We are all
accustomed to the grace of God and rightly so. God had shown Himself gracious
even in our wickedness, in that He provides the way in Christ for us to avoid
His wrath. The problem with us is that we have taken His grace for granted and
ignore the fact that God is also a God of wrath.
What do we
understand by the word, wrath of God? It is not anger of the human kind. The
human anger is the uncontrollable, impulsive and negative emotion that causes
him or her to hit out. The word wrath is a controlled, measured and perfect
anger. He is not a God who gets out of control, and haphazardly hit out at
anyone who happened to be nearby. And just as God had revealed His
righteousness, Paul said that He had also revealed His wrath. As much as we
need to know the righteousness of God, we also need to be aware that He is also
a God of wrath. This wrath, Paul said, is directed at all ungodliness and
unrighteousness of men.
Why are the
ungodly and wicked people under the wrath of God?
The first reason
for God’s wrath is that in man’s unrighteousness, he chose to suppress the
truth. God is knowable and anyone has the capacity to know Him. By examining
oneself, a person should be able to detect evidences of God’s design in his or
her life. For ages, all of nature had been there to reveal God with all His
powerful and invincibility as well as His invisible qualities. Yet man chose to
ignore this truth of a God who had created the universe and all nature, and
that He continues to sustain them. Creation clearly and plainly reveals God’s
existence to mankind. God had made it so plain and obvious that man has no
excuse for not knowing Him. Mankind in their philosophical thinking considered
themselves wise, but by suppressing the truth they had proven themselves to be
fools. Only a fool would say in his heart that there’s no God.
The second reason
for God’s wrath towards mankind is because they twist and pervert the truth.
Instead of seeking and worship the knowable God of Creation, they chose to
worship His creatures, peoples and beings that He had created. They had made
God into all forms of images of fallen man, birds, and four-footed and even
crawling creatures. In so doing man had perverted the truth and denigrated God,
making Him lesser than Who He really is.
The third reason
for God’s wrath is mankind’s perversion of life. Mankind had chosen to take a
path lower than the one that God had created for them to assume. They chose to
denigrate themselves in all kinds of loose living, and exchange what is real
and true for something untrue and false. They would rather worship what they
had deceitfully contorted than a God who alone deserves to be praised and
blessed forever.
God had revealed
two great things to us: His righteousness and His wrath. Thankfully all of us
had chosen to receive God’s righteousness by faith in Christ. In so doing, we
are now the object of His love rather than His wrath. God’s revelation of His
righteousness which we have received in Christ, shows us how He longs to
connect with us. Can we see that God is straining to reach us? Shouldn’t we
reciprocate His love by seeking to know Him more? Knowing Him will lead us to
live our life gratefully in the light of that inextinguishable hope we have in
Christ!
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