3 Easy Steps to Experience God's Wrath

by Jan 21, 2014

Blackout

Nobody likes to think about God’s wrath, because we don’t like the idea of being punished. But God’s wrath isn’t just about lightning bolts from the sky, and eternal hellfire and brimstone. God’s wrath can also be what we bring on ourselves through our own sin. Paul lays out a three-stage process in Romans 1 of how that happens in our lives:

1. Reject the one true God.
Paul says, “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.” (Rom 1:18). OK, Paul, so what kind of unrighteousness are we talking about? Murder? Child abuse? Genocide? … No. He says, “By their unrighteousness they suppress the truth.”

We’re really good at suppressing the truth. When you have a faucet that’s leaking a little bit, what do you do? You ignore it as long as you possibly can, until you get a water bill for $8,000, and you’re forced to deal with it. And the one main truth we all suppress is that “his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him” (Rom 1:20-21).

We know that he’s created everything, and he’s created us, so he must be taking care of us and providing for us. So we know we need to depend on him. We know we need to honor him. We know we need to give thanks to him. Instead, we ignore him and insult him. We try to live as if he didn’t exist, which is the very definition of godlessness.

We fail to worship God, but there’s a problem. He created us to worship. We’re hard-wired to worship something, so we…

2. Create substitute gods.
”Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things” (Rom 1:22-23). Remember how God created man, in his image? We were made to reflect his glory and love and beauty. Instead, we want to reverse it. We want to create God in our image.

We replace God with things that look like us, because when you worship something that’s just like you, then that thing is never going to challenge you to be anything different than the you that you already are!

The fundamental issue is, we just don’t want to change. We like the way we are, and we don’t want God to mess with that. And if we can find something ELSE to worship — something that’s more like us — then we won’t need to change!

But there’s another problem. Whatever we worship starts to rule over us. We start to be controlled by the things we worship. And that’s why we start to…

3. Pursue self-destructive behavior.
“Since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless” (Rom 1:28-31).

This is a list of sins, and also a categorization of the kinds of destruction that come from our sin: our marriages, economies, societies, relationships, families, and characters are all damaged by the things we pursue apart from God. As C.S. Lewis said in The Weight of Glory, “We fool about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

And that’s why Paul says the gospel is the “power of God for salvation” (1:16). Jesus doesn’t just save us from eternal hell. He saves us from the hell on earth we create for ourselves.