Today at WMB (notes, service) the message focused on Romans 1:18-23.
I always get hung up on words like wrath and sin (or in this case godlessness and unrighteousness). They don’t land for me and give me cartoon images of the cosmos (“God is good, I am bad, he is mad, I need to feel sorry and love Jesus). Nothing in my day-to-day life helps me sort this out, so every 6 months or so I have to go back to understand the idea of sin, wrath and grace.
In the What Are Sin, Iniquity, and Transgression in the Bible? blog post, The Bible Project Team summarizes 3 different biblical “bad words” (with a ~5min word study video for each).
- Sin: Missing the Goal (video)
- Iniquity: Distorting What Is Good (video)
- Transgression: Violating Trust (video)
I find this really helpful: Sin then is “missing the goal” of loving God and people. I don’t think of myself as an evil person, but if we are defining “sin” as “missing the goal of loving God and others the way he intended”, well then I am “sin-full”.
Does God really want my inside thoughts to love him and people around me? I can see that’s how he would want the world to run, and I’d like to live in a world like that. But I don’t think I can love God and people in my thoughts and attitudes like he wants.
Now back to Romans.
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of people who suppress the truth in unrighteousness
Here’s another place where I get tangled up in the words. One of my trusty tour guides is the Saved from God’s Wrath podcast on this Romans passage. Its part of a larger series The Character of God. Anger is one aspect of God’s character this is the last six podscasts in the series exploring how God’s anger is described in the bible. That seems a lot — I guess we struggle to understand God’s anger.
You can take in the Saved from God’s Wrath podcast by listening to it (1 hour) or reading the show notes (10 minutes). Or (worse choice) you can rely on these key takeaways:
- God’s anger occurs most often in the form of “handing over” those he’s called to represent him, whether that be handing them over to an enemy nation or simply to the moral degradation and eventual death that comes as a natural consequence to human sin.
- By fulfilling God’s wrath, Jesus invites us into a new set of natural consequences: lives given over to love and righteousness, producing in us eternal life.
- Because God is good, he has to get angry at injustice. This is why his slowness to anger is central to his loving character, as described in Exodus 34:6-7.
So its not that hard to see how far our modern western world is from God’s ideal. We certainly value the “self” above loving God and our neighbour. And the natural consequences seem painfully obvious — it seems pretty far from what God had in mind for Eden. That all seems pretty clear to anyone who cares to look.
Which brings us back to the choice that God always puts in front of us – what path are we going to choose.
The Thursday After 