July 17

The wrath of God. - Romans 1:18.

IT is delightful to contemplate God’s goodness, and his abundant mercy, and the exceeding riches of his grace. It is delightful to dwell on the glory and blessedness of the heavenly world. But here with Paul, who is called by Augustine the herald of grace, our reflection will turn upon the wrath of God.

Observe, first, its nature; it is difficult to speak of wrath in connection with God. Among men it is known to be a passion; it is well known also seldom to be a righteous passion. But it is not a passion in God. “Fury is not in me.” “Wrath” in him is a principle; in him it is the love of order, a determination to maintain equity, a resolution to punish sin. It results, therefore, from the perfection of his nature, and is not the effect of malignity but the conviction of judgment. The legislator is not angry when he promulgates his laws, the judge is not under the influence of passion when he pronounces sentence of death on the criminal. Yet it does him honour when he does it with tears.

The case is this: that society cannot be maintained without laws, and laws are nothing without penalties and sanctions. In all well-ordered countries crime is punished and must be punished; and can it escape in the empire of a Being “who is righteous in all his ways and holy in all his works?” It is essential to the very character of God; we could not esteem him nor love him if we supposed that he viewed equally truth and lies, honesty and injustice, cruelty and benevolence. An earthly magistrate would not be “a praise to them that do well,” nor “a terror to evil doers,” if, when he had before him the incendiary who had burned down the house of one, and the murderer who had killed the child of another, he would smile and say, This does not concern me; go in peace. God is the dictator of the universe, and he is of “purer eyes than to behold iniquity.” “The wicked,” he says, “shall not stand in my sight; I hate all workers of iniquity.” Therefore he has pronounced in the Scriptures a peculiar curse upon the man who presumes upon impunity. “If it come to pass, when he heareth the words of this curse, that he bless himself in his heart, saying, I shall have peace though I walk in the imagination of my heart, to add drunkenness to thirst, the Lord will not spare him; but then the anger of the Lord and his jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven.” So much for the nature of this wrath.

Secondly, The dreadfulness of it. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” If the wrath of a king be, as Solomon says, as the roaring of a lion, what must the wrath of God be? Who knoweth the power of his anger? Can the angels that sinned tell us? No, they cannot; they are “reserved in everlasting chains under darkness, unto the judgment of the great day.” And there is as much difference between their present and future state as between imprisonment and execution. Neither can lost souls in perdition tell us the dreadfulness of Jehovah’s wrath: they are yet only Spirits. All the miseries that rushed into them through the body, and by the eye, the ear, and the other senses; all these parts of woe are necessarily postponed till after the resurrection, for want of a system of organization to receive them. “Who knoweth the power of thine anger? even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath.” In many cases the evil is far less than the fear, and when the reality comes it is found to be nothing compared with the apprehension. But here the reality will equal, yea will surpass all imagination.

When one drop of his wrath has fallen upon a man judicially from God, he has been driven into despair, his soul has preferred “strangling and death rather than life.” And even when a little of it has been felt by the Christian himself, under conviction of sin, he has “eaten ashes like bread;” he has “mingled his drink with weeping;” he has slept, but he has been scared with dreams and terrified with visions; he has said with David, “When I suffer thy terrors I am distracted;” he has said with Solomon, “A wounded spirit who can bear?”