will you turn with me to Romans chapter 1 and we're going to read from verse 16 towards the end of this first chapter of the book of Romans this morning Romans 1 from verse 16 I am not ashamed of the gospel because it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes first for the Jew and then for the Gentile For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last. Just as it is written, the righteous will live by faith. The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them. because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him, but their thinking became futile. and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator who is forever praised and then in verse 32 although they know God's righteous decree but those who do such things deserve death they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them. May God indeed bless to our hearts this very solemn and very soul-searching passage of his holy word this morning. Now as you recall we are beginning a series of expository sermons through the first part at least of Paul's letter to the Romans. This book that in so many ways as we have noticed has influenced profoundly the history of the Christian Church and indeed the history of all mankind. Surely one of the most important and significant and influential letters that has ever been written in the world's whole history. Now we've come this morning to a passage that surely must be one of the grimmest passages in the whole Bible if not in the whole of literature itself. And nobody really in his right mind enjoys reading a passage such as the one we read together a few moments ago. Yet it is profoundly important for us if we are ever to understand and grasp that other thing that Paul has been speaking of and which we've been looking at since we began this series in Romans, the glory of what he calls the Gospel of God. This great message that he is bearing all through the Roman Empire and longs to bring indeed to the imperial city of Rome itself. You see only as we begin to grasp the meaning of this great section from verse 18 to the end of the first chapter can we begin to marvel as we should at the greatness and glory of the things that God has done for us in the gospel of his Son. And indeed the whole theme from verse 18 through to almost the end of chapter 3 is as important to grasp the gospel as it is for us to understand those great verses 16 and 17 on which you remember we spent two Sundays together. if you like I can put it this way if a doctor is seeing someone in his surgery who is very sick indeed what he needs that patient in order to become well again is really two things he needs the doctor to make a thorough and accurate diagnosis And secondly, what the sick patient needs is to be able to accept that diagnosis that the doctor has made. I think it was Dr. Lloyd-Jones, himself a medical doctor, as well as a great and anointed preacher of God's word, who said that the doctor who fails in diagnosis fails everywhere. But the second thing is equally necessary. that the patient must be able to receive that diagnosis and acknowledge that there is indeed something very seriously wrong with him. Now this brings us to the point of the whole subject before us this morning, the wrath of God. What is the real diagnosis of mankind's plight as God sees it in the gospel of his dear son? And you will realize that immediately several-ish answers have been given to that question. Some men may say I need a savior because life is difficult and uncertain and I need someone who will be my guide and friend all through life. Someone else may say, well, the diagnosis of my need is that I have an inner emptiness and frustration and a restlessness that I realize that only God himself can satisfy. And still a third person might say, well, because of my sin I'm conscious that in my life I need pardon and cleansing and deliverance from its power that continually frustrates me. Now good in a sense as all these answers are, they do not take us to the real biblical diagnosis of man's plight. They do not tell us why the gospel of God is the power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes it. but Paul takes us you see to the right diagnosis in verse 18 and in the rest of that chapter and indeed in all of chapter 2 and most of chapter 3 as he says to us in verse 18 the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. And congregation this morning I have to tell you that biblically that is the nature of man's ultimate plight. And Paul comes to it at the very start of his message. to the church in Rome. You see it's not at all that man needs simply to discover that he is a sinner because so often when he discovers he's a sinner His only concern is with what sin has done to him or to those around him that his sin has affected. But Paul is saying to us, you see, under this title of the wrath of God, that the real seriousness of sin is not what it has done to me at all. or to others if it comes to that. But what it is doing and has done before the holy God of earth and heaven, it has called down his active wrath and anger and displeasure upon the sinner from a holy and a righteous God. Now you see that's basically why it is such a serious matter to be a man or a woman without Christ it's not ultimately a question of being less happy without Christ or more happy with Christ but it's a question of this dimension that there is no shelter anywhere in the entire universe from the wrath of God unless you are sheltering under the righteousness of Christ. And that's why it's such a terrible thing that men are ignorant today of the only saving message that God has revealed and ever will reveal to mankind. Ignorant of the background in which the gospel of good news is being preached, the background of the wrath of God against mankind in all his sinfulness. Now that's why we need to do two things, three things indeed this morning. We need to look first at the fact of God's wrath and then the revealing of God's wrath from heaven and finally at the object of God's wrath. and I want to do that if I may in that order that I've given to you now first of all you notice that our passage and particularly in verse 18 declares the fact of God's wrath for the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven Now it's very easy for us to dismiss this whole concept in the 20th century, the concept of the wrath of God, because men don't much like the idea of it. And there have been many attempts to explain it away. Psychologically, for instance, it's been said that this whole concept of the wrath of God is almost Victorian in its ethos. but those who hold to it are suffering from an aftermath of that stern Victorian era you remember with the picture of the father in the family with his cane in his hand and almost vengefully inflicting punishment on even the slightest deviation of his children in that home And it's the kind of attitude that looks at Jonathan Edwards' sermon, that great sermon he preached on sinners in the hands of an angry God. And modern men laugh and ridicule at the idea that there is an angry God who has sinners in his very hand and is holding them literally over the pit of hell. Psychologically, then there's an attempt to dismiss the wrath of God. Ethnically, there has been an attempt to dismiss it, as men have come to these scriptures and said, why, this is Paul, the Jew, the ethnicist, writing these Old Testament concepts of an angry God. But we are now under the New Testament, the God of love. and historically there have been attempts to deny the concept as we are told that certain people in the church's history unfortunately talked a great deal about an angry God who held sinners to account Luther for example and John Calvin and John Knox and the Puritans and theologically there have been many attempts to deny the wrath of God saying it is unworthy of him And our problem, you know, is that we see God's wrath as the equivalent to our own sinful convictions and emotions. The outbreak of passion, the spasm of uncontrolled rage and anger. And we think of God's wrath after our own fallen emotions. And we say this is unworthy of the God of Scripture. Now you see why so many men have lost their way regarding the wrath of God is simply this, why they found this epistle indeed so difficult, because they refuse to see the connection between verses 16 and 17 with verse 18. Now there are three words in that connection that bring out the fact and reality of God's wrath and I want to point them out to you. And the first of these words is the word for. Now in the New International Version and I'm so often disappointed with this version, it leaves out the connective words. In Greek the word gar or deoti for or because, it's left out in this translation and you lose the entire sequence between verses 16 and 17 and verse 18 that Paul intended us to grasp and understand as an explanation of the wrath of God. Why is there a need for the righteousness of God to be revealed in the gospel? Because the wrath of God is being revealed against all human sin. And when we fail to see that connection, you see the true background to the gospel that is good news is evacuated. You cannot truly understand the gospel, you cannot grasp it. Until you see the answer to the question, why did God have to send his son into the world to pay the awful penalty for sin and to suffer so greatly? Because the wrath of God! is against all human sin and against the whole human race and it summarizes says Paul in the succeeding verses the history of the whole human race men have always been under the wrath of God and always will be in their natural state the word for secondly the word revealed the wrath of God is being revealed now you notice that in verse 17 a righteousness from God is being revealed in the gospel of God and then in verse 18 the wrath of God is being revealed the identical words are being used something else is being revealed as well as righteousness and what is being revealed is this you see that if you are not sheltering under the righteousness of Christ alone, the salvation, there is nothing else in the whole universe that will shelter you from the wrath of God. If you are not living by faith in the righteousness of Christ in God's sight, no one else in the entire universe will be able to live, Paul is saying, because the wrath of God has been revealed against all the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men wherever it is found. among Jews and Gentiles alike it doesn't matter who it is because all are condemned in his sight that every mouth may be stopped and all the world become guilty before God Now you see, you can no more deny the wrath of God than you can deny the gospel of God. If you deny the wrath of God against sin, which has been revealed from heaven, you must be bound to deny the righteousness of God that is also revealed from heaven as the solution for the sinner's plight. The whole Christian faith is a revealed religion. Not man's ideas and conceptions and psyches and so forth. And it stands as a whole together. You reject one part of it, you must reject all of it. and you cannot deny the fact of God's wrath without also denying the fact of God's righteousness offered freely in the gospel of his son. Now the third term of course is the term wrath itself and it occurs all through scripture. and we are to see it as a fixed, unchanging, controlled attitude of holy anger against men's sins. He hates it. He is irrevocably opposed to man's sin. all that belongs to the realm of darkness and sin and Satan is abhorrent to the holy God and his wrath means his view of sin and his hatred of it that he who is just and altogether righteous must deal with sin and bring upon it its punishment both in this life and in the greater life to come Now that, you see, is the fact that is before us. And you see how tremendous this revelation of His wrath really is? It spans the whole of time, all of human history. It takes into its ambit the whole story of man, from the Garden of Eden through to the coming Judgment Day. and it is God's verdict as I said upon the whole world but unless we have learned what it is to live in the righteousness of Christ there is nowhere else in the universe that we can live in God's sight Now you see that's what makes the gospel such a glorious message. It's the message that man needs in all his ungodliness and unrighteousness. And the fact of God's wrath is the only true background in which the glory of God's gospel can be truly seen and understood. Now secondly, there is the revealing of God's wrath in the middle, as you notice. Of verse 18, God's wrath is being revealed, says the apostle. now we need to look at this revelation of God's wrath from heaven by the way the fact that it is revealed from heaven simply means that it is with all God's divine authority but that wrath is coming down upon men it is revealed from heaven the place where he rules and has dominion over all his creatures and all their actions It is with a holy, divine, awesome authority that his wrath is ministered upon the sins of all mankind. Now consider for a moment how many of us would have begun our preaching of the gospel with such a theme as this. Would we not have said to men today, we realize you're living very defeated lives. and I have something in this message that will bring you victory or again I've had a marvelous experience in my life through the gospel of Christ and you can have it too or again this is something so wonderful and marvelous it's going to appeal to you and so forth now you notice this is not what the great apostle does at all He's not talking about their happiness. He's not talking about their state of mind and their condition of life. He's not even talking about something that appeals to them at all. But he does this staggering and amazing thing. He confronts the church in Rome with the wrath of God as the very first element of his gospel preaching. Now why does he do it? Well of course because he's interested primarily in men's relationship to God. Their standing in his sight, their eternal destiny face to face with God. The gospel he preached is invariably God-centered, not man-centered, as we often see around us today. He starts with the wrath of God, and he says to mankind, your whole plight consists in this, that you are out of relationship with the God who created you and made you for himself. And all your other problems stem from that first great problem, and that first great plight. It's not what gets you down in life. It's not your unhappiness. It's not the things you're worrying about. And you know that distinguishes incidentally the true church from all false cults around us. What do the cults project today in the world? You come and join us and all these benefits will be yours. You'll live such a fulfilling life. if you become one of us there are so many rewards if you adopt our view of the Christian gospel and the Christian teaching but you see the true gospel starts with God and holds men accountable face to face with him in their relationship to him in terms of his wrath against their sins and incidentally ten times in this one epistle the apostle mentions the theme of wrath twice in chapter 2, again in chapter 3, in chapter 4, in chapter 5, in chapter 9 even in chapter 12 and in chapter 13 twice again ten times over the wrath of God is mentioned in the book of Romans and this is all of the biblical testimony of scripture that man's prime need is in that area and that's the theme of all the great preachers of the gospel all through the history of the church whether it's Augustine in the 4th century John Calvin in the 16th century Whitfield in the 17th century or 18th century and Jonathan Edwards in that same century the business of the gospel is to bring people to face that they are out of relationship with God to reconcile them to Him the business of the gospel is not primarily to fill churches it's not to have good statistics but to reconcile men to God to save them from the wrath to come that's why I think Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones in one of his volumes on Romans says I confess freely I cannot understand a jocular evangelist Now where is God's wrath revealed? It's revealed from heaven, Paul says, but where specifically is it revealed? He says it's being revealed to men Well the Bible gives a number of answers, look at them with me. It's revealed in man's conscience. You read this in Romans 2 verse 15, their conscience also bearing witness in their thoughts, meanwhile accusing or else excusing one another. The fact that all men, says Paul, have a sense of right or wrong is part of this revelation of God's wrath that is resting upon them. You know how it is in your own life, you cannot do something wrong without feeling immediately, usually a sense of guilt. or misery, or shame, or all three of them. Why? Because the activity of conscience, beloved, is already a revelation of God's wrath upon your ungodliness and unrighteousness. Secondly, His wrath is being revealed in the whole state of creation. you remember God made the world perfect at the first and it lost its perfection and the whole of creation scripture teaches us has been plunged into a state that is imperfect and incomplete where all nature is rocked by violence in the realm of tornadoes and earthquakes and hurricanes and all kinds of natural disorders and it has become the seat of sickness and many of our sorrows and death has been introduced into the natural world and Paul says later in Romans the whole creation indeed is groaning and travailing in pain together waiting for the manifestation of the children of God the day when creation will be restored to its perfection you see part of the punishment of man's sin has fallen upon nature, and nature reveals the wrath of God. Nature is bearing part of the penalty of your sin and mine. And God is saying, as you look out on a fallen world, that's what your sin has done. That is a revelation of my wrath against sin. That when man fell, creation fell with him. Thirdly, it's shown in the history of mankind. You see it particularly in biblical history. That history almost blasts the theories of historians and philosophers who want to say that we are on the rise up in the process of evolution from something primitive to something that is better. Because all human history bears the message of God's unrelenting wrath resting upon the nations and mankind in all their sinfulness. You see it in the punishment of Adam and Eve. You see it in the history of Cain and the first murder. You see it universally in God's judgment in the flood of Noah destroying all mankind save a handful of persons. You see it in his judgment upon the tower of Babel. You see it upon Sodom and Gomorrah as he rained fire and brimstone from heaven upon that sinful city and those sinful cities. And you see it in the rise of all the nations and their prospering for a season and then transgressing God's law and going into deeper foulness of sin and God brings them all down into humiliation. When they pass a certain point, down they go. And in history, there is the revelation of God's wrath against sin. Fourthly, it's being revealed in the present time, in the condition of mankind. Look at verses 19 through 32. We're not going through them this morning. The very section before us. Men rejecting the knowledge of God. God giving them up to their own desires. Men choosing sin rather than righteousness. God giving them up to their pleasures for a season. becoming more and more perverted, God giving them up the third time into their perverted ways so that they receive in themselves, he says, the just reward for their conduct. And the wrath of God is being revealed in men's conduct at the present time as God takes his restraining hand off man's sin and lets them plunge into it to their own destruction. it's an evidence of the wrath of God upon sin he takes the brakes off and makes them reap the awful consequences of their actions. In the present time, in the final judgment, it will be fully revealed. That's what makes the final judgment so awful as the book of Revelation teaches us. Men in that day will call upon the mountains and the hills and the rocks. to fall on them and cover them from him that sits upon the throne and the wrath of the Lamb. But you know, the sixth place in which the wrath of God is revealed, and the most awesome place of all, is in a place that you would probably not have thought of this morning. In the cross of Jesus, on Calvary's hill, the wrath of the Holy God is revealed more clearly than in any other place in the entire universe. Why? Because it's the picture of Christ in outer darkness, drinking up the cup of God's wrath against the sins of his people from the first of time to the last of time, drinking it to the very dregs. and God turning his back on his own son. So that Jesus cried with that cry of dereliction, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? That's what hell is. He was experiencing the wrath of God in undiminished measure. against the ungodliness and unrighteousness of a covenant people. And I have to tell you this morning, before you ever see the love of God in the cross of Jesus, you need first to see the wrath of God in the cross of Jesus. Because that is what is being revealed there primarily. So you see His wrath revealed in creation, in conscience, in history, in the present time, in the final judgment, supremely in the cross of Christ. What a terrible thing this is! The wrath of God against sin. because those who live and die in their sins the scripture says their works will follow them and the punishment that they will receive is to be shut out of the presence of God in eternal suffering for all eternity and Paul puts this at the beginning of his message Now it reminds us that it should be at the beginning of our message as we present the gospel and the great motive on which we appeal to men to be reconciled to God. but you know it also says to us but if that is the fate of the ungodly to have his wrath resting upon them now and to all eternity what a wonderful and glorious thing that alternative is that has been revealed from heaven that a righteousness has been provided that allows me to shelter from the wrath of God, both in this present time and in all eternity. And it tells me, you see, that the wrath of God belongs as really as the love of God. to the gospel of God. And may Calvary's message burn its way into our hearts this morning, that the cross of Jesus has brought to us a love beyond human understanding, to meet a wrath beyond human understanding. Now thirdly, and quickly as I finish, because our time is gone, the object of God's wrath, what is it? Well it's there at the end of verse 18, the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. And it's all through the rest of chapter 1 and into chapter 2 and right up to verse 20 of chapter 3. What is the nature of man's sin that calls down upon it with divine authority the awful wrath of a holy God? It is ungodliness. the breaking of the first four commandments. It is unrighteousness, the breaking of the other six commandments. In other words, in summary, if at any point we fail in a right relationship with God, first of all, and if at any point in our lives we fail in a right relationship with our fellow men, secondly, we are automatically under the wrath of God because ungodliness is the biblical word for summarizing our wrong relationship with God and unrighteousness or wickedness summarizes our wrong relationships with other people in other words the total nature and extent of human sin is under God's wrath Now you can see in the rest of this chapter how he works it out in all its horrifying and horrible details. Mankind, knowing God by the witness of creation, deliberately turning aside from that revelation, choosing to glory in the works of their own hands in all manner of idolatry. which is utterly inexcusable, leading to lives of continued and awful perversion, and Paul showing us how God is revealing in their very conduct his wrath against it all. Now we'll look at it, God willing, next Sunday morning, the universal reign of sin. But here let me make three brief observations and finish. The first is this, I want you to notice. The real essence of sin is ungodliness. You need to realize that. Because you see, today man looks at sin in terms of the little peccadilloes that he does. He cheats, he lies, he sleeps with another woman, she sleeps with another man. And they think of sin in terms of the second table of the law only, if they think of it at all. But Paul says, beginning with the first table of the law, the real essence of sin is ungodliness. Because man was made for relationship with God. And because he has fallen out of that relationship with God, he has fallen out of relationship properly with his fellow men. You don't put the second before the first. Unrighteousness then, and this is the second thing, comes about only because of ungodliness. and it's sinful and insulting to God to believe that any kind of righteousness is possible apart from Him. That's where all moral philosophy goes wrong today and where humanism goes wrong today. It thinks it can establish righteousness without fiddling us. But the two hang together and the first must be put as first. Now the third thing is this, that in evangelism we need to start with man's ungodliness instead of starting with man's problems and needs. We become so subjective, interested in ourselves and our problems and salvation as something that has an answer that is man-centered. No, salvation is primarily something that has an answer to the problem that is God-centered. We start with God, our relationship with Him, and only when that is put right does man's unrighteousness begin to put right, be put right as well. Now in conclusion I must ask you, are you in a right relationship with God this morning? Do you know what it is in your own life to shelter under the righteousness of Christ by faith? Remember what Paul said quoting the words of Habakkuk the prophet He who by faith is righteous shall live! And what he says in Romans 18 is if you're not under that righteousness You cannot live because the only other alternative is to live under the wrath of God and to perish under his everlasting displeasure in hell under the full torrent of divine and holy wrath against your sin. I say to you young people in the congregation who've been in the communicants class My dear young friends, we are not dealing with theories and philosophies and ideas in this pulpit and this congregation. We are dealing with your life. And if you haven't seen the seriousness of your sin and your need to have a righteousness, a right standing with God, put down to your account something you can never possess by nature and never produce by yourself. If you have not seen that need and cast yourself upon the Lord Jesus Christ, you are under the wrath of God this morning. And each one of you, who may be here, who is outside of Christ, is in that appalling and dangerous condition. Oh, my friends, I appeal to you. Are you in right relationship to God this morning? Are you sheltering under the righteousness of Christ? By faith, let's pray. Our Father in heaven, we thank Thee for this solemn and soul-searching word from Thy Word, and we pray that each of us may examine our condition and those of us who by Thy grace have passed from that life of condemnation with its awful consequences Here and now, and in eternity, may we be thankful with a glorious thanksgiving for that deliverance through the gospel of God that the Apostle proclaimed. And if there are those here who are not under that righteousness, May they realize ever more seriously the reality and fact of God's wrath, revealed from heaven with divine authority upon it, against all human ungodliness and unrighteousness, and be moved to flee unto Christ. For now is the day of salvation. Now is the appointed time, for Jesus' sake. Amen.