Jesus not only suffered God’s wrath, he satisfied God’s wrath against those who sincerely believe in him and accept his rule.
I spoke with someone last week who went to the dentist for a checkup that included x-rays. After examining the pictures, the dentist said the nerve for one tooth had died, and untreated it would eventually become infected, which leads to bigger problems. The treatment, he said, was a root canal.
Have you ever felt as though you needed a root canal? Probably not. You get a root canal because someone who knows more than you says you have a bigger problem than you realized. The person who told me this story said her tooth had been sensitive to hot and cold for some time but not painful.
Whether we are deciding about getting dental work, car repairs, home repairs, or surgery, the only thing that makes us willing to spend significant money and perhaps experience significant pain is the alternative of doing nothing is even worse.
Evil deeds are a bigger problem than we realize
To many lost souls, the gospel is like a root canal. It only sounds like good news when they understand the scope of their problem. People reject the gospel of Jesus Christ because they think their teeth have become sensitive to hot or cold, or just maybe they have a cavity. They don’t realize every nerve in every tooth of their mouth is dead, and their gums are infected, and as a result they have other serious medical conditions in the rest of their body. The disease in their mouths could literally kill them.
Oh come on, it’s not that serious.
Sure, it’s not that serious if we are distracted by the cares and pleasures of this life, by movies, sports, and news, by work and good times with family and friends; if we think more about money than about God; if we don’t read the Bible or take it seriously.
But if you read and believe the Bible, you can’t miss here, there, and everywhere a disturbing revelation about God. Namely that he hates evil—hates it, opposes it, constantly, fiercely. He is never indifferent to it. He feels about evil the way a dog or cat lover feels about animal cruelty, the way a nature lover feels about pollution or commercial development of wetlands and forests, the way an art lover feels about vandalism of public art, the way a humanity lover feels about sex trafficking and hunger and cancer and child abuse. Every single incidence is grievous, a cause for sorrow and outrage.
God feels about evil the way we should but generally don’t. We become dulled or exhausted by all the evil in our world and in ourselves. We can only remember or stomach so much of it. God, however, does not become dulled or forgetful of evil. He mourns every incidence of human evil.
God’s wrath
At some point, immediately or eventually, he feels and expresses what the Bible calls wrath. Romans 1:18 says, “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.” Romans 2:5 says, “Because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.” Psalm 7:11 says, “God is a righteous judge, a God who displays his wrath every day” (NIV).
Wrath is the right response of a good person—a healthy moral being—to evil. In other words, a person who sees someone torturing a dog and laughs about it or shrugs his shoulders and says “whatever” is sick. God’s wrath is the right response to human evil. It is the right response morally, emotionally, relationally. His response is never extreme or out of control. Scripture says he is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger” (Exodus 34:6). Although his opposition to evil never varies, his full wrath usually waits. The wrath he does feel and express is always perfectly right, the outworking of his justice, holiness, patience, mercy, perfect knowledge, righteousness, redemptive desires, love, and slowness to anger.
Why we don’t see our own evils
One big difference between us and God is he perfectly recognizes what is evil. Although we recognize many evils, we also miss and minimize many.
One reason God correctly recognizes many evils we miss is, we are part of the problem. We have evil in us that blinds us to evil. We do not see our own evil, or we minimize it. If our evil is lying, for example, we may see the wrongness of lying as a 2 on a scale of 10, as fibs rather than lies, and we rationalize that we only lie occasionally when we need to, and nobody is hurt by it. And then we forget our “fibs,” forget that we have told dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of lies over our lifetime.
Evils committed against God himself
In particular, we are blind to our evils committed directly against God our Creator, who gives us all we have and daily sustains us. Just as we can commit evils directly against other humans, so we can do toward God, and so we all have done. People use his name in vain, disobey his commands, ignore his Scriptures, don’t bother to give thanks to him and worship him, treat what God has created as if it were God by loving it above God himself, which is a form of idolatry, and even blaspheme him.
The greatest evils humans can commit are evils directly against God himself. To ignore God—the highest good and source of all good—is evil. Not to believe God—who is the truth and tells only truth—or not to believe in him, is evil. Such evils end in his proper wrath.
Because of God’s wrath, we need the gospel
The gospel brings God’s wrath into sharp focus. It is one of the gospel’s prominent ideas because at the center of the gospel is Jesus Christ and his substitutionary death on the cross. The cross, and the scourging that preceded it, was a horrific, bloody, gruesome event. It only makes sense if we understand the wrath of God. Although Jesus had never done evil, he suffered God’s wrath against evil humanity—as a substitute—to save humanity from wrath. What you see at the Cross is God’s wrath.
Jesus not only suffered God’s wrath, he satisfied God’s wrath against those who believe in and accept his rule. He changed God’s attitude toward the followers of Jesus from wrath to favor.
Romans 5:1–2 says, “Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand” (ESV).
Our way and God’s way
Our way: We do not see human evil for how heinous it actually is.
God’s way: The gospel teaches us that the Lord rightly sees evil for its wrongness, vileness, and corruption, and hates it.
Life principle: Mankind’s biggest problem is the wrath of God. Every person needs to be saved from it, and the only way that happens is by God’s grace, through faith in Jesus Christ, who alone at the Cross dealt with the problem of God’s wrath.
Jeremiah 9:23–24: “Thus says the LORD: ‘Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the LORD.’” (ESV)