Our son was once playing on a hockey team at a provincial tournament. It was Saturday and we were playing a game that would determine our future involvement. If we lost, we would go home. If we won, we would play in semi-finals on Sunday. I have to confess that I was cheering for the other team because it would have meant a problem for me to stay until Sunday. The good news is that we lost. Of course, for the team that was bad news, but for me it was good news.
Can bad news be good news?
The atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 were bad news. Hundreds of thousands of people died and it issued in a terrible new era of atomic warfare. It was unqualified bad news, except in the sense that it was probably one factor in ending World War II. In that one sense bad news was good news.
God’s wrath sounds like bad news to our ears. However, this morning I would like to invite you to examine Romans 1:18-3:20 with me to discover that the revelation of the wrath of God is also good news.
A few weeks ago we began to look at Romans and noted at that time that Romans 1:16-18 provides us with an outline of the book of Romans in reverse. It speaks of three things – the gospel of God, which is the power of God for salvation, the righteousness of God, which is revealed in the gospel and the wrath of God which is also revealed in the gospel. This morning we will look at this third item – the wrath of God revealed.
What we learn is that salvation does not begin with us, it begins with God. The passage reveals how God deals with the world He has created – both with a compassion that restores and a wrath that punishes. We will see that the wrath of God reveals the justice, impartiality and faithfulness of God, which is a good thing.
The first thing we learn is that we are all bad. It says in 1:18 that God’s wrath is being revealed against “all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness…”
John Toews says that the term ungodliness “focuses sin as an attack on the holiness and majesty of God.” Romans 1:18-32 speaks about God’s wrath against the Gentiles in their ungodliness. The term wickedness “defines sin as a violation of God’s just order in the world.” This is described in 2:1-29 and speaks of the Jews who, although they knew the way of God, failed to live in it and so also experience God’s wrath.
I have often wondered how people can reject God when they look at the created world. How can chance make a world that is so wonderfully balanced in space? How can chance make a tiny insect and a huge elephant? How can chance cause one animal to fly, another to swim and another to run? The evidence of God is all around us and even within us, yet many deny the truth. They bury what they know to be true because they ignore God. Romans 1:21-23 says that they do not glorify God as God, they do not give thanks to God and since they still have to worship something, they exchange the glory of the immortal God for images. In 1:25 we read that they deny the truth of God and in 1:28 that they reject the knowledge of God.
The critical first sin is the rejection of God.
Failure To Obey God’s Law – Jews
Every Jew who would read this would have nodded in agreement. In 2:1 it speaks about “you who pass judgment on someone else.” They did pass judgment on all the Gentile world and agreed that they were godless.
At the same time, the Jews believed themselves to be in a privileged position. God had chosen them to be his special people. God had communicated His law to them. He had established a covenant with them. God had given them circumcision in order to identify them as His own possession. They firmly believed, as much as we as Christians believe, that they were God’s chosen ones and acceptable to God for all eternity because of being chosen.
However, Paul points out some irregularities. He acknowledges that they have all of these privileges and that they have every opportunity to rejoice in being God’s chosen ones. The problem is that although they know all the right things to do and although they have entered into a covenant with God, they do not follow the conditions of the covenant. Please notice the words of accusation in chapter 2. In 2:1 he says, “you…do the same things.” In 2:5 he points out that they have a stubborn and unrepentant heart. In 2:17-23 he talks about how the Jews consider themselves to be teachers, knowing the way of God and being willing to tell everyone the way of God but they are hypocrites. They teach against stealing, but they steal. They teach against adultery, but commit adultery. In 2:25 he is very direct when he says, “you break the law.” The conclusion is that even though the Jews had every privilege and advantage, they rejected it and were no better than the Gentile sinners and were therefore also under God’s wrath.
When we think of disobedience to God, there are two concepts which we need to understand. On the one hand, there are sins we commit, on the other, there is SIN as a power which enslaves us. What Paul is saying in these chapters is that every person on earth is under the power of SIN. John Toews describes SIN as a “magnetic field that draws all created reality into its force field.” He also says that SIN is a “power that dominates all people.” The Jews knew this about the Gentiles, but now Paul is saying that because of the evidence of the sins of the Jews it reveals that they also are under the power of SIN. In the conclusion to this section, Paul declares clearly in 3:9, “Jews and Gentiles alike are all under SIN.” In 3:10-18, he quotes seven Old Testament verses to support his claim. I doubt if there is another idea which is so thoroughly supported from the Old Testament. The passages here (Ecclesiastes 7:20; Psalm 14:1-3; Psalm 5:10; Psalm 139:4; Psalm 10:7; Isaiah 59:7,8; Psalm 35:2) all speak of the power of sin in the life of every person.
This SIN as a power is so strong that there is nothing on this earth that can overcome it. The Jews thought that because they had the Law, that the Law could overcome the power of SIN. But Paul says in 3:20 that “no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law.”
That is the bad news, it is terrible news! It is more deadly than ten Hiroshima’s. It is more catastrophic than 100 Katrina’s. The whole world is trapped in the power of SIN and each person lives daily committing many different sins.
What sounds like more bad news is that God is mad about this and His wrath is being revealed against all of this evil.
The Consequences Of Rejecting God
Already now the wrath of God is being revealed against all those who reject God. We often think that people do immoral things and then as a result they reject God. In fact, we find in this passage that it goes the other way. First of all people reject God and God gives them over to the consequences of that rejection and as a result he lets them go their own way and they end up in all kinds of moral evil which destroys. Our moral failures are not the beginning of our walk away from God, but the consequences of it. They are a manifestation of the wrath of God against all ungodliness.
Notice how this comes out in the passage. First of all, in verses 18-23 there is a description of how people reject God. Then in verse 24 it says, “Therefore God gave them over…” In fact, this phrase is repeated three times in this passage, in verses 24, 26 and 28. In 1:24 it says that, God “gave them over” to sexual impurity. In 1:26 we read, “God gave them over” to shameful lusts and in 1:28, God “gave them over” to a depraved mind. “God gave them up” is an act of divine judgment. John Toews says, God abandons humans who have turned away from him and He does not “protect humans against themselves.” “Human rejection of God’s honor by shameful actions constitutes an offense, which God judges by letting men and women become so shameless in their behavior that social order disintegrates.” The question is not “will we worship?” the question is “who will we worship.” When people stop worshipping God, they begin to worship themselves and God’s wrath is revealed as our new god fails us. “The more people reject God the more dehumanized, the more fractured, the more abusive relationships become. The end is total social chaos.”
God’s wrath is poured out on a broken relationship with God in the complete wickedness and immorality in which the world lives. The further consequences of this rejection of God is that the sin and evil and wicked consequences simply multiply so that the world is full of evil, greed, depravity, envy, murder and so on as described in 1:29-31. The end result, described in 1:32 is that people not only continue to do such things which leads to their destruction, but they encourage others who do them.
The other sign of God’s wrath against these things according to 1:32 is that “those who do such things deserve death.”
The Consequences Of Disobeying The Law
Not only is God’s wrath against the ungodliness of humanity, but also against the wickedness of those who do not do what God says. The Gentiles reject God and God’s punishment is the immorality which destroys and brings chaos and death.
The Jews, thought they could escape this chaos and death because they had God’s law and the covenant sign of circumcision. However, because they do not keep the covenant, they find that they are no less guilty than the Gentiles. They also will not escape God’s wrath.
In Romans 2:3, Paul asks, “do you think you will escape God’s judgment?” The consequence for those who know the law, but don’t do it, is that they “show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you toward repentance…” Because they fail to repent, they continue in disobedience and as a result are under the wrath of God. That is exactly what Paul says in 2:5, “Because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath…”
This is what it means that God’s wrath is revealed against all the godlessness and wickedness of all humanity - Jews and Gentiles.
God’s Wrath Reveals God’s Nature
I want to apologize for title of the second point. It is trite and cliché. It makes it sound like God is a child with a temper tantrum or a teenager having a snit. It makes it sound like the wrath of God is bad news. It is bad news, but in another sense it is actually good news. The wrath of God revealed against all the godlessness and wickedness of human sin is good news in two senses. First of all, because of the hopelessness we have because of the power of SIN, the power of the gospel to save is so much greater. The wrath of God against all godlessness and wickedness sets up the need for and the hope of the good news of Jesus Christ. Next week we will talk about that.
The wrath of God revealed against godlessness and wickedness is also good news because of what it tells us about God. Although this passage reveals much about who we are and where we stand, it is written primarily to tell us something about God. The beginning of the gospel is not us, but God and we need to see and understand how things are from God’s point of view. His wrath is revealed against all the evil in the world and that is good news. How is it good news?
It is good news because it tells us that God’s judgment is just and that therefore God is just and righteous. It tells us that God is faithful, despite human unfaithfulness, and it tells us that God is steady, constant, and reliable because He is impartial.
When we understand that God’s wrath is against all godlessness, it shows us that God is impartial – He does not show favorites.
One of the issues in Romans, which also appears in this section is the issue of the relationship between Jews and Gentiles. Gentiles knew they were sinners and needed a way out. Jews thought they were God’s special people and did not need a way out. They had a relationship with God marked by the giving of the law and the covenant of circumcision. All agreed that Gentiles deserved to be under the wrath of God. The Jews thought they were exempt from the wrath of God. But their disobedience made the name of God to be a cause of blaspheming as we read in 2:24. They were filled with disobedience and if God let them get away with their sin, it would show that God was partial, that he favored some and treated them differently just because of their religious or cultural or racial background.
We live in a world in which there are all kinds of inequities because of race or culture or education or wealth. Last Monday in Little Rock, Arkansas, they celebrated the 50th anniversary of the day when 9 black students, flanked by national guardsmen, were escorted into Central High School to mark the beginning of desegregation. At the celebration, one of those 9 students spoke and indicated “we have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.” Racial prejudice has created all kinds of inequities which exist to this day in the United States, Southern Africa and many others places.
The wrath of God against all ungodliness shows that God is not like that. Romans 2:9,10 says, “There will be trouble and distress for every human being who does evil: first for the Jew and then for the Gentile…” Romans 2:11 declares, “God does not show favoritism.” Romans 3:19 says, “the whole world (will be) held accountable to God.”
The wrath of God against sin reveals that God is impartial and that is good news. Every evil person is judged accurately and not according to who they are.
The problem the had Jews was that they thought that if God judged them, it meant that God was not faithful. God had made a covenant with them and that covenant meant that they were safe from the judgment of God, they were already accepted. The question is, “How can God be faithful to his covenant if he punishes us?”
This question is answered in 3:3, 4a when it says, “What if some did not have faithfulness? Will their lack of faithfulness nullify God’s faithfulness? Not at all!” Some Jews thought that they could escape God’s wrath because they had a covenant with God, but they forgot that their relationship with God was a covenant and that they had broken their part of the covenant. They forgot what Romans 2:4 says, “do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you toward repentance.” They forgot that if God failed to punish their wickedness, he would be wrong to judge anyone’s wickedness.
How many times have governments made promises, but then broken them? At one time our government promised that it would not change the definition of marriage. Now it has been changed.
God is not like that. The wrath of God against all wickedness shows us that God is faithful in keeping the covenants He makes. If we break them, punishment comes and this shows that He is faithful to His promises. How thankful I am that God is faithful.
God’s wrath also reveals His justice. I believe that most of our judges, lawyers and law makers are doing their best to judge wisely and fairly. The saying that 95% of lawyers give the rest a bad name is really quite unfair. Yet there are those judges and lawyers who are unjust. They do not always do what is right perhaps because they have a vested interest. God is not like that. When Romans 2:9 says that there will be “trouble and distress for every person who does evil,” we understand that God is absolutely fair in all his judgments. That is why Romans 2:5 can speak of God’s “righteous judgment.”
One of the main problems in bringing justice is that we don’t know every side of an issue. If someone says, “I was not responsible because I was mentally incapable of making a proper decision,” how do we really know to what extent that is true? God does not have that problem. Romans 2:16 says, “God will judge men’s secrets.” God knows what is in a person’s heart and is therefore able to judge justly. The wrath of God revealed against the godlessness and wickedness of humanity shows that God is a just judge.
The knowledge of the power of SIN and the pervasive acts of sin in every human life is bad news. It reveals the hopelessness of our lives. We cannot overcome the power of sin. Not even the Law given to the Jews could overcome the power of SIN. The wrath of God against all the godlessness and wickedness of humanity is also bad news because it means that every human being is condemned. The good news of the gospel must be seen in light of that bad news and I am looking forward to next week when we can examine that contrast and rejoice in the wonderful good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ. In it our sins are forgiven, we are freed from the power of SIN and we are given life instead of death.
But even the bad news of the wrath of God against the godlessness and wickedness of humanity is good news. It is good news because it reveals the holiness of God. It shows us that God is impartial, faithful and just. In a world that is not, how wonderful to know this and to be able to count on God because of this good news. As we contemplate these things, I would encourage us to think about this and rejoice as you see that God can be absolutely trusted to do what is right.
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