Sermon Transcript
Hey everyone. Well, we are sure grateful that you have made this worship service part of your day and that you have chosen to participate in it. And we really hope that the past weeks of this series that we’re in, focusing on the bright future that we have as Christians, that that has really been encouraging to you. But today’s message, I want to let you know upfront, might be difficult for some of you. It might really challenge some of your preconceptions about God.
So I want you to know upfront, you are totally welcome to say, I struggle with a God like that. I don’t really know what to think about a God like that. I, I need some time to process You are totally welcome to do that. And now I know, okay, I know nearly all of you always feel comfortable challenging what a preacher says. So I know you already feel permission to question or disagree with me.
Anyway, what I want you to know right now though is that I am also okay with that. If you still have questions. We want to be a place at Bridges where skeptics feel welcome. Where skeptics can feel like they can be skeptical and take time to process everything we say. Nobody needs to come to Bridges fully formed.
You can disagree. You can wrestle. You can even argue. Now, I, of course, would prefer that you argue respectfully.
But, you know, if you want to yell and scream at me, I’ll listen to that too. If you yell and scream at somebody else, I’ll tell you, cut it out. But if you want to yell and scream at me, I’ll listen. We just pray that you stay engaged. We don’t want you to drop out of the conversation because you found something challenging.
Something didn’t fit neatly into your already existing picture of God, so you’re like, well, I’m done with them. That’s what we really hope you don’t do. So depending on your background, this might challenge you. But here’s my hope for you. In the end, if you stick with us to the end, I believe this will ultimately encourage you.
Now along the way you might say, I’m not comfortable with a God like that. But in the end, I hope— there’s no guarantees here— but I hope you say, I love a God like that.
So here we go. We’ll start easy with something we’ve said before. A question: Don’t you want justice in the world? Doesn’t it make you mad when someone does something wrong and gets away with it? A jury acquits someone on a— on just a technicality, and the person was clearly guilty, maybe even said they were guilty, but they get to go free because of a technicality.
What do we say? We say, is there no justice for the victim? I mean, don’t you wish things like that were different? Or there are still reports of genocide in the world. Or human trafficking is as bad as ever.
We wonder, are these guys just going to get away with it? Is there no justice? I mean, aren’t you upset about that? Don’t you want something to happen to the perpetrators of evil? For them to be held accountable in some way?
Don’t you long for that? For something to happen?
Well, something is going to happen.
God is going to judge, and God is going to take vengeance on the evil in the world. God isn’t going to let anyone get away with anything in the end. Right now, sometimes it looks like the wicked prosper, like they are going to get away with it, but it will not always be so. Vengeance is mine, says the Lord. Romans 12:19.
But here is where some of us start to have difficulty, right? As much as we know it’s not okay for anyone to, to to get away with injustice or inequality. You know, we know it’s wrong for people to hurt or abuse or oppress or exclude. We know that’s wrong. We want something done about it.
But for some reason, some of us can become squeamish when we start to say that God will punish such actions. Some of us want to believe God is only, a type of benevolent marshmallow who’s ready to help us if we lost our car keys, but he is not someone who ever gets roused to anger. That’s not him. He’s like the grandfather who always lets you have chocolates and lets you stay up late. That’s the picture of God for some of us.
So when we start talking about a God who executes judgment with righteous wrath, some of us are like, wow, wait a minute there, you know, like, what’s got into Grandpa?
Calm down there, buddy. You need a nap? You need to take a walk or something? Like, you just go cool off for a bit and then come back when you’re, when you’re back to yourself.
But the truth is, God is not a benevolent marshmallow. He stands on the side of the oppressed. He defends the cause of the widow and the orphan, Deuteronomy 10:18. What do you think it means to defend the cause of the widow and the orphan? Who, you know, I mean, widow and orphan are vulnerable groups who are frequently oppressed.
What does it mean to defend them? Well, Scripture tells us repeatedly. God will break the oppressor into pieces. Psalm 72:4. God will plunder those who exploit the poor.
Proverbs 22:23. God says he will feed oppressors their own flesh. Isaiah 49:26.
God doesn’t passively sit next to victims as they are abused. He is provoked to anger. And he fights for them.
That’s the justice of God.
I know some of you take issue with that.
You think God is only love and acceptance and tenderness.
But you know who doesn’t have any problem talking about and trusting in a God who pours out wrath and destroys evil? You know who easily accepts the idea of a God like that? The poor church. The persecuted church. Churches whose members have experienced tremendous inequity.
They get it. And they love it. They love it. They cling to it. It’s their hope that someone would fight for them, that God is on their side.
You know who typically paints God as a fairy godmother who only talks in a sweet voice and never gets mad? You know who writes those books? Comfortable, upper-middle-class academic elites who have never experienced any type of oppression.
They are the ones who want to believe God’s basic only jobs are to pat them on the head and tuck them in at night. It’s hard for them to stomach a God who could bring the wicked to justice with furious force They can’t see God like that. They’ve made, they’ve made God in their own image, right? Comfortable suburbia where nothing too extreme ever happens.
But the poor and the oppressed and the persecuted know they need a defender. They feel the goodness of a God who will fight evil, and they talk about it. And they trust him. And they love him.
What are you going to tell them about God? Oh well, sorry, God won’t avenge the wrong that has been done to you. God is just going to sit up in his cloud and wish it were different.
Go tell victims that. Go tell marginalized communities that and see what kind of response you get. It’s not going to sound like good news to them. The good news is that God brings the wicked to justice.
Okay? So now, hopefully, we are all well prepared to hear about the wrath of God. The good, redemptive, righteous, necessary wrath of God. So maybe we’re almost ready for our scripture passages for today. And if you haven’t participated in our worship services the past several weeks, we’re in the middle of this series entitled Future Hope, which we mentioned earlier.
We’ve been teaching about the various events associated with the end of the world. Great things like God stops suffering, God heals all our illnesses, God wipes every tear from every eye. Fantastic future ahead of us. But before we step into that eternal future, God executes judgment on all the wicked. Now, throughout the history of the world and throughout the pages of the Bible, there are— there seem to be seasons of of God’s wrath upon the wicked.
He allows sin and evil to reign for a time, patiently giving people an opportunity to repent. But eventually, the opportunity to repent comes to an end and he pours out his judgment. Instances of this abound in the Old Testament, but I’ll just give you 2.
Ezekiel 32. This is what the Sovereign Lord says. It’s what God says, it says. I, God, will throw you on the land and hurl you on the open field. I will let all the birds of the sky settle on you, and all the animals of the wild gorge themselves on you.
I will spread your flesh on the mountains and fill the valleys with your remains. I will drench the land with your flowing blood, all the way to the mountains, and the ravines will be filled with your flesh. I will snuff you out!
Or Nahum chapter 3: I am against you, declares the Lord Almighty. I will lift your skirts over your face. I will show the nations your nakedness. And the kingdoms your shame. I will pelt you with filth.
I will treat you with contempt and make you a spectacle.
God is serious about fighting evil.
He is serious.
And as severe as those past instances are, Jesus tells us those, those past instances of God’s wrath are nothing compared to the wrath that’s coming at the end of days when God brings his final judgment upon the world. Jesus tells us, Matthew 24:21, there will be great tribulation. That’s Jesus’ word. There will be great tribulation such as has never happened before. Jesus tells us the future wrath is going to be more severe than anything that has ever taken place on the earth.
The prophet Daniel in chapter 9 seems to indicate this time of tribulation will last 7 years. But it is the apostle John, probably Jesus’ best friend, who gives us the longest description of these days. And while John writes extensively on the subject of this tribulation, as Jesus calls it, we’re going to focus only on the 6th and 9th chapters of the book of Revelation. And we won’t even be able to cover all of the 6th and 9th chapter. But John writes, chapter 6, starting in verse 3, When he— now that’s Jesus, or in this passage Jesus is referred to as the Lamb— so when Jesus, or the Lamb, when he opens the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, Come!
And out came another horse, bright red. Its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth so that people should slay one another, and he was given a great sword. Verse 8, and I looked, and behold, a pale horse, and its rider was named Death, and Hades followed him. And they were given authority over a 4th of the earth, to kill with the sword and with famine and with pestilence and by wild beasts of the earth. And verse 15, then the kings of the earth and the great ones and the generals and the rich and the powerful, and everyone, slave and free, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling out to the mountains and the rocks, fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb!
For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?
Jumping over to chapter 9, verse 20. The rest of mankind who were not killed by these plagues did not repent of the work of their hands, nor give up worshiping demons and idols of gold and silver and bronze and stone and wood, which cannot see or hear or walk, nor did they repent of their murders or their sorceries or their sexual immorality or their thefts.
This is only a small portion of what John says about this time of final judgment.
So I would encourage you— maybe nobody else has encouraged you to do this before, but I encourage you to just read the entire book of Revelation. And of course, much of it seems abstract, but if you just sit down and read the whole thing in one sitting, I think probably more bits and pieces will will fall into place for you. But from the few passages which we read, let’s just focus on 3 questions. 1, what causes wrath? 2, who delivers wrath?
And 3, how can anyone escape wrath? So first, what causes wrath? We’ve mentioned this already, but these verses make it explicit. The wickedness of mankind is what partially triggers the wrath. There’s more to it.
We’ll see that in a second. But verse 21, sexual immorality, thefts, murders, idolatry. So wickedness is the partial answer. But more specifically and more fully, it’s our refusal to repent from the wickedness that is the cause of wrath. A refusal to admit we’ve done anything wrong.
Verse 20 and verse 21 are— I mean, you could jump over to chapter 16, verses 9 and 11. It’s the exact same idea. They did not repent of what they had done.
Now, we can understand this, right? Parents, teachers, leaders, when someone in our charge does something wrong, Often how they respond to what they’ve done wrong is probably even more significant than what they did. If they try to hide what they’ve done, if they lie about it, if they make excuses for it, if they try to blame someone else for what they’ve done, if they argue with us and they say, it’s not really a problem, it’s okay that I did what it is that I did, it leaves us almost no choice. But to bring action against them, right? But if they come forward and admit to what they’ve done wrong, if they’re remorseful, if they beg our forgiveness, you know, throw themselves on the mercy of the court, they say, I really wanna fix this, what can I do?
What’s our typical reaction then? Normally we’ll say, oh, we’ll work with you. So let me just ask you, When you think about your life, when you think about what you’ve done, when you think about the times you’ve fallen short morally, when you think about the times you deliberately did what you knew to be wrong, and for argument’s sake, like, let’s just say you got away with it. You were never caught. No one knows what you did.
When you reflect on those instances, what’s your reaction? Are you grieved over your behavior? Are you remorseful? Do you have a sense that you need God’s forgiveness? Have you asked him for forgiveness?
Or are you just relieved you didn’t get caught? Maybe, maybe it’s even kind of a joke for you, something that makes you laugh, you know, remembering the times you were able to cut loose and how fun it was to break the rules.
It won’t always be a joke. You won’t always get away with it.
Judgment is coming.
The only question is whether or not you will repent.
Okay, second question: who delivers the wrath? Did you catch this? It’s the one seated on the throne and the Lamb. Both God and the Lamb deliver the wrath. It’s verse 16 and verse 17.
It’s God the Father and it’s God the Son. It’s Jesus the Lamb and God the Father who is seated on the throne. Now sometimes we can get the idea only God the Father dispenses wrath upon the earth, you know, like he’s the angry part of God or something, but lucky for us Jesus is more compassionate and Jesus steps in and stops his Father from what he wants to do, which is completely obliterate the earth. Right? We can get that idea.
As if there’s some disagreement within the Godhead about what to do with sinful humanity. There is no disagreement within the Godhead. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are always completely unified in what they do. Jesus says, John 5:19, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.
So Jesus only does what the Father does, and whatever the Father does, Jesus does too. So when Jesus saves us from wrath, which we’ll talk more about in a minute, The Father wanted it as well. You know, who sent Jesus into the world to save us? God the Father. It’s the most famous verse in the Bible, for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, right?
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit agree on salvation. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit agree on wrath. Jesus the Lamb delivers the wrath along with the Father.
Which admittedly, the idea of a lamb delivering wrath is a little paradoxical. We don’t normally associate wrath with a lamb. But this isn’t your normal lamb. Revelation 19 describes Jesus as the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords who returns to earth with a sword flying out of his mouth. And it says— this is what it says about Jesus.
This is not, you know, what it would say about if you think the God of the Old Testament is more angry, you know, and it’s what it’s saying about that guy. It’s not it. This is what it says about Jesus. Revelation 19:15: Jesus treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God.
That’s Jesus. Jesus comes to earth in judgment over all the evil that is here.
Okay, lastly, how can anyone escape the wrath?
The Lamb and his Father are crushing evil in this winepress, right? So can anyone escape? Is anyone innocent? The people in Revelation 6:17, those were some of our verses for today, they ask, who can stand to this wrath? And because the answer appears to be no one, they all run and hide from the wrath of the Lamb.
It says, everyone, rich, poor, slaves, free, Everyone runs to hide from the wrath of the Lamb, but none can escape, right? Because all are guilty.
Here’s the problem we always run into. We, we want justice for the earth. We want all the wrongs accounted for. We don’t want people to get away with the evil they’ve done. We want juries to convict the guilty.
We don’t want juries to let someone off on a technicality, right? We don’t want someone in power to pull strings and set a criminal free. We hate that. So we long for the day when justice and judgment will come upon the earth. Except, here’s our problem.
If we’re honest, we understand if God wipes out all evil, then we ourselves are in trouble because we have contributed to that evil.
Some of us have only recently learned that the Founding Fathers of the United States of America are not squeaky clean heroes as we might have been taught in school. And today there’s a great number of people, right, who are now disillusioned because they found out these men who have statues and monuments in their honor, these guys were not always honorable. In all their endeavors. In fact, right, at certain times and in certain ways, they were villains. They were not heroes.
In other ways, they were heroes. But we’re finding out, some of us, the villain part. And some people have been shocked when they found that out.
But let me just ask you, do you think your ancestors 200, 300 years from now will look at you any differently than you look at the sins of our founding fathers?
Tim Keller notes, since we look back on past generations in judgment, you know, what makes us think future generations won’t look back on us and judge us. For all of us, you don’t have to go back that far. For all of us, there might be things our grandparents did and believed that disgust us. What makes us think our grandkids or our great-grandkids or our great-great-great-grandkids won’t be disgusted by us in some way? Yeah.
Hey, I know you think that you’re better than our founding fathers. I know that you think that you have arrived morally.
But they thought that too. And some of you, let’s be honest, right? Some of you have only recently adopted some of the convictions that you now passionately hold. You don’t believe the same things about the world that you even, from even just a few months ago, that you believed, right? You’ve embraced a whole new framework that has changed what you think and what you believe and what you do.
That, like, in the last several months. And now you stand in judgment of even yourself from 6 months ago. But now, you know, today, now you’re confident that you’ve arrived for real this time.
I doubt you have.
I doubt people 300 years from now will look back and say, wow, they nailed it. You know, I doubt history books will say July 2020 is when the pinnacle of morality arrived.
Unlikely.
The truth is, we are a mess, and we don’t even know all the ways that we are a mess.
Who can stand under God’s coming judgment?
No one.
We want to rid the earth of evil, But we know there’s evil in all of us.
And that would be unbearable to hear if it weren’t for the fact that wrath comes from the Lamb.
In the Old Testament, the Lamb was used as a substitute to bear the weight of God’s wrath in order that people could escape from it. When Israel fled as slaves from Egypt, they, they took the blood of a lamb and they, you know, spread it on their doorframes so that God’s plague would pass over their houses. The Egyptians, who did not spread the blood of the lamb on their doorposts, they suffered under God’s plague. So the difference between the Israelites and the Egyptians was not that Israel was good and Egypt was bad. The difference was that a lamb had been slain for Israel.
For us, Jesus has been slain. He endured the weight of the wrath that we deserve so that we can escape. From it. In the book of Revelation, the first reference to the Lamb, chapter 5, verse 6, before what we started reading today, the first time the Lamb is referenced, it says that the Lamb looked like a lamb that had been slain.
So later, when this Lamb shows up to come to earth with wrath, he’s a lamb that has already been slain. All right, he’s a slain lamb that comes. He’s a lamb who has already suffered under wrath. The wrath Jesus pours out is the same wrath he bore himself so that any who trust in him can be free from it forever.
How do we escape from wrath? The Lamb endures it for us.
This is, this is how you fall in love with a wrathful God.
He hates evil, as he should. We do too. We hate evil. But unlike us, God offers to bear the weight of that evil and be slain for it so we can be free from it.
Picture some grievous injustice that deeply upsets you. Think about how wrong it is, how evil the people are who, who perpetrate it, and what deserves to happen to them. What punishment should be inflicted on the people who perform this grievous injustice?
Now imagine you— not them— you volunteer to bear the guilt of their injustice so they can be free.
You take the punishment so they can be free.
That’s what God does for us.
That’s what He does for you.
So when you go back and read Ezekiel or Nahum, where God says, I will spread your flesh on the mountains. I will drench the land with your flowing blood. I will snuff you out. I will lift your skirts over your face. I will show the nations your nakedness.
That’s what Jesus took for us.
Jesus’ flesh was spread open. Jesus was snuffed out. Jesus’ nakedness was shown to the world. He was the Lamb that was slain so you could be free.
The wrath we see in the Old Testament and the wrath we see during the Great Tribulation is one, 1, what we deserve. 2, what Jesus took for us on the cross. And 3, what we are free from forever if we have trusted in his substitutionary sacrifice.
May his love for you be evident. May you be drawn to him who simultaneously strikes down injustice with righteous wrath, but but also at the same time bears the weight of that wrath himself so that any who trust in him can be free from it.
Would you turn to him today?
Would you trust in him to take your guilt away?
Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for Jesus. Thank you that he is not only a Lamb of Wrath, but he is a Lamb that was slain by that wrath to deliver us, to set us free.
Lord, we long for this day, for the day when this world is, is free from evil. When you have accounted for every wrong, and we weep over the fact that we have contributed to that wrong. We are sorry, Lord. Forgive us.
We know we would stand under judgment if there is any justice, but we also know That you took the judgment we deserve. You took our guilt away. You took our sins away by what Jesus did for us on the cross. We pray, Lord, that we would trust in him, that we would trust in him today. We pray those things in his name.
Amen.
