Righteousness And Wrath Revealed (Part 2)

Thanks for tuning in to No Compromise Radio with pastor and author Dr. Mike Abendroth. Today on No Compromise Radio we'll be hearing Pastor Mike open the Word of God in a recent message he preached at Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston, Massachusetts.

Now let's join Pastor Mike in progress as he preaches through the scriptures verse by verse with No Compromise.

The Wrath of God and Human Suppression of Truth

Indignation, eternal detestation of all unrighteousness one man said. Pastor Steve prayed, he's kind, he's slow to anger, but one day there was the flood. And wrath really is holiness in action. And it's not passive.

Take a look at the text. Wrath of God is revealed from where? Heaven from God himself. Talk about not being a nice evangelical today. It's a taboo in Christian circles to talk about the wrath of God. He's not passive in the face of sin.

People run around and just throw things out. I don't know why they throw them out. We just assume they're Christian. God hates a sin but loves a sinner. That's a bald faced lie. It should be abandoned in light of Romans chapter 1 verse 18.

Does he love them as a creator? Yes. But somehow that sin is outside of the people separated from a sinner. The sinner has the sin. The sinner is the sin. And here God is with holy hatred judging the sin.

All of it. Because people do what? It's not like they're just living their life. What does the text say? They suppress. They hold down. They quash it. And it's an ongoing thing. A deliberate restraining.

We will not let this truth rise up. This means if you could just take all your weight on something and hold it down. When I was younger I used to think about holding my sister down in the pool or something.

And you'd have to have all your weight on it. And I hate to even mention it because it's kind of funny to think of that. But here it's people going, you know what? Here's the truth of God. God created you.

You are to honor His name. You are to worship Him. You are to esteem Him. You are to honor His Son and love Him.

And you're just like, I will not let that up. It's deliberate. A choice of the will.

You watch our culture do this too. The truth comes up. Homosexuality is a forgivable sin. I've got to hold down that truth. God isn't just love. He's a God of righteousness. I've got to hold that truth down, society says.

And it's the truth about God that sets people free. They've got to squash it. Quash it. God also judges them because they ignore things willfully. Verse 19. This is the truth they suppress and they know it.

It's another indictment. They just willfully ignore it. For what can be known about God is what? Hidden in the stars? No, it's plain to them. Natural revelation is plain. You look outside and you see the handiwork of God.

Because God has shown it to them. No one can say, I didn't know about God. I didn't have the facts about God. I'm not sure. Technically, no one's an atheist. I'm sometimes interested in what pagans say when they die.

Especially pagans who hate God with their words and with their actions. William Pope was a well-known infidel. He died in 1797. One of his favorite things to do with his buddies was to get a Bible in the middle of the floor.

You can imagine the Juana Circle and you play not kick the can, but kick the Bible. Because if you kick it just right, you can get the pages to just rip. But then his same friends who liked to play kick the Bible with him, showed up in his death chamber and he said, I have no contrition.

I cannot repent. God will damn me. I know the day of grace has passed. You see the one who is damned forever. Oh, eternity, eternity. Nothing for me but hell. Come eternal torments. I hate everything God has made.

Only I have no hatred for the devil. I wish to be with him. I long to be in hell. Do you not see? Do you not see him? He is coming for me. Everyone believes. The substantiation is found in verse 20 for his invisible attributes.

It's not that they just know there's a God. They know about this God. Details about the God. Namely, his eternal power and divine nature, having been clearly perceived, clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made, so they are without excuse.

They are without apology. No defense. No legal defense. Trying to make some blame for something, and Paul goes on to indict them with something else. They pervert God's glory. Verse 21. They don't just suppress it.

They don't just ignore it. They pervert it. And again, we're reading, if we're Christians, this was our resume. When you realize how black sin was, you realize how great grace was. Grace greater than all our sin.

How can a God save me as I suppress these things? Ignored, perverted, for although they knew God, they did not honor him. When you see creation out there, there's a response that you should give. Here's a response.

God, I honor you. Or, give him thanks. God, thank you for the rain and for the sun and for the moon. When you see natural revelation, what's the response? Honor. Thanks. Because, mark this, beloved, revelation requires a response.

When you see God unveil Himself and gets to show you who He is, the response is, fear the Lord's beginning of the wisdom, praise, singing, honor, glory, service. Revelation requires a response. But when people don't respond rightly, what happens?

But they became futile in their thinking. And their foolish hearts were darkened. I was thinking the other day about evolution. No one to thank. No one to honor. Become futile in their thinking. God-hating philosopher Rousseau said, No man can come to the throne of God and say, I'm a better man than Rousseau.

But now he's about ready to die. Ah, how happy a thing it is to die when one has no reason for remorse or self-reproach. He prayed, Eternal Being, the soul that I'm going to give Thee back is as pure at this moment as it was when it proceeded from Thee.

Render it a partaker of Thy felicity. And my only comment for Rousseau there is verse 22. Claiming to be wise, they became fools. If you're here today and you think you can hide from such a God, somehow you're safe from a holy God, there's no safety for you.

You're a fool to think that. Your only refuge is found in Christ Jesus. It's a hallucination to somehow think that you can get away with it. Voltaire, he said, I'll show you how just one Frenchman can destroy Christianity within 50 years.

In 20 years, Christianity will be no more. My single hand shall destroy the edifice it took the 12 apostles to rear. Before he died, he said, I wish I had never been born. I'm abandoned by God. Man, I will give you half of what I'm worth if you will give me six months life, doctor.

You cannot live six weeks. Then I shall go to hell and you shall go with me. His last words were, I am abandoned by God and man. I shall go to hell, oh Jesus Christ. And the nurse that watched him die said, for all the wealth in Europe, I would not see another infidel die.

The story goes that Peter McKenzie was a preacher and he went to the Wax Museum in London and he came to a place where the guide said, this is the chair in which Voltaire sat and wrote his atheistic blasphemies.

And so Peter McKenzie sat down without permission and sang this song, Jesus shall reign wherever the sun doth his successive journeys run. His kingdom shall stretch from shore to shore till moons shall wax and wane no more.

Idolatry, Judicial Abandonment, and the Descent into Moral Disorder

And the insanity of sin, verse 23, perverts the truth of God and what does it do? This is a gross substitution. Replacing God with false idols deliberately and exchange the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

The downward slope. You can read about bird worshipers, scarab beetle worshipers. And when a society does that, what does God do? Verses 24 -32, He gives them over. Judicial abandonment. This is probably the most frightening kind of judgment ever.

Active outpouring of displeasure. Verse 24, God gave them. Highlight on God gave. Verse 26, God gave them. 28, God gave them. God gave them over. God gave them over. God gave them over. What a horrible refrain that is.

Look at verse 24. Therefore, logical order, you reject divine revelation, God actively, not passively, gives people up. This is judgment. This is our society today. We don't want to have anything to do with God.

Okay. And God gives them up. This is not, well, let nature take its course. This is not, well, God's hand is kind of slowing everything down and He takes His hand away. No, this is full-on active judicial judgment.

This is taking somebody, not holding them back from going down the hill. You don't want a kid to go down a hill too fast in the wheelbarrow or the little cart, so you kind of slow them a little bit or hold them from behind.

This is God saying, when you don't honor me and when you don't give me thanks, He's at the top of the hill and He's pushing the society downhill. Forcefully gave them up. No wonder someone said this is the most frightening verse in all the Bible.

You want to know what the culture is doing today? Moral depravity? It is a result of God's judgment, which is a result of people saying, I won't honor God or believe in Him. You turn on Jerry Springer and you go, how can all this happen?

Back up, friends. This is the divine judgment of God. Because when society suppresses and ignores and perverts, then God pushes down the hill. And then you look at the effects and you go, yes, all this talk about, well, God's going to judge America if this doesn't happen.

Friends, we are in the middle of divine judgment in America today. Depravity is a result of judgment here. This abandoning kind of depravity. It's not passively permitting people to fall. It's not withdrawing a hand of grace that's restraining.

As Lewis Johnson said, the meaning is not simply that God withdrew from the wicked the restraining force of His providence, although that privative sense is included, but that He positively gave men over to the judgment of more intensified and aggravated cultivation of lusts in their hearts.

They reject the truth about God. They turn away and God gives them immorality. God punishes sin by giving people over to more sin. I think of Nebuchadnezzar. I think of false teachers. I think of Israel's same judicial abandonment.

Verse 25, because they exchanged... This is the unholy substitution again. They rejected the truth about God for literally in the Greek, the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.

Paul can't stand it. Who's blessed forever? When you see creation, you should respond with the psalmist. Blessed be His glorious name forever and may the whole earth be filled with His glory. Psalm 72, amen and amen.

Psalm 145, I will extol Thee, my God and King. I will bless Thy name forever and ever. That's the right response. But when the response is, this isn't true, it's a lie, evolution reigns, then the bell tolls too.

God gave them over. Verse 26, for this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. And now Paul has as a centerpiece of a society's moral degradation, homosexuality. Is homosexuality a forgivable sin?

Yes. But it also tells you a society is ultra-judged when this happens. It's at the top of the list. Centerpiece. Showcase. For their women, women usually hold out longer than the men do in terms of just who they are and their countenance and how God has made them in propriety.

And so when the women are at the top of the list with lesbianism, it's really bad. For the women exchange the natural relations for those contrary to nature. The Bible says this is degrading. It's dishonorable.

It means absolutely no honor. Out of the 23 sins that are listed, homosexuality is at the top. The Greek word means it's base. It's low. And the men likewise, verse 27, gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another.

You look at society and you'll see consumed men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for the temporal penalty they receive. Pritchard said, homosexuality is first tolerated, then accepted, then praised, and finally enshrined as the ultimate freedom.

Welcome to the United States of America. Paul Noody was talking about it. He wrote from Corinth. They worshiped all kinds of things there including sexual immorality and homosexuality. And this is only temporal judgment.

Just think of eternal judgment for those that don't repent. Thomas Watson said, eternity is a sea without bottom and banks. After millions of years, there is not one minute in eternity of hell wasted and the dam must be ever burning but never consuming, always dying but never dead.

The fire of hell is such as multitude of tears will not quench it, length of time will not finish it, the vial of God's wrath will be always dropping upon a sinner. As long as God is eternal, He lives to be avenged upon the wicked.

Oh, eternity! Who can fathom it? If the body of earth and sea were turned to sand and all the air up to the starry heaven were nothing but sand and a little bird should come every thousand years and fetch away in her bill but a tenth part of the grain of all that heap of sand, what numberless years would be spent before that vast heap of sand would be fetched away.

Yet, if at the end of all that time the sinner might come out of hell, there would still be some hope, but that word ever breaks the heart. Verse 28 of Romans 1,. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.

Debased there means worthless. It means disapproved. It was used of a cowardly soldier. Disapproved. The Greek word is adakimasu. Adakimasu. It was used of a counterfeit coin. And it was also used by stonemasons when they found a stone for construction that didn't fit for some reason or wasn't right and couldn't bear a load.

They wrote A on it. Adakimasu. And for these people here, if they don't repent, Romans 1, the eternal A written on their forehead, adakimasu. And now their minds can't even work. So great is the fall, so great now is the depravity and the judgment of God and the wrath of God, they can't think straight.

Don't you want to just argue with people and convince them and debate and logic? Well, they can't think because their moral thinking has gone. And so what happens? Now the smoosh gates just go. They were filled, 29, with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetous, malice.

They're full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness, gossips, slanders, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.

Verse 32, if it couldn't get any worse, people cheer him on. For though they knew the righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, people know that. They do not only do them, but they give hearty approval to those who practice them.

Hearty approval. Wasn't that long ago when Harvard sociologist Sorokin wrote a book called Crisis of Our Age. Then he wrote another book called The American Sex Revolution and basically said sex-anarchy leads to mental breakdown.

Kind of different than Freud, who taught the exact opposite. The retributive justice of God is a society that's run amok with sexual rebellion. Running to help so fast they can't hardly stop to take their breath.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ for Sinners Under Wrath

And the saddest thing of all, even though this is such a horrible judgment, this is only temporal judgment in chapter one. Now I have to say this because we can't stay 15 more hours for me to finish the rest of Romans, but Romans has some good news in it in chapter 30.

For the foolish out here and the insolent and the disobedient and the sexual sinner, this book, the Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Paul's pen, called Romans, it offers forgiveness for all kinds of sinners, including you.

Including sexual sinners, homosexual sinners. Men who have forced their partners to have abortions. Women who have had abortions. Because God offers to the unrighteous Christ's perfect righteousness. Just imagine.

I said to someone yesterday when I was preaching the Gospel, why did Jesus live such a full life? Because when God said, do this and live, He knew we couldn't do it. So out of His mercy and love and He demonstrated His kindness towards humanity, He sent His Son to go live the life.

You don't see Jesus in that list because He's the exact opposite. Because He is righteousness. He is godliness. And so when the sinner who is enslaved to these sins and more looks to Jesus Christ by faith, can you imagine?

If hell's so bad, heaven's so great. It would be an awful, awful... It's a nightmare for me and the elders that for some of you, week in and week out, you hear the good news. The Gospel of Grace for you.

Through faith alone. To believe on Christ Jesus, the representative for mankind. The substitutionary debt has been paid for all those who will look by faith. Believe for you to sit here week after week after week after week.

Perhaps you persuade me to be a Christian. May I implore you today? You must believe. This isn't games. This isn't pressure. This is eternity. And for me, when I look at this list, forget speaking in tongues as a second blessing.

I get to go to heaven. You get to go to heaven. If God has granted you faith and you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, we get heaven. And you know what? Instead of looking here, because Romans 2 is going to do this to us, these people are bad.

Look at how bad they are. Romans 1 is me. But maybe worse. I might be worse. And I get to go to heaven. How can a scallywag like Mike Avendroff go to heaven? By baptizing me? By me being good? I mean, I don't know.

What? Could there be anything that I could do? No. I just have to look to the cross and say, Lord, I believe what You say. I'm a rotten sinner. But I believe Your love for me and Your grace for me and Your mercy for me way outweighs my sin.

Because when you save people, you even get more glory than you do when you make a volcano or a sun or a moon. Because you show people a little bit what it's like in the eternal decrees of God in eternity past that the sun would go rescue people.

And then He'd take those people and then He would transform them by His grace and then He would make them look more like Christ and then He would hand them back to the Father and say, I rescued them for Your sake so You would look good.

And He did that for every Christian here.

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