 16 are true for the confessor of Lord’s Day 4: "My Lord Jesus Christ, by His unspeakable anguish, pain, terror, and agony, which He endured throughout all His sufferings but especially on the cross, has delivered me from the anguish and torment of hell" – specifically in my daily life.

The wrath of God is not a pleasant subject. But a presentation of Scripture, brothers and sisters, that has cut out reference to the heat of God’s anger is a hollow gospel; if there was no anger from God on sin, why did the Savior ever have to suffer as He did on the cross?! As it is, His sufferings on the cross point up how great my sins and misery are; He suffered what I deserved. And that’s why I can delight so richly in the fact that I belong with body and soul to my faithful Savior! He suffered the curse of God that I deserved, suffered it in my place, so that I don’t have to taste that wrath – ever. Hallelujah!  Amen.