Rebuilding the foundations - Romans
part 5: The wrath of God

Now if you have got your bible this morning im going to read to you some verse from Romans 1. These very solemn verses but very necessary that we look at them, that we understand them and we live our lives in the light of them. Because in our unfolding of this message of the book of Romans we come to an issue which for many of us is an extremely difficult issue. It is that of the wrath of God.

And I am going to simply tell you what this passage says this morning. We are going to talk about it, how it applies, how it works in our life and our experience. I am not giving you any personal opinions, I am telling you what God says here in his Word about this, because that is what we need to understand. Now let me read it to you, Romans 1:18-32, if you don’t have a Bible you may want to listen carefully to this, we may go back to these verses in a few moments.

“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 worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator - who is forever praised. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.”

Well, there’s hardly a more solemn section of Scripture. I’d like to pray before we talk about it. Because Paul talks about these things being revealed. We need the Holy Spirit to give us insight and understanding. Let’s pray together.

Father, we acknowledge this morning that the natural mind does not always like the things that come from God. The natural mind doesn’t always understand the things that come from God, but we pray that you would give us that spiritual discernment and understanding, that we may know your mind about these matters. Speak to us, we pray, for we ask it in Jesus’ name, Amen.

I was sent a story this week of Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick Doctor Watson. They were out on a camping trip, and one night after dinner together, they retired for the night and go to sleep. And some hours later, in the middle of the night, Holmes wakes up Watson. And he says, “Watson! Wake up! Look up into the sky and tell me what you see!” Watson woke up and said, “I see millions and millions of stars.” Holmes said, “What do you deduce from that Watson?” Watson thought, for a moment, “Well, astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn isn’t Leo. Horologically, it’s about quarter past three in the morning. Meteorologically, I suspect we’ll have a beautiful day tomorrow. Theologically, I can see that God is all powerful, that we are very small and an insignificant part of his universe. What does it tell you Holmes?” And Holmes was silent for a moment, then he turns and says, “Watson, you idiot. It means someone has stolen our tent.”

Why do I tell you that? I’ll tell you why I tell you that. Because some things are so obvious — there so logical — we actually miss them. I am going to talk to you this morning about something Paul says is part of the gospel — that is a very logical part of the gospel — but is to many of us, the embarrassing part of the gospel. We don’t talk about it, and it is the wrath of God.

I know that few other subjects are more difficult for us than this. We relish in the fact that God is a God of love. We’re a little embarrassed about the fact that he is also a God of wrath, a God of anger. But we need to understand it, because if in Romans 1:17, which we looked at last week, Paul says “in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed”. A righteousness that is by faith. That is the moral character of God that has been revealed to us. In the next verse he says, “the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven.” (Romans 1:18) Both the righteousness of God and the wrath of God is being revealed. The righteousness of God is the good news that we recognise. The wrath of God is more like the bad news.

I’ve called this message this morning: ‘Now for the Bad News.’ Because we need to understand how bad is the ‘bad news’, before we ever begin to understand how good is the ‘good news’. Because the ‘good news’ is only ‘good news’ because it is rescuing us from the ‘bad news’ from which we need recusing.

And for the next two and a half chapters of Romans, Paul talks about the wrath of God and the judgement of God, and we have to look at this and understand it. Now it isn't pleasant reading. As I've said, there’s no subject more difficult for most of us to embrace than this. I know that this issue has been a stumbling block to many people, but may I say this: we will never fully understand the love of God until we understand the wrath of God.

In fact, I’d go further. If God is not a God of wrath, we must question whether he is a God of love. Because love and wrath are not opposites — they are parallels, and I’ll tell you why. If I love my children, it means I am going to be angered by those things which threaten my children or damage my children. And that anger is going to be a result of the fact that I love them. If I profess to love my children, but don’t care about those things which might damage them, or about those things that ultimately might destroy them, you would legitimately question whether I really loved them at all.

You see, it’s not that God is a God of love, but there is a sort of kink in his character, and his kink is that he is angry. It is part of his love.

And the bad news is not that God is angry. The bad news is that he has reason to be angry. That’s the bad news. We are going to talk about it this morning. We’ll never know how good the ‘good news’ is until we know how bad the ‘bad news’ is. You see, if we’re serious about finding a solution to our dilemma, we have to be honest at understanding our dilemma.

Now, there are always popular messages going around that don’t involve any need to face the reality of our sin, and they’re popular — inevitably — because they leave us exactly where we are, and we prefer that. That’s why we are there in the first place, often. But they don’t deal with the issue. If you go to visit your doctor because you have chest pains, and your doctor says to you, “It’s simply a case of indigestion. Go home and take TUMS, and you’ll feel better.” You will drive home from your doctor’s surgery with a sense of relief, there is nothing to fear. But if in reality you are having a heart attack, and he tells you it’s indigestion, it may send you home feeling good for the next 30 minutes or so, but if it’s a heart attack, you’re going to die overnight.

You see, Paul is saying this is a diagnosis of the human dilemma. There are lots of nicer things we would like to hear, but if you are having a heart attack, you better know you’re having a heart attack.

If our problem is not just that we’ve messed our lives up by our sin, and it’s a very selfish issue, then if you want to live with your sin, then you can get away from it. But if the issue is more than that — the issue is that our sin provokes the wrath of God, we’d better understand that. That is the problem. Paul diagnoses the heart of the human dilemma here and it is serious.

You see, we tend to be much more interested in knowing what human ideas about God are. Paul tells us here what God’s ideas about humanity is, and they’re not very complimentary, and we need to talk about it. Now, we’re going to talk about two things:

First of all, I’d like to talk about the provocation of the wrath of God, and ask the question: ‘On what grounds is God angry with us?’ God made us didn’t he? God gave us our limitations, didn’t he? How come he’s angry with us? Well let me read to you several things from these verses. First of all, in Romans 1:18, Paul says, “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness.”

Now he talks there about ‘suppressing the truth’. In Romans 1:21, he says, “Although they knew God,” speaking of humanity as a whole, “they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him.” So, they knew God, but they didn’t respond to that knowledge of God. Romans 1:25 says, “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie.” They had the truth; they exchanged it. Romans 1:28 says, “Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to” various things.

Now, the point is there, he talks about failing to retain the truth, suppressing the truth, exchanging the truth — although they knew God, they did not respond to him. So, Paul says, the issue is not that God is angry because we are ignorant, because we are not ignorant. The problem is not that we don’t know. The problem is that we have rejected what we know. The issue is not ignorance but disobedience.

Let me summarise Paul’s argument by having a conversation with him, and with what he has to say in these verses. He says in Romans 1:16, “I am not ashamed of the gospel.” And I might say to him, “Why not Paul?” He answers, “Because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.” I might say, “How is that so, Paul?” And he says, “In the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed. A righteousness which is by faith.” And I’d say to Paul, “But why is righteousness necessary to us?”

And he says in Romans 1:18, “Because the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men.” And I’d say, “Paul, the wrath of God? Why in the world is God angry at us?” And he’d say, in the second part of Romans 1:18, “Because men have suppressed the truth; that’s why he’s angry.” And I’d say, “But how have they suppressed the truth, Paul?” And he answers in Romans 1:19, “Because what can be known about God is plain to them, for since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities have been clearly seen so that men are without excuse.”

If we were to work our way backwards, God has revealed himself to humanity, and we have turned our back on that revelation, and so he is angry. Because he is angry, we need help. We need his wrath to be replaced by his righteousness, and Paul says that’s why we have a gospel that is good news.

Now, if Paul speaks of the suppression of truth, and the exchange of truth for a lie, and our failure to retain the knowledge of God, we then ask the question: ‘By what means has God revealed himself?’ There are two answers in this section. First of all in Romans 1:20, God has revealed himself in creation. Paul says there, “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. Now says Paul, ‘God has revealed himself through creation.’ It’s what theologians call ‘natural revelation.’ By ‘natural revelation,’ we mean it’s available to anybody who will open their eyes and actually believe what they see. That behind the marvel of this creation is a creator. Now, of course, it is not politically correct to think in those terms anymore.

We have suppressed this knowledge, as Paul has said. We hide it. We undermine its credibility. We try and explain it away. But as David wrote in Psalms 19:1-4, a psalm we looked at some weeks ago. Psalm 19:1-4 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech. Night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the end of the world.”

David says that the creation preaches the creator in every language of the world. Everybody sees the handwork of the Creator. Now I know we’ve made this naïve. We have made this simplistic. I picked up this last week, a book, it’s on my bookshelf at home, by a man named Richard Dawkins. Richard Darkins is a professor at Oxford University, in Britain. He is an avowed atheist and he has written two best-selling books, he may have written more, but two best-selling books. His declared purpose, in his introduction, is to kill any belief in God. Because he says it is totally unnecessary, it is based purely on superstition.

In the preface to his book, The Blind Watchmaker, which I was looking at this week, he said, it’s remarkable that prior to 1859, (that was the year Darwin published his Origin of Species), prior to 1859 nobody had grasped how the universe works. He said that it’s remarkable that Newton never got hold of it, some of the early philosophers — Plato and Aristotle — never got hold of it. He said that Charles Darwin was the first one to really grasp the fact the creation does not require a creator. ‘There are natural processes that brought this world into being.’

Well, that’s very comfortable of course, if you want to live as you please. If you don’t want to be accountable to anybody. But as a scientist in Britain who is not a Christian said a while ago, “Any evolutionary theory has no more validity than any theory of a creator simply because neither can be proven.” Nevertheless, the handiwork of God is displayed throughout the universe, the Scripture tells us.

I love that statement of Abraham Lincoln, who was a boyhood hero of mine when I read his biography as a boy. He said this, “I never gazed at the stars without feeling I am looking into the face of God. I can see how it might be possible for man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how he may look up into the sky and say, ‘There is no God.’”

Paul’s argument is that the creation reveals the creator. Interestingly, he says, “God’s invisible qualities have been clearly seen.” It seems like a contradiction, doesn’t it? ‘His invisible qualities, clearly seen.’ How is that which is invisible clearly seen? By the handiwork that is displayed across the universe every night you look up into the sky.

Every time you look into the intricacy of that which God has created. The intricacy of a human body, the intricacy of a little fly that lands on your table. You see design, you see purpose, you have a revelation of God. Now, Paul does not say, ‘everyone has heard the gospel,’ because that isn’t true. What he does say is, ‘everyone has had a revelation of God,’ and that is true if you listen and believe it. The problem is not that they didn’t know God. He says “although they knew God,” in Romans 1:21, “they neither glorified him as God, nor gave thanks to him.” They didn’t acknowledge their dependency on him. So, God has revealed himself in creation, he says there in Romans 1:20.

The second way God has revealed himself is in Romans 2:15, He has revealed himself in conscience. One is an objective, outward revelation. The other is a subjective, inward revelation. We read in Romans 2:14-15, “When gentiles who do not have the law do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts. Their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing them, now even defending them.”

Now, says Paul, in the context there, speaking of the law of God, he says there are people who never received the law of God. It was given to the Jewish people. The gentiles have never known the law of God written on stone, but they have known it written in their hearts. There's a consciousness; a conscience, should I say, that every human being has. There's a sense of right and a sense of wrong, a sense of good and a sense of bad.

One of the pursuits of life for the ordinary person is to find some objective means of deciding what is right and wrong, good and bad. In the same way a compass would be useless were not for true north, and once you've got true north on your compass then you can find your way in life. The heart of human beings is searching for a true north. God placed into a human heart: a conscience. You can violate it, of course, and you can distort it, but there's that inner witness of the Spirit of God. Because we're searching for that true north — we're searching for something outside of ourselves — human beings have become inherently religious, we might say.

You see, you can go to any country of the world,any city in the world, any time in its history. You will not always see great industry in every place. You will not always see places of learning, in every sphere. You will not always see the accumulation of wealth in every place. But I will tell you what you will see in every place to which you go: you will see the evidence of worship.

There’ll be the temple, or the shrine, or the mosque, or the idol, or the church, or the icon and people will worship. We may be spiritually dead, we may be separated from God, but the fingerprints of God are all over our inner hearts, and that sense of someone bigger than ourselves to whom we need to relate. And if with our sense of sophistication, we crush the idea of a God out there, we will replace him with sporting stars, or rock stars, or film stars. We will have our heroes. Whether we call it this or not, we will worship.

G.K. Chesterton famously said, “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.” And I would add to that, ‘because they must believe in something.’ Because the evidence of God in our hearts says there’s something out there I need to relate to.

Paul’s charge here is not that people are ignorant and they don’t know. His charge is that they have turned a blind eye to creation and a deaf ear to conscience. As a result, he says “the wrath of God is being revealed against humanity.”

Now, how does this wrath show itself? How does the wrath of God show itself? We talked about the provocation of God’s wrath, that was my first point. Let me talk secondly about the ‘demonstration of God’s wrath.’

There are two ways in which God shows his wrath in these two chapters, (Romans 1-2) There is, what I’m going to call, ‘The immediate expression of God’s wrath.’ How is God’s wrath expressed? Is his wrath expressed in the fact that he zaps us when we do wrong and destroys us when we do wrong? No, it’s much more subtle than that. We’re told that he gives us over to the sin that we’ve chosen. Let me read to you, Romans 1:24 — “Therefore, God gave them over.” Romans 1:26 — “because of this, God gave them over.” Romans 1:28 — “he gave them over” and following each of those statements, he lists the things to which he gives them over.

Do you know how God expresses his wrath on us, the immediate expression of God’s wrath? He gives us over and lets us go to the logical end of our own choices. God’s judgment is that he will let you, but as Romans 1:27 says, you’ll reap the due penalty for your perversion. You see, sin is always cloaked of course in sugar, it always looks good. But sin has a destructive kick in it, no matter how attractive it may look at the time. He specifies three areas where God gives people over.

First of all, he talks about sexual perversion. Romans 1:24 — “Therefore, God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity, for the degrading of their bodies with one another.” There, he talks in general terms about sexual impurity, which he describes as degrading their bodies.

Let me talk about this for a moment because it seems to me this. Not just in the world at large, but even in the church of Jesus Christ, there is right now either enormous confusion about sexuality, or sheer disobedience about sexuality. You see, ‘sexual impurity,’ and that’s a general term Paul uses there. It involves things we have domesticated to become okay. It involves adultery - adultery is extramarital sex. That is with someone to whom you are not married, when you are married to someone else. Fornication, the other word that is used frequently in the New Testament, is premarital sex relationships.

Now, I know it’s not easy in our sex-saturated world, where we are bombarded and everyone else’s standards are down, everything is okay, ‘as long as you don’t hurt anybody.’ But we are doing enormous damage to ourselves. Paul talks about this — they ‘degrade their bodies’ (Romans 1:24). As I said just now, sin always has a destructive kick, no matter how attractive it looks. Anybody involved in counselling people will know this, there is enormous devastation brought into people’s lives through sexual sin.

You know what God will do if you go down that road? He will let you go. He will hand you over. You see, God doesn’t send thunderbolts to destroy us as his judgment on us, he gives us over. If you’re involved in an illegitimate relationship, God won’t strike you down because of it. He won’t make your car go off the bridge when you drive home from your secret rendezvous. He’ll let you go. Because his judgment, his wrath is that he hands us over. You see, in 1 Corinthians 5:5, you can read that verse sometime, there’s a case of sexual immorality within the church in Corinth. And Paul says, giving instructions to the leaders there, he says about this particular man who is involved in a sexual relationship with his father’s wife — that is, his stepmother — he says, “Hand this man over to Satan, so that his flesh will be destroyed, though his spirit will be saved on the Day of the Lord.” He’s a Christian he is talking about.

He says, “Hand him over to Satan.” That’s the very same term used here in Romans 1. God hands us over, He hands us over, and Paul says to hand this man over to Satan. That is, he has chosen to live in Satan’s territory, let him go. There will be consequences, he’ll reap those consequences. What he describes back here as the due penalty of our perversion, but he’ll let you go.

That’s why you’ll find that every time you sin, you make it easier to sin the next time. You see, the first time you do something you know is wrong, you’ll come home that night and you’ll toss and turn in bed that night. Your conscience will keep you awake. You’ll wait for the ceiling to cave in, but it won’t, and the next morning you’ll still be okay. The second time you commit the same sin, you won’t stay awake quite as long as that night. The third time you’ll hardly stay awake at all. The fourth night, you’ll sleep normally, and before long you begin to say to yourself, “What’s so wrong with this?” The only reason I thought it was wrong is because of prejudice thinking about these things. This is okay, and God doesn’t seem to be doing anything about it.

Let me ask you: are there things in your life today that shock you, that would have shocked you five or ten years ago? But you have tamed your conscience. God is giving you over to these things. He talks not just about sexual impurity generally. He talks about homosexuality in particular. In Romans 1:26, he talks about lesbianism — female homosexuality.

God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. Female homeosexuality. Then he talks about male homosexuality in Romans 1:27, “in the same way men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.”

Now this is a big and a very important issue in our culture and society. We have haven't time to talk about this issue in any detail. But I want to point out to you that Paul in these verses uses a word that recurs several times, and it's the key to understanding something of what he's saying about this. In Romans 1:23, he talks about how they “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images.” The word ‘exchanged.’ They “exchanged the glory of God for mortal images.” Romans 1:25. “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie.” Let’s pause there. He says they’ve exchanged the truth of God as revealed for something as a substitute which is not true. And then, in Romans 1:26, he says “women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones.” In Romans 1:27, “men abandoned natural relations;” the same idea: the “exchange of natural relations for unnatural ones.”

I think there's a link here. Paul speaks about exchanging the truth about God for a lie, and as a result, there is an exchange of sexual orientation. Now what is the relationship between these two? Is it any relationship between these two? I think there is a connection that Paul is making, and I believe is a very important one. We were created to be in God's image. Therefore, if we are to understand what humanity is intended to be like, we must understand what God is like. Which is why, as we said last week, the righteousness of God is being revealed. The moral character of God is being revealed, because to know what human beings are supposed to be like, we must know what God is like in whose image we were created.

But if we lose any understanding of God, if we reject the truth of God, if we suppress the truth about God, if we exchange the truth about God for a lie and we no longer know what God is like, we cannot know what human beings are supposed to be like.And if we do not know what human beings are supposed to be like, we will not know what I am supposed to be like. And if I lose my sense of deity, I'll lose my understanding of humanity. I’ll lose my understanding of my identity. And that will lead to confusion about my sexuality.

That's the link that Paul gives here. Now, I don't want to be simplistic about a very deep issue. When we talk about homosexuality, it is a very deep issue. It is a very powerful issue. It's a very personal issue. It's an issue of which I have sympathy with people who are caught in that. I have sat and talked and wept with people who are caught in that. But this passage implies that sexual confusion may not only have its psychological component, though it does. It may not only have its physiological component, though it does. It may not only have its environmental component, though it does. It may not only have its emotional component, though it does. This passage tells me it has a theological component; I've lost touch with who God is and therefore who humanity is, and therefore who I am, and therefore with how I behave.

And the breakdown of humanity, as expressed in the abuse of sexuality, can be traced back to our rejection and a suppression of the truth about God in these verses. And God's wrath has expressed, he says, in letting us go down that road.

That's the first thing: sexual perversion. Secondly, he talks about material preoccupation. This is a more difficult one because we are so seduced by materialism that we don't see its dangers. Romans 1:25 says, “they worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator.”

Created things are given to us for our pleasure. Let's have no embarrassment about material things. God has given us richly all things to enjoy, and we enjoy disproportionate amount of good things materially compared to much of the world. Let's not be embarrassed about that in itself. But he talks about the fact that the created things replace the Creator, and we worship and serve the created things. And this, of course, is called idolatry. We don't call it idolatry in our daily life. But it's idolatry. When people's goals in life become the accumulation of things, when we measure our value by our possession of things, when we attach virtue to the possession of created things, Paul says we are living under the wrath of God.

This is very difficult for us, because these things have become almost normal in our society. We live for the pursuit of things. I work with students. For the last 20 years, college students, I would say to them again and again, as you choose your career, make sure your goal is not simply to make money. You will make money, some will make lots of money, but your goal is to serve other people well with something beneficial. And you make your money from that? Maybe that's okay.

And let me tell you this when materialism is God, sex becomes the goddess. You see, history shows us — long history over thousands of years, and as much as we can trace it back — shows us again and again that when nations and peoples are materially prosperous, they often become morally bankrupt. And the moral bankruptcy, in turn, will destroy the prosperity. Paul is writing this letter to the Romans at the very heart of the Roman Empire. It's survived for another 300 years, but already the seeds of its corruption were being shown because of the sexual corruption. It was rampant in Rome. It's true of civilisations like the Incas in South America. What we know of their history? We see the symbols and signs of moral bankruptcy, in their paintings and their records. And they implode because of it.

And Paul says God's wrath is shown by giving us over to sexual perversions, by giving us over to material preoccupation, and thirdly, he talks about being given over to self-promotion. Where in Romans 1:21, he says “although they knew... they claimd to be wise, they became fools.

He speaks there in particularly about intellectual arrogance. They strutted around saying,” We've thrown off the shackles of God. We don't need God anymore. We have a worldview that is detached from God. Aren't we smart?” And Paul says, they become fools. They're thinking in Romans 1:20 becomes futile, and their foolish hearts become darkened. There's only one thing worse than being a fool, and that's being a fool and not knowing it, and thinking you're smart.

When we detach ourselves from God, we have no means of knowing what is true and what is right, because the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the beginning of knowledge. It's not just a piece of the jigsaw, it's the foundation of real understanding and real wisdom.

We live in a day of great information and knowledge. Information technology has revolutionised the last 20-30 years. Some of you probably are totally confused by it all, but you can tap through the internet and carry around on a CD an incredible amount of information. I have the 32 volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica on one CD - I carry with me when I travel. It’s one of the few things I carry with my laptop computer because it accesses so much information, if I need it. But I'll tell you what you'll never find, you’ll never find any wisdom technology. You can be clever, but a clever fool. You find wisdom on your knees; the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. And he talks about these folks who have been handed over to their own arrogance, their own self-sufficiency.

And he sums it up in Romans 1:28 describing 22 things that characterise the world that Paul’s readers in Rome knew was descriptive of their world, and if we to be honest, must recognise to be descriptive of our world. Romans 1:29 — “they’ve become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed, depravity. They're full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They’re gossips, slanderers, God haters, insolent, arrogant, boastful, they invent ways of doing evil, they disobey their parents. They are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. And although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things, but they also approve of those who practise them.”

Of course they do, if everybody else is doing it, it makes it easier for us. Without mock exaggeration, we can hold up this passage as a mirror to our society. Sadly, it tells us we're under the wrath of God; he's giving us over. He's letting us go, and the consequences will be destruction and perversion.

You can shipwreck your faith through sex, I'm talking to you as a Christian now. You can shipwreck your faith through materialism. By allowing it to be your master instead of your servant. You can shipwreck your faith through egotism and arrogance. And this is serious stuff. But you say, “Is that all? God hands me over? Well I'm willing to take the consequences if I can live this way, I'll live with the consequences.” But that's not all you see. If there's an immediate expression of God's wrath, I finish with the ultimate expression of God's wrath, and you find out in Romans 2:5. Let me read it to you, Romans 2:5, “Because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you're storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God's wrath, when his righteous judgement will be revealed and God will give to each person according to what is done.”

Now, says Paul, there is that immediate expression — God's wrath is being revealed, that's present tense. He's giving us over, but he says there’s going to come a day, which he calls the day of God's wrath, when his judgement is going to be revealed. Romans 2:16 says, “this will take place on the Day when God judges men’s secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares.” This is part of the good news, he says, because God is a judge who actually cares about sin. There’s going to come a day of judgement. You see, we need to understand this is something God has revealed. This is not a viewpoint, this is not part of Christian theology, and therefore it fits in somewhere. This is truth. God has revealed to us that there is coming a Day of Judgment.

Let me finish with this. I want you to go home with something positive. But it is necessary to get the diagnosis right. This is the diagnosis of our need, and there's some more diagnosis next week, in the next chapter. If you're here this morning, I want you to be here next week and in two week’s time as well. I'll tell you why. Because this is one sequence of thought and in two week’s time we're going to find the solution, and in two weeks time, I'm going to give an opportunity for many of you to get right with God on the basis of what we got to understand there. That doesn't mean you can't get right with God right now this morning; you can. But let me say this: if the problem with sin is simply that it distorts my life, simply messes me up, simply makes me a slave, then you can resolve it, maybe by trying to overcome it, by getting some counselling — trying to resolve it — but that is not the issue with sin.

Sin does all of that. It does messes up. It does distort our lives. It does make us a slave. It does leave its scars. But here's the real problem with sin: it provokes the wrath of God. And no matter how much counselling you may get with your personal sin, unless we address this issue — that God's wrath is provoked by our sin — we will never resolve it.

That's why we'll see in Romans 3, Paul begins to talk about the cross of Jesus Christ, because the Cross of Jesus Christ with all its brutality is an expression of God's wrath. I know behind the cross lies the love of God, because God sent his Son in sheer love for us. But the cross is not a very nice picture of love. It's a picture of anger, it's a picture of wrath.

And the wonderful thing, if you and I will accept it, if you and I will live in the good of it all, all the wrath of God that is legitimately directed towards me is redirected to Christ. That's why, as we said last week, “he who knew no sin was made to be sin for us.” For what purpose? “That we might become the righteousness of God in Christ.” (2 Corinthians 5:21) And I'm going to explain that more fully — how that transaction takes place. How all the wrath of God is channelled instead to Christ, that all the righteousness of God might be channelled to me. That's the marvel of the good news. But it's only good news if we understand the bad news.

And this morning, if God is speaking to you, don't wait two weeks, of course. I just want you to know it’s coming. If you're listening on television, tune in the next two weeks. If God is speaking to you and you know that there’s sin in your heart and life that you need dealing with — you need that wonderful privilege of being clean and forgiven and standing under no condemnation — then we want to explain how that becomes possible.

But we have to understand the diagnosis. Any good doctor will not prescribe a remedy until he has understood the problem. But I finish with only a word. If you need to get right with God this morning, it's a song that I used to sing as a kid in Sunday school, and probably many of you know this. It’s an old song, and if it's still sung at all, it says this:

“There’s a way back to God from the dark paths of sin,
There’s a door that is open and you may come in.
At Calvary’s Cross is where you begin,
When you come as a sinner, to Jesus.”