But I ask you to turn your Bibles or to listen as I read from Romans chapter one. And today we're only looking at one verse, and that is verse 18. I think I'll read verses 16 and 17 as well, which is what we looked at last week, so you'll get a little bit of the context. Romans one and verse 16. For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes. For the Jew first and also for the Greek, for in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith as it is written, the just shall live by faith. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. This is the word of the living God. Let us pray. Father, we thank you that you have spoken. Lord, we don't always listen well when you speak. Give us ears to hear today. May we hear what you're speaking through this word to each of us individually and as a congregation. We ask it in Jesus' name, amen. Romans 118 gives us a glimpse into one of the most neglected attributes of God, and it's easy to see why that is the case. This morning we examined the dreadful attribute of the wrath of God. You may ask what good it would do to spend time dwelling on the anger, the fury, the wrath of God. Wouldn't that be depressing when we come away from this sermon with heavy hearts, strained of all the joy of the Lord? Well, it actually depends on where you are with the Lord. And it depends on how we respond to this preaching about this particular attribute. I'll just share a little bit of my own personal experience. I don't always like to talk about myself, but Friday morning I was Preparing this message or about to begin preparing it and I thought I need to come Into the sanctuary and pray. It's a wonderful thing privilege. I have to do just walk through those doors and come in here and and Spend time with God And as soon as I started praying, a flood of tears started flowing from my eyes and I was caught up in this profound awareness in that moment of how deserving I was of the wrath of God. But at the same time, I had this deep outpouring of gratitude to the Lord because I knew he had saved me from his wrath. He had rescued me. from that wrath. And I praised and thanked God that Jesus bore the wrath of God in my place. That I would, for all eternity, I would not suffer that wrath, but would indeed glorify and enjoy the Lord forever. It was just a few minutes of time, but it was very impactful in my life. And I have no way of knowing, of course, where you stand with the Lord this morning or how you might respond to this message, the only thing I can do is present the truth and pray that God will impact your life through it in whatever way he chooses and that your soul would be gripped by this truth. as I was, and I would suggest three responses at the outset. Really, these are applications that we would normally make at the end of the sermon. I will probably stress them again at the end, along with a few others. But the first response that would be proper is to repent as a lost sinner and receive Jesus Christ. as your Savior and Lord. If the wrath of God is real and the wrath of God is for all eternity on those who don't believe in today, it's a day of salvation for you if you don't know Him. Secondly, repent if you're a wayward saint and return to the Lord today as your first love in light of the wrath of God. And then last, if you know the Lord, rejoice with trembling, as the psalmist said, and consider what the Lord has done for you one who was deserving of his wrath. Well, there, again, there are other applications we could make, and we'll do more of those at the end. But in Romans 1, 16, we learn Paul said, I'm not ashamed of the gospel. And he said, because it was the power of God for everyone to believe. And, and then in verse 17, he says that in the gospel is revealed, uh, righteous, the righteousness of God, the righteousness of God is revealed. And now he says that the wrath of God is revealed. And remember, the righteousness of God that he refers to in verse 17 is not the attribute of God's righteousness, but it's the gift of his righteousness. In fact, the righteousness of Christ that's imputed to us through faith alone. But the wrath of God is one of his attributes, and it is his attribute that's being talked about here. And so Romans 16 and 17 lays out the main theme of the book, the righteousness of God that's received by faith alone, justification by faith alone. So why does Paul mention the gospel, the good news, and then all of a sudden go right to the bad news? Well, because he lays out the theme first and now he's starting over, if you will, to show the development of this theme, how we get there and to possess this righteousness and what difference it makes for our lives. That's what the book of Romans is about. And so in a real sense, verse 18 is the beginning of the book. The first part was the introduction through verse 17. And so why does he mention the gospel and then start talking about wrath? Well, because we cannot rightly understand the gospel until we first know something about God's wrath. See, the righteousness of God in Christ meets the need of those who by nature are children of wrath, as Paul says in Ephesians. Dr. Sproul tells the story of a time when he was teaching a theology class at Temple University. It would have been an interesting class, I'm sure, but it was back in the 60s. And he had just finished a quiet and peaceful lunch in the faculty cafeteria. And so as he's heading back to class, he's walking rather briskly. to make sure he wouldn't be late, and he said, I was alone, I was minding my business, and suddenly, apparently, out of nowhere, a gentleman stepped in front of me, blocked my path, and looked me in the eye and asked directly, are you saved? And he said, I wasn't quite sure how to respond to this intrusion. And he said, saved from what? And the man began to to stammer and stutter a little bit. And he wasn't sure how to respond. And the man said something like, well, you know what I mean. Do you know Jesus? And so the gentleman tried to share the gospel with Dr. Sproul. And Dr. Sproul said in his book, he said, I was thankful that someone cared about my soul, cared enough to talk to me. But the point of the story is that Until we can answer that question, saved from what? We don't really know what the gospel is talking about. Saved from what? No point in talking about salvation unless we know the answer to that question. Well, the biblical word saved is the idea of being rescued, delivered from danger and being brought to a place of safety. And in the case of sinful man, the danger that we face, the greatest danger we face is the wrath of God, the judgment of God, the vengeance of God against our sin. In short, we need to be saved from God. We need to be saved by God, but we need to be saved from God. It's been said that the glory of the gospel is that the one from whom we need to be saved is the very one who saves us. Do you understand? Do we understand and appreciate the gospel? Dr. Alan Ross said, before people can fully appreciate the gospel, they must understand the depths from which sinners have been rescued. Well, that's what Paul is going to do for us through chapter three, is to help us understand the depths of sin. But today the focus on wrath. What exactly is the wrath of God? The Greek word is orge. Orge, and it means anger, wrath. indignation and the punishment that's carried out from this anger. God's wrath, said John Murray, is the holy revulsion of God's being against that which is the contradiction of his holiness. Holy revulsion of God against what is the contradiction of his holiness. And God's wrath and anger are not like man's. There's no taint of sin in God's anger. It's holy anger. It's pure. It's perfect. His anger is not fitful. It's not out of control. God doesn't lose his temper. When God exercises his wrath, he's in full control, and he is responding rightly to that which is evil and unrighteous. It's not irrational. It is holy. It is perfect. Well, God's anger can be seen as an aspect of his goodness. And the thing is, is that we know that there's injustice in the world. There's injustice in our own lives. If there was not a God of wrath who punished sin and injustice, then he would be unjust. He wouldn't be good. But because he's good, he punishes sin and evil. It's the right thing to do. And we realize that on a human level, that those who are angry at injustice and do something about it are doing the right thing. When we stand against moral wickedness, it's seen as a positive trait. And the same is certainly true in God. God's wrath is the wrath of one who is perfectly loving, perfectly good. The Bible is full of language that describes very vivid language that describes the wrath of God. The prophet Nahum. I can't remember the last time I've read the prophet Nahum. I'm reading through the Bible this year. I haven't gotten to Nahum, but there's a lot of justice and vengeance there. And Nahum wrote in the very second verse of the book, the Lord is a jealous and avenging God. The Lord is avenging and wrathful. The Lord takes vengeance on his adversaries and keeps wrath for his enemies. That's who God is. The Bible is full of not only vivid language concerning the wrath of God, but examples of God's wrath. In the Old Testament, the first example we see is when Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden in Genesis 3, the Garden of Eden. And then this angel with the flaming sword is standing to guard to keep them from coming back. And then we move on to Genesis chapter 6 through 9. God's judged the world by sending the flood to destroy every living person and every animal that was not on the ark. Only eight people and the animals that were on the ark survived or were saved. In Genesis 19, we read that God in wrath rained fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah killing everyone in those cities except Lot and his family who were saved. Well, and then there was Lot's wife who proved that she really wasn't a woman of faith and was turned into a pillar of salt. But the book of Jude we read of Sodom and Gomorrah who quote, having given themselves over to sexual immorality and gone after strange flesh are set forth as an example suffering the vengeance of eternal fire. Now, we could go on in the Old Testament with examples of the wrath of God, but what about the New Testament? Liberal scholars like to say, well, God in the Old Testament was wrathful and vengeful, but he's changed somehow in the New Testament, and Jesus is the meek and mild Savior, and God is not as vengeful as he used to be somehow. But though Jesus was meek and mild, He did some very unmeek and mild things. He came into the temple, he overturned the money changers' tables, and he drove them out with a cork, with a whip. And Jesus taught, of course, a lot about the Day of Judgment and the coming wrath of God. In Matthew chapter 10, Jesus said it would be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Day of Judgment than for the various cities who were at that time rejecting the gospel message. So the wrath of God is not merely taught in scripture all throughout. A.W. Pink says that it's prominent. It's a prominent theme. If you read the Bible and you miss God's wrath there, you have missed a very, very prominent part of it. And so just look up in a concordance the references to anger, fury, and wrath of God, and you will see that there's far more references to these things than even the love, mercy, and tenderness of God, though both are included, of course. We see in the New Testament God's wrath meted out in Acts chapter 5, the sudden death of Ananias and Sapphira who lied to the Holy Spirit. They were killed by God himself on the spot. Instant death. And God's wrath, you see, in Romans 1.18 it says that God's wrath is revealed. That's the present tense, not will be revealed. It is being revealed. against sinners. It was being revealed in that very day, and it's being revealed still today. James Montgomery Boyce said, in the present tense, this verse seems to refer to a continuing disclosure of the wrath of God against wickedness at all periods of history and in all places. So don't think that God's wrath is something for you to worry about down the road, in the future. It's taking place now. And you may be subject to it. I may be subject to it. We need to consider these things. So as Paul, he'll talk about in the rest of Romans 1, the punishments and the outworkings of God's wrath and the effects of sin. We see it today in the progressive moral decline of our culture into a virtual cesspool of sin. And in verse 18, he says, this wrath is revealed against two things, all ungodliness and secondly, unrighteousness of men. And these two words are similar, but they're not the same. Ungodliness has to do with our attitudes toward God himself. The ungodly person is the person who does not have God in his thoughts, who does not live life in light, of God. He doesn't orient his life toward God. He doesn't worship God. The unrighteous person, unrighteousness, on the other hand, has to do with our behavior toward our fellow human beings, toward others. The ungodly person, on the one hand, is irreverent, refuses to worship God, but the unrighteous man is disobedient and does not obey God, especially those commandments regarding the second table of the law, the second half of the Ten Commandments. So ungodliness violates the first half of the Ten Commandments, and unrighteousness the second. And you see the order here is significant. Man first abandons his religious devotion to God, the vertical dimension, and that affects everything horizontally in relations with others. In simple terms, if you turn away, if we turn away from the worship of God, we will end up living wicked lives. So this ungodliness, this unrighteousness in mankind, it's in the face of this truth that we'll learn more about as we go along in this chapter. And that is that the truth is that each and every human being knows by creation and in their conscience that there is a God and that this God is a God of justice. and even of judgment. These are things people know innately and as I said by creation and by conscience. So when, and it says that this wrath is revealed against the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth. So they're not, sinners are not merely violating the truth and disbelieving it, there's an intentional rejection and suppression of the truth. Now a person who is suppressing the truth in their minds and in their hearts is a person who does not want to hear the truth. And that's why people get upset when we try to talk to them about sin and God's judgment. They've been suppressing the truth. And so when someone comes along to tell them that truth, then we shouldn't think it's strange that one who has already rejected the truth and suppressed it is not going to be happy when they hear it. Well, God's wrath is being revealed. It has been revealed in the past, as we've seen. It's being revealed day by day. But the culmination, the consummation of the manifestation of God's wrath is going to be revealed at the return of Jesus Christ in his second coming. In 2 Thessalonians, the Bible says, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, he will take vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. These shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power. So the question is, have you obeyed the gospel? Do you know God? Have you turned away from sin and trusted in Jesus Christ for the salvation of your soul? Are you ready for the day of wrath? In Revelation six, we read this and the kings of the earth and the great men, the rich, the commanders, the mighty men. Every slave and every free man hid themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains and said to the mountains and rocks, fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the lamb. The great day of his wrath has come and who is able to stand. Did you hear that phrase? It's almost an oxymoron, isn't it? The wrath of the lamb. Why didn't he say the wrath of the lion? You know, Jesus is called the lion of the tribe of Judah. The wrath of the lamb, the one who took the wrath of God upon himself as he died as the lamb of God on the cross is the one who in the end will pour out his wrath on the unrepentant and the unbelieving. Christ, we can give thanks that he stood in our place and when he died He suffered God's wrath, the punishment that we deserve. But when he comes back to this wicked world, it's not to save us. It's not to die on the cross again. It's to judge the world. It will be the great day of his wrath. And who is able to stand in that day? No one in their own righteousness. Only those who have turned to Christ, the wrath bearer, the sin bearer, to trust in his righteousness. who are covered by His grace and righteousness. He's the only safe refuge for sinners condemned under God's wrath. He's the only shield that will protect you from the coming wrath. He's coming to judge the world, and on that day you will face Him as judge. or as your Savior. Yes, we all stand before the judgment seat of Christ, but for some, we'll be standing before the one who has saved us and loved us with an everlasting love. So if you want to face him as your Savior, you need to know him now. It'll be too late on that day. Now as we close, what are some of the implications of God's wrath, some of the applications that we can make? Well, the first three I've already mentioned. If you don't know the Lord, today is the day to turn from your sins, to get right with God before it's too late. Repent and receive Jesus Christ. And then secondly, if you do know Christ and you have drifted from him, you have gone away from him, Then repent as a wayward saint and return to the Lord Jesus Christ as your first love. And then third, as I mentioned in the beginning, rejoice with trembling. That's a phrase from the Psalms. Rejoice with trembling as you consider the wrath of God and what the Lord has done for you in Christ. Give praise and thanks to the Lamb of God, who has washed your sins and taken your guilt away, and whose wrath in the end you will not have to endure. Spend time thanking God for the wrath that is just and for the wrath that has been removed. Fourth, the doctrine of the wrath of God is an incentive for us to live a holy life. Even though you and I will not have to endure the wrath of God in eternity, the Bible says, therefore, since all these things will be dissolved, this is 2 Peter, What manner of persons ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness, looking for and hastening the coming day of God, because of which the heavens will be dissolved, being on fire, and the elements will melt with fervent heat? So let the thought of God's coming wrath motivate us to holy living. Fifth, the Bible's teaching about the wrath of God should teach us not to worry, not to fret about those who are evil and doing wicked things in our day. People may appear to be getting away with their sin and their wickedness, but they are under the wrath of God and they will be under that wrath for all eternity, they will get what they deserve. They will not get away with their sin. And then last, the knowledge of God's wrath should motivate us to tell others about that wrath and about the only one who can deliver them from it. In 2 Corinthians 5, Paul wrote, therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade men. Knowing the terror of the Lord, knowing the wrath of God, the coming wrath of God, the present wrath of God. We persuade men, we persuade them to turn to Jesus Christ and receive him. As we close, I want to give you two verses from the Gospel of John to take with you, to think about, and then to share with others. One is the most familiar verse in the Bible, John 3.16. The other is John 3.36. John 3.16. It doesn't mention the word wrath, but it's implied, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him should not perish under the wrath of God, but have each everlasting life. There's good news there, but it's good news only for those who believe. Those who do not believe the gospel will perish, and that's what John 3, 36 says. He who believes in the Son has everlasting life. And he who does not believe in the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him. The most incredible and awful thing to imagine. is that the wrath of God would abide on a human being for eternity. Let us pray. Lord God, we humbly bow before you. We acknowledge how deserving we are of your holy and perfect wrath. You created this world and it was all good. You created man, male and female in your own image, and you said it was good, but something changed. Sin entered the world, and because of sin, wrath, Lord, entered the world. And I pray, Lord, that those who have heard this message, that don't know Jesus Christ, and are not certain that they have Christ dwelling in their hearts by faith, I pray that today they would turn from sin, receive Jesus Christ, not only as their Savior, but as their Lord, and give the full reign of their hearts, their souls, for time and eternity over to Him. And for the rest of us, Lord, May your wrath be what it should be to us, a motivator to live the kind of life that we ought to live before you. With thanksgiving and praise for a great savior who suffered and died, who absorbed the wrath of God and covers us and shields us from it. In his name I pray, amen.