Christ Sanctuary – 12th November 2023 
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We come now / to what must easily be the most unpopular of attributes
Christians generally shy away from talking about the wrath of God

J.I. Packer in his book Knowing God says:
“The subject of divine wrath has become taboo in modern society
and Christians by and large have accepted the taboo
and conditioned themselves never to raise the matter”

C. H. Dodd / one time professor of Divinity at Cambridge
held the view that the wrath of God is an archaic outdated idea

But why do so many Christians shy away from affirming God’s wrath?
Many do so because they equate the emotion of anger with moral failure

But that’s because they think of God’s wrathas God going into a fit of rage
losing His cool / blowing His lid off / ranting and raving / and flying off the handle
And they conclude / surely it is not God to be acting that way
It puts Him in a bad light

It makes Him out to be intolerant and judgmental

And there are people who think of God to be like those pagan deities
who are capricious and vindictive / and dishing out punishment
willy-nilly as and when it fancies them; a deity who could only be appeased 

by the offering of a bribe

But this is not what God’s wrath is God’s wrath is not an erratic temperamental impulsive passion God is not a curmudgeon and His wrath is not an irrational impulsive outburst of rage

Leon Morris the Australian theologian says / God’s wrath “denotes
not so much a sudden flaring up of passion which is soon over
so much as a strong and settled opposition to all that is evil
arising out of God’s very nature”

John Murray says: “Wrath is the holy revulsion of God’s being
against that which is the contradiction of his holiness”
God’s wrath is His settled expression of His absolute displeasure
of everything that is evil unholy and unrighteous

God’s wrath is His righteous and holy displeasure with sin
It is the expression of vengeance He takes towards sin
It is His holy act of retributive justice towards sinners
whose actions deserve eternal condemnation

The Bible insists / that a day of wrath is coming

* Isaiah says: “Behold, the day of the LORD comes
 cruel / with wrath and fierce anger” / 13:9
* Nahum says: “The Lord is a jealous and avenging God
 the Lord is avenging and wrathful
the Lord takes vengeance
 on his adversaries / and keeps wrath for his enemies” Nah 1:2
* Jeremiah refers to that time as “Jacob’s trouble” / Jer 30:7
* Isaiah calls it / the “destruction from the Almighty” / Isaiah 13:6
* Ezekiel calls it a “time of doom” / Ezek 30:3
* Joel refers to the day as “great and very terrible” / Joel 2:11
* Amos describes it as a day of “darkness and not light” / Amos 5:18
* Zephaniah calls the day of wrath / a day of distress and anguish
 a day of ruin and devastation
a day of darkness and gloom Zeph 1:14-18
* Ezekiel says:  “Neither their gold nor their silver / shall be able to deliver them
in the day of the wrath of the Lord” / 7:19

Now / some people have argued / that all that is Old Testament stuff!
that God was then more primitive / that He hadn’t yet come of age
that by the time you come to the New Testament
He has mellowed into a loving and merciful God

This is absolutely not true / As Packer says anyone who reads the NT
“even in the most cursory way / will find at once /
that the Old Testament emphasis / on God’s action as Judge
far from being reduced / is actually intensified”

Packer says: In fact the entire New Testament is overshadowed
by the certainty of a coming day of universal judgement

* Our Lord Himself speaks of the day of wrath
He calls it “a time of great tribulation” / Matthew 24:21
* John contrasts Christ’s offer of salvation with God’s wrath:
He said “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life
 whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life
 but the wrath of God remains on him” / Jn 3:36
* Paul warned us against sexual immorality / impurity / lust & greed
 He says “because of these the wrath of God is coming”/ Col 3:5,6
He calls it / “the day of wrath and righteous judgement of God” / Rom 2:5
He says / we are all by nature children of wrath / Eph 2:3
* The writer of the Book of Hebrews says it plainly: 

“our God is a consuming fire / Heb 12:29

And by the time you reach the Book of Revelation it gets literally gruesome 

even brutally explicit

* John says / on that day / the Lord Himself 

with His breath like a river of burning pitch
like a stream of burning sulphur will stoke with hot-burning wood
and start the fire / Rev 14:10

* He says “they will drink the wine of God’s wrath
poured unmixed into the cup of his anger
and they will be tormented with fire and sulphur in the presence 

of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb / 14:9

* He says / on that day the seven angels would be given seven vials 

full of the wrath of God and people will call on the rocks and mountains :
“Fall on us / Hide us from the presence of Him
who sits on the throne / and from the wrath of the Lamb
 for the great day of their wrath has come
and who is able to stand?” / Rev Rev 15:1 / 6:16-17

People will be so frightened they will fall over dead / or cry out for mercy

And predicting the attack on Jerusalem / just before His return

Our Lord Himself said: “How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women 

and nursing mothers! There will be great distress in the land  

and wrath against this people” / Luke 21:23
Now / does all that sound to you like a little gentle slap to the wrist!
And yet they are all found not in the Old / but in the New Testament

Now / there are basically three things for which God will pour out His wrath
All taken from one verse / Romans 1:18
It says / the wrath of God is revealed / from heaven against
one – ungodliness
two – unrighteousness
three – suppression of the truth

Proceed three verses forward to v.21 and it’s all crystallised for you
“For although they knew God / they did not honour him as God
or give thanks to him / but they became futile in their thinking
and their foolish hearts were darkened”

And that / is the sin under all sins / “they glorified him not as God”

Lucifer did that / Adam did that / and many today are doing that
* They know God’s truth
* Rom 1:19  “what may be known about God is plain to them”
* They suppressed God’s truth
* Rom 1:18 / “they suppressed the truth of God by their wickedness”
* This ungodliness and unrighteousness / invites God’s wrath
* Col 3:6 / “on account of these / the wrath of God is coming”

Romans 2:5 makes it even more clear
“Because of your hard and impenitent heart
you are storing up wrath  / for yourself / on the day of wrath
when God’s righteous judgement will be revealed”

Now / while we may rightly speak of the coming wrath of God
there is a sense in which God’s wrath is already on us now

* The fact that every man and woman and child is vulnerable to death
is evidence that we now live under the shadow of God’s wrath

Death is God’s judgement on sin 
 Rom 5:15 / “by the transgression of the one man / we all die”
Adam heard it directly from God’s mouth: “In the day that you eat
 of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil
 you shall surely die” / Gen 2:17

* Further / we trace God’s wrath  in the sense of futility and misery 

all around human existence

Charles Hodge refers to the misery caused by moral evil 

as “a present manifestation of God’s wrath”

The erosion of civility around us / the brazen depravity; 

the blatant indecency / the degradation of purity and virtue 

are all evidences of God’s wrath now at work

We’ve rejected God / and God / in turn / judicially abandons us 

and gives us over to evil

* It’s the reason / why we all live under a vale of tears 

Not a day passes without some people coming to grief 

n some areas of life / illness / toil of labour /relationship fractures \

loneliness / depression anxiety / worry / ageing

* Nature too is not spared

Among animals we see merciless / savage and brutal killing / 

Tennyson speaks of “nature red in tooth and claw” 

Rom 8:20 / says creation is subjected to futility condemned to frustration

So the whole world stands under the wrath of God
We all stand in need of redemption

But / I wonder what your answer would be / if I should ask you:
“What is God saving you from?”
 / You’ll probably say
“God is saving me from my sin”
 / and you’re not wrong

But if I press you a little more / and tell you /
that there is something
more horrendous that He is saving you from
 you might say “He is saving me from hell”
And again you’re right / but you need to go deeper
But what if I should rephrase the question
and ask “From who / is God saving you?” most of you will say
“He’s saving me from Satan / the world / the flesh”
Again you’re right / but still not quite there

Strange as it may sound / the One we’ve got to be saved from / is God!

Romans 5:9 reads: “Since we have now been justified by his blood
how much more shall we be saved / from the wrath of God”

The Orthodox Jewish Bible translates John the Baptist’s words this way
“You brood of vipers / who warned you to flee
from the “charon af [Hashem] habah” 

“the coming burning wrath of Hashem [God]”

* God is the One / from Whom we must be saved
* It is God Who is coming at us with His wrath to destroy us
 / for the sin in our heart
* Listen to Amos / “Seek the LORD and live
 lest He break out like fire / devouring you completely” 5:6

And further you might be surprised to find out who it will be /

who will execute God’s wrath / in hell

It will not be Satan / Satan himself will be punished in hell

It will none other / than that meek and mild Lamb of God
He / will be wielding that sword
 on that great Day of Judgement

He may have been humble and self-abased
when He submitted Himself / to the humiliation
of wicked men at His first coming

But at His Second Coming
He / it is / Who will wield the sword of God’s wrath

John describes Jesus as both Judge and executioner
“And from His mouth comes a sharp sword
 / so that with it
He may smite the nations
 / and He will rule them
with a rod of iron /
and He treads the winepress
of the fierce wrath of God
 the Almighty” / Revelation 19:15

The cup of iniquity is full / the angel with his sickle is ready
the grapes of wrath are ripe / they are gathered
and thrown into the winepress of the wrath of God
and trodden outside the city / Rev 14:19,20

Alright / let me now make a shift of gear here

Let me ask the big question / and it is this:
Why is God this angry? / I mean / Isn’t all this an overkill?
What could humans have done to earn this horrendous judgement?
What rattles people’s cage is the thought
that God could be this judgmental / this wrathful / merciless

How may we  best understand God’s wrathfulness? 

Let me put it this way
Most of us / experience a sense of outrage 

when we hear of little babies / killed in their mother’s womb
 with suction machines and forceps or
when we hear of abuse / murder / or other forms of social injustice

A person who has had his little sister violated
will not respond with some kind of a benign tolerance
Far from it / he would be enraged / he’ll go on a rampage
The more he loves his sister 
 the more fiery will be his hatred for the perpetrator

Now / our DISREGARD of God / our DISTRUST of Him / our UNBELIEF
INGRATITUDE / INDIFFERENCE / indeed our DEFIANCE of Him is an 

infinitely greater sin / than all sins put together

John MacArthur is right when he says / that a crime is wicked
in direct proportion /
to the worth of the one assaulted
– there are no penalties for smashing a mosquito
– if you kill a dog / you can get into trouble
– if you kill a rare Siberian snow tiger / you’ll be in worse trouble
– when you assault another human person / your guilt increases
because a person is of greater worth than an animal

Now /when you assault the GLORY / the MAJESTY / the HOLINESS of God
you offend the INFINITELY GREATEST / MOST EXALTED Being
And / an offence against an infinitely holy Being / would demand
 an infinite condemnation
 and given an infinite penalty

Look at it this way / God’s wrath is NOT an overkill
God’s wrath is a just and proportionate judgement
on sin / against an infinitely righteous and holy God
God’s wrath is an expression of His righteous revulsion
of all that violates and defiles His holiness
It is His holy act of retributive justice towards sinners
whose actions deserve / an eternity of condemnation

In fact / God’s wrath / reveals the infinite worth of His holiness
Didn’t Habakkuk say “You who are of purer eyes / than to look at evil”

God pours out His wrath on sinners
 / to vindicate His holiness

Hell is intensely furious / because God is zealously holy
Hell is unbearably tormenting / because God is outrageously holy
Hell is so long / because God’s holiness is so infinitely precious

I remember mentioning several times before
that if God were incapable of wrath He wouldn’t be holy and righteous

A God Who is incapable of an infinite hatred against sin
would be a god / who is morally deficient
What kind of a God would He be
if He looked at chastity and depravity with equal gratification
If He cannot hate what is profane and defiled
He cannot love what is chaste and virtuous

Now let me push this closer to home / Let me ask
If God’s wrath / is this horrendous / then until you come to God 

you are in a most vulnerable place

Jonathan Edwards describes unrepentant sinners 

as people walking over the pit of hell
walking on timber flooring / that’s so rotten and slippery
it’s only a matter of time / before they fall through
And the only reason why they haven’t fallen / is only because
they are preserved by God’s restraining hand
God’s appointed time has not come / He quotes Deuteronomy
“In due time / “their foot shall slide” / Deut 32:35
Edwards says / that because of their sins
they’ve become as heavy as lead
 And if God should let them go / they would plunge into hell
And all that they thought will save them
their wealth / health and wisdom
 “will not be able to hold them up and keep them out of hell
anymore than a spider’s web could stop a falling rock.”

Where then / do you and I stand? / What hope have we got

Our text tells us that while our Lord 

is praying in the Garden of Gethsemane
He said: “My soul is very sorrowful / to the point of death” / Matt 26:38
Luke tells us that His distress was so intense He sweat drops of blood

We need to get as close as we can / to the bottom
of why our Lord is in such agony
of what exactly it is / that He so dreaded / and shuddered?
We get a hint / of what he feared from a line of His prayer / He prayed
 “Father if it be possible let this cup pass from me” / Matt 26:39

Just what’s this cup / that’s causing Him to stagger
J.D. Greear gets us to see how puzzling this scene is / that Jesus
the eternal Word of God / the One Who spoke the worlds into existence
the One who quelled the fiercest storms / cast out demons
healed diseases / and brought the dead back to life
should be so horrified at something he sees
that he came close to physically dying

So we ask / just exactly what was it / that He had seen

But Greear says: “The real question is what he had not seen”
He’d not seen His Father reaching out to Him / comforting Him
His call for the Father to have the cup removed / was met
with a stony silence / not once / but three times

Now if you imagine that the Son and the Father had been intimate
for all eternity / and that’s an awful long time / and then
for the very first time / ever since the span from all eternity
the Father shuns and snubs the Son / treats Him with disdain

* He runs back to where His disciples were
looking for some kind of comfort / but they were deep in sleep
* He goes back to the spot He was praying / cries out to the Father
But again He was met with a deafening silence

Greear tells us that William Lane / the New Testament scholar
makes the point that / right here / in Gethsemane
“God had already begun to turn his face away
The judgement for our sin had already begun
Even before the first nail / was driven into his body
Jesus’ soul was being abandoned by God”

This silence is a fulfilment of the prophecy of Psalm 22:1,2
“My God / my God / why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me / from my groaning?
O my God / I cry by day / but you do not answer
and by night / but I find no rest”

See / this was why He fought off / from having to drink from the cup
Scripture uses the metaphor of the cup to refer to God’s wrath
The “cup” that Jesus sought to have removed
is the pure / undiluted / full-bodied portion of divine wrath

* Psalm 75:8 / “For in the hand of the LORD there is a cup
with foaming wine well mixed . . . and all the wicked
of the earth / shall drain it down to the dregs”

* Ezekiel 23:34 / “You shall drink the cup of his wrath
of ruin and desolation / and you will tear your breasts”
It’s the imagery of a person who’s drunk poison
and they stagger because their insides are burning up

So did Christ drink from the cup?

We know He did / because at the ninth hour on the cross / He cried
“Eloi Eloi Lama Sabachthani”
what’s now called in theology “the cry of dereliction”

Although not everyone there understood Aramaic / there was
no mistaking / that it was an ghastly / haunting sound
Someone said that / for the first time / humans on earth
heard a cry / that rose from the bottom of Gehenna

What seems to be happening?

Martin Luther once sat motionless for hours / as if in a trance
Denying himself food and drink
he remained absorbed in deep contemplation
Finally / he stood up and exclaimed:
“God forsaken by God! Who can understand that!”

Describing the Cry of Dereliction / Calvin rightly said
that that is the best commentary to that line in the Creed
that says: “He descended into hell”

And John Duncan / divinity professor in Edinburgh / Scotland
who died in 1870 / once asked:
“Do you know what it was / to be forsaken by the Father?
It was damnation / and damnation taken lovingly”
In today’s language / it’ll have to be “Damn you!”

But isn’t that / the essence of what hell is:
complete abandonment by God

When Jesus hung there on the cross
our sins were lumped upon Him / imputed to him
and the vindictive wrath of God was poured on him
the sword of justice was sheathed in him
And He bore the brunt of the Father’s wrath

The curse of God’s wrath that should rightly fall on us fell on Him
God made him / who had no sin / to be sin for us
so that in him
we might become the righteousness of God /
2 Cor 5:21
God shielded you and I from His wrath
by pouring it all / into the cup of His own Son
And Jesus satisfied God’s justice / propitiated God’s wrath

Joel Beeke says
God’s elect now have full immunity from God’s wrath

We are immune
one / to God’s condemnation
two / to God’s anathema / His curse

We’re immuned from His condemnation / Romans 8:1
“There is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus”
We’re immuned from His anathema / Gal 3:13
“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law
by becoming a curse for us / for it is written:
“Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree”

Jesus’ suffering
* satisfied the demands of justice
* ransomed penitent souls from God’s wrath / and
* made redemption available to all who believe

Because sin against an infinite God / warrants an infinite penalty
you never could finish your payment
But on the cross / dying for you / Jesus finished the payment

Now / you and I / may be saved from His wrath
because the infinitely holy Son of God / paid the infinite price
so that the infinite justice of an infinitely holy God
might be infinitely satisfied

I pray that there isn’t a single person here
who hasn’t fled from God’s wrath to come

If you’re not a Christian / you are walking on slippery ground
and one of these days / your feet will slip

Edwards ended his famous sermon saying
“Let everyone who does not now know Christ
awake and fly from the wrath to come . . .”
Let everyone fly out of Sodom
Run for your lives!
Don’t look back! Escape to the mountain / lest you be consumed!”