Romans 1:18-23 | The Righteous Wrath of God

Preacher: Joel Fair
Scripture: Romans 1:18-23

Romans 1:1 (ESV)
1 Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God,

Romans 1:7 (ESV)
7 To all those in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Romans 1:15–17 (ESV)
15 So I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome.
16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.
17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”

Romans 2:5 (ESV)
5 But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.

Exodus 19:5–6 (ESV)
5 Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine;
6 and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel.”

"Paul, in another epistle, speaks about certain people 'having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof' 2 Tim. 3: 5. They talk about God, they seem to be interested in God, they might have prayed to God, but their lives were denying it, and therefore it was not real. You must never separate righteousness from godliness, or godliness from righteousness. These two things must always go together. There is no such thing as godliness without righteousness. I would, therefore, lay great stress and emphasis upon that."

• Martyn Lloyd Jones - Romans

Exodus 20:3–6 (ESV)
3 “You shall have no other gods before me.
4 “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
5 You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me,
6 but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

"Because of human willfulness, people’s knowledge of God became clouded and their thinking became darkened. Without contact with God, the human heart loses contact with reality, misses the purpose of one’s existence, ignores God, and becomes ungrateful. People are supposed to glorify God as God but instead find all sorts of created objects to worship. Part of the wrath of God is revealed in humanity’s loss of intelligent thinking."

• CSB Study Bible: Notes

“That is why, my friends, it is almost a greater injustice to the cross to sentimentalize it than to deny it. If you do not see the wrath of God when you look at the cross of Calvary's Hill, it is very certain that you do not see the love of God either. It is there that you see the wrath of God revealed. What does it mean? It means that God's attitude towards sin is such that He cannot pretend He has not seen it. He cannot just say, 'Very well, I will not punish you'. God's attitude to sin demanded the death of His only begotten Son. God's hatred of it, His abhorrence of it, His determination to punish it, His righteous demand upon it was such that Christ had to come to this world, not to tell us that 'God is love' - God had said that repeatedly through the prophets and others: that was already known - but to bear the wrath of God against sin. God must punish sin. The cross proves that, the cross would never have happened but for that.”

• Martin Lloyd Jones - Romans