Scary Bible Warnings vs. God’s Grace: Which One Wins?

Hey, thanks again for sending in questions related to our recent sermons. We’ve been progressing through the book of Romans in our Sunday services. And this last week, we came to Romans 4, where we have the amazing declaration that God justifies the ungodly. That it’s the ungodly who are elevated, the ungodly who are brought into God’s good graces, the ungodly who have God’s favor, the ungodly who are forgiven, made righteous, validated, given the status of Christ, the future of Christ.

It’s the ungodly that receive that. It’s not those who have earned it. Paul’s very specific about that. It’s by grace, it’s not by work. If it was by work, then the things that we receive would be wages, compensation, our just due. But because we are ungodly and yet we still get it, then it’s by grace.

Hallelujah, right? So the question comes in this week, what about the many places in scripture that have warnings against sinful behavior? We’ll come up to one in just a couple of weeks when we’re looking at Romans 8. Cover it again in Romans 11. There’s places like Hebrews 10 or Hebrews 6 or 2 Peter 2 that can get pretty graphic of those of us who continue in sin, what we can expect to happen.

And it’s not pretty. It’s it looks like wrath and condemnation and, you know, fire and destruction. So how are we to understand that? How could the ungodly both be justified, Romans 4, and what seems to be later, condemned? Can’t be both of those, so which one is it? Well, I’d say really in in every, almost every, if not every one of those sections of scripture that I just mentioned, there’s, along with the warning, is a comfort of, this is what will happen if you go go down this path, but

that’s not you. In Romans 8, it’s, but we are not of those who participate in darkness because we have God’s spirit in us. In Roman, in Hebrews 10, it’s, but we are not those who shrink back and are destroyed, but we are those who go forward. And so the idea is that because we have God’s spirit in us, and we’ll talk about this more in our Roman series, but because we have God’s spirit in us, we are drawn to him.

Our lives will begin to conform in him. In Philippians 1:6, he will complete the work that he began in us. If God’s Holy Spirit is in us, as is what happens when we first have faith, God’s Holy Spirit will not be drugged down an unholy path for very long. I mean, we can all, we all run, we all try to get away from God’s good plan for us, but if God’s Holy Spirit is in us, he will turn us around.

He will bring us to repentance. If you’ve been a Christian for a long time, you’ve experienced that. You’ve tried to run. You didn’t make it very far. Or maybe you did, but yet you still came back. It became harder and harder and harder to run the farther away you got, and he brought you back. It is a comfort of the message of the Bible is God won’t let us run away from him.

He is saving us. He’s bringing us back to the goodness that he is. And so while there are these warnings, there’s also this comfort that Paul says, the author of Hebrews says, Peter, other places say, but that’s not, that’s not us because we have God’s spirit in us. So we hope that’s helpful. We’ll see you next time.