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A Passive Wrath

It was mentioned last month that we would be taking a look at a different form of God's judgment. The Bible is filled with historical examples of God's judgment falling upon nations. Some of these are quite extraordinary, like the flood, the exodus, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, etc. Others are similar to what we would expect to encounter in the annals of any other historically accurate book. One nation rises up against another nation in warfare with the winner taking ownership of the loser's land, possessions, and people. The Bible tells us that it is clearly God who is doing the rising up and the taking down.


How else does God exercise his judgment? How else do we see his punishment for sin? We see his judgment in his abandonment of people over to their sinful desires. God loosens his restraints and says, in effect, "have at it."


The apostle Paul makes this argument in Romans 1:18-32. He does so in response to his statement about the power of God to save and that if anyone is to be saved then it must be through faith. Why must it be through faith? Because all are under sin, no one is righteous, all have turned aside, no one fears God, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. That is the point he is making. He develops this in chapter one in two ways.


First, God has made himself known to us, but we have rejected that knowledge. This passage makes it clear that we do not know God exhaustively, as if that were possible, but that we know of his existence, power, and hatred of sin. This knowledge is not enough to transform us (obviously!), but is only sufficient to condemn us. That is Paul's point. No one is innocent or inexcusable. We suppress the truth about God in our own unrighteousness and choose to worship the creation instead of the Creator.


Second, God's response to our rejection of him is to reveal his wrath toward us by abandoning us over to our sinful desires. Three times in this passage Paul describes God as abandoning us. God "gave them up" to the lusts of their hearts (1:24). God "gave them up" to dishonorable passions (1:26). God "gave them up" to a debased mind (1:28). This response is what Paul describes as the revealing of the wrath of God (1:18).


This is precisely where we find ourselves as a society. It does not take much of a prophetic imagination to see ourselves in Paul's description of a people under the passive wrath of God. I encourage you to read through this section of Scripture and see if my conclusion is sound.


If this is so, then what should our response be? Same as it always is: repent. Repent of our insistence of being the creator. Repent of our arrogance in deciding for ourselves what is right and wrong. Repent of our twisted distortions of his created order. Repent of the self-centered destructive tendencies of our own hearts. Once we turn from these things, we are now prepared to honor God as God, to depend upon him for truth and love, to embrace and celebrate his good design, and to serve each other in humility.

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