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Colin Smith: Why did Jesus Christ come into the world? Most important question a Christian could ever ask, or any person could ever ask. Why did he come? Why did he have to die? What was this cross all about? What happened there?

Steve Hiller: Welcome to Open the Bible with Pastor Colin Smith. I'm Steve Hiller and Colin, today we're looking at some really big questions including why did Jesus die on the cross and anything new today that we haven't heard before?

Colin Smith: Nothing new, but something that we don't hear, I think, nearly enough. There are many dimensions to what Jesus accomplished for us on the cross. All of them are wonderful. Our forgiveness, our reconciliation to God, a triumph over Satan and so forth and so on.

And yet, one aspect of what Christ has accomplished at Calvary that doesn't get as much emphasis as perhaps it should is that he bore the wrath of God for us. What that means is that Jesus descended into hell itself on the cross. He experienced everything that hell is right there. He was in the darkness. He was loaded with our guilt, not his own guilt because he had none, but he was loaded with our guilt. You've got all of the demons let loose. You've got him crying out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" And even the eternal Son of God is cut off in that moment from the knowledge of the Father's love.

And that is hell itself in all its dimensions. And he goes into this hell so that we should never know what it is like. That's amazing. And this is getting to the unfathomable riches of what is ours in Jesus Christ. And we're finding, I think, Steve, in this series that the deeper we go into the problem, the greater our glimpse is of what God has provided for us in Jesus. And therefore, this is a means by which we can come to love him more and appreciate and serve him better.

Steve Hiller: Colin, thanks for reminding us of that. If you can, I hope you'll open your Bible to Ephesians chapter 2. We're really focusing in on verse 3 as we continue the message Children of Wrath. Here's Pastor Colin.

Colin Smith: Three things you need to know about the wrath of God: the world needs it, I deserve it, Christ bore it. This goes to the very center of our faith. That's why this subject is so important. Why did Jesus come into the world? Most important question a Christian could ever ask, or any person could ever ask. Why did he come? Why did he have to die? What was this cross that’s at the very center of our worship, at the center of our gathering around the communion table today? What is this cross all about? What happened there? And why did it have to happen? That's the question.

And the answer was never put more clearly than in the prophetic words of Isaiah the prophet, Isaiah chapter 53 and verse 5. Here's what was happening at the cross: the punishment, the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, upon Jesus. Jesus the Lamb of God takes away the sin of the world. And on the cross, here's what was happening: he became the sin-bearer. He bore sins and he died for sinners.

He took the wrath that should have been ours so that we could enter the joy that was rightly his. And bearing sins meant that Jesus came under all that sin brings. On the cross, he absorbed the divine wrath. He entered into hell and all that it is there on the cross so that those who are his should never know what hell is like. Christ absorbed the wrath of God for us so that we could know the love of God through him.

Now, I want to ask this question: have you taken this truth that's before us today seriously? You say you are a Christian, perhaps. Have you taken this truth seriously? Christian, have you ever seriously considered what it is that you have been saved from? Have you ever thought about what it would have meant if you had remained under the wrath of God? I've tried to do that again this week and here's my personal reflection. I'll just read it to you. It's true of you as much as it's true of me.

If it were not for the grace and mercy of God to me in Jesus Christ, I would be facing a future in which I am against God and God is against me forever. A future in which I have no place for God and God has no place for me. And in that everlasting separation, I would endure the continued gnawing of an activated conscience in which I see the full extent of my own sin and the destruction I have brought on myself.

I would endure the clear knowledge that there is a God of love and that I could have known him, but through my own folly, I chose to reject him all the days of my life. I would endure the unending regret and loathing of myself because of my own wretched choices and its miserable consequences. And I would endure the continuing impulse of an ongoing rebellion against God that just keeps foaming up, as it were, from within, from which there is no deliverance.

You want to imagine what that is like, think about an addict who keeps going back to what he knows is destroying his life. And why does he do this? Because the power of his addiction is stronger than his desire to be free. That is what it would have been like for me, an eternity addicted to sin in the company of all those who share the same addiction. Caught in an ongoing never-ending destruction for which I would have no one to blame except myself.

Now I sit for just a few minutes and I write these thoughts in preparation for this message and I end up saying, "Oh God, what you have saved me from." Are you taking this truth seriously? Have you felt the weight of that within your own soul? And if you take it seriously, do you ever think about what it would mean for your neighbor, or for your colleague at work, to endure the wrath of God? You see, if you do, you will begin to have compassion for that person who you might despise. You will begin to pray for that person. You will begin to look to God for their salvation.

And then I ask, have you ever really thought about then what it meant for the holy Son of God to endure this wrath on the cross? I mean, here we are about to come round the Lord's table today. And you know the old spiritual that we often sing? It's very popular, but I wonder if we know anything about its meaning. "Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Were you there when they crucified my Lord?" Remember what comes next? "Oh, oh, oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble."

Have you ever trembled? Ever? At the thought of what Jesus Christ endured for you on the cross, bearing the wrath of God? God bearing the wrath of God in his own body, in his own soul. The Son of God stretched out on a cross, rejected by earth, rejected by heaven, plunged into the depth of hell and there for you. This the power of the cross. Christ became sin for us, took the blame, bore the wrath, we stand forgiven at the cross. I hope that makes your jaw drop today.

Steve Hiller: You're listening to Open the Bible with Pastor Colin Smith, and we have to pause right there, but we'll get back to this message Children of Wrath in just a moment, so stay with us. Well, Open the Bible is a listener-supported program and as you give a gift of any amount this month, we want to say thank you by sending you a book entitled Lincoln's Daily Devotional. Colin, tell us about this book.

Colin Smith: Well, the first thing that's absolutely fascinating to me is that Abraham Lincoln had and used a devotional. He read scripture and had it in his mind and in his heart. And I discovered this because a friend of mine a while ago gave me an early edition of the actual devotional that Abraham Lincoln used. And it's brilliant. It lays out each day a verse or two of scripture. They’re organized topically around a month, and they go through the experience of a Christian believer: our joys, our sorrows, our temptations, and of course our final hope and blessedness.

I was absolutely thrilled to discover that all these years ago Abraham Lincoln was reading and meditating on a verse of scripture each day. And then I discovered that the book has been reprinted and it's been beautifully reproduced. And so Steve, it's a joy to make this available to folks. It's in the old King James Version, which of course is so beautiful in the way that it expresses the Word of God. I've found this just to be very wonderful and rich. I think people will treasure having a copy of the devotional that Abraham Lincoln himself used to meditate on the Word of God.

Steve Hiller: Well, we want to send you a copy as our way of saying thank you for financially supporting Open the Bible this month. You can give a gift online at openthebible.org or when you call 1-877-OPEN-365. That's 1-877-673-6365. Or again our website is openthebible.org. Let's get back to the message. Again, here's Pastor Colin.

Colin Smith: Christ absorbed the wrath of God for us so that we could know the love of God through him. Now I want simply to give three very practical applications of this truth and then we're through for today. How are you to use this truth as it bears in on your mind and on your heart and on your soul? I want to encourage you today to use this truth often to deepen your grasp of Christ's love. I hope you're beginning just to see for a moment already how grasping this truth in the light of the cross takes us right to the center of God's love and gives us a bigger grasp of it than you would ever have otherwise.

Here's something that remains to me an extraordinary enigma: no generation has ever been told "God loves you" as often and as frequently as this generation. And at the same time, no generation has had more difficulty in experiencing the love of God than this generation. Why is that? And I believe that a large part of the answer to that question is that we have sentimentalized the love of God. We have lost touch with this truth of God's wrath, and in doing so we have lost knowledge of God in his love.

Tim Keller has a very helpful illustration here and I think you will find this useful in just giving us a picture of how this happens. Let me read these words to you. He says: "Neglecting unpleasant doctrines in the historic Christian faith will often bring about counter-intuitive consequences." And he uses a distinctive phrase. He says: "There is an ecological balance about scriptural truth that we cannot risk disturbing." And then here's the illustration. If an area is cleared of its predatory or undesirable animals, the balance of the environment may be so upset that desirable plants and animals are also lost.

You understand how this happens? You take away the predators, and then some other undesirable animals end up multiplying, and the next thing the plants are disappearing altogether and so forth and so on. You've upset the ecological balance. Now says Keller, in the same way, if we avoid difficult or harsh doctrines within the historic Christian faith, we may find to our surprise that we have gutted pleasant and cherished beliefs also.

In the end, the loss of the doctrines of hell and judgment and the holiness of God will do irreparable damage to our deepest comforts and particularly our understanding of God's grace and love. In other words, what he's saying is this: if you reject the doctrine of the wrath of God, don't expect ever to have very deep experience of his love. You'll live at the level of sentimentality, and sentimentality will not bring you to the place of feeling with awe that God truly loves you.

But friend, when you grasp the truth in the scripture about the divine wrath, then in the light of the cross you will begin to see the awesome extent of the divine love. When your eyes are opened to what was happening at the cross, you will begin to see how this was an outpouring of the love of God, inexplicable outpouring of the love of God, and it was for you. This truth of the divine wrath tells you just what you have been saved from, and it tells you just what it took for you to be saved.

When you view the divine wrath being poured out on the divine person at the cross, God absorbing the wrath of God, you will know that God loves you. You will begin to say with awe and with trembling, "The Son of God endured this for me. Oh, I am surely loved." Do you see that? Grasp this and your soul will begin to sing, "Love so amazing, so divine, shall have my soul and my life and my all."

Now folks, this is of huge importance. Maybe you have thought that God's wrath shows how much God hates you. Can you begin to look at it through the cross? And even begin to see that it shows how much God loves you? Maybe this is the truth that has caused you to hate God and fight against him and to rebel against him. Could it be that coming to the cross and looking at this through the cross, this could be the very place where you come to love God because for the first time you see the extent of his love for you? So I urge you to use this truth. Don't jettison it. Use this truth to deepen your own knowledge, sense of the love of God for you in Jesus Christ poured out at the cross.

Second application for all of us together, it's for the church, for our church, for every church. And it's simply this: please use this truth and let us keep this front and center in everything that lies ahead in our ministry in the coming years. Use this truth to focus our mission on the gospel. And here's the point, very simply: if there was no hell, the best thing we could do as a church is to make the world a better place. But if you believe what the Bible says here, there is no comfort in this world that can soften the awful reality of divine wrath in the next.

Ajith Fernando put it so powerfully in his message from this pulpit last week. He said lostness is the greatest tragedy in the world today. And here's why: because all other tragedies are temporal, but lostness is an eternal tragedy. That's why it's unlike anything else. It's in a different category. It's the biggest problem. John Piper puts it another way, making the same point: as Christians, he says, we are concerned to alleviate all human suffering and especially eternal suffering. Especially eternal suffering.

There are many needs in the world, but no human being alive today has a greater need than to find deliverance from the divine wrath through the divine love that is poured out by Jesus Christ at the cross. Friends, that is the gospel. And our mission is to bring the gospel to the world. So use this truth, use this truth so that we will always focus our mission on the gospel.

And here's the very last thing, and I want to speak now to someone who may not yet have made a closed commitment to Jesus Christ. You've not yet sealed faith in him, you're not yet committed as a follower of Jesus Christ. And this is what I want to say to you in the last moment in this message today: use this truth. Use this truth to overcome all the barriers that keep you from Jesus Christ.

There are so many barriers. There are so many reasons that you could put up even today as to why you should not come to Jesus Christ, why you would not become a follower of Jesus Christ, why you would hold back, why you would delay a decision. There are always a hundred reasons that a person could come up with, but I urge you, in the light of this truth, I urge you to begin a journey of faith and repentance with Jesus Christ today. And I urge you that to do this for these two reasons: first because of your need. Sin puts us all in a desperate position before God. You are in that position if you have not yet closed with Jesus Christ. Like the rest, you are a child of wrath. How are you going to endure this eternal wrath? How are you going to endure it?

And I urge you to come to Jesus Christ today, not only because of your need, but I urge you to come to Jesus Christ today because of the extent of his love. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. And in the preaching of the gospel, God himself reaches out to you and invites you into all the blessings that can be yours in Jesus Christ today. And as you think about what he endured in order to bring salvation to sinners that could be yours right now, how can you possibly resist love like this? Where else in the world do you ever think you will ever see love like this? How can you walk away from love like this today? So I urge you then to use this truth to overcome all the barriers that you have been putting up that hold you back from coming to faith in Jesus Christ and beginning that journey of faith and repentance with him today.

Steve Hiller: You're listening to Open the Bible with Pastor Colin Smith and Colin, today's message really so practical, but in some ways it kind of seems counter-intuitive. So how is it that grasping the wrath of God can actually lead us further into his love?

Colin Smith: Of course there are a lot of folks in the Christian world who've actually rejected the doctrine of God's wrath. They've said that's an unworthy kind of a concept and it's going to be a much more a loving view of God if we just think that he's kind and forgiving and so forth and so on. And here's the tragedy: you jettison the truth of the wrath of God and you end up with a diminished view of his love.

The amazing thing about his love is that while we were still sinners Christ died for us. The amazing thing is that when he went on the cross he endured that wrath in order to redeem me. The more clearly we see the extent of what he endured, the more evident it's going to become to us of the extent of his love. That is amazing love. And that's a different kind of a place from being say, "Oh, God loves me. Yeah, of course that's cool. I'm a great guy. Why wouldn't he?" No, here's the love of God: Christ bore the wrath of the Father, divine justice, in order that mercy might reach out to a sinner like me. That's a love that would captivate a life of following Jesus.

Steve Hiller: And I hope that you have experienced that love. But maybe you never have. You're listening to today's program and you realize that you don't know that kind of love, but you'd like to. We would love to introduce you to Jesus, to let you know how you can begin that personal relationship with him. To talk with one of our staff members about how you can know that love of God yourself, I want you to give us a call. Our number is 1-877-OPEN-365. That's 1-877-673-6365. Or you can connect with us at our website, openthebible.org. Well, thanks for listening today and I hope you'll join us next time. This program is a listener-supported production of Open the Bible.

Colin Smith: At Open the Bible, we're grateful for like-minded organizations committed to sharing the gospel around the world. And to that end, I'd like to commend the work of Global Fingerprints. You know, in the book of James, God calls us to help orphans in their distress. That's a clear command, but it's not always clear how we should obey it. And this is where Global Fingerprints comes in. Through Global Fingerprints, you can sponsor a vulnerable child to help meet their physical needs and ensure they hear the gospel of Jesus Christ. I want to commend Global Fingerprints to you. They're focused on equipping the local church to care for children, and where there is no church, they help to plant one. If you'd like to help a vulnerable child, you can find more information on Global Fingerprints at our website openthebible.org/gf. That's openthebible.org/gf.