Reasons for the Wrath of God, Part 1 B

If God judges, He judges justly with equity, because man is without excuse. Much more so are you without excuse, who know the gospel and the name of God's Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Now you may not be a brilliant scientist, but did you know that even a rudimentary understanding of the natural world is all it takes to make you guilty in God's eyes? The fact is, every person knows enough about creation to recognize it as the handiwork of the Lord. Today on Grace to You, John MacArthur is going to show you the connection between what you clearly see in creation and the wrath of God. God is angry with mankind, and it's imperative for you to understand why.

Your eternal destiny depends on it. So follow along now with John as he continues his study, Wicked World, Angry God. Turn with me in your Bible to the first chapter of Paul's epistle to the Romans, verses 19 through 23. Now this is such a tremendous section of Scripture with so much import and impact that we want to think carefully and closely along with the Spirit of God as he writes through the Apostle Paul. I really believe that this passage answers many, many questions that are constant questions asked by folks about the meaning of the gospel, the nature of God, and the destiny of man. Let me read to you verses 19 through 23, and you follow along as I read.

We ought to begin, I guess, at verse 18. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who hold the truth in unrighteousness, because that which may be known of God is manifest in them, for God hath shown it under them. For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse. Because when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God. Neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations and their foolish heart was darkened.

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man and birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things. Now the question that comes up in this passage is this. How can a man be held responsible for his sin? I mean, how can God judge people?

I mean, what if no one ever told them about the truth? How can He hold them responsible? The answer comes beginning in verse 19, and there are four reasons for the wrath of God. I call them revelation, rejection, rationalization, and religion.

Let's begin with revelation. Verse 19, because that which may be known of God is manifest in them. Commentator Hodge has written, God therefore has never left Himself without a witness. His existence and perfections have ever been so manifested that His rational creatures are bound to acknowledge and worship Him as the true and only God. End quote. So what is knowable about God?

Now mark it. His divine power and divine nature has been revealed to all men so they're without excuse. And not only, now watch this, not only is it revealed unto them as an external reality, but in them as an apprehended perception.

They see it and they know it to be Him. Turn with me to Acts for a moment, the 14th chapter, Acts 14, 16. And here Paul is speaking and talking about God and how God reveals Himself. And in verse 15 he talks about the living God who made heaven and earth and the sea and all things that are in them. And then he says, who in time past allowed all nations to walk in their own ways, nevertheless He left not Himself without witness.

How? In that He did good. Did He make a good earth?

Yes. He gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons and He filled our hearts with food and with gladness. In other words, the very goodness of life speaks of the goodness of God. The food and the rain and the seasons and the joy of living all speak of a beneficent, loving, gracious Creator.

Now go to the 17th chapter of Acts. And Paul preaching to the philosophers on Mars Hill in Athens, verse 23, says you have here an unknown God, which by the way was reflective of their understanding of the true God, though they didn't know His name. You ignorantly worship Him, so I'm going to tell you about Him. You know He exists and you've got an unknown God statue just to cover Him, but you don't know who He is.

But I'll tell you who He is. He's the God who made the world, verse 24, and all things in it. He's the Lord of heaven and earth. He dwells not in temples made with hands. He has not worshiped with men's hands as though He needed anything, seeing He'd give it to all life and breath and all things.

They were always accustomed to bringing food and sticking it at the feet of their idols. He said, you don't have to feed this God. He is made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on the face of the earth. He has determined the times before appointed and the bounds of their habitation. In other words, He controls the nations, their boundaries. He controls time. He controls destiny.

He controls everything. That they should seek the Lord if perhaps they might feel after Him. In other words, if men would just feel after Him, if they would just see that He is and reach out for Him, they would find Him because He is not what? He's not far from every one of us. For in Him we live and move and have our being. He is right there and He has manifested Himself in an undeniable way. Listen to this remarkable passage of Scripture, John's Gospel, chapter 1 verse 9.

Listen to what it says. Just listen. Christ is that light that is lighting all men. Did you hear that? Does that mean all men are saved?

No. What it does mean is that all men are illumined with the knowledge of God. Christ is the light that is lighting all men. No one has an excuse. That is the meaning of verse 20. You say, well, wait a minute. You mean everybody in the world has an opportunity?

Yes. Somehow, in some way, listen to me, God is a God of goodness and grace. God is a God of love and equity and justice and God does not pour out wrath on people who never had a choice, who never had an opportunity. They all have the knowledge of God around them who's shown it unto them and in them they have internally perceived it to be Him. And Christ is the light that is lighting all men. You say, well, how did this revelation come?

Look back at verse 20. The invisible things of Him, that is His attributes, God is invisible. The things about God that are invisible, the essence of His nature, the reality of His existence, His qualities and attributes, namely His eternal power and His divine nature.

You say, what do those mean? Well, eternal power simply means never failing omnipotence. His omnipotence, His tremendous power is available to men and His divine nature. That is that He is wise, that He is good, that He is loving. All of the elements of God's nature are visible. I can tell you God is a God of beauty by looking at this world, can't you? I can tell you God is a God of goodness because there's goodness in life. I can tell you He's a God of love because there's love. I can tell you all about His nature. He's a God who is wise because of the intricacy of the design of His creation. You can know His divine nature and you can know His eternal power.

That's what He's saying. Through the creation of the world, these things are not muddy, but they're what? Clearly seen, being easily understood by the things that are made. You say, well in the time that the Bible was written, people didn't have science. I mean, could they see things? Oh, they could probably see some things clearer than we can see them.

We've just about blotted out nature with concrete. In ancient times before the microscope and the telescope, men were able to reflect on the vastness of the universe. They were able to understand the fixed order of heavenly bodies. They could pick up a flower and see how marvelously the petals were arranged.

They could look at how the leaves attached themselves to the stem. They saw the cycle of the water as it evaporated into the clouds and was carried over the land and deposited. They understood the mystery of human birth. They saw it.

They saw growth. They knew the glory of a sunrise and the majesty of a sunset. They knew the rolling and the roaring of the seas and the rushing of the rivers and the trickle of a brook and the flight of a bird and the caterpillar that came out a butterfly. And they looked up and saw what the psalmist saw in chapter 19 when he said, the heavens declare what? The glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork.

They knew what the psalmist had in mind also in the 94th Psalm and the ninth verse. He who planted the ear shall he not hear? He who formed the eye shall he not see? In other words, if they said if we can hear, then whoever made us must understand hearing. If we can see, he must see. If we can think, he must think.

And you can carry it all the way out. Sure they understood God. They understood about his nature from what they saw in their world. In Psalm 143 5 says the psalmist, I remember the days of old. I meditate on all thy works. I muse on the work of thy hands.

I sit here and I contemplate what you've done, he says. Even in the non-sophisticated world then, by our standards, they sat in awe of the creation. Look at Job. You just read through Job and see the staggering statements of that book about the creative power of God and the revelation of his nature.

But just think about something. Let me just tell you how you can see God in creation. Do you know that some birds navigate by the stars when they migrate? And do you know that if you raise birds, these kinds of birds, from eggs inside a building, they've never been out of the building, and if you show them an artificial sky, and this has been done in scientific experiment, representing a place their species have never been, they will immediately orient themselves to the proper place to which to migrate.

Now you tell me how they know that. There's a special fish that I've enjoyed reading about called the archer fish. It gets its food like all other fish. It just swims around, opens its mouth, and takes its food. But they have the amazing ability to fire drops of water with great accuracy and knock insects out of the air.

And did you know that there is a little thing called the bombardier beetle, who produces chemicals which mix perfectly and at the right moment explode in the face of his enemy, but the explosion never occurs prematurely and never blows him up? Think about the hydrological cycle of water, which just absolutely staggers my mind. Water is lifted against gravity from the sea, thousands of feet into the air, and there it is suspended.

Just suspended. Collected in clouds, and then the clouds are floated over the land, and they're dropped. Now we can't invent a machine to do that, so God has one, and it's the sun, and it does it all, and it's only 93 million miles away. No wonder the psalmist says power belongs to God. No wonder he says the greatness of his power. No wonder Nahum says the Lord is great in power, and Isaiah says the Lord God is everlasting strength. No wonder the psalmist in chapter 65 says, who by his power establishes the mountains. You know, scientists have always tried to say it's all evolution and it's all explained by certain circumstances and so forth apart from God, but they're really running out of the ability to say that.

They're fast losing their case. Robert Jastrow, an astrophysicist and the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies says this, now we see how the astronomical evidence supports the biblical view of the origin of the world. The essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same. It wasn't evolution at all, says Jastrow. It asks what caused, produced this effect. Who or what put the matter or energy into the universe, and science cannot answer. He goes on, for the scientists who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance. He is about to conquer the highest peak and as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who've been there for centuries. Great statement.

In other words, when you study science, the conclusion is God created the world. And today with the 200 inch telescope at Mount Palomar, astronomers can look into space for 4 billion light years. If you don't understand that, try 25 sextillion miles. You know how much space that alone would make as far as they can see? Seven times ten to the 67th power cubic inches of space. If someone had been examining this large a volume at the rate of 1 million billion cubic miles a day since the universe began, he'd be just a little shy of halfway done.

And the universe that we see with that telescope is a small piece of actual space. Can you imagine the power? And some pea brain comes along and says, well, once there was a one-celled thing, said to itself, let's be two.

And away they went. A press bulletin from the University of Alberta in Canada said it may be surprising to people in a temperate climate to hear that there are on the average of 1,800 storms in operation at any time, and the energy expended in these storms amounts to the almost inconceivable figure of 1,300,000,000 horsepower. A large caterpillar machine has 420 horsepower requiring 100 gallons of fuel a day. How much fuel does God have to operate storms with a horsepower of 1,300,000,000 every day? Missouri has 70,000 square miles and 38 inches average rainfall. That amount of water is equal to a lake 22 feet deep, 250 miles long and 60 miles wide.

And God moves that water around just in that one state alone. The U.S. Natural Museum says insect species now number 10,000,000. And I know when they were all at your last picnic. You realize there are 2,500 kinds of ants and one colony alone can have 100,000,000 ants? You know there are 5,000,000,000 birds in America. Some can fly 500 miles across the Gulf of Mexico. Did you know that mallards can fly 60 miles an hour, eagles 100 miles an hour, and a falcon can dive at 180? I know you didn't know that codfish can lay 9,000,000,000 eggs.

But they can. The earth is 25,000 miles in circumference. It weighs 6,000,588,000,000 tons and hangs in empty space. And spins at a 1,000 miles an hour with perfect precision so that time is kept to the split second and at the same time careens through space around the Sun in an orbit of 580,000,000 miles at a 1,000 miles a minute. Consider the Sun. The Sun burns up 4,000,000,000 tons of matter a second. If you could convert the energy the Sun gives off to horsepower, you'd wind up with 500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 horsepower.

If that's too big to handle, that's the same as one and a half million million billion Corvettes. Think of the distance from the Sun. The distance from the earth to the Sun is 93,000,000,000 miles as I said. It takes the light from the Sun traveling at 186,000 miles a second, eight and a half minutes to get here. The speed of light is 186,000 miles a second and if you take that speed of 186,000 miles a second going 60 seconds a minute, 60 minutes an hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, that light travels over 6 trillion miles in one year. And yet if you were to go across our galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy where our star system is, going at 186,000 per second, 6 trillion miles a year, it would take you 125,000 years to get across our galaxy and ours is one of millions.

If you're screaming mercy, I'll quit. Now consider how small we are. Atoms are not visible. We know they exist but to this day no one has ever seen an atom.

They're so small it takes three atoms to make up one water molecule and if you were to take every water molecule in one drop of water and blow them up so each molecule was the size of a grain of sand, you'd have enough grains of sand to make a road one foot thick half mile wide and the road would go from Los Angeles to New York. But did you know the atom is mostly empty space? The actual material, and this fascinates me, in an atom takes up one trillionth of the atom's volume. And what you really have is a lot of little orbits. Everything is mostly empty space. For example, if the average person had all the space squeezed out of him, how much volume do you think he'd occupy?

Take a person who is six feet tall and all the actual mass that's in him, when all the space is squeezed out, he would fit on the head of a pin for he would occupy one one hundred millionth of a cubic inch. So don't argue when somebody says you're nothing. Listen, if God says he is visible in his creation, then he's visible in his creation. You can see the eternal power. You can see the divine nature of God.

You can look at creation and so can a Canaanite or a Philistine or an Egyptian or anybody living in any period of history up until today, and he's going to see that God is. There has to be a cause for all this effect. There has to be a designer for all this design. I mean, when somebody tells me it just happened, that makes no more sense than saying take your watch apart, put all the pieces in your pocket, and see how long you have to shake your pants before you hear a tick.

It's absolutely ridiculous. Design speaks of a designer. So you know God is, and if you know God is, you know God is powerful, and you know God is divine.

And that's why the end of verse 20 says men are without excuse. Everybody living on the face of this earth has experienced God, His wisdom, His power, His generosity in every moment of their existence, though they have not recognized Him. He's been there. He has bounded their lives. He's been sustaining them. He's been enriching them.

He's been giving Himself to them, and in their senses they have perceived Him so that they're without excuse. Yes, general revelation is the foundation of all condemnation. General revelation is the foundation of all condemnation.

Men have the opportunity because God is evident everywhere. Listen, if God judges, He judges justly with equity because man is without excuse. Much more so are you without excuse who know the gospel and the name of God's Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. How shall you escape if you neglect so great a salvation?

For the wrath of God is revealed against all who hold the truth and suppress it in unrighteousness. The Bible says that the way to God is through Christ, and He offers you that opportunity. If you do not know Christ, open your heart. Confess Him as Lord.

Believe the gospel, the good news that He came into the world and lived and died and rose again, and enter into God's life and step out of the wrath of God. That's John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. Today's message is from his series, Wicked World, Angry God. Now, let me bring you back to something John just said about general revelation.

In other words, the evidence for God's existence that is revealed in creation. John said this, general revelation is the foundation of all condemnation. The question, John, is if general revelation is enough to condemn sinners as guilty before God, is it also enough to lead a person to salvation?

Well, the answer to the question is no. General revelation is enough to condemn the sinner, it is not enough to save the sinner. What we mean by that is you look at the general revelation, that is the revelation of God in nature, in the created order, in the created world, or the revelation of God that is in the mind, the cause and effect, the ability to reason, the revelation of God that is in the moral character of every human being, the law written in the heart, Paul calls it. And you know there is a God. And as Romans 1 says, you know he is powerful. And as Romans 2 says, you know he is moral, he is a lawgiver.

There is enough in all of that to make you responsible to know there is God, God is the Creator, God is the lawgiver, and God is the judge. And so we say there's enough in general revelation to condemn the sinner to eternal judgment. But there's not enough there to lead the sinner to salvation. For that, it is absolutely essential that you hear the gospel. Saving faith comes by hearing the message concerning Christ. And Paul in Romans 10, that same chapter, says they have to hear. How will they call upon Him whom they have not heard? How will they hear, he then says, unless there is a preacher? And how will they preach unless they are sent? So the responsibility then is to fulfill the Great Commission, to go to the ends of the earth with the message of Christ and the cross and the resurrection, the glorious gospel, to preach, because there is no other way to be saved. And so again, there's enough in the general revelation to condemn the sinner, but not enough to save the sinner. For that, the gospel is required. Paul says, I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew and to the Gentile. And again, that's why we have been given the Great Commission, to preach the gospel to every creature. That's right, John. And friend, the only way to escape God's wrath is by trusting Christ alone.

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