“For God’s wrath is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and unrighteousness of people who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth…” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Did you ever do anything you knew was wrong when you did it, but then never faced any consequences for it? My guess is that you felt pretty good then, at least initially. You felt like you had gotten away with something. Maybe it started to convince yourself that it wasn’t really all that wrong of a thing as you first thought. Perhaps it led to your doing it again…and again…until you finally did get caught. And when you finally did get caught it was bad. Worse even than what it likely would have been had you gotten caught in the beginning. What you needed that first time you did it was a bit of wrath directed your way. Wrath is not a bad thing. It also happens to be an attribute of God. It is, in fact, the first attribute of God Paul mentions after introducing the Gospel to us. Let’s talk about what it is and why it matters.

More than just about anything else when it comes to religion, our culture today wants a God who is nice. We want Him to be happy. We want Him to be tolerant and understanding. And we don’t want Him to be angry. And the Christian God is an angry God, so therefore, He must not really be a good God.

The idea that God is angry is not a terribly uncommon one. In fact, for a long time people in the church worked really hard to convince church members and anyone who would listen that God is so angry about sin that He’s going to send sinners to burn for an eternity in Hell if they don’t shape up and do better. I remember more than once studying Jonathan Edwards’ most famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, when I was in school. It was, we were told, and example of the kind of “fire and brimstone” sermon that was both common and popular in that day…and for a whole lot of days afterward.

Of course, if you peruse a collection of Edwards’ many other sermons we still have access to today – or, better yet, the sermons of the Puritan preachers who everybody “knows” was an especially angry lot – the idea of God’s wrath occupies only a minority of their actual attention. They tended to maximize on the goodness and grace of God and the joy believers can experience when they follow Him.

From a preaching standpoint, though, it’s easier to manipulate people’s emotions by leaving them afraid of judgment. Better yet, it’s easier to manipulate their behavior in a certain direction if you successfully convince them that God is waiting to pounce if they do wrong. Fire and brimstone sermons weren’t just the territory of the Puritans. Southern Baptist preachers have a long and well established reputation of “turn or burn” sermons. Talk to many folks in my neck of the woods, and they will often have memories of a preacher from their childhood who always seemed to preach angry. Which just conveyed the message that God is angry. But nobody really wants to worship an angry God. Culturally speaking, it’s really not all that surprising that we collectively turned away from Christianity after enough years of enduring all of that.

And then you have verses like this one from Paul that seem to back up all of that thinking. “For God’s wrath is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and unrighteousness of people who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.” There you have it. God is angry. All those critics are right. Again, this is the first thing Paul says after introducing the Gospel to us. He declares that it is the power of God for salvation for everyone, and then the very first thing he does is to proclaim God’s wrath against godless and unrighteous people. This is just all Christianity is: judgment and wrath from an angry God.

You can perhaps see how easy it is to frame out this particular argument. You don’t really even have to try very hard to do it. But as is usually the case when it comes to matters like this, the truth is both harder and better than these kinds of easy…and lazy…assertions of God’s anger.

To see why, we need only ask a fairly simple question: Is there anything Christians are reputed to either support or oppose that you find to be morally reprehensible, and which leads you to the conclusion that the Christian God is unworthy of your devotion because you can’t imagine worshiping a God who either supports or opposes whatever it is? I suspect you could come up with something…or maybe a few different somethings…fairly easily. You may have even had your list ready to go.

There’s a lesson here if we’re willing to learn it. The truth is that we don’t mind the idea of a God who vigorously opposes certain behaviors. In fact, we want our God to oppose certain behaviors. We want Him to do something to stop the people who would do such things. They should be judged and punished, and if He won’t do it, then we’ll take care of it ourselves. The kick here is that we want a God who opposes the behaviors we have decided we don’t like. We don’t mind the idea of God’s wrath at all, we just want it focused in the right direction, namely, away from us and the people who do the kinds of things we are inclined to support. The trouble with the declared wrath of the God revealed in the Scriptures is that our behavior sometimes gets caught up in His net, and that’s just not something we want to abide.

Where I’m going with all of this is here: we inherently recognize that a God who has wrath against certain behaviors is a good thing. We may quibble over the collection of behaviors against which that wrath is directed, but the fact itself isn’t what bothers us as much as we may protest otherwise. There’s a reason for this. Wrath is a good thing when it is properly motivated and directed.

In fact, let’s go one more step beyond that: God’s wrath is a consequence of God’s goodness. Someone who is good does not like or tolerate what is bad. Just look at the kinds of heroes we celebrate in film and screen today. They are often terrifically violent, but their violence is directed at the right people. Sony’s Venom trilogy takes the complicated comic character that is mostly a villain and turns him into a hero. Sure, he’s a hero who has no problem with killing, but because his killing is all directed against bad people, people who are deserving of wrath, we celebrate it.

The uncomfortable reality – uncomfortable because we do and even support things that fall into the category of sin according to the New Testament authors – is that if God did not have wrath over sin, He would not be a good God. He would not be a God who is worthy of our worship.

So, yes, God’s wrath is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and unrighteousness of people. God doesn’t like it when we do things that are wrong. He doesn’t like it because He loves what is good. He doesn’t like it because He loves us. He wants the best for us. When we do things that are wrong, we are actively hurting either ourselves or the people around us (He loves them too) or both. He doesn’t like that. He hates it. He hates it because when people do things that are wrong, they obscure His goodness such that the people around them have a hard time seeing and experiencing it. That is, unrighteousness suppresses the truth…just like Paul says here.

All of this is the result of His love and goodness. Wrath is an expression of God’s love and goodness. The fact that God has wrath against sin is a very good thing. It may not be a comfortable one, especially if we have done something or are even committed to a path that is out of sync with His character, but coming to understand this will save us a whole lot of grief and forming images and ideas of God that are simply false. God may hate your sin, but His wrath against it is a consequence of His great love for you. That love, if you’ll receive it, will transform your life for the better in every imaginable way. I hope that you will.