God's Wrath And Unbelief (Part 4) - [Hebrews 3:7ff]

There were two pastors in Ireland and they were debating modern theology. Does hell exist? Is the wrath of God something to be avoided? They were both at the Elmwood Presbyterian Church, 1931. Their names were Dr. Fraser Hurst and Dr. Hindenman.

And they were beginning to talk about what they learned as a child growing up, and these were people who had been catechized with a question and answer format. What is the chief end of man type of thing?

And they began to ask about this particular catechism question for children. What are you by nature? So you teach your children by question and answer, what are you by nature? I wonder if we ask your children, what are you by nature?

I wonder what they would say. And of course, if you're not thinking about scripture, it will be, I'm a good person, I'm valuable, I'm a good citizen, a variety of things. The question that they bantered back and forth was, what are you by nature?

And the answer to the catechism question reads, quote, I am an enemy of God, a child of Satan, and an heir of hell. That is quite different than what we've grown up with. I'm an enemy of God, a child of Satan, and an heir of hell.

If there were news cameras here today, CNN maybe, or Fox, I wonder what they would think if we talked about such an egregious topic. These two men hated what they were taught when they were children. These were monstrous ideas, these were hurtful ideas, these were cavemen-like ideas, troglodyte-like ideas.

Dr. Fraser Hurst said, these ideas belong to the mentality and outlook of bygone ages. And it's not just in 1931 that this is happening, it's happening today in modern evangelicalism. Don't talk about hell, don't talk about sin, don't talk about people are enemies of God.

After all, your church might not be full, people might leave. They need something positive and encouraging. I almost said a K-love moment. Those doctrines about hell and wrath are outdated. We have, in a sense, evolved from those ideas, so the modernists would say.

We've gone past that. You start here, and you kind of work your way up. C .H. Dodd wrote a commentary, and for 14 years taught divinity at Cambridge. He helped translate the English, the New English Bible, and he says the wrath of God talked about in Romans 118 is, quote, an archaic phrase, end quote.

He also said it suits a thoroughly archaic idea. So I'm wondering about you. When it comes to the grace of God and God's forgiveness and we have a great Savior, we're all in. I hope you're all in. But when it comes to what God saves us from, Himself, His wrath, our sin, are we still as all in?

Because you can't really have one without the other. You're saved by someone because you're saved from someone. You're saved by the Lord Jesus Christ, grace incarnate, Jesus, the God-man, fully God so He can rescue millions, fully man so He can be our substitute and representative.

And He rescues us, essentially, not just from hell, not just from damnation, but from His own wrath. Arthur Pink said, it's sad indeed to find so many professing Christians who appear to regard the wrath of God as something for which they need to make an apology or who at least wish there was no such thing, while some would not go so far as to openly admit that they consider it a blemish on the divine character, yet they are far from regarding it with delight.

They like not to think about it and they rarely hear it mentioned without a secret resentment rising up in their hearts against it. Others harbor the delusion that God's wrath is not consistent with His goodness and so seek to banish it from their thoughts.

The Wrath of God and the Need to Think Biblically

So this morning I have a question for you. How do you rightly think about the wrath of God? Should you even think about the wrath of God? Please turn your Bibles to Hebrews chapter 3. We are going verse by verse through the book of Hebrews and here's the wonderful thing about verse by verse exposition, whether it's at your dinner table or whether it's from the pulpit, our Sunday schools.

Whatever the Bible says, we teach that part that week. And sometimes it's about God's patience and long suffering and His goodness and other times it's about His severity and His justice and His high standards of holiness.

Verse by verse, just teaching through the Bible, God, whatever you have for us, we want to think about it rightly. And the word repentance, as you know, simply means to think about things biblically, to change your mind so you think biblically.

The world says this is what wrath is and abandon it from your thoughts and the Bible says here's how we have to think about sin and wrath correctly. I will never forget when we would sit around the dinner table with my four young children at the time and Kim and I thought, you know what, I'm just going to teach chapter by chapter, Exodus 1 tonight, Exodus 2 the next night, something happens the next night, we skip it and then the following night Exodus 3 and it's amazing what you end up talking about to your children.

And since it's in the Bible, is not everything in here good and profitable and right to talk about to your family, to the church family? And I'll never forget that time when Luke looked at me and sometimes when something was very, well I just thought maybe over the kids' heads, I would just read that verse or two faster and I would keep my head down because I told the kids, you can raise your hand anytime you want and ask any question.

So, I knew I was coming to a particular section like Song of Solomon, I just kept my head down, read as fast as possible. I don't see that hand. And something was said about Israel whoring herself. I could see Luke's hand go up.

Daddy, what's a whore? You know, the lesson for that is we want to teach our children and we want to be taught, I want to be taught everything in the Bible. All Scripture is God-breathed. All Scripture is profitable.

All Scripture should make you think, God, you are a God to be praised. And so, when it comes to this topic of wrath, it's going to be right from Hebrews chapter three. And it's not one of those passages where you think, wow, you know, that's warming my heart.

Essentially, I'm going to try to convince you today that it should warm your heart because you're saved from wrath, Christian. If you're a Christian, you are saved from the wrath of God. While it is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of a living God, there is rest for the Christian and peace.

And this, as Harry read today in Galatians chapter four, a father who adopts a son or a daughter. If you see the passage and we're in Hebrews chapter three, we'll pick up the context in a little bit. But there it is, is it not, with a spotlight on it.

Verse 11 of chapter three, as I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest. Now I guess we could just try to put our head down and quickly read it and then never talk about it. Or we could address it like we should, because the wrath of God is found in many places in the scriptures.

Frankly, if you study God's anger against sin, his resentment and fury and wrath against sin and unrighteousness, there would be more verses pertaining to that subject than there would be to God's marvelous grace and God's kind love and how he loves people freely.

Both of those topics are very, very important. And here we address the wrath of God. T .J. Crawford said a great part of the Bible would need to be written over again before we can expunge from it the broad and palpable evidence of God's holy displeasure against sinful men and of his righteous purpose to inflict judgment for their iniquities.

Our Lord Jesus taught more about hell and wrath than he did about love. Of course, he taught about both. John chapter three, verse 36. He who believes in the Son has eternal life. He who does not obey the Son shall not see life.

But the wrath of God rests on him. So what we're going to do today is we're going to look at Hebrews chapter three. And at the end of the day, you're going to have to say this. The God of the Bible is wrathful.

You can't say, well, my God isn't wrathful. My God is all the love. Friend, if that's the way you talk, then your God is a figment of your own imagination. And you're trying to, just like in a cafeteria.

Let me see what I could use. The New Zealand cafeteria. And you walk up. How many people have been to New Zealand? OK. One? OK. And you can order a variety of things in this kind of cafeteria. And I say, oh, you know what?

I'll take a kiwi fruit. That might be nice. A gold one. Boy, those are sweeter. This mussel fritter served on a thin piece of bread. I'll pass on that one. I did eat it, but next time I pass. The fresh green mussels that are so big like this serve with this coconut kind of milk with chili in it.

And they're so big that little tiny crabs sometimes can live inside the mussels. So there's extra crunchy stuff while you're eating. Those are good. I'll take two of those. And these little fish that they put in, there's a size of bait.

And they just put it into like an omelet and put it on a piece of bread. They're called white bait. I don't think I'll go for those. I'll pass on those. And so we walk up and we think, you know what? Here's my God.

Three parts love. No part holiness. And definitely hold the wrath. But see, God is. And God exists. And we have to take God at His Word. You just can't make things up. Remember, you can know things about God by looking at the Son.

He's wise. He's powerful. He's other. But you can't know things about God like how He detests sin. And how He loves sinners. And how He would combine the two, as it were, as He would pour out His wrath on His own Son who didn't deserve it in our place.

You can't figure that out by going in here, my God. And you can't figure it out by going out there. You have to submit to what's in here, in this book. And so we're working our way through Hebrews, a book about the exaltation of Jesus.

But spliced into this book is a bunch of warnings. Because when you learn about Jesus, you just can't say, That's nice. Take it or leave it. There's a response. And the response is in the book of Hebrews, Believe or reject.

Those are the two responses. Believe, I trust in Jesus. I know about Him. I assent to Him. And I trust in Him. That's the one response. The other response is, I couldn't care less. It is hard for me, so it must be hard for you, to think in the Bible, there's even praise for the wrath of God.

Deuteronomy 32, Rejoice, O nations, His people! For He will avenge the blood of His servants and render vengeance to His adversaries. It's hard. I heard a great voice of much people in heaven saying, Hallelujah!

That's praise. Salvation and glory and honor and power under the Lord our God. For true and righteous are His judgments. For He had judged the great whore which did corrupt the earth with her fornication and hath avenged the blood of His servants at her hand.

And again, they said, Revelation 19 .13. Hallelujah. That's hard. Very hard. The context is chapter 3, verse 1. Read along with me, please, as we remember where we were two weeks ago. Therefore, holy brothers, in light of this great Jesus that has been talked about in chapter 1 and chapter 2, the only Savior, the only One who can reconcile sinners, forgive their sins.

Therefore, holy brothers, you who share in a heavenly calling, consider Jesus. Think about Him long and hard with determination. The Apostle and High Priest of our confession who was faithful to Him who appointed Him, just as Moses also was faithful in all God's house.

Both were faithful, but they're different. How are they different? Verse 3. For Jesus has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses. As much more glory as the builder of a house has more honor than the house itself.

For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God. Now, Moses was faithful in all God's house as a servant to testify to the things that were to be spoken later. But Christ is faithful.

Moses was faithful. Christ, present tense, is faithful over God's house as a, not servant, but Son. And we are His house if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope. The series we started in verse 7.

This is part 4. Questions to ask to think properly about who God is and saving faith. Designed to, congregation, do what Luther said. If I could believe that God was not angry with me, I would stand on my head for joy.

Can you imagine? We know we're sinful people. And if we would just get that truth. Oh, God isn't mad at me. He's happy with me because He sees me through the lens of Christ and He's happy with His Son.

This is my beloved Son in whom I'm well pleased. If I knew God was good with me, I would stand on my head for joy. Years ago, I gave up standing on my head in front of the kids doing dumb things around the house.

Because it hurt your neck for days standing on your head. But I might just do it today when I get home in light of this sermon. God's not angry with the person who trusts in this Son of chapter 1 and chapter 2.

But if you go back to verse 17 of chapter 2, it does say, does it not, therefore He had, talking about Jesus, to be made like His brothers in every respect. He had to be fully human as our representative so that He might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God to make propitiation to assuage God's wrath.

We deserve for the sins of the people. So why would we want to avoid talk about the wrath of God? Because it's built into that word propitiate. God is angry with the wicked, the Bible says. He's angry against all sinners.

We're sinners. And God the Son takes that wrath of the Father that we deserved because they agreed in eternity past with the Spirit to go show their love and rescue sinners. Why would I not want to talk about that?

The first question we looked at, is there anything more important than believing on the Lord Jesus Christ? That was in verse 7. Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, today if you hear His voice. There was an urgency there.

Not just this was good for people in the wilderness, but it's right and meet for you as well. There's nothing more important. And so I asked the question, do you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ? Have you confessed Him as Savior and Lord?

Turn from your sins by repentance and believe in Him. Question 2 that we looked at in verses 8 -10 of chapter 3. Do you feel that temptation to go back to your old ways when things get hard? If you do, you need to resist it because the end is the way of death.

When things go badly, you're in a really bad trial, don't run back in disbelief. Verse 8, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion on the day of testing in the wilderness where your fathers put me to the test and saw my works for 40 years.

Therefore, I was provoked with that generation and said, they always go astray in their heart. They have not known my ways. And now we come to question 3. Question 3 to help us work through this very stark warning, the second warning in Hebrews, the book of Hebrews.

Are you resting in Christ's perfect work? Are you resting in Christ's perfect work? I could say it this way. Isn't the chasm between wrath and rest the difference between heaven and hell? I could say it this way.

Do you know at the end of your life you will either receive heaven as a free gift because you trust in Christ or hell because the wrath of God won't be poured out on Jesus because it will be poured out on you.

Verse 11, as I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest. At its essence, boiled down, if you believe, you get the rest from God. And if you don't believe, you get the wrath from God. It is eternal rest or eternal wrath.

Nothing in between. It is praise and thanks in heaven or it is gnashing teeth in hell. Those are the only two options. God is serious about it. My dad would say I'm as serious as a what? Heart attack.

Look at the text. I swore. God with a divine oath. God with a determination. This is going to happen. God, I'm not kidding around. God, this is a burden of mine. My name isn't God unless this happens.

That's the idea. Very, very solemn. If they do enter into my rest without believing in my Son, then I'm not God at all type solemnity. Divine oath. I swore. Friends, if we just thought about it for a second, if God just said without that, in verse 11, they shall not enter my rest, would that not be enough?

They're not believing in my Son. They won't enter my rest. These Israelites in the middle of the wilderness weren't trusting in who I am. They're going to get slain in the wilderness. But when God adds, as I swore, the seriousness factor multiplies.

And He swears what? He could have sworn in His holiness, by His faithfulness, by I will keep my promises, great is my faithfulness. But here, when you reject the Son, when you don't believe in Jesus Christ, when you trust in your own righteousness, when you say to God, Jesus' death was fine, but I can do the rest on my own.

Then it's not swearing in faithfulness. What is it? As I swore in my wrath. The Old Testament translation in Greek uses the word loathe. I loathe them. I detest them. I am incensed. This is not the term that just means I'm mildly irritated.

I'm a little bit upset. Kind of disappointed. I'm unhappy. This is anger. This is holy anger. Put it this way, what would you think about a God who wasn't mad at sin? You just look at the world. You look at CNN.

You look at Fox News and you see the sin of the world. It's just put on display with cameras. And you think, what if God just looked at all that sin and pedophilia and pornography and prostitution and murder and theft and embezzlement and God just said, yes, I applaud that.

I'm happy. I delight in that. I take great joy. You would say, that's no God. And you would be right. Instead, since God is holy, He is incensed when there's a rejection of His Son. You could even say that wrath is holiness on display.

That would be a good way to think about it. So you see what the writer is trying to do? He says in chapter 1, Jesus is this great God. He's the only one to have your sins purged by. In chapter 2, yes, the Old Testament even says that.

So chapter 3, keep believing in Him. Don't go back because the only way back is going to lead to the broad road of destruction. Who wants the anger of God? Who wants anyone to be angry at you, let alone God?

The Greek word is orge. And it is, as one man said, fever-pitched anger. Quote, It will mark the end of God's patience and tolerance with the unregenerate, unrepentant mankind in the swelling of His final, furious anger, which He will vent on those whose works evidence their persistent and unswerving rebellion against Him.

Could we really worship a God who only loved good and didn't hate evil? It would be hard. And when you read the wrath of God, it swore in my wrath, this is an active opposition. This isn't just a passive, I'll just take it when it comes.

When I read the Arthur Pink book, Attributes of God, it's one of the top ten books that's most influenced me. By the way, it is free online. The Attributes of God, Arthur W. Pink. He had chapters in there.

The loving kindness of God, the grace of God, the love of God, the holiness of God, the foreknowledge of God. I think 19 chapters, so I figured I could read one chapter a day to think rightly about God.

And if I missed a few days, I'd be fine. 19. Once a month I could do that. And then I got to the one that said the wrath of God. You want to skip over it, but it is a perfection of God. It is something to be worshipped.

God, I worship you for all your attributes except the wrath part. We don't talk that way. We shouldn't talk that way. But what's the flip side? If you don't get the wrath of God, if you're trusting that Jesus took God's wrath in your place as substitute, He intercepted the wrath of God for you, not because you were worthy, not because He looked at me and thought, well, Mike will one day believe or He's worthy.

No, just out of sheer love. I love them freely. I loved Mike and the people at BBC who are believers just like I loved Israel because they were weak and small and not mighty, and so I would get all the praise, God would say.

According to my doing, 1 Corinthians 1, these are my people. What do you receive? It says they shall not enter my rest, but the believer, what does he or she receive? Rest. No more striving. For the Israelites, can you imagine?

40 years camping. I don't like to camp for one day. Although I like to go to camping shops and buy little snake bite kits and stuff that I might need, little suctions. I need those things. Little flints.

They're out there. 40 years. And I've been gone for two weeks. It was great to sleep in my own bed last night. And you just feel at home, and I thought, home. 40 years they're out there. And so the physical description of rest that he's referring to was real rest.

They're not at home yet in the promised land. But now what the author does, it could be Paul. It might not be. We don't even need to know. The author says, do you know what? There's an eternal rest. Striving to get to heaven.

Trying to keep the law to get to heaven. Doing religious deeds to get to heaven. Praying often enough to get to heaven. I remember when I was a kid and I had a Lutheran background, I'm trying to remember every sin I've ever committed before I go to sleep.

Because if I die, I thought with any sin not confessed, I would go straight to hell. And I was worried about what my confession was. And every sin I could think of, I confessed except worry. If that was true, I would have died.

Because my view of sin is pretty low and my view of God's holiness is pretty low. So I need someone to bridge the gap. I need someone to pay for all my sins that I don't even know about even. Some I do know, some I don't.

Completely take care of those. So then it's rest. No more striving, not to get into the promised land, but no more striving to get to heaven. The work's been done for you. And you are to take it by faith.

God said, if I look to the Lord Jesus Christ with faith, that I'm done working to get to heaven. And notice what this is not. This isn't, make sure your life is a super faithful life and you get into rest.

I want your life to be super faithful. But that's not how you get into rest. You get into the rest of God by Jesus' super faithful life. A perfect life. That's your only ground of salvation. The only condition of salvation.

If the ground and condition of salvation is you, I have a question for you. How are you doing? My works are less than perfect. Tainted. His works are perfect. Because of that, yes, and we'll get into it as the book goes on, I would like to live a sanctified life.

I'd like to live a life that shows that I'm growing in holiness and I'm regenerate and a new creation in Christ Jesus. That's all true. But this rest is accomplished by Jesus. And if you're weary and heavy laden, trying to get to heaven, guess what?

Jesus earned it for people like you and then He says, and I give you what? My rest. No more striving. Now when people come to my door and they'll knock and they'll say, I don't know I'm a pastor yet. We'd like to talk to you about getting to heaven and religious things and there are Jehovah's Witnesses.

I do a variety of things. I've tried to be nicer over the years. But I will say, do you have a Bible and could you please look up Romans 9 -5 and tell me who that is. Titus 2 -13, who is that? 1 John 5 -20, who is that?

It's all Jesus and He's God. But I have been known to say this on occasion. I know your theology is you have to work to get to heaven. And only 144 ,000 of you get to heaven. And you know what? In the last 25 years of my life, I've had a lot of Jehovah's Witnesses come to my door and most of them are more hard working than you are.

I'd suggest you get to the next house because if you've got to earn heaven, get a move on. They look at me like I'm weird and I know I am. But I have received the rest from God for the sinful, for the weird.

How am I going to climb that ladder made of sand that goes to the moon? As Whitefield would say, I can't make it. And so God says, here's my way to heaven. Rest in my Son. He did the work. When He said it is finished, He did it and He meant it.

So believe in Him. Trust in Him. Turn from your old way of thinking and trust in Him. That's the only way to heaven. You say, I'll take a different way. There's wrath. Yeah, but I want to add my religion and Jesus' work.

There's wrath. See what He's doing here? They're tempted to go back to their old religion. I like the smells. I like the incense. I like the Latin. I like this, this, this and this. Except there wasn't any of that.

It was the temple. I like the temple of God. I want that Solomonic temple to go back to the temple. And He says, there's only wrath back there because the veil's been torn from the top down. Wouldn't you like to rest?

Wouldn't you like relaxation in the presence of God? Now, we'll develop this in the next few weeks in chapter three and four. But when you see the word rest, as Harry said quite aptly, when it comes to English words, you have to remember there are Greek words.

And there are concepts too that are just more than, well, there's one word. It's love in the Greek. But that could be familial love or agape love or family love. But sometimes there's the same Greek word, but it has different meanings.

Rest is one. It could either mean the Canaanite rest. It could mean God cease from working. Creation rest. Or it could mean salvation rest. It's been done for you. And that's what he's going to talk about right here.

They shall not enter my rest. Talking about the Israelites, but now preaching to the people. This is Augustine. God, thou hast created us for thyself, and our heart cannot be stilled until it finds its rest in thee.

The Greek word for rest comes from two words. Down and cease. Down, it's kind of a word that intensifies. It's put at the front. And something to cease. To cease working. God has provided everything and he has done all the work.

Cessation of activity. A permanency. The Israelites in Egypt were slaves. They worked. Jump, how high. Make bricks, no straw. Now they come into the promised land and they rest. Turn to Revelation 14, please, as we continue to talk about wrath versus rest.

For every Christian here, you can rest in Christ Jesus. Because he has done all the work. And your contribution was my contribution. Nothing but sin. And then God gave us saving faith. And then we responded.

We don't even say our faith saved us. That would be shorthand for faith in the Lord Jesus Christ saved us. If you had to answer the question what makes hell, hell? The answer is the wrath of God given by God himself in hell.

Chapter 14, verse 9. And another angel, a third, followed them saying with a loud voice, if anyone worships the beast and its image and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, he also will drink the wine of God's wrath.

Poured full strength. He's not deluded at all in the cup of his anger. And he will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of holy angels and in the presence of the capital El-Lam. And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever and they have no rest day or night.

These worshipers of the beast and its image and whoever receives the mark of its name. Now you know the context there is the doom of Babylon and her followers. And God's undiluted wrath gets poured out on those beast worshipers.

Yet what does the text say? The Lamb, Jesus Christ, will be there. In what way is God in hell? God is in hell as Punisher. God by nature is a wrathful being. And He is the one that pours out wrath. From whence does wrath come in hell?

The answer is obvious. God is in hell as Punisher. No longer do unbelievers receive any common mercy in hell. They don't receive beautiful sunrise or nice food. In hell, long gone, are God's pleasures of marriage, food, and sunshine.

Look at chapter 6. It's a similar language. If anybody here is on the cusp of saying, you know what, I don't really know if I should believe in Jesus or not. I know I'm counting the cost of discipleship and following Him.

It's going to cost me. It might cost me in my marriage. It might cost me with my kids, my job. Well, that will pale in comparison to the ultimate cost. Revelation 6 .16,. And they said to the mountains and to the rocks, Fall on us and hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb.

For the great day of the wrath has come and who is able to stand? It is true that in hell, 2 Thessalonians 1 says, away from the presence of the Lord. And that God is present in hell. How can both of those go together?

Well, it's simple. The wrath of God will be in hell because God will be there giving the wrath. He is omnipresent, but He won't be giving any kindness or longsuffering or patience or graciousness or forgiveness.

It will be wrath. Both are true. While we think of heaven as Psalm 16 .11, in your presence there is fullness of what? Joy. At your right hand are what? Pleasures forevermore. But hell will be the exact opposite.

In your presence in hell there will be fullness of wrath. And at your right hand is wrath and angst and gnashing of teeth forevermore. Romans 2 .5,. But because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God.

Jesus said in Matthew 10,. Fear him who can destroy soul and body in hell. Somebody is going to have to be in hell to torment the soul. Who is the tormentor? Who is the torturer? The answer is found in Jesus' words in Matthew 8, I tell you many will come from east and west and recline at the table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.

While the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into outer darkness. It will be a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth. Because the thrower is Jesus. From his mouth comes a sharp sword so that with it he will strike down the nations.