You know we love to hear about the love of God, don’t we? But we don’t want to hear about His wrath. We don’t want to hear about His judgment. And yet deep inside of us don’t we realize that if God is God, if He is righteous, if He is holy that He also has to be a God of wrath, that He has to set a standard and that there has to be a degree of punishment for those that break the standard?
I know the subject for today doesn’t sound very very encouraging. But you know what, we really need to understand God. And we need to understand if there is a wrath of God that is going to be poured out on men, then we need to understand that so that we can avoid that wrath, because God tells us and we’re going to see it that all men, all men are without excuse.
In other words, whether you believe in Him or not, whether you acknowledge Him or not, whether you honor Him as God or not, some day you and I are going to stand before Him. And when we stand before Him our mouths are going to be shut. We’re not going to have any excuse. Now why?
Well, let’s look at it, Romans, chapter 1. Now as we look at Romans, chapter 1, I want to start in verse 16, and I just want us to catch the flow here because when you study the Bible, context is very important. Context means what goes before and what goes after. Context is the setting in which you discover truth. And God never wants you to take scripture and rip it out of its context because the minute you rip truth out of its context what happens is you get a pretext and so you don’t want that. You don’t want what’s false or what you’re just assuming. You really want to know what God says. And you want to understand it in the context in which He says it. So Romans, chapter 1.
Now as I read, there’s a word that you and I have not marked yet. And that word is “righteousness”. And so when I come to “righteousness”, if you’re just able to listen and you’re not able to look at the Bible for some reason or another, then, simply say “righteousness” out loud, okay, because the minute you do that, it helps you remember it.
So in Romans, chapter 1, verse 16, Paul says,
“I am not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believes, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.”
So he says this message that I have is not a message that brings me shame. And the reason it doesn’t bring me shame is because it changes a person’s life. It saves them from the power of sin. But then he goes on to say this, “For in it, in the gospel, the righteousness of God …” that’s right, righteousness. Now how are we going to mark it? Well, purple is a royal color and so I use purple sometimes for God, but I also use yellow. So what I did, since God is righteous, then I colored it purple and I boxed it in in yellow. You can simply put an R over it if you want to. The thing is that it’s always better when you’re marking your Bible to color code it, rather than to use a lot of symbols, because otherwise the symbols can overcome what you’re reading.
So in verse 17 it says,
So in verse 17 it says,
“For in it, in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith.”
Now remember we marked faith like a little, like a little Bible. So righteousness of God is revealed from faith. In other words, we receive it by faith and we live it by faith, from faith to faith. It’s all of faith, nothing else. As it is written and then he tells us why it’s from faith to faith, “… because the righteous man shall live by faith.” In other words, the way that you and I live every single day should be according to what the Word of God has to say. That’s to order our steps. That’s to show us what we’re to believe. That’s to show us how to respond. So we live by faith.
Then he says, “For the wrath of God …,” Now remember, wrath has a red slash like that.
You say, well that’s unrighteousness. How do I mark it? Mark it the same way that you mark righteousness, but put a slash through it. So you take unrighteousness, color it the same way and then put a slash through it. Okay.
He says, “For the wrath of God is revealed ….” Now let me explain something to you. And I told you this last week. But the word “is revealed”, the verb “is revealed” is in the present tense in the Greek language. Now the present tense in the Greek language means continuous or habitual action. In other words, what he’s saying is the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven. In other words, right now, do you know what? “God’s wrath is being revealed on this earth. And it is being revealed from heaven against …,” now watch what he says, “… against all ungodliness and unrighteousness.” Now this word for ungodliness is “asebia”, “a-s-e-b-i-a.” And what it means is this, just think of un god like. Ungodliness means I am far away from being like God as I can be. I, I’m the opposite of God. And so what God is saying is, look a man can be righteous. A man can be like God. God’s a righteous God. And a man can live by God’s standards. But when men refuse to live by God’s standards, when they suppress, when they suppress the truth of God in their ungodliness, in their unrighteousness, God’s wrath is coming out on them.
You say, but I didn’t get struck from heaven and I know that I’m not living like God would have me live. And I know you haven’t gotten struck by heaven. There was day when men would say, oh don’t say that, lightning will strike you. Why? They knew that God would judge. They knew that God had standards. And that if we didn’t hold those standards he would judge and so they’d say, oh I hope lightning doesn’t strike me.
We have such of a lack of fear of God and by fear of God I mean a reverence of God, a trembling of God. We don’t respect Him anymore. We don’t even think about Him striking us with lightening. We just think that God’s a God of love. He’s a mamby pamby God. You can manipulate God. You can get away with it and nothing’s going to happen.
But, just look around you. Look at your life. Look at your relationships. Look at what’s going on. Look at the things that you’re caught in and enslaved in and you know that they’re wrong and you feel trapped. All right, what is that? That’s the wrath of God. You say, whoa, whoa, you mean that God’s wrath is seen in some of the hard things that I’m going through? Un huh. You say, explain that to me. I will in just a minute, but first I want you to see this.
I want you to see that His wrath is being revealed against two things, against all ungodliness and against all unrighteousness. So unrighteousness is when I deliberately do not do what God says is right. Unrighteousness is when I choose to say, listen don’t set my standards. Don’t tell me what’s right and what’s wrong. I will do what I think is right and what I think is wrong. All right. So it’s being revealed against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. So you want to mark unrighteousness again.
Now that word suppress means this; that you’re literally going to hold down the truth. In other words, the truth is not going to be seen. The truth is not, is not going to be visible at all because you’re suppressing it. Now that word suppressing is also in the present tense. So it means this; that you keep on suppressing truth. How? By your unrighteousness.
You see when God made you, when He made mankind; He made us in the image of God. He made us so that we could reveal to all of creation what God was like. But then remember sin entered into the world. And this is the segment that we’re in in the book of Romans. We’re dealing with a segment that has to do with the issue of sin. So we’re looking at sin and we’re about to see what God is going to do with sin. But as we look at sin what I want you to understand is that when sin entered into the world then all men are born as sinners. Romans 3 is going to tell us this.
But when you and I just in flat out rebellion, in flat out, just digging our heels in and saying, listen, I’m going to live the way I want to, then you can know that as you keep suppressing truth, as you keep disobeying God, as you keep defying God, then God’s wrath is being poured out on you. What is the Greek word for wrath? And you want to write it down that the word for wrath is “o-r-g-e”, “o-r-g-e” it is an anger that is a building anger. It builds and it builds and it builds and it builds until finally, finally it’s expressed.
And so what he’s saying here is that this wrath that he is pouring out this wrath, is really a wrath that says, okay, you want to live that way, you want to act like that, you want to behave like that, you want to think like that, you want to talk like that, you want to do those things, okay, go ahead. You want it, you’ve got it. You do it and I’m going to stay out of it and you know what? You’re going to reap the consequences.
I want to ask you a question. Have you looked at our society lately? Are you aware of all the changes that have come in the past thirty some, thirty plus years? It’s a result of us suppressing the truth of God in our unrighteousness. It is the result of us saying I will do what I want to do. Get your hands off of me. Don’t tell me what to do. I’ll live the way I think is right. And you know what? What man thinks is right is not right according to God and he gets and reaps the wrath of God.
Oh Beloved, oh Beloved, what you have to understand is another important factor in all this. That important factor is you. It’s me. It’s anybody that does not believe, that does not respond to the evidence that there is a God. So, can I erase your name because you have responded? I can erase my name because I have responded.
When you sow a seed, the minute that you sow that seed, you don’t get a product. It takes a while for that product to come up, for that seed to fall into the ground and for it to open up and then that little shoot begin to come out and for a long time you don’t necessarily see it come out of the ground until later. And you think, oh you forgot that you sowed that seed. Oh what is that? Oh that’s what I put in the ground some time ago. You see, we don’t stop and think.
So God says, “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all ungodliness, against all ungodlikeness, against all unrighteousness, of men who suppress, men, women, who suppress down, hold down the truth, of God in their unrighteousness because …,” look at the next verse, “… because that which is known about God …,” now watch, “… is evident …,” where? “…within them, within them.”
Now you say, wait a minute. Wait minute, I wasn’t raised in church. Wait a minute, want a minute, what about all those people in those dark countries and those Aborigines that have never heard? Listen, listen to me. God made man. God created man and God created every man with a God shaped vacuum so that man knows that something is missing and man knows that there is a God. Do you know that they have studied every tribe practically on the face of this earth and they have never found anyone that did not worship something outside themselves? We know that there has to be a God outside ourselves, that we’re not God. Many of us think we’re God today. But he says,
For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, God’s attributes that you cannot see are His eternal power, His divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through that which has been made, so that they are without excuse.”
In other words, listen, if you are listening to me and you do not believe what I’m saying or you’ve never bowed the knee to Jesus Christ and you would never bow the knee and you would never say, okay, God, Your Son is going to be my master, He’s going to be my Lord, I’m going to accept Him as my Savior and He is going to direct my life, if you would refuse to do that, then you know what? When you stood before God at the Great White Throne judgment of God, and the books were opened and they went down and they saw your name and then they looked at all your deeds, all your deeds, they would say, you’re going to spend eternity in the lake of fire. You’re going to live forever and ever and ever because you’re eternal. Once man’s born he’s eternal. You will live eternally in the lake of fire with the devil, with his angels, “where the worm dies not and the fire is not quenched.” That’s where you’re going to live forever. And you know what? It’s a sad moment for you. It’s a horrifying moment for you.
But it is also a grievous moment for God because He doesn’t want you to perish. He doesn’t want you to spend eternity in the lake of fire. You say, well then why did He make it? He made it for the devil and his angels. The end of Matthew 25 tells us that. That’s who He made it for.
But listen, Precious One, you will not be able to offer one single excuse, not one single excuse because God says, look at verse 20.
absolutely without excuse. Why? Because we just read it. God makes the truth of God evident in here and He splatters out all creation, the sun, the moon, the stars, the night, the day, the oceans, stopping at the seashores and never coming over them, all these things testify that there is a God, that there is an Elohim, that there is a Creator and that there is an order to this universe, that there is a power outside of man.
You say, “I don’t believe it.” Listen, if you don’t believe it, it’s because you’ve suppressed that truth. It’s because you have ignored this gnawing within. But I want to tell you something, the reason that you’re listening, the reason that you’re listening is not the reason that you may think. The reason that you’re listening is because God wants to bring you to Himself, because God loves you, because God does not want you to perish, because God does not want you to experience His wrath, because God wants to come inside of you, as we’re going to see in the book of Romans, and shed His love abroad in your heart, because God wants to take you and gather you in His arms and bring you to his all sufficient breast.
His name is El Shaddia, the all-sufficient one and He wants you to be His. He wants you to be His. So listen to me very carefully. God has brought you and me together on this program and whatever else you’re seeing that tells you the same thing, that the Word of God says. God is bringing you to Himself. Don’t resist, because as long as you resist, you’re experiencing the wrath of God. Let me take you to the gospel of John, John chapter 3, verse 36. And this is what he says;
If you’re in your Bible and you’re looking at it, mark “wrath” again. “But the wrath of God abides on him.” And abides on him means it’s right now. The wrath of God is abiding on you right now and God wants to remove that wrath.
And that’s why Paul says; “I am a debtor to the gospel. I am under obligation. I am not ashamed of this good news because, it is the power of God to salvation to everyone that believes, to everyone that believes, to the Jew first …”
If you’re Jewish and you’re sitting in Israel or you’re sitting in the United States of America or in Europe, wherever you’re sitting and you’re listening to this, just know this, that to believe this does not deny the fact that you’re a Jew, but it proves as you’re going to see as we go on, that this is what Judaism is all about. Judaism is all about the Messiah. It’s all about the changed life that the Messiah brings. So just know that, Precious One.
Then he says, “For the wrath of God …,” Now remember, wrath has a red slash like that.
“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness.”
You say, well that’s unrighteousness. How do I mark it? Mark it the same way that you mark righteousness, but put a slash through it. So you take unrighteousness, color it the same way and then put a slash through it. Okay.
He says, “For the wrath of God is revealed ….” Now let me explain something to you. And I told you this last week. But the word “is revealed”, the verb “is revealed” is in the present tense in the Greek language. Now the present tense in the Greek language means continuous or habitual action. In other words, what he’s saying is the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven. In other words, right now, do you know what? “God’s wrath is being revealed on this earth. And it is being revealed from heaven against …,” now watch what he says, “… against all ungodliness and unrighteousness.” Now this word for ungodliness is “asebia”, “a-s-e-b-i-a.” And what it means is this, just think of un god like. Ungodliness means I am far away from being like God as I can be. I, I’m the opposite of God. And so what God is saying is, look a man can be righteous. A man can be like God. God’s a righteous God. And a man can live by God’s standards. But when men refuse to live by God’s standards, when they suppress, when they suppress the truth of God in their ungodliness, in their unrighteousness, God’s wrath is coming out on them.
You say, but I didn’t get struck from heaven and I know that I’m not living like God would have me live. And I know you haven’t gotten struck by heaven. There was day when men would say, oh don’t say that, lightning will strike you. Why? They knew that God would judge. They knew that God had standards. And that if we didn’t hold those standards he would judge and so they’d say, oh I hope lightning doesn’t strike me.
We have such of a lack of fear of God and by fear of God I mean a reverence of God, a trembling of God. We don’t respect Him anymore. We don’t even think about Him striking us with lightening. We just think that God’s a God of love. He’s a mamby pamby God. You can manipulate God. You can get away with it and nothing’s going to happen.
But, just look around you. Look at your life. Look at your relationships. Look at what’s going on. Look at the things that you’re caught in and enslaved in and you know that they’re wrong and you feel trapped. All right, what is that? That’s the wrath of God. You say, whoa, whoa, you mean that God’s wrath is seen in some of the hard things that I’m going through? Un huh. You say, explain that to me. I will in just a minute, but first I want you to see this.
I want you to see that His wrath is being revealed against two things, against all ungodliness and against all unrighteousness. So unrighteousness is when I deliberately do not do what God says is right. Unrighteousness is when I choose to say, listen don’t set my standards. Don’t tell me what’s right and what’s wrong. I will do what I think is right and what I think is wrong. All right. So it’s being revealed against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. So you want to mark unrighteousness again.
Now that word suppress means this; that you’re literally going to hold down the truth. In other words, the truth is not going to be seen. The truth is not, is not going to be visible at all because you’re suppressing it. Now that word suppressing is also in the present tense. So it means this; that you keep on suppressing truth. How? By your unrighteousness.
You see when God made you, when He made mankind; He made us in the image of God. He made us so that we could reveal to all of creation what God was like. But then remember sin entered into the world. And this is the segment that we’re in in the book of Romans. We’re dealing with a segment that has to do with the issue of sin. So we’re looking at sin and we’re about to see what God is going to do with sin. But as we look at sin what I want you to understand is that when sin entered into the world then all men are born as sinners. Romans 3 is going to tell us this.
“All have sinned and we’ve all come short of the glory …,” the correct estimate, the opinion that the world should have, “… of God.”
But when you and I just in flat out rebellion, in flat out, just digging our heels in and saying, listen, I’m going to live the way I want to, then you can know that as you keep suppressing truth, as you keep disobeying God, as you keep defying God, then God’s wrath is being poured out on you. What is the Greek word for wrath? And you want to write it down that the word for wrath is “o-r-g-e”, “o-r-g-e” it is an anger that is a building anger. It builds and it builds and it builds and it builds until finally, finally it’s expressed.
And so what he’s saying here is that this wrath that he is pouring out this wrath, is really a wrath that says, okay, you want to live that way, you want to act like that, you want to behave like that, you want to think like that, you want to talk like that, you want to do those things, okay, go ahead. You want it, you’ve got it. You do it and I’m going to stay out of it and you know what? You’re going to reap the consequences.
I want to ask you a question. Have you looked at our society lately? Are you aware of all the changes that have come in the past thirty some, thirty plus years? It’s a result of us suppressing the truth of God in our unrighteousness. It is the result of us saying I will do what I want to do. Get your hands off of me. Don’t tell me what to do. I’ll live the way I think is right. And you know what? What man thinks is right is not right according to God and he gets and reaps the wrath of God.
Oh Beloved, oh Beloved, what you have to understand is another important factor in all this. That important factor is you. It’s me. It’s anybody that does not believe, that does not respond to the evidence that there is a God. So, can I erase your name because you have responded? I can erase my name because I have responded.
When you sow a seed, the minute that you sow that seed, you don’t get a product. It takes a while for that product to come up, for that seed to fall into the ground and for it to open up and then that little shoot begin to come out and for a long time you don’t necessarily see it come out of the ground until later. And you think, oh you forgot that you sowed that seed. Oh what is that? Oh that’s what I put in the ground some time ago. You see, we don’t stop and think.
So God says, “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all ungodliness, against all ungodlikeness, against all unrighteousness, of men who suppress, men, women, who suppress down, hold down the truth, of God in their unrighteousness because …,” look at the next verse, “… because that which is known about God …,” now watch, “… is evident …,” where? “…within them, within them.”
Now you say, wait a minute. Wait minute, I wasn’t raised in church. Wait a minute, want a minute, what about all those people in those dark countries and those Aborigines that have never heard? Listen, listen to me. God made man. God created man and God created every man with a God shaped vacuum so that man knows that something is missing and man knows that there is a God. Do you know that they have studied every tribe practically on the face of this earth and they have never found anyone that did not worship something outside themselves? We know that there has to be a God outside ourselves, that we’re not God. Many of us think we’re God today. But he says,
“Because that which may be known about God is evident within them…,” Now listen, “… for God made it evident to them.
For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, God’s attributes that you cannot see are His eternal power, His divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through that which has been made, so that they are without excuse.”
In other words, listen, if you are listening to me and you do not believe what I’m saying or you’ve never bowed the knee to Jesus Christ and you would never bow the knee and you would never say, okay, God, Your Son is going to be my master, He’s going to be my Lord, I’m going to accept Him as my Savior and He is going to direct my life, if you would refuse to do that, then you know what? When you stood before God at the Great White Throne judgment of God, and the books were opened and they went down and they saw your name and then they looked at all your deeds, all your deeds, they would say, you’re going to spend eternity in the lake of fire. You’re going to live forever and ever and ever because you’re eternal. Once man’s born he’s eternal. You will live eternally in the lake of fire with the devil, with his angels, “where the worm dies not and the fire is not quenched.” That’s where you’re going to live forever. And you know what? It’s a sad moment for you. It’s a horrifying moment for you.
But it is also a grievous moment for God because He doesn’t want you to perish. He doesn’t want you to spend eternity in the lake of fire. You say, well then why did He make it? He made it for the devil and his angels. The end of Matthew 25 tells us that. That’s who He made it for.
But listen, Precious One, you will not be able to offer one single excuse, not one single excuse because God says, look at verse 20.
“So that they, they, these who have suppressed the truth of God in their ungodlikeness, in their unrighteousness, those who have held it down, those who have walked in rebellion to God, they’re without excuse,”
absolutely without excuse. Why? Because we just read it. God makes the truth of God evident in here and He splatters out all creation, the sun, the moon, the stars, the night, the day, the oceans, stopping at the seashores and never coming over them, all these things testify that there is a God, that there is an Elohim, that there is a Creator and that there is an order to this universe, that there is a power outside of man.
You say, “I don’t believe it.” Listen, if you don’t believe it, it’s because you’ve suppressed that truth. It’s because you have ignored this gnawing within. But I want to tell you something, the reason that you’re listening, the reason that you’re listening is not the reason that you may think. The reason that you’re listening is because God wants to bring you to Himself, because God loves you, because God does not want you to perish, because God does not want you to experience His wrath, because God wants to come inside of you, as we’re going to see in the book of Romans, and shed His love abroad in your heart, because God wants to take you and gather you in His arms and bring you to his all sufficient breast.
His name is El Shaddia, the all-sufficient one and He wants you to be His. He wants you to be His. So listen to me very carefully. God has brought you and me together on this program and whatever else you’re seeing that tells you the same thing, that the Word of God says. God is bringing you to Himself. Don’t resist, because as long as you resist, you’re experiencing the wrath of God. Let me take you to the gospel of John, John chapter 3, verse 36. And this is what he says;
“He who believes in the Son has eternal life. But he who does not obey the Son …,” you see obedience and belief are synonymous. If you really believe, according to God’s definition, then you respond. There’s an act obedience. So it says, “… but he who does not obey the Son shall not see life but the wrath of God.”
If you’re in your Bible and you’re looking at it, mark “wrath” again. “But the wrath of God abides on him.” And abides on him means it’s right now. The wrath of God is abiding on you right now and God wants to remove that wrath.
And that’s why Paul says; “I am a debtor to the gospel. I am under obligation. I am not ashamed of this good news because, it is the power of God to salvation to everyone that believes, to everyone that believes, to the Jew first …”
If you’re Jewish and you’re sitting in Israel or you’re sitting in the United States of America or in Europe, wherever you’re sitting and you’re listening to this, just know this, that to believe this does not deny the fact that you’re a Jew, but it proves as you’re going to see as we go on, that this is what Judaism is all about. Judaism is all about the Messiah. It’s all about the changed life that the Messiah brings. So just know that, Precious One.
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