We are past the era when we
would name a child “Wrath of God Smith.”
However just because I have burned my fingers several times cooking
doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t continue to cook.
Cooking is necessary, especially if you don’t like your beef raw, and
acknowledging the reality of the wrath of God is necessary, especially if you
don’t want to end up cooked at the end.
It is not that God is wrathful as man is wrathful. No, not at all! When man is wrathful all kinds of godless
emotional overtones are in man’s wrath, fear, anger, rage, and loss of
control. God’s wrath is quite different;
it is part of his very nature. George
MacDonald says, that “It is the nature of God, so terribly pure that it
destroys all that is not pure as fire,” and again, “Therefore all that is not
beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love’s kind must
be destroyed. And our God is a consuming
fire.”[i] The only way to stop the burning is to
embrace the fire with penitence and a resolution for amendment of life. The wrath of God is a purifying fire, not an
arbitrary wrath marked by the loss of self-control.
Romans 1:18 For the wrath of God is
revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by
their unrighteousness suppress the truth.
19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has
shown it to them. 20 For his invisible
attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly
perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been
made. So they are without excuse. 21 For
although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him,
but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were
darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they
became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory
of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and
reptiles.
The wrath of God, that burning
fire, is directed not only against the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men,
but especially against the fact that they willfully “supress the truth.” C. S. Lewis gives a wry explanation of the
evolvement of the apostasy of a bishop in his book The Great Divorce,” Let us
be frank. Our opinions were not honestly
come by. We simply found ourselves in
contact with a certain current of ideas and plunged into it because it seemed
modern and successful . . . When did we
put up one moment’s real resistance to the loss of our faith?”[ii]
The problem is self-centered
pig-headedness! Our independent
rebelliousness is mocked by T. S. Eliot’s poem about the cat Rum Tum Tugger,
“For he will do, as he do do, And there’s no doing anything about it.”[iii] St. Paul tells us that all of creation
testifies to eternal nature and power of God and willful man shies away from
that revelation because he do do, what he do do, and that’s the way it is. The result is that futility descends upon the
thinking of the rebellious, and their foolish hearts are darkened. It is not that men in that condition can even
recognize what they are becoming. George
Macdonald speaks the truth, “A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the
nearer a man gets to being a beast, the less he knows it.”[iv]
Paul then focusses on the
immediate social problem. The wrath of God
is not a bolt of furious anger burning the ungodly to a crisp, rather it is the
divine acknowledgment that the unrighteous have freedom of will. “They pays their money and takes their
choice.” C. S. Lewis puts it this way,
There
are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be
done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no
Hell.[v]
God’s wrath is exercised in
this, that God gives them up “in the lust of their hearts to impurity, to the
dishonoring of their bodies among themselves.”
24 Therefore God gave them up in
the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among
themselves, 25 because they exchanged the
truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the
Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
The reason for divine
abandonment is that this is the choice they have made in their wilful flight
from the truths that are evident to all even in general revelation, that
general revelation being Creation itself.
I feel a sting here, even though I have forsaken sparkling sins the
lesser ones nag at me, and as I work on that continual surrender, I hear the
same voices that St. Augustine heard, “Can you cast us off? And: From this
moment, never more to be with us?! And: From this moment, never to do this, not
ever, or to do this!”[vi] The surrender of my right to eat the third
Danish at breakfast is subtly difficult, never mind the call on the life of the
unrighteous to abandon the sparkling sins of the flesh that they say they love
so much. Oops, did I say “third Danish?” I actually have to surrender my right to eat
the second Danish. Surrender on any
level is hard which is why we should have mercy on others. All God ever asks of us is that we surrender
ourselves, that we die to ourselves.
What God is asking means that we have to surrender even what we think
are our identities or our orientations.
Let me not mince words. Paul’s immediate social problem is lesbian
and homosexual physical acts. He will
later say the same thing regarding heterosexual adultery and fornication;
further what he says also clearly applies to pornography. But don’t miss this. The presenting problem that Paul is dealing with is that women are
being consumed with lust for other women, and men are being consumed with lust
for other men. Some will cry out, “But
that’s my orientation!” It has nothing
to do with what you might claim to be your orientation; it has to do with
fondling your lusts and with your chosen actions. Naturally polygamous men are not condemned
for their temptations, but only for acting them out. Homosexuals and lesbians are not condemned
for their temptation but for their various sexual actions. As fallen creatures, we have diverse
orientations; that’s not really the problem.
26 For this reason God gave them up
to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those
that are contrary to nature; 27 and the
men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with
passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving
in themselves the due penalty for their error.
28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up
to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.
Here is the tragedy: As they are
consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men
they receive in themselves the due penalty for their error. Their personhood is formed around their
passions, and in those passions they find a fulfillment which bends their personalities
to their lusts and leaves them prey to a host of other behaviours. Make no mistake the same is true for those, who out of wedlock, are consumed with passion for the opposite sex, sometimes destroying lives and families in the process. It works both ways.
29 They were filled with all manner
of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder,
strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent,
haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 foolish, faithless, heartless,
ruthless. 32 Though they know God's
decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do
them but give approval to those who practice them.
The lives of some of those committing
homosexual or lesbian acts are no worse than the lives of adulterers or
fornicators; and in both opposing groups of “orientation” there are some very
affable and socially acceptable people. Not only that, there are some very straight
and moral people who are just cranky and unpleasant to be around. It takes more than just sexual morality to
live into the image of Christ.
[i] C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, An
Anthology, (New York: Macmillan, 1978), p. 2
[ii] C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce,
(New York: Harper, 2011), p. 36, 37
[iii] T. S. Eliot, “Old Possums Book of
Practical Cats,” in The Complete Poems and Plays, (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1980), p. 153
[iv] MacDonald, p. 141
[v] C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, (New
York: HarperCollins, 2001), p. 75
[vi] St.
Augustine, The Confessions, Garry Wills, trans.
(New York: Penguin, 2006] p. 179, 180
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