Sunday School at 9 am | worship at 10 am

Amazing Wrath

 

 

book's Prayer of General Confession, which includes a request for the forgiveness of the sins of "miserable offenders." Why, then, were the monthly magazines pulled? The official comment: "We don't want to give the impression that the
doctrines of the Christian faith cause people emotional trauma."

While I’m not convinced that calling people “miserable sinners” is necessary to drive home the message of the gospel, but we do need to understand that we are sinners who are deserving of judgment.  But that’s not what we want to hear.  We live in an age that demands we preach a kinder and gentler gospel.   We, as a culture do not care to hear about the horror of the cross.  The cross itself is offensive to us.  And so is its message. 

Years ago, when Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion came out, I, like so many of you, went to see it.  But I never want to see it again. The images of
Jesus suffering those brutal beatings, then mercilessly being nailed to the cross are just too horrific to look at.  And so we don’t.  We want a gospel that emphasizes the love of God in kinder and gentler ways.  And so, because we want to communicate the work of Christ more kindly, we flee from any mention of the wrath inflicted by God upon his own Son.  This is why I’m taking us through a series of sermons titled Amazing Wrath.  We need to understand something absolutely foundational.  Unless we are amazed at the wrath of God, we will never be amazed at the grace of God. 

In our attempts to soften the brutality of the cross, we stray away from one of the harshest images of the atonement—that on the cross, God the Father cursed the Son.  R.C. Sproul said that this disregard for the curse motif of the atonement actually betrays a serious misunderstanding of God himself.  The God we have fashioned loves all people and blesses all people.  He’s incapable of cursing anyone, much less his own Son.  But if we declare that there is no divine wrath, then we are saying that there is no need for the cross.  If there is no wrath, then what would sinners need to be saved from? It is only when we recognize the reality of God’s wrath against those deserving of judgment that we find the cross to be such glorious news.

You know that the message of the gospel has sunk in when the shocking thing about the gospel is not that God extends wrath to sinners, but that he extends grace.  Here’s why: The basic human condition is to believe that God isn’t really all that holy and that I’m not really that bad. God is lenient toward sin, we say,
although I am really not all that deeply sinful. So we are a good match, God and I. That’s what most people think.   But it takes no faith to believe that. It requires no great change of mind and heart.But the gospel unmasks that kind of
delusion. The gospel helps us see things as they really are. The gospel says that God really is far holier than I dared even imagine and that I am far more sinful than I ever could have guessed. And, right there—with the right assessment of both God and me—right there the gospel blazes forth. Right there the gospel gives hope.