When we left Paul last week he was in Corinth and had just finished telling the Roman church that he was looking forward to seeing them. He opens with his calling as an apostle even though much of the leadership of the early church thought of him as an outsider and someone pushing his way in. And then he reiterates his special calling to the Gentiles and we looked at all the years he had spent unsuccessfully preaching to the Jews. But, we also said it is often the case that those very things we might consider failure and wasted effort might well be God’s way of keeping us occupied while we are being prepared for the most important work of our lives. Elie Wiesel, the Jewish author and survivor of the holocaust said this, “Sometimes it happens that we travel for a long time without knowing that we have made the long journey solely to pronounce a certain word, a certain phrase, in a certain place. The meeting of the place and the word is a true accomplishment.”

I think that may be the case for Paul and the Jews. He had to travel a long time solely to pronounce a certain word in a certain place ­ and many scholars would say that word is the book of Romans written from the moral cesspool of Corinth. He had been prepared by years of experience ­ good and bad ­ to write this one book which has become the cornerstone of the doctrines of the Christian faith.

He was compelled by the foolishness of the cross and the power of the resurrection to speak this word to people in an increasingly hostile culture. He is not writing strategies of church growth or how to increase influence. He is writing about supernatural faith and righteousness that is not native to the creation but can only be revealed by God. “For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last…”

But this morning we see that something other than righteousness is being revealed and it is God’s wrath against all godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness. The wrath of God is not a nuclear war, or ecological disaster or anything else we can do on our own. That is not the way things end in Scripture. They end with an intervention and Paul is saying here that there are two invasions going on in the world ­ the invasion of righteousness that has been revealed and the invasion of the wrath of God that is being revealed but has not been fully revealed. We have hints of it but there is no way to comprehend what it will mean to life on earth.

I’m not sure Paul is describing Rome as much as he is Corinth. There would be no reason for him to say such things about a place he has never been or to be that negative about the home of people he has never met. I suspect in the two years he has been in Corinth he has been repulsed by the wickedness of the city that was world famous for its depravity.

So, Paul starts at the beginning, doesn’t he? He begins with what has been revealed about God in his creation to all men. Look at Psalm 19:1­4:

The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
2 Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
3 They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
4 Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.

Creation is not silent about the Creator. It is not just beautiful in its complexity and splendor but creation speaks of a Creator. It points to someone beyond itself. Look at Psalm 104:2­5:

2 The Lord wraps himself in light as with a garment;
he stretches out the heavens like a tent
3 and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters.
He makes the clouds his chariot
and rides on the wings of the wind.
4 He makes winds his messengers,[a]
flames of fire his servants.
5 He set the earth on its foundations;
it can never be moved.

As you know, I love the writing of Annie Dillard and Mary Oliver. Each of them speak about the message of the creation that is spoken to us every day if we would hear it.

“After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down eons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.” Annie Dillard

“It must be a great disappointment to God if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day.” Mary Oliver

“Beauty without purpose is beauty without virtue. But all beautiful things, inherently, have this function ­to excite the viewers toward sublime thought. Glory to the world, that good teacher. “Mary Oliver

In other words, a person has to choose not to see God in his creation. We do not need to search for him and because God has made Himself so plain it takes a conscious effort to avoid seeing the evidence of him there. God is not in nature. Nature is not God. But, the evidence for God is plainly in his creation because all creation, like a magnet points to North, points to God and not to itself. We are, along with the rest of creation, his workmanship who carry his image ­ no matter how marred it is from the Fall.

There is something else that points to God and to the order of what he has created. It is what we call Natural Law. There is a moral order that is hard­wired into the universe and even though we break those laws we still assume them. Here is how C.S. Lewis puts it in “Mere Christianity”:

“This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colorblind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behavior was obvious to every one. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to—whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked. It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table.”

There are not only plain signs of God in creation and in natural law but there are natural consequences for unnatural behavior. We are not talking about eccentric behavior but twisted and distorted behavior. This is behavior that is deserving of the wrath of God. The wrath of God is not the same as anger. It is not God throwing a fit or losing his temper.

It is the natural consequence of sin that determines to separate itself from the love of God. In some ways, Paul speaks about the wrath as if it is almost a separate force that is only held back by the love of God. Until the final moment God holds out the possibility of reconciliation until it is refused and the ultimate choice of rebellion is the inevitable consequences of wrath. William Barclay says that moral order is the wrath of God at work. It is there in the structure of the universe and while it may not be immediate it is relentless. The wages of sin paid out in small increments over a very long time is death. Often it is invisible like the story of the portrait of Dorian Gray who appears to be ageless put his portrait in the attic records all the terrible changes of his debauched life. His portrait no one sees reflects what he has become.

Sin hates God and anything created in the image of God. I was at a conference on mental illness yesterday here at the church and people were talking about voices they heard telling them to kill themselves. Sin and Evil are like that. It is a voice that says to individuals and whole cultures, “Kill yourself.” It hates goodness, compassion, loyalty, fidelity and all the virtues we talked about last week. It hates any reminder of God ­even broken remnants. It only desires death. In fact, Sin and Evil hate anything that is created because they can only destroy and not create. All they can do is give birth to death. In James 1:14 we read the process of sin.

“When tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.” For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.”

Paul then leads us through the process of wrath that leads to death. It’s not just a laundry list of sins with each one exceeding the last. It is a path in a particular direction with a destination.

It begins with a lack of gratitude. “For although they knew God (from the evidence of the creation), they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.” That is the first step. Not to be an atheist and have no belief in God but to fail to be grateful to him. Ingratitude is the first gate we open to wrath. We attribute the blessings we enjoy to things we make and control. With that we lose constraints in other areas of our life. When we lose gratitude we lose more than we bargain for.

The second gate is intentionally exchanging the truth we know about God for a lie. Truth is inconvenient or not tolerable or not sufficient for what we want to do so we hand it over in exchange for lies that then control our minds. We are not conquered by falsehood and deceit. We give up our interest in truth freely of our own will. We choose a life of lies.

Some of you probably know that Adolf Hitler had a strong interest in religion and spirituality. In fact 10 percent of his library of 16,000 books were about religion. In the spring of 1943, while the outcome of World War II hung in the balance, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services—forerunner to the CIA—commissioned Walter Langer, a Boston based psychoanalyst, to develop “psychological profile” of Adolf Hitler.

A survey of all the evidence forces us to conclude that Hitler believes himself destined to become an Immortal Hitler, chosen by God to be the New Deliverer of Germany and the Founder of a new social order for the world. He firmly believes this and is certain that in spite of all the trials and tribulations through which he must pass he will finally attain that goal. The one condition is that he follow the dictates of the inner voice that have guided and protected him in the past.

As I traced the penciled notations, I realized that Hitler was seeking a path to the divine that led to just one place. Fichte asked, “Where did Jesus derive the power that has held his followers for all eternity?” Hitler drew a dense line beneath the answer: “Through his absolute identification with God.” At another point Hitler highlighted a brief but revealing paragraph: “God and I are One. Expressed simply in two identical sentences—His life is mine; my life is his. My work is his work, and his work my work.”

The first two gates are spiritual and the next are physical and primarily sexual. What is twisted is seen as normal and people are consumed with sexual immorality that becomes increasingly perverse and distorted. Their desires consume them and their appetites are insatiable. They require higher and higher doses of immorality until they are addicted to sensuality and lust. Oscar Wilde wrote in De Profundis (Out of the depths) his confession toward the end of his life:

“The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flâneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I literately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.”

Finally, there is the gate of not only being ungrateful, intentionally exchanging truth for a lie and a character corrupted by lust and immorality but obliterating the knowledge of God completely. It is the sin not of the spirit or the body but of the mind. “God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. They became filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity….Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.”

This is a culture that is suicidal. It is a picture of the melt down of a soul and an entire society. This is not just individual sin. This is sin that becomes a way of life for a whole people. Values are reversed and what is wicked is admired. Psalm 12 puts it this way. “The wicked freely strut about when what is vile is honored among men.” When virtue is absent and vice is admired there is literal hell to pay. This is the final stage of wrath. Not only are individual lives destroyed but a whole culture has thrown off all restraint. The result is not anarchy but structural evil.

How do we respond? With self-righteous indignation and finger pointing or like God ­with tears? Are we secretly pleased that the wrath is coming or do we believe that the foolishness of the cross has the power to save even these seeming so totally given over to sin. If, in fact, God was in Christ reconciling himself to the world and that God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God, then there is hope even for the worst of sin. Otherwise, what is the power of the cross other than just another ethical religion? Remember when we talked about the power God gave the disciples at his ascension? What was it again? It was not the power to influence or change the world. It was the power to be martyrs…and that is the
foolishness of the cross that will save men and women who are drowning in delusion and depravity. No legislation or law or can save a culture from the wrath ­only the redeeming of the heart.

In the presence of incomprehensible evil there is the Church that remains the salt and light of the world. Only the church can restrain the flood of deceit, delight in wickedness, delusion of lies and flood of immorality. Nowhere does it say we will overcome these but it does say that our responsibility is to restrain them as long as possible.

Sometimes I feel like Frodo in the Lord of the Rings by Tolkien:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them
to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

The wrath is inevitable and it will come but Paul’s great desire is that the Church, the bride, be found pure and spotless and “to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.” (Ephesians 5:27)

Our prayer is that God will find us faithful.

Three things to think about this week.

Is my life marked by gratitude?

Is truth what I desire for myself and others?”

Is there anything I am letting through the gates of my life that will eventually give birth to death?