What is the Wrath of God Being Revealed?

AD Robles

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:00

Well, hope you're having a good week so far. Thank you so much for all the people who have subscribed to this channel.

00:06

If you're not subscribed, please go ahead and consider subscribing. Make sure you hit the little bell icon next to the subscribe button so that you can get notified whenever I upload a new video or I might be going live sometime in the near future here and things like that.

00:20

Also, thank you for all of you who have signed up for the new AD Robles newsletter. Check it out at adrobles .com.

00:26

I'm gonna be doing a little bit of writing. There's some interesting, I think, interesting updates coming to that and some new news that is coming out about some projects that I'm engaged in.

00:35

So keep an eye out for that kind of stuff as well. Thank you so much for watching. And if you support me as well, thank you for supporting me.

00:41

It goes a long way in being able to continue to produce this kind of content that hopefully you find helpful and hopefully you enjoy.

00:49

I wanna make one other comment before we begin with today's topic. I did a video last week about the

00:55

Pulpit and Pen blog and why I think people read the Pulpit and Pen blog despite all the opposition that they get.

01:03

And obviously, I struck a nerve. People really do care about Pulpit and Pen. Either they hate it or they love it or they wanna talk about it.

01:11

Typically, one of my videos, when I put it online, will get like 20 to 30 comments, something like that. This video already has 130 comments.

01:19

So obviously, people wanna talk about this. There's some pushback that I've been getting about that video.

01:26

And I'm glad to get it. There's been a couple of themes in some of the pushback. Different people are coming from different perspectives and a lot of the pushback and the responses have been kind of similar to other responses.

01:39

So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to address some of the concerns people had about it. Not directly, so I'm not gonna put anyone on blast or anything like that, but I'm gonna try to categorize the responses

01:47

I've been getting and offer more information because obviously, people are interested in this. And so we gotta give, sometimes gotta give people what they want.

01:55

So I'll be explaining myself further and all of that kind of thing. Stay tuned for that in the near future. Here's what

02:01

I wanna talk about today. There's a verse that, if you're a Calvinist, you know this verse very well. If you're not a

02:07

Calvinist, chances are, you know this verse very well. And probably a lot of us can quote this verse without even looking it up.

02:14

It's Romans 1, verse 16, I'm sorry, verse 18. And the verse starts like this.

02:21

It says, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.

02:32

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven. This is an idea that any preacher worth their salt will unpack for you and will explain and give you the sense of what this means.

02:44

The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.

02:53

The wrath of God. What do you know about the wrath of God? Because Paul seems to expect that you know what he's talking about here, the wrath of God and what that looks like.

03:05

But what does it look like? I think, I worry that sometimes in the hope of being,

03:11

I don't know, respectable or being accepted in our culture, we're kind of expected to have this kind of esoteric sort of theoretical, almost like overly spiritual idea of what the wrath of God is.

03:26

But the wrath of God is a real thing that you can really see is really being revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men here on earth.

03:39

You see, this is not something that's theoretical. The wrath of God isn't theoretical. The wrath of God isn't only in the spiritual realm where it's like this internal turmoil.

03:49

I've heard people describe it as that or things like that. Or the wrath of God is not just something for the future.

03:55

At some point in hell, there's gonna be the wrath of God unleashed against ungodliness and righteousness of men.

04:01

No, Paul talks about it as a present reality. The wrath of God is being revealed.

04:07

And so that's something that we need to understand what the wrath of God is. And luckily,

04:12

Paul, because this is how he typically does it, Paul gives us a little bit of a window into what he's talking about.

04:19

He goes on in the chapter, starting in verse 24. He starts talking about the wrath of God.

04:27

Well, actually, he starts in 21. So he says, for although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened.

04:38

And claiming to be wise, they became fools. So this is part of the wrath of God. He makes people futile in their thinking.

04:45

He makes them stupid. He makes them foolish. And so instead of being smart, they might think they're smart, but he actually makes them fools.

04:54

That's part of the wrath of God. He also says in verse 24, he gives them up in the lust of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of bodies among themselves.

05:04

So he gives up people to impurity. He gives them, because of the lust in their hearts, they start to dishonor themselves, their own bodies and each other, that kind of thing.

05:14

For this reason, he says in verse 26, God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature.

05:23

And likewise, the men gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another. Men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty of their error.

05:33

That kind of exchange that Paul's talking about there, that's part of the wrath of God. That is how

05:38

God is revealing his wrath from heaven against all the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.

05:45

He makes them stupid and gives them up to impurity, to dishonor their own bodies.

05:50

And then he gives them up to dishonorable passions as well. Women with women, men with men, that kind of thing.

05:57

This is part of the wrath of God. And it goes on even further. God gives them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.

06:05

They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness. They're full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness.

06:13

There are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.

06:25

And so these are all part of God's wrath and what he pours out on a nation when their unrighteousness and ungodliness, he's put up with it long enough.

06:39

And so the wrath of God is being revealed against these kinds of things. And what does he do? He essentially multiplies their sin.

06:47

He gives them up to the debased minds. He removes his hand of restraint. And so they do what they know they shouldn't do.

06:52

They do it. And all that whole list of just vices, all that stuff from gossip to ruthlessness, to foolishness, to faithlessness, to heartlessness, that kind of stuff is

07:03

God's wrath being poured out. But it's actually even more basic than this. Because if you think about the wrath of God, we have to understand that the wrath of God is multifaceted.

07:14

And this whole idea of him giving up people to do things that ought not to be done, making them stupid in their mind, making them foolish in their mind also has consequences.

07:24

And you see, Paul, when he's writing Romans, his Bible, what he reads and how he understands

07:31

God comes from the Old Testament. Paul probably had large sections of the

07:37

Old Testament memorized. And we get further revelation into what the wrath of God is all about from the

07:46

Old Testament code. Deuteronomy chapter 28 gives us a list of the kinds of curses and the kinds of blessings that God gives to nations that obey him.

07:56

And so it starts off with the blessings. If you obey God's law and you do justice in your land and you're not, you haven't been given over to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.

08:07

Instead, you're obeying Christ and you're doing the right thing and you're trying to practice righteous practices, things like that.

08:16

You'll get a certain list of blessings. And that's something we can go over at a different time. But he also later in the chapter talks about the curses that come from the

08:26

Lord, that come from Yahweh himself, if you disobey. And this is part and parcel of the wrath of God.

08:34

It's not just an internal thing. It's not that he makes you stupid personally and that you give yourself up to these debased practices.

08:41

No, those debased practices also have consequences for the country at large, consequences.

08:46

And let's go through the list of what some of these consequences look like so you can understand what the wrath of God is and how we need to speak about the wrath of God to a world that needs to understand what the wrath of God is all about.

09:00

It's not just this internal turmoil thing that so many people have talked about over the years.

09:06

Here's the wrath of God. Here we go. If you will not obey the voice of the Lord your

09:11

God or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes that I command you today. Again, let me just step out for a second.

09:17

He's talking to Israel in particular. But these curses, if you look at the Old Testament, they're applied to countries that did not have the law of God, that did not have this stuff.

09:26

So you can be sure that countries that practice unrighteousness and ungodliness, they're going to get these kinds of curses unleashed upon them.

09:35

And we see many examples of the Old Testament of countries that are nations that do get these. Ready? He says, cursed you shall be in the city.

09:42

Cursed you shall be in the field. Cursed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. Cursed shall be the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your ground and the increase of your herds and of your young flock.

09:52

Cursed shall you be when you come in. Cursed shall you be when you go out. This is in my interpretation of this, he's talking about economic curses.

10:02

Your fruit, the fruit of your ground is going to be cursed. Your herds, which is how people kept wealth, this is their stock market essentially, is going to be cursed.

10:11

Cursed when you go in, cursed when you go out. Cursed both ways. Okay, economic turmoil.

10:17

It goes on in verse 20. The Lord will send on you curses, confusion, and frustration in all that you undertake to do until you are destroyed and perish on the account of your evildoes because you have forsaken me.

10:30

The Lord will make the pestilence stick to you until he has consumed you off the land that you are entering to take possession of it.

10:38

The Lord will strike you with wasting disease and with fever and inflammation and fiery heat, with drought and with blight and with mildew.

10:45

They shall pursue you until you perish. And all the heavens over your head shall be bronze and the earth under you shall be iron.

10:53

The Lord will make rain of your land powder from heaven. Dust shall come down on you until you are destroyed.

10:58

There's a combination of curses here. He's talking about sickness, illnesses, diseases. These are very real things that we experience, right?

11:06

And then he's talking about weather patterns. He's talking about, he's going to send you weather that will destroy you, weather that will destroy you because we can't survive with tremendous droughts.

11:18

We can't survive with tremendous heat and with mildew and things like that. It will ruin us.

11:24

We will be destroyed. That's part of the curse. That's part of the wrath of God. So we've got economic curses.

11:30

We've got confusion and frustration. That's making you stupid, making you foolish. We've also got weather that will destroy us.

11:38

The Lord, he goes on. He says, the Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You shall go out one way against them and flee seven ways before them.

11:46

You shall be a whore to all the kingdom of the earth. The dead body shall be burned for the foods and all. So what's going to happen here is military, battles, war.

11:55

That's part of the curses of God. That's the wrath of God being unleashed on your nation when there's no peace, but instead war.

12:04

Goes on, it says, the Lord will strike you with boils of Egypt, with tumors, scabs, itches, from which you cannot be healed.

12:09

The Lord will strike you with madness and blindness and the confusion of the mind. You shall grope at noonday as the blind grope in darkness.

12:16

You shall not prosper in your ways. You shall be only oppressed and robbed continually and there shall be no one to help you.

12:24

Now, let me skip some of these because he goes into extreme detail about the kinds of economic, the kinds of pestilence, the kind of military strife that we will be getting that is all part of the wrath of God being revealed.

12:41

But I want you to hear something else too. I want you to hear something else too. This is verse 34 or 43 rather.

12:49

The sojourner who is among you shall rise higher and higher above you and you shall come down lower and lower.

12:57

He shall lend to you and you shall not lend to him. He shall be the head and you shall be the tail.

13:03

Do you hear what he's saying here? You see, the wrath of God is being revealed right now.

13:11

And I saw John Piper get lambasted for something years ago.

13:17

I've criticized John Piper on my channel before, but I got to defend him here because there was a storm. I think it was like a tornado or something like that.

13:24

And after the tornado, I think like the next day or something, John Piper, and I don't know, dozens of people died,

13:31

I think, if I'm not mistaken. John Piper had the audacity to say something about it being a demonstration of the wrath of God, this tornado.

13:41

And people flipped out over this. People flipped out over this. They were ridiculing him and lambasting him and all this kind of, you insensitive, all this stuff.

13:51

But the reality is John Piper is right. Hurricane Dorian that we just got through down in the

13:57

Bahamas, that's the wrath of God being revealed. Military strife, all of this kind of stuff, that's the wrath of God being revealed.

14:07

Sojourners getting to a higher level than the people that are native citizens. People, sojourners getting more stuff than the native citizens.

14:14

And that process is part of the wrath of God being revealed. Disease, sickness.

14:20

Let's not mince words here, friends, because the reality is, guys, you need to understand that we need to respect the

14:29

Bible's categories and have the Bible's categories of things. So when God talks about making you stupid, giving you confusion and things like that, where you don't, you're so confused, you don't even know what gender you are and things and stuff of that nature.

14:41

This is the wrath of God being revealed. Now, does that mean that every single case of sickness or pestilence or every single case of a military conflict, every single case is because you've sinned against God?

14:54

No, we have examples of that not being the case, right? But we can say with definitive, definitive warrant from the scripture that when these kinds of things are unleashed on a nation in droves, when men are offing themselves in record numbers in your country, when there's storm after storm after storm causing economic chaos and deaths and things like that, we can say with great warrant from the scripture that this is the wrath of God being revealed.

15:26

When we have a civil war in our country, the United States had a civil war, that's an example of the wrath of God being revealed.

15:32

We can definitively say that. When you're being dispossessed of your land, like the farmers in South Africa and things like that, that's the wrath of God being revealed.

15:41

Look, it doesn't mean that we have to agree with it. It doesn't mean that the people that are perpetuating this are in God's side or something like that, but you can be sure that the wrath of God is being revealed.

15:52

And the only way to respond to these calamities, these curses, if you will, whether it's weather, whether it's pestilence, whatever it is, the only way to respond to these things is to throw yourself at the mercy of God, the mercy of God and say,

16:07

Lord, we repent. We will do what you say. We've had enough. Please take these curses from our nation.

16:13

It's just that simple. It's just that simple. If you don't look around this country and go to the curses listed in Romans 1, go to the curses listed in Deuteronomy 28 and see how many of those curses you can see literally happening right now in the

16:28

United States. If you don't see the obvious connections between what's going on here with the confusion, with the stupidity, with the conflict, with the violence, with all of this stuff, if you can't see the direct relevance of Deuteronomy 28 to the

16:46

United States, I mean, I'm not sure what to tell you. We have to repent. We have to preach a message of repentance and faith in Christ, because the reality is that God didn't change the way he operates from between then and now.

17:02

The nations that he destroyed back then, whether it was Babylon or the

17:09

Assyrians or whatever it was, he destroyed those nations on the same grounds that he will destroy the

17:15

United States for. The same standard, the same law. And so the blessings and curses are the same.

17:23

We need to teach that and preach that, because the only thing that will save the United States from the judgment and the wrath that it faces currently is for a massive repentance, a massive revival, a massive changing of the mind.

17:38

That's what repentance is, is a change of the mind and faith in Jesus Christ. That's the only thing that can stop it.

17:44

So let's remember that the wrath of God is a real thing. And when we see violence in the streets, when we see economic turmoil, when we see weather patterns that are just, they boggle the mind, like this

17:57

Hurricane Dorian was crazy. Just like stood, it stood in one place for like two days.

18:03

We haven't seen these kinds of things before. These aren't accidents. These aren't outside of the will of God. These aren't, we don't, these aren't random.

18:10

I think some people think, oh, this stuff is just random. It just happens randomly. That's not how God works. God is not a

18:15

God of randomness. There is a method to all of this. There are blessings and curses. God told us about them and he did not revoke them.

18:24

And so we need to remember those things and teach those things. And this country desperately needs a change of mind.

18:31

And the only person that can make that change of mind happen is the Lord. And so I suggest that we pray desperately for that change of mind to happen.

18:41

Lest we go the way of the Assyrians. Lest we go the way of Babylon and the Romans and all that kind of stuff.