God’s wrath and reconciliation and Gospel

GOD’S WRATH AND RECONCILIATION AND GOSPEL 

Romans 1:18 For the wrath of God is revealed (apokalypto – uncovered) from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. (Note; This is present tense)

God’s wrath is an act of love nested in justice and truth as well as in mercy and forgiveness. God’s wrath (orge – intense feeling of indignation) is an expression of his protection of humanity against the destructive effects of sin that we commit against each other.
The main causes of the pain and harm that we inflict upon one another are the corruption of Justice and truth in the misuse of power over each other and our malevolent attitudes towards one another. This protective indignation of God is dealt out through his discipline upon us individually and corporately.
This expression of God’s justice goes hand in hand with God’s offer of his mercy and forgiveness to all the world which brings about his great acts of redemption and reconciliation with all mankind. 
So he exercises his discipline like a loving Father upon us as his children to change our character and very nature to be like his own.
That has to be proclaimed, and that is the reason for the absolute necessity of the Gospel.

The nature of God’s wrath is also that it is revealed (apokolypto), which means that it acts by uncovering the sin of injustice and the suppression of truth that is occurring in the world. 
The Bible shows us how God has acted upon the world throughout history as a loving Father to intervene when we go off track and to bring us back to himself, such as with the flood of Noah’s time and with the judgment upon Sodom and Gomorrah in Abraham’s time. These have also been times of God’s gracious intervention and deliverance of those faithful to him, as with Moses bringing God’s people out of Egypt and the time of their entering into the promised Land under Joshua. The greatest of all interventions in a time of injustice and suppression of truth was the Incarnation of Jesus as the living God who came to us to give us his life and his heart of love to the Father through the Holy Spirit.

We are currently living in a time of a rapid escalation of the corruption of justice and truth in our world. The Godly values which used to be a foundation of our society have been replaced in many cases with ideological values and virtues that compete with one another for a place of influence and political power.

God is allowing many areas of injustice and suppression of truth to be uncovered (apocolypto) and to come under his hand of discipline, and in a widespread communal crisis like a pandemic where people do not know what to trust or who to trust anymore that uncertainty becomes a crisis of anxiety concerning the future. It also becomes a crisis of anxiety concerning a scarcity of outward things that were once expected to be on hand but are now often not even within reach.
In an environment like that suspicion and blame and resentment is out there, and it is at times like this where God counters all of that negative activity with a Gospel of hope and an abundance of grace where God is always within reach and peace can abound in our inner lives. 

God created us to be at one with him – that is, to be at peace with him (Eirene – peace – oneness). And even more than that, to be sharing in his divine nature.
God lived in perfect oneness and harmony as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, where there was perfect love and perfect agreement. There was no need for forgiveness there because there was no sin of selfishness from one against the other, so there was no wrath because there was no sin, and there was no temptation because perfect love cannot be tempted. That was the perfect way to live in a perfect relationship. 

So what happened? Why couldn’t God create us as very nice people who loved one another with the same love that Father and Son and Holy Spirit have?
Because only God is perfect and anyone and anything he creates is not perfect, and even the angels who are spirit beings are not perfect, and as we know, they are able to be tempted, like Lucifer. He was deceived into thinking he could have what he wanted without God, and so he became proud and independent and rebelled against God. And he deceived mankind into thinking the same way.

It is obvious really - We believe a lie about who God is and what he is like and then we believe a lie about who we are as an independent self with a right to have certain things, and then we rebel against the authority that stops us getting what we want, and then we become disobedient and miss the mark of staying close to God and then we sin, and sin runs the show from there, causing harm to our own soul and to the people around us.

God hates sin because it separates us from him AND it destroys our soul.
Isaiah 59:1 But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you, so that He will not hear.
Only he can do something about that. Left to themselves people wander off track.
So what does God do?’

He uncovers all the disorder and corruption that is waiting to be exposed for his purpose of shaking and converting the minds and hearts of people who have resisted him.

God’s love feels the grief of the hostility of his children against him, and the pain and destruction that that hostility brings upon them. And that is all because our human independent mindset of a lie about what God is like robs us of the truth of his loving heart of goodness and blessing towards us. 

His heart is constantly seeking to subdue or overcome that hostility and soften our hearts and to make us aware of his love. 
How much would his love delight in there being a heart of love in the earth that loved him back as much as is humanly possible (like Jesus). 

 

 

Also nested in his love is God’s offer of forgiveness and mercy.
We need this change of heart to get out of the ‘sin cycle’. We have to be rescued from the law of sin and death and receive his Spirit of life in Jesus. God has forgiven sin AND he does change the desire of our hearts to love him more than sin, and yet we still see the hostility of humanity against him happening in our human hearts.

Only God can do something about that – we can’t. 
He cancelled out the sin factor of humanity that separated us from him and that allows us to be close to him and to love him back.

RECONCILIATION
God had to bring about reconciliation because our distrust towards God was too great an obstacle for our hearts to reach out to him. 
So if God wanted peace and oneness only he could put away this estrangement between man and God. It had to be all his work. 
And he was already perfect so he couldn’t make himself become more perfect. 
So what was he to do?
Instead of remaining in his perfection of Heavenly Being who could not be tempted, he entered into our weakness as a human being who could be tempted. He came down as Jesus and so Father in Heaven had a Son in the Earth who was indwelt by his Spirit, and who could and would love him totally on behalf of all of us.
But how does this change the rest of us, because we are still human beings who still can’t trust God because we never have?

A simplistic way to see the heart of reconciliation is this;
Two friends who have fallen out decide to try and make up and bury the hatchet. Then one of them who has a very generous heart says ‘look I care deeply about our friendship and I want you to know that anything you might have done to offend me I forgive you for’. He then goes on to say ‘so are we good?’ and the other one replies ‘yes we’re good - thanks’ 
That is reconciliation – it’s not a blame game.

That is where the miracle of God’s supernatural reconciliation comes to pass. He not only changed himself into one of us, he changed us into one of him. He died like a seed going into the ground and he rose like a plant springing up from the ground, a resurrected tree of life that bore fruit which was us as a New Creation humanity. We have his resurrected life sent from Heaven as the Holy Spirit who joins our spirit to the Spirit of God. We can now have Jesus’ heart of love for his Father. That is reconciliation.

The word reconciliation in the Bible is katalasso – that means a mutual change of two things to make one new thing. The supernatural miracle of God’s act of reconciliation for us is that he caused both himself and us to experience a change of being. God became one of us – forever – as the risen Christ in Heaven, and he has made us one with him because the Bible says we are ‘partakers of his divine nature having escaped the corruption that is in the world through sinful desires’ (2Peter 1:4)
That is the Gospel of Peace – oneness – that is what Paul preached.
Paul was not told to tell the world to make peace with God, but to tell the world that God has made peace with them. 
2 Corinthians 5:19 For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting men's sins against them but blotting them out. This is the wonderful message he has given us to tell others…
That is the message of the Gospel – Accept the forgiveness of God through Jesus and begin to walk in a new way.

There are examples of Jesus demonstrating both God’s wrath and his reconciliation as he walked among the people and ministered to them. There is the story of the Jewish elders who approached Jesus and brought forward a woman who had been caught in adultery, and they placed her in front of Jesus and told him that the Law of Moses commanded them to stone such women. They asked Jesus what he had to say about that. The wrath of God was revealed (apocalypto – uncovered) upon these men as Jesus began to write in the sand, uncovering their sins before all that were there watching. Each of the men walked off in shame and guilt. Then Jesus turned to the woman and the reconciliation of God was ordained upon her as her sins were not charged to her but were forgiven.
In a similar way in the Gospel of John chapter 4, Jesus was sitting by a well and a Samarian woman came to draw water and Jesus asked her to please draw some water for him to drink as he was thirsty. On this occasion God’s wrath was nested in his love as a most effective tough love wake-up call about her disordered life. When Jesus said to her ‘you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband’ the woman said to him, ‘Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet’. But Jesus did not berate her or condemn her. Jesus had just told her that he could give her more than just the water from the well, and that he could give her the living water of the Holy Spirit that would spring up within her, and she had said ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty’. 
So in that story we have both tough love wake-up call of God’s wrath uncovering her moral disorder, and the magnanimous bestowal of reconciliation in the promise of her being filled with the living water of the life of God. Her human weakness was her thirst 
for love which she could never emotionally gratify, and that was satiated not only emotionally but now spiritually by God’s love flowing within. 

If you begin to search you will find many examples of God’s wrath and God’s reconciliation coming forth through the ministry of Jesus in the Gospels. A clear case of God’s wrath is seen in Jesus overturning the money changers’ tables in the temple uncovering the corruption and injustice of the Jewish stewards by overcharging the poor people and making a profit from the sale of the birds and animals required by law for the temple sacrifices for sin. He was expressing his Father’s indignation against this corrupt abuse of power over the people in this holy place of prayer. 
Notice how often the wrath is tempered by love and sadness. For example in the story of Jesus uncovering the sin of the rich young ruler’s love of money, there was great sadness as he walked away from the offer to follow Jesus. There is also the beautiful example of both wrath and reconciliation in the story of the prodigal son. 
Let me read this beautiful Scripture  from Romans where all that I have been sharing is encapsulated.
Romans 5:8 God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us … having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him, for if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. 
That solves the problem of God’s wrath from his side – and now it is up to us to believe and to trust in that every moment of our lives. 
That is the faith that saves our soul.

THE GOSPEL
Because of God’s love, his wrath is a significant reality, and the very reason from God’s point of view for making the Gospel so necessary and powerful. He hates the bad news of what sin does to people so he has good news about what forgiveness and reconciliation does for people.

That is why there has to be a Gospel – both for those who wilfully do harm and for the poor people who get harmed. The good news is that there is forgiveness and the further good news is that there is the gift of the life of Jesus within. He gives us a new spirit - he gives us his Spirit and he gives us a new heart.

People need to be told they are forgiven, and that they need no longer be separated because of the feelings of guilt and shame about their sinful behaviour, which makes them hide from God and cover up in front of each other. They need to have a new mindset – metanoia – which means repentance. The new mindset acknowledges that God is not at odds with them and they no longer need to be at odds with him. They are reconciled. They cannot have everything that they want, but they can receive every good thing that God wants for them. They are now able to have God’s peace. They are now able to trust God. They can now know what it means to be saved. And they also need to know that God holds us to account to not neglect such a great salvation.

Sometimes people need a wakeup call, and God is giving the world a wakeup call right now. It is like the story of the prodigal son who had to have things go so bad for him that he came to his senses and said ‘I will go home and return to my father’. He decided to settle the score with his conscience and to return to his father before the consequences of his life brought him complete ruin.

I believe that in these days God wants to grow his Church as his loving and caring family that will find its voice to proclaim a loving and forgiving God who desires to turn the heart of  the world to himself - all of his sons and daughters, created in his image .
Lost sheep will be found and prodigal sons and daughters will come home. The healing rain of the Holy Spirit will fall upon the hearts of men and women and grace will abound. People will call on the name of The Lord and be saved. They will receive the Spirit of wisdom and revelation of the knowledge of God. He will strengthen us with power through his Spirit in our inner being. He will do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power of his life that he has placed within us. Amen