What About The Wrath of God? (Part 1)

Posted on September 18, 2023

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What About The Wrath of God? (Part 1)

The post below contains extracts from: The Wrath Of God, A Forgotten Doctrine by Ray Pritchard

The Bible is filled with warnings about God’s wrath and about eternal judgment. God has made no secret of his wrath, and neither should we.

Let’s begin with a simple definition of wrath as one of God’s attributes. We tend to think of uncontrolled anger when we speak about wrath. While that may be so with human wrath, it is far from the truth about God’s wrath. God’s wrath is His settled hostility toward sin in all its various manifestations. To say it is “settled” hostility means that God’s holiness cannot and will not coexist with sin in any form whatsoever. God’s wrath is His holy hatred of all that is unholy. It is His righteous indignation at everything that is unrighteous, every blatant disobedience of His commands.

God’s wrath is not:

  1. Uncontrollable rage.
  2. Vindictive bitterness.
  3. God losing His temper.

Wrath is what happens when holiness meets sin!
Wrath is what happens when justice meets rebellion!
Wrath is what happens when righteousness meets unrighteousness!
Wrath is what happens when perfect good meets pure evil!
 
As long as God is God, He cannot overlook sin. As long as God is God, He cannot stand by indifferently while His creation is destroyed. As long as God is God, He cannot dismiss lightly those who trample His holy will. As long as God is God, He cannot wink when men mock His name.

Consider the following examples of the display of God’s wrath:

  • The worldwide flood of the days of Noah—Genesis 6-9
  • The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah—Genesis 19
  • The destruction of Pharaoh and the Egyptian army—Exodus 14-15
  • The crushing of the rebellion of Korah and his accomplices—Numbers 16
  • The uprooting of the people of Israel from the promised land—2 Kings 17:1-232 Chronicles 33:6,13, and in recent history
  • The destruction of the sin-soaked Roman city of Pompei after the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.

Many more could be detailed in recent history, evidence of divine wrath against blatant rejection of God’s ordinances.

The clearest passage in the Bible on God’s wrath—Romans 1:18-32. Please take time to look at this passage closely that pronounces God’s judgment on the whole human race.
 
We see the progression of man’s rebellion and how God’s wrath comes in response to man’s rejection.

  • Men by nature suppress the truth about God.
  • That suppression leads to ungodliness.
  • Ungodliness leads on to wickedness.
  • That wickedness leads to every kind of evil and violence.

To put it in plain words apostasy in doctrine leads eventually to apostasy in lifestyle. What you believe is how you live. Every man, every, woman, the educated and the illiterate alike, all by nature suppress the truth about God. Left to your own devices, you will always turn to wickedness.
 
All of us suppress the truth about God. All of us when left to ourselves will turn to wickedness. That’s why “suppress” is in the present tense. As hard as that may be for you to accept, it is exactly what the Apostle Paul is teaching.
 
Romans 1:21-23 trace the downward progression as men come under God’s wrath. What starts with indifference ends in total moral corruption.

  • Vs.21a—Indifference to God. Truth demands a response, and the truth about God demands that we the creatures glorify Him as the great Creator. When we don’t, we fail in the great purpose for which we were created.
  • Vs.21b-22—Moral blindness—As men become indifferent to known truth, they begin to actively search for alternative explanations (Acts 17:22-24). The mental processes of those who turned away from God, their ability to look at the world around them and to draw accurate conclusions about it—became futile.
  • Vs.23—Loss of God.  Note the progression: Neglect leads to speculation which leads to moral blindness which now climaxes with a total loss of God. This is God’s divine estimate of the great philosophers of Greece and Rome. In God’s eyes they were fools because their philosophy was based on a rejection of God’s truth. This is the fallacy on one hand and the reality of the new age truth!

Dr. R. A. Torrey used to read verse 22 this way, “Professing themselves to be wise, they became philosophers? No, Foolosophers.” That’s what God thinks of the world’s intellectuals. Although possessing great intelligence, they are moral and spiritual pygmies.

  • Vs.23b—Idolatry—What has happened? Because man is incurably religious, if he will not worship God, he will find (or make) something to worship. When man turns away from God, he creates an “image” to worship. First there are images that look human, then the images themselves begin to degrade into images of birds, then four-footed animals and finally images of snakes and snails and bugs. Interesting. When man turns from God, he begins by worshiping himself, but he doesn’t stay there. The course is always downward.

Don’t miss the point. When you turn away from God, you always turn to something else. No man lives in a vacuum. You either worship God or replace Him with a god of your own making! Paul uses an unusual word to drive this point home. He says men “exchange” the glory of God for man-made images.
 
There are consequences to the choices we make as evident from verses 24, 26, and 28:
Verse 24 — “God gave them over.”
Verse 26 — “God gave them over.”
Verse 28 — “He gave them over.”
 
The word in Greek is paredoken. The King James Version translates it as “God gave them up.” Barclay renders it “God abandoned them.” J. B. Phillips says, “They gave up God. So God gave them up.” It is a very strong word, meaning that act of God whereby He hands over the human race for judgment because of their sins. Put in simple terms “When men lose God, they always lose themselves.” It’s as if God has said, “All right. If you want to turn away from me, I’ll let you go. I won’t try to stop you. But you’ll have to face the consequences of your own actions.” So we find ourselves as a society turned over to:

  • Vs.24-25—Sexual immorality
  • Vs.26-27—Widespread Homosexuality
  • Vs.28-32—Total moral depravity 28-32; and
  • Vs.32—Final step in God’s judgment: Public praise for evildoers. We have now reached the bottom, and it is not a nice place to be. The bottom is where you are when evil becomes good and good becomes evil. The bottom is where you are when the wrongdoers are publicly praised while defenders of morality are reviled. (Malachi 3:14,15 (NLT, GNT, MSG)

The bottom is where you are when truth is on the scaffold and wrong is on the throne. The Living Bible has a striking translation of the first part of this verse 32: “They were fully aware of God’s death penalty for these crimes, yet they went right ahead and did them anyway.” That, my friends, is the bottom—when evil is celebrated publicly!
 
At this point you have the total reversal of values in society. This is where the world stands today, particularly the so-called democratic world.
 
The wrongdoers have nearly taken control of two key areas of modern society—education and the media. Now they seek legal status for their iniquity. And they defy all attempts at control. When a major magazine argues that homosexuality is “normal” and when a public figure is chastised for speaking out against it, when the churches are ordaining homosexuals and those who object are mercilessly vilified, when Baptist ministers rally in support of a boxing champion convicted of rape, when all those things are true, what you have is the final loss of public morality. No one knows the difference between right and wrong because the values of society have been turned upside down.

These are the blatant acts of the gods foisted upon the people that sit in darkness. This is the climaxing of the alternative society started in Cain, enhanced by the rebellion under Nimrod to trigger the cosmic geography, the battle of the gods against the Supreme Creator in full bloom today, yet in His mercy God’s still made a way. Which way? Join me in next post for the concluding part of the wrath of God.

Shalom.

Pastor Afolabi Oladele

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