Story 4: The Righteous Wrath of a Holy God
Romans 1:18-2:16
This next section of Paul’s letter to the Romans is going to take us through some painful truths. They are hard to think about, but they are important because they help us come to terms. As humans, we like to imagine that all is well. We buy ourselves a lot of temporary peace by ignoring a lot of the evil and degradation going on all around us. If we had to face all of the suffering and evil that goes on in the world, we wouldn’t be able to bear it. It would break us.
But God is not so fragile. In His all-knowing power and might, He has the strength to fully understand all of the evil that is going on in our world, to look it square in the face, and to come to terms with what has to be done. He understands the horrific suffering it causes, He knows the victims by name. He has to bear the pain of seeing how the vulnerable are abused and taken advantage of, how the orphaned and widowed struggle just to live on…He sees the ravages of war and famine and human apathy with perfect clarity.
The Lord looks at all of our self-centeredness, our apathy and lack of love, the many injustices we commit, large and small, and because God is good, these pernicious evils fill Him with wrath. This is not the foolish anger of a tantrum. This is not the narcissistic rage of a petty man’s ego. This is the righteous anger of a holy God who is inflamed by injustice and enraged by abuse. He will not shrink away from evil and sin or pretend it does not exist. When the Apostle Paul writes about the wrath of God, this is what he means. Let’s read what Paul has to say in Romans 1:18-20:
“For the wrath of God is revealed from Heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of people who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, that is, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, being understood by what has been made, so that they are without excuse.”
It is incredible to consider the cost of human sin and rebellion against God. This broken world is not what God prepared for us from the beginning. He provided us with a perfect Garden. Our contaminated, fraught reality was what we chose for ourselves when we rejected His way. And yet God, in His infinite goodness, chooses to persevere with humanity. He continues to provide us with the glories of nature: the brilliance of the stars at night, the warmth of the sun, the refreshing rains. He provides as with the air we breathe and endures with us even as we use it to curse His name and reject His love. For thousands of years He has persevered with us in the midst of our sin and shame, so that He can bring many sons and daughters to glory.
And yet we still rebel, rejecting the path of salvation that God has provided. We know something is profoundly wrong. Humanity has devised all kinds of religions and philosophies to explain the problem. We have a thousand ideas about how to cure it. In the next few passages in Romans, Paul will provide God’s perspective about what went wrong.
In Romans 1:18-3:16, Paul explains what happened when the Gentiles tried to live apart from God. In the Bible, the Gentiles included everyone who was not Jewish. The Gentiles did not have the Old Testament law to help them know right from wrong or teach them about the One True God. They worshipped idols instead. A Gentile might argue that it wasn’t their fault. How were they supposed to know about the Jewish God? How could they possibly follow His ways?
But Paul explained that God has given every person a deep, internal understanding of Himself…that God makes Himself known to them. With this knowledge comes a profound intuition about right and wrong.
What is more, humanity has all of nature around us proclaiming the reality of God. All that God has made provides continual evidence of His divine nature and His everlasting power. The facets of nature exhibit the many attributes of God. The Gentiles only needed to look around.
In fact, the wonders of the natural world provide the necessary evidence of a Creator who is not only powerful, but worthy of worship. Have you ever paused in the dark of night to stare up in awe at the silent grandeur of the stars? The Gentiles ought to have taken the truth that was spoken to them through the glory of the great mountains, the wide, vast sky, and the glorious setting of the sun. These beauties exhibit the reality of the one true God who created them. The Gentiles should have embraced God as worthy of all their love and adoration.
Instead, they turned to lesser loves. They rejected what their own hearts testified about what is good and right and chose to embrace corruption and sin. They followed their twisted path until their minds became dark and they could not see the truth of God any more. They lost their access to truth. How terrifying. They began to worship idols made of clay and wood. They put their faith in breakable statues made by the hands of humans, so He gave them over to the sinful life they had chosen.
This is how Paul described it:
“For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their reasonings, and their senseless hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and they exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible mankind, of birds, four-footed animals, and crawling creatures.
Therefore God gave them up to vile impurity in the lusts of their hearts, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for falsehood and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.”
It is interesting that Paul wrote that God “gave them up.” It is as if God had protected them from the full consequences of their sin, but then finally relented. The lusts of their heart would have full sway over their lives to the point that they would bring degradation to their own bodies. They demoted their worship to idols. The service that could have been for the King of Heaven would be devoted to squalid creatures that were just like them…or worse. Wow.
Paul was casting a vision of what happened to all those in humanity who were not given the privilege of being a part of the Jewish faith. Historical scholars and philosophers and evolutionary psychologists have come up with all kinds of explanations for how human society has unfolded, but it is the Apostle Paul who gives the most accurate description about the most important factors. At the very heart of what happened was the rejection of the one true God by humanity and the devastating consequences that came with their separation from Him.