The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): We all experience anger. It's part of being human. But have you ever wondered what it's like when God becomes angry? Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, featuring the Bible teaching of Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. Today we're continuing our series on the book of Romans called The Power of Salvation. We've been exploring the impact and importance of the phrase justification by faith alone. Today we'll look at what happens when God becomes angry and how that anger is satisfied. The answer can be found by studying Romans 1:18.

Let's turn there now and see if the God we serve really is an angry God.

Dr. James Boice: Our subject today is the angry God and our text is Romans 1:18. The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven. I can't think of the last time I heard a message on the wrath of God. Matter of fact, I can't think of any time I've ever heard a message on the wrath of God. And when I think back in history, the only message I can even recall that is on it is that famous sermon of Jonathan Edwards entitled Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, for which he, the Puritans, and all evangelical Christianity are castigated by the modern mind.

Oh, how far we have fallen. How deficient is evangelical preaching in our time. Evangelical preaching in our time is deficient in lots of ways, but certainly in no way more than in its neglect of this theme, this great biblical theme, this point with which the Apostle Paul begins his exposition of the gospel and this classic statement of the gospel in the New Testament, the book of Romans. To judge the most preaching today, you would think that the wrath of God is an embarrassment or a mistake or something that thinking Christian people should at least dispense with.

Now, instead, we've developed other kinds of preaching. This is the point with which Paul starts, but when we present the gospel today from the pulpit or in personal conversation with other people, it's generally the case that we follow other patterns than a biblical one. Quite common today, it's taught in the seminaries, it's recommended is that you're to begin sermons or a presentation of the gospel by focusing on what are termed the felt needs of people. All kinds of felt needs. It means a lack or longing that people are willing to acknowledge. Sometimes it's loneliness, frustration, sin they're unable to overcome, problems at work, in relationships, all sorts of things like that.

And so the argument goes, well, you begin by talking about felt needs and thus establish a point of contact. And when you have a point of contact, then you can go on to present Christianity. Well, I'm not entirely against that, of course, but there is a great danger in it. When we talk about felt needs, the danger is that the needs themselves are a camouflage often for what the real need is. The real need we have is for a relationship with God. And it's broken by our sin. And when we talk about felt needs, loneliness, frustration, whatever that may be, that's a way often of failing to confront the real thing.

And sometimes what we really want when we talk about felt needs is to be made to feel good. I think of a classic example of a felt need in the New Testament. Paul is writing to Timothy. And he says in the last days, there will be false teachers and people will not endure sound doctrine, but rather, says Paul, will heap up to themselves teachers who tell them what they want to hear, having itching ears. Now, itching ears is a felt need. People think there are certain things they need to hear. And yet Paul's point as he writes to Timothy is that Timothy shouldn't cater to that.

And it's quite evident that Paul didn't do that himself. Now, sometimes when we talk about the gospel today, we talk about it in terms of the promises of God. We hold out the promises as it were like a carrot saying that all of this you can have if only you will come and believe in Jesus. In other words, we present Christianity as a way to get something, get something valuable. Sometimes we talk about the gospel in terms of our experience. We speak about that and we say I've had a marvelous experience and you can have this experience too if only you will come to Jesus.

Well, as I say, there's a place for those things. Paul certainly told his conversion experience on occasion, but the point I'm making is that when he begins to talk about the gospel as he does here in this great model book of Romans, he doesn't say in writing to these Christians in the capital of the Roman Empire, I know you're leading defeated lives and I have a secret that's going to help you obtain victory. He doesn't say I had a great experience in Palestine a number of years ago and I want to come to Rome to tell you about my experience.

So he talks about the gospel. And in order to pave the way for the gospel, he talks about the wrath of God. In other words, you see Paul was not man-centered. That's what we are. Paul was God-centered. He knew that the problem is our relationship to God, becoming righteous before God. He knew that we aren't righteous before God. And he knew that people don't even begin to think about these things or be concerned about them until they understand how desperate the situation is. Not only that they can't help themselves, that's true enough. Many people will acknowledge that and they're glad to have human help.

But worse than that, they're under God's condemnation. His wrath hangs over them. That wrath is already working its way out in their lives and will one day lead to their eternal condemnation and separated from God unless they find salvation through the cross of Jesus Christ. Now, I recognize that we do have a problem in our time and I suppose people have always had a problem with this idea. The problem, of course, is that we think in human terms and we define experience humanly. And so we don't understand the divine terms. And whenever you come across a word like this, wrath, wrath of God, we think of it naturally, not as the Bible thinks of it, but something like capricious human anger or malice.

And because we're uneasy with that sort of thing and don't want to attribute it to God, we avoid the concept entirely. That's not what the biblical writers did. The Old Testament contains more than 20 words that are used about God's wrath. And then there's a whole other set of words that are used for human anger. There are 20 words to describe the wrath of God in Hebrew and 600 key passages. Moreover, these passages are not just incidental sayings as if here and there throughout the Old Testament, particularly gloomy redactor through statements about the wrath of God in there.

They're not like that at all. They are bound up with the most important parts of the Old Testament historical revelation. Let me give you two examples. The key event in the early history of Israel was the meeting with God at Mount Sinai when God gave the law. You find it first in the 20th chapter of Exodus. And it's immediately after that in the 22nd chapter of Exodus, two chapters later, that we meet the concept of the wrath of God in scripture for the very first time. God is speaking. He's speaking about mistreatment of widows and orphans of all things.

And here's the way God speaks. Do not take advantage of a widow or an orphan. If you do and they cry out to me, I will certainly hear their cry. My wrath will be aroused and I will kill you with the sword. Your wives will become widows and your children fatherless. 10 chapters later in Exodus 32, we find the second example of the wrath of God. This is the great chapter. We 're going to come back to it at the end of the study in which God has been giving the law on Mount Sinai and down in the valley, the people have been breaking the law.

They made golden calf and began to fall down and worship it. And God interrupted the giving of the law. He talked to Moses. He disclosed his intention of destroying the people. And this is what he says. Now, leave me alone so that my wrath may burn against them and I may destroy them. And Moses begins to plead for the people. And he says this, why should your anger burn against your people whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and by a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say it was with evil intent that he brought them out to kill them in the mountains and to wipe them off the face of the earth?

Turn from your fierce anger, relent, and do not bring disaster on your people. So it's very important to reflect on the approach Moses takes. Moses does not say as many of our contemporary theologians would say, wrath is an unworthy aspect of your character. You can't be a great loving God and be a God of wrath at the same time. Moses knew better than that. He knew that a God without wrath is a crippled God. God must be wrath against sin. And Moses did not say oh, don't be so angry with your people. After all, they're innocent or they've just made a mistake.

He knew perfectly well they weren't innocent. He knew this wasn't a mistake. This was the outbreak of the sin of the heart of men and women against the majesty and righteousness of God. Instead, he pleads as he could. It was the only argument he had. He said it's not for their sake. They deserve it. But it's for your sake, oh Lord, because you brought these people out of Egypt and if you wipe them off the face of the earth as of course you have every right to do, the Egyptians will say their God is essentially an evil God.

He brought them out of Egypt simply to destroy them. When we come to the New Testament, we don't find the same multiplication of words. The Greek language is not as rich as Hebrew at this point, but it contains two words for wrath. One is thumos. It comes from a word root meaning to rush along and it would be translated to rush along fiercely, to be in a heat of violence, to breathe violently. We can perhaps capture the idea by the phrase a panting rage. That's what thumos describes. But then there's another word and this other word is orge.

And it's quite different. It doesn't describe something that is suddenly flaring out in violence, but it's a quiet word. It describes the slow building of anger against that which is evil. This word occurs most commonly in the New Testament. As a matter of fact, as Leon Morris observes in his study of these words in scripture in his book The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, the word thumos is confined almost entirely to the book of Revelation, which describes the final outpouring of God's wrath upon the ungodly. Only one instance of that word elsewhere in the New Testament.

But in every other place the word is orge. And he makes this conclusion. The biblical writers habitually use for the divine wrath a word which denotes not so much a sudden flaring up of passion which is soon over as a strong and settled opposition to all that is evil arising out of God's very nature. John Murray has a classic definition of wrath. Wrath is the holy revulsion of God's being against that which is the contradiction of his holiness. Now, it's that idea, orge, the slow building up of wrath that Paul uses in the book of Romans.

And there are 10 uses of this word in Romans. And the idea is seen most clearly in the second chapter in the fifth verse where Paul writes, because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are building up, storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God's wrath when his righteous judgment will be revealed. You see the point Paul is saying, one day all of this is going to come pouring out in fury against the ungodly. But even now that wrath is building up. God is not indifferent to the sins of men and women.

But he says something else too, something that is very significant. And we're going to come to again as we begin to look in greater depth at this second half of Romans 1. You notice as you read verse 18 that the verb there, the verb reveal is given to us not in the future tense as if it were describing wrath yet to come, but in the present tense is being revealed. Paul's statement is that the wrath of God is being revealed. That is even now. Oh yes, there's to be a final judgment. He doesn't deny that at all.

That will come, but but even now there are evidences of the wrath of God against sinful humanity. You say, well, how is that? Where do we see that wrath of God? Theologians talk about it in different ways. Charles Hodge speaks of three things, the actual punishment of sin, the inherent tendency of moral evil to produce misery, the voice of conscience. Martin Lloyd Jones lists conscience, disease and illness, the state of creation, the universality of death, history, the cross, and the resurrection. All as evidences of the wrath of God. And Robert Haldane in his commentary has a long section that I won't read and which he begins to detail survey all the evidences of the outpouring of the wrath of God down through human history.

Now, all of those things are true, but in my opinion, as we read this text and take it in the context of Romans 1, what Paul has in mind is something much more specific. You know the second half of this chapter. You know what Paul says there is that because men and women would not have God, because men and women willfully rejected and suppressed the knowledge of God, turning to go their own way, God in a judicial sense gave them up to the consequences of their own disobedience. And being given up to the consequences of their disobedience, they entered upon a downhill course in which their moral and spiritual natures became increasingly depraved until in the end they find themselves so inverting moral values that they call that which is good evil and that which is evil good.

You see he's saying, you have the evidence of the wrath of God in your very being when you run away from him. Some years ago in California, a friend of mine, Dr. Ralph Keiper, was witnessing with some young people on a beach and they were talking to a hippie, a man who had lived what we would call the best a liberated lifestyle. And they were trying to talk to him about the gospel. He wasn't sure there even was a God. And if there was a God, he certainly didn't reveal himself in any meaningful way, at least of all in the Bible.

But this man was not unperceptive. And so Keiper said, well, let me show you something. And he turned to Romans 1 and he had the man read the description of the human race in the second half of that chapter. And when he had read it, this hippie said to Ralph, I think I understand what you're getting at. You're saying that I myself am the verifying data of this revelation. And he had it exactly right, you see. That's what Paul is talking about. When we turn from God and go our own way, we think we're going to find happiness.

We think things are going to go well. We even express it that way. Even when we know the law of God and we want to do something else, we say, but surely God wants me to be happy. And in a sense he does, but in his way. And when we go our way, we don't find happiness. We find the contrary. We find misery. And so we have demonstrated in our very makeup the truth that the wrath of God is revealed against as Paul says, all the godlessness and wickedness of men and women. But the problem, you see, is how we escape from that just condemnation.

And here I go back to the story I mentioned earlier, Exodus 32. Moses was on the mountain receiving the law of God. And while he was receiving it, the people were in the valley breaking the very laws Moses was receiving. They were committing adultery and adultery and lying and cheating and dishonoring their father and their o mother and no doubt breaking all the other laws of the Decalogue. And here was God on the mountain, most ironic, you see, saying, I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not have any God before me. Thou shalt not make unto the any image of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth, for I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations of them that hate me and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments.

And while God was giving that, the people were breaking all the laws. Now, God interrupted the giving of the law, revealed to Moses what was happening and they had the exchange that I read earlier. And then Moses was sent back down the mountain to deal with the situation as best he knew how. Because you see, even on a human level, apart from the grace of God, sin has to be dealt with. And Moses was the magistrate. It was his responsibility. And so he began. First of all, he rebuked Aaron. Aaron was appointed by the Lord, ordained by the Lord and answered to him.

He was very cautious in the way he handled Aaron, but he rebuked him publicly. And then he called for any among Israel who were still loyal to the God of Israel. And the tribe of Levi responded. When they came forward, Moses said, now take your swords and go into the camp and kill all the ringleaders. And so they did. The text says that they killed 3,000 men that day. Sounds like a lot, but the percentage wasn't high. 600,000 men came out of Egypt according to the text. And of course there were the women and the children, probably 2 million in all.

But the ringleaders were killed. And then Moses recalled the people by an act of reconsecration. And then he destroyed the golden calf. He grounded up and mixed it with water. He made the people drink it. And so as far as was possible to Moses, the work was done. He had reestablished order and righteousness at least temporarily. But you see the problem was this. Moses didn't merely stand in a special relationship to the people as their leader. He also stood in a special relationship to God as their representative. And God still waited in wrath upon the mountain.

What was he to do? For theologians who operate in the seminaries or the colleges today, the wrath of God might be an interesting theological speculation. And it wasn't that for Moses. Moses was no armchair theologian. He had to go back up that mountain. He had to meet with God and he knew something of what God was like. He had received something of the law. All of the law wasn't given yet, but he had received enough of it to know the horror of sin and the jealous nature of the great holy God of righteousness. What was he to do?

He had done what he could humanly speaking, but how can he possibly think that that would satisfy the justice of God? So the night passed, morning came, the morning in which he was to reascend the mountain. And during the night, Moses had been thinking. An idea had come to him which just might be a way out of the difficulty. He recalled the sacrifices that had been performed by the patriarchs and the rights of the Passover that had just been instituted. God had indicated had he not and those sacrifices and rights that under certain circumstances a substitute could die for the sinner.

The wrath of God would not be denied. It was an entity. It must be faced, but it could be poured out upon the substitute rather than the one who deserved it. And so with that idea in mind, Moses began to reascend the mountain. Now, it must have been in great anguish because when he finally comes to stand before God, the Hebrew text is uneven as he speaks and it even breaks off at one point without an ending because he was offering something that was really tremendous. Exodus 32 verses 31 and 32. Moses went back to the Lord and he said, oh, what a great sin these people have committed.

They have made themselves gods of gold. But now please forgive their sin. And then that's the point at which it breaks off because Moses can't understand how God can do it. How can the just God of the universe simply forget about the transgression? Why he can't the God of all the universe must do rights and must be judged. Forgive their sin if you can is what he's saying, but I sure don't know how. And then there's a pause and this, but if not, then blot me out of the book you have written. That's tremendous, you see.

Moses is saying that he's willing to be the substitute. He's willing to be sent to hell if it could mean the salvation of the people whom he loves. Now, earlier God and Moses had an exchange. God when he said he was going to pour out his wrath upon the people said, let me destroy them and then I'll begin again. I'll make a new Jewish nation beginning with you. You'll become the new Abraham. And Moses had declined rightly. Now, he declines again, you see, but in a even stronger way. Earlier God had said to Moses, I'll destroy them, but I'll save you.

And now Moses says by contrast, rather save them and destroy me. And yet Moses didn't understand that the thing he was asking for couldn't be done. And the reason is that he was not innocent. He was himself a sinner. He too needed a savior. He couldn't give his life for the people. But there's one who could and did, Jesus Christ the righteous. That's why Paul when he comes to write to the Christians in Galatia says in the fourth chapter verses four and five, but when the time was fully come, God said his own son born of a woman made under the law to redeem those who are under the law that we might receive the adoption as sons.

That's what Jesus did. Jesus was able to die for us because being sinless, he had no sin for which he himself had to die. He could die for others. And because being God, the value of his death was infinite. We don't properly understand the gospel by sneaking into it from the perspective of our imagined needs. We understand it when we know because God reveals these things to us that we stand under his wrath. We are not creatures of his favor. We are destined to die and perish unless God does something to save us. And then when we understand that to realize that that is what he has done in Jesus and to hide in him.

Let us pray. Oh our Father, we confess because we are sinful and because sin affects our thinking as it does every other aspect of our being that we prefer to think of the gospel in more manageable, more human terms. And so we water it down. We fail to appreciate it or we neglect to respond. And yet here you tell it to us as it is. Things are not good, you say. We are children of wrath. We are destined to perish. And the only way to escape that is by the death of Jesus Christ who died in our place.

Our Father, do speak to many through these truths in this hour. And despite the weakness of our presentation or reception, do what is necessary to bring forth life or before there has only been death and to turn aside wrath that those who come to you through faith in Jesus Christ might know the fullness and abundance of your eternal love. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen and amen.

Guest (Male): You have been listening to the Bible Study Hour, a ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, featuring the Bible teaching of Dr. James Montgomery Boice. We appreciate your ongoing support of this broadcast ministry. The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals exists to promote a biblical understanding and worldview. Drawing upon the insight and wisdom of Reformation theologians from decades, even centuries gone by, we seek to provide contemporary Christian teaching that will equip believers to understand and meet the challenges and opportunities of our time and place. The Alliance also produces the radio broadcasts Every Last Word, featuring the teaching of Dr.

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