God's Wrath Against Sinful Humanity

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Romans 1:18-32
  1. The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness  
  2. since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.  
  3. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
  4. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.  
  5. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 
  6. and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.
  7. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.
  8. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator - who is forever praised.  Amen.
  9. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts.  Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 
  10. In the same way, the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another.  Men committed shameful acts with other men and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
  11. Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind so that they do what ought not to be done. 
  12. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity.  They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice.  They are gossips, 
  13. slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 
  14. they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy.  
  15. 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.
In these scriptural verses, Paul explains an aspect of divine righteousness and why this righteousness is of necessity 'from God' and 'by faith from first to last'.  God's wrath is being revealed from heaven against those who suppress the truth by their wickedness.  Just as those who claim that there is no tangible evidence of the existence of God, therefore, refuse to conduct themselves accordingly, will most certainly not be excused from God's wrath.
Paul also introduces us to the very real concept of 'the wrath of God'.  As God is real, his hatred and prohibition of sin are real.  His justice is real.  His just and sustained anger against sin is real.  His judgement is real.  To deny the reality of the just, sustained wrath of God is to deny the reality of our need for salvation and to deny the necessity of Christ's sacrifice.  Apart from this wrath, there would be no need for salvation, for there would be no penalty incurred by sin.  Salvation is necessary because of this 'wrath of God'.  We must also seek to understand 'wrath' which refers to a spontaneous or irrational anger that is an indication of God's just, deliberate, determined, historic and on-going opposition to and judgement on sin.  God opposes sin.  God imposes sin's penalty.  God exacts punishment.  This is part of his holiness, part of his perfection, part of his justice, that sin must be opposed because sin is contrary to all that God is and to all that he created us to be.

Paul also teaches us in these verses that God's wrath is being revealed.  That is, right now, at this present time.  Just as he has told us that in his word 'a righteousness from God is revealed'', so also is God's wrath being revealed from heaven.  This has been so from the first warning against sin as stated at (Genesis 2:17  "but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die"), right up to the time that Paul was writing, and even until now.  God has not kept his wrath hidden.  God's opposition to sin and his final judgement against sin on the last day has never been a secret.  In addition, the death of Christ for sin is the clearest revelation of the wrath of God that God has ever given; every time the message of this death is proclaimed, the wrath of God is revealed in its ultimate expression.  This death that Christ experienced affirms beyond question that the wrath of God is real.

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