By No Means Clearing The Guilty

Summit church, it is impossible for me to overstate the importance that small groups play in the life of our church. It is the place where people go from being on the sidelines into the game. It is where real disciples are made.

It is where friendships are formed, real community is found. It's where we go deeper in Bible study. So I hope that if you are not a part of a small group here at the church, that you will avail yourself of the many opportunities at your campus this weekend, that they are going to make available to you to get into one. I know this might be a little unusual, and happy Labor Day weekend for everybody, but I want you to, if you would, at this point, because you've got to stand to your feet at all of our campuses, I want you to stand with me for just a moment and we're going to pray together. The world that we live in, you know, is always chaotic, but it seems like over the last several weeks, there's just been, I mean, just a lot of things that our country is enduring.

You know, the continued racial tensions, most recently the violent outbreaks against the police and our men and women in uniform, the continuation of horrific stories that we hear, things like, groups like ISIS and the persecution of our brothers and sisters in Christ, literally all around the country, or all around the planet, excuse me, and then the continued disturbing revelations that we get from Planned Parenthood. There's just a lot of things that God has his people here to be, he says, a kingdom of priests, which means that we pray and we ask God. I know many of you are dealing with some of your own things, and so I just want us to go before the throne of God together. We're going to pray on behalf of each other. We're going to pray on behalf of what's going on in our community and ask God to bring his peace and his gospel and let it flourish here in our community.

So would you lift your eyes, lift your hands, bow your heads, whatever, and let's go before the throne of the Father. God, thank you. Thank you, God, that you are promised, have promised to be here with us, that you are present with your people. You're a very present help in times of trouble, and there are many listening to me right now at one of our campuses that are overwhelmed, God with situations in their family, and we pray, God, that you would give them wisdom and grace and guidance.

God, do miracles this weekend. Father, we pray for what's going on in our community. We pray that you would give our leaders wisdom to guide us to a more peaceable and just society. God, we pray that you would give us forgiveness to be able to forgive one another where we've disappointed and wronged each other. God, I pray maybe most especially for those churches across the United States where someone is standing this weekend to faithfully proclaim the mercy and the justice of the almighty God. I pray that you would enable them, empower them to God to preach with clarity, to preach in a way that convinces and compels and brings people to the Prince of Peace. God, not just our church, God, but churches all over Raleigh-Durham and the United States that are partnering together to see Jesus lifted up. God, give us grace and ability. We pray because we're desperate. In Jesus' name and all God's people said, amen, amen.

You may be seated. One of the things that I have learned now after being a pastor now for a few years is that people expect me to talk like I have it all together. Many of you think that I open my eyes every morning and I say, oh, good morning, Lord, and then I roll over and I grab the harp that I keep beside my bed and I strum out a few love songs to Jesus. Then I go downstairs to a kitchen that smells like cinnamon and all my kids are sitting around the table with their Bibles open saying, teach us, Daddy. I can assure you that that is not the usual way that I wake up in the morning.

In fact, by not usual, I mean not ever. I usually wake up to the sounds of someone yelling in my house. My first thought is not good morning, Lord. It's usually the good Lord isn't already morning.

When I go downstairs, one of my kids is strangling the other one and I'm like, hey, let's read the Bible together and they say, Daddy, how long do we want to watch TV? So the things that you experience in your family are probably similar to what I experience in mine. I tried to say that when I became a pastor, I didn't get any special card that exempted me from questions and doubts. One of the things I've shared with you over the years is that throughout my life, I have gone through various seasons where I've really struggled to believe. One of the worst of those was in college and it was over the issue that we are going to dive into today. Probably the closest I ever came to actually losing my faith was in regards to this issue. The issue was the wrath of God. The whole system just didn't seem fair to me.

It didn't seem like the punishment fit the crime. It seemed like God was this vengeful deity who was just going to show up at somebody's bedside when they died and say, aha, you didn't believe in Jesus and they were going to say, Jesus who? He would say, well, it's too late now and he'd cast their souls into hell. As they went tumbling down into hell, they'd be like, Jesus who? I never heard of Jesus and he would mutter tough cookies in Latin or something like that to them.

It just didn't seem like it was fair. I know that I'm not alone in that struggle. I know that for a lot of people, this is the issue that creates the biggest obstacle to their faith. The famous skeptic Bertrand Russell in his book, Why I am Not a Christian, said that the primary reason that he did not believe in Jesus was because Jesus so clearly believed in the wrath of God. You've got to at least give it to him, by the way, that he's willing to recognize what a lot of Christians refuse to recognize and that is that Jesus did believe and teach in the wrath of God. But Bertrand Russell called Christ's belief in the wrath of God the one profound defect in Christ's character.

Nevertheless, than C.S. Lewis would say, there is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this if it lay in my power. I've often told you, maybe you've heard me say it, if you gave me a divine eraser and ten minutes of impunity, I would take this out of the Bible altogether. But we cannot take this out of the Bible and really we shouldn't because while it is a difficult doctrine, it is a good doctrine that is absolutely essential to knowing, to loving and worshipping God. A God without wrath would be a God without goodness.

Let me show you. Exodus 34 is where we've been now for four weeks. We will be there one more week. Next week, we're talking about the name of God, the unfolding of God, who he is and his name. The setup is this, God. Moses asked God, God, let me see your glory. And so God says, Exodus 33, 19, Yes, Moses, I will make all my goodness, that's a key word, pass before you, and I will proclaim before you my name, the Lord. He puts Moses in the cleft of the rock, covers him with his hand, and the Lord descended there in the cloud and he proclaimed, The Lord, proper name of God, Yahweh, I am the Lord, a God that is merciful and gracious, a God who is slow to anger, a God abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgressions and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children to the third and to the fourth generation. There are six things in those two verses that I want you to see that we can learn about the wrath of God. The first one is very simply that God's wrath exists. It is crystal clear in that passage. I don't see how you could deny it.

It exists. The Bible speaks of God's wrath more than 600 times. Psalm 7, verse 11, King David says that God is angry with the wicked every single day. I know some of you hear that and you think, well, that's just an Old Testament thing. God gets a lot nicer in the New Testament. He's kind of cranky in the Old Testament, his junior high years. Then he has a change of heart. He comes back as God 2.0, Jesus, meek and mild.

That's not true at all. I showed you last week that the love of God is a predominant theme in the Old Testament. We're going to see this week that God's wrath is a repeated theme in Jesus' teaching in the New.

In fact, many commentators say one of his most frequent themes. Jesus would say it this way in John 3.36. Whoever rejects the Son will never see life because God's wrath abides.

It remains on him. He's basically just quoting Psalm 7.11 and saying God is angry with the wicked, those outside of Christ, every single day. Not only does Jesus talk about it, but he's going to demonstrate it. Toward the end of his life, Jesus goes into the temple and he chases out a bunch of temple workers with a homemade whip. I grew up on flannelgraft, Jesus.

You know what I'm talking about? Vacation Bible School. We never had a flannelgraft image for this one. We had Jesus stroking the lambs and holding the kids and looking pensively up toward God. We never had Jesus with a whip driving the people out of the temple. But Jesus' testimony to the wrath of God was central to his message and to his ministry. It didn't matter. It was not effusive talk about God's love that God had killed.

It was not about personal empowerment. It was his insistence on God's anger toward hypocrisy and injustice. So the first thing we see is very clearly God's wrath exists.

You can't deny that. You'd have to deny your whole Bible. Number two, we see that God's wrath is an expression of his goodness in this passage. Notice that God did not say to Moses, Moses, okay, I want to make all my goodness pass before you, but there's a little bad mixed in there too. There's a little sweetness and a little poison. No, his wrath is part of his goodness.

It's all goodness. God's goodness would not be goodness without his wrath. His goodness would not be complete without his wrath because God's wrath and his anger grow out of his love, his love for goodness and purity and holiness and us.

As a dad, I love my children. And because of that, I get angry when I see things at work in them that harm them, whether that's dishonesty or cruelty or laziness. I get angry when I see those things not in spite of the fact that I love them, but because I love them. God is angry at sin because he loves his creation and us, and sin destroys his good creation. Probably one of the best depictions of the unfolding of the wrath of God takes place in the account in the book of Exodus of the plagues. The plagues were what God sent to Egypt to try to wake them up out of their rebellion against God.

You may not remember this. I was on it a few years ago, and when I did that, I explained to you that the plagues were not just a random set of bad things like practical jokes that God was playing on Egypt. What was happening was a very logical progression. The Nile water turns to blood, which destroys the ecosystem of the Nile, which drives the frogs out of it. So the frogs come, then they die, and that brings the gnats, and the gnats bring disease. What you're seeing in the plagues is essentially creation unraveling. Had God's only point in the plagues been to show Pharaoh that he existed and that he was more powerful than Pharaoh, he could have done any number of things.

He could have had Moses walk in the court and grab Pharaoh by the Darth Vader chokehold and just like that, or you could have turned a bunch of Pharaoh's soldiers really tiny and squashed a few of them and been like, you're next, Pharaoh, and Pharaoh would have gotten the point. But his point was not just that he existed and that he was more powerful. The point was demonstrating what sin was doing to the human race and to the world. It was unraveling creation. In Genesis 1, we see God bringing order out of chaos. So in the plagues, you see order descending back into chaos because when we sin, that is exactly what's happening in our lives and in our community and in our world.

You're seeing your life descend back into the chaos of darkness. And because we have a God of love, He cannot just sit by and watch it happen. He desires to bring us to a world that is free of injustice and sin and exploitation and racism and greed and perversity. He wants to bring us to heaven. And heaven can only be heaven if there's no sin there. I mean, think about the ways that heaven is described, things that we long for. It is a place where there is no pain or crying. Like, oh, I want to be there, right?

How many times has my sin caused somebody else pain or caused them to cry? There is a place where you don't have to lock the doors. Well, the only way you can not lock the doors is if nobody's ever tempted to steal. So when somebody says to me, well, why couldn't God just destroy all? If it really wasn't God, He would destroy injustice.

My question is always, what if He started with you? If God decides that He's going to get rid of all evil tonight at 12 o'clock, which of us is going to be here at 1201, right? God's holiness means His love means that He cannot tolerate sin because He loves us, and it's love toward us gives rise to an anger toward sin. He loves His purity. He loves creation. One theologian said it this way, God's anger is His unrelenting, uncompromising, and steadfast antagonism towards evil and injustice in all of its forms. So we see that God's love grows out of His goodness. The third thing we see is that God's wrath often consists in letting us experience the consequences of the choices that we make. God's wrath consists of just often letting us experience the consequences of the choices we make. The theologians call that the, get this, passive wrath of God.

Passive means God just kind of sits back and says, okay, as you wish. You see that in this passage with this phrase here. God is the one, watch, visiting the iniquity of the fathers and the children, the children's children down to the third and the fourth generation. People read that verse, and the first thing they think is, well, that doesn't sound very fair. It's not like God is holding accountable the great grandchildren for the sins of the great grandparents. And that would be unfair, and that's not what that verse means.

Here's how I know that. Moses expressly denies that in Deuteronomy 24. He says each person will be punished only for their own sin. Ezekiel would repeat that, Ezekiel 18, 20. He would say the wickedness of the wicked will only be upon that person.

The parents will not be punished for the sins of the children or vice versa. So you say, well, if it doesn't mean that, then what does it mean? Well, here's what it means. It's actually very logical and kind of obvious. It means that parents' sins always have consequences that affect their children.

Right? If I embezzled money from this church and I go to jail, are my kids going to suffer because of that? Of course they are. If you cheat on your wife and you leave her for somebody else, will your kids suffer because of your action?

Of course they will. God's judgment, you see, often consists of simply allowing us and those around us to experience the painful consequences of our choices. It is the passive wrath of God.

When you do see the active wrath of God, the lightning bolt in Scripture, it's always consistent with and an extension of the passive wrath. For example, Genesis 3, the first kind of punishment on sin. After Adam and Eve sin, God drives them out of His presence in the garden.

Okay, what had Adam and Eve done just right before that? They had hidden from God's presence. So God was just giving to them what they desired. They were hiding from God's presence. And Pharaoh is judged in the midst of the plagues in that story.

It says that God judged him by hardening his heart, but that was only after Pharaoh had hardened his own heart several times. In fact, the way that Jesus describes hell shows it to be the fruition of our sin, the full fruition of what we are looking for in our sin. We might miss that because Jesus uses a bunch of Jewish metaphors that might be unfamiliar to us, but He says things like, it is a place where the worm dieth not. And what that is an image of is an image of a conscience that is continually being eaten away by guilt and regret. He says it is a place of outer darkness, which represented in Jewish thought the total absence of God and all of His goodness. With God goes light and goodness and everything that we love on earth. It is a place of the gnashing of teeth, Jesus said, which is a Jewish image that meant self-condemnation and self-loathing.

It is the desire, which is the agony of God's displeasure. Jesus is saying essentially hell is just the full fruition of you telling God to get out of your life. And God is saying okay. God is saying okay. So you get a college student that is like, oh, I just want to drink beer with my friends and I am better at being in hell than being in heaven and going to church. You have no idea what you are saying. Because essentially hell is where you say, God, this is what I want.

I want you gone. And God says as you wish. It is the fruit of allowing sin to grow unchecked in you. And this is the idea of hell more than C.S.

Lewis. He says, you know, there are a lot of things in your life that you wouldn't really worry about if you were only going to live for 80 years. But the Bible teaches that every human being is eternal. And He said there are some things that grow in you that if it only lasts for 80 years probably wouldn't get that bad.

He says sin is like cancer. It never stops growing. Or I have heard some scientists say that there are certain kinds of lizards that never stop growing. They will grow as long as they are alive.

And the only reason they don't get huge is because they have a short lifespan. What does it look like, C.S. Lewis says, for sin that never stops growing, what does it look like when it grows in you for eternity? He says in the space of 80 years, your pettiness, your jealousy, your foul moods, your tendency to abuse others, your selfishness, it doesn't even look that bad in 80 years. But when that has grown in you for a million years, He said the word you would use to describe that condition would be nothing less than hell itself. God's final statement of judgment in the book of Revelation is to the people He says, let him who is unjust be unjust still. In other words, that's the path that you choose as you wish. Hell is God giving you what you are asking for.

Here's how Lewis summarizes it. In the long run, the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell is itself a question. What are you asking God to do? Are you asking God to wipe out our past sins at all costs to give us a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? That's exactly what He's done at the cross. Are you asking Him to forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is precisely what God does.

In the end, there are only two kinds of people. There are those who say to God, Thy will be done, and there are those to whom God says, Thy will be done. Hell is you telling God, I don't want you in my life, and God simply saying as you desire it. By the way, that means that God's mercy now for you is letting you taste some of the painful consequences of your sin in order to wake you up. We always think that when a husband or wife gets caught in the middle of an affair, that that's God's judgment. I would argue to you that's God's mercy. God's wrath is when he or she gets away with it. There is nothing that represents the judgment of God more than Him just backing up and saying, Okay, have it your way. The absolute worst thing that God can do for you is to give you what you want when your heart's not right with Him. I read this week an account written by a Christian leader who got caught in this Ashley Madison scandal.

Ashley Madison, the website where people had their email addresses to cheat on their spouse. He said, I never acted on it. He said, but I did.

I went on, and I signed up. He says, I never even paid. He says, I knew it was wrong, and I knew I shouldn't do it.

He said, it was two years ago, and I walked away from it. He said, now two years later, it comes out, and my email address is one of those email addresses there, and I've stepped down from ministry for a good while. He said, at first, I thought it was God's judgment that I got caught, but God was paying me back. He says, but I've come to see it really as God's mercy toward me. He said, because there's a lot of sins in my life, including this one, that I have just never really dealt with. I've just managed to keep my nose clean enough that I stayed out of trouble, and I didn't really deal with the repentance that I had, never really went that deep. He says, and it is God's mercy in allowing this to be exposed so that I would see the depth and the wickedness of sin so that I could finally repent of this thing in truth for the first time.

Here's my question. Where is God doing that with you? Because I would say that there's some of you that are beginning to taste some of these painful consequences of sin, and you're tempted to look at God and say, God, what's going on? Why are you judging me? And God's saying, I'm not judging you. This is mercy. Judging would be for me to back up and say, as you wish, and let you go to the full fruition and never wake up, I am allowing these things to come into your life just to say, do you really want this path?

Number four. We see in this passage that God chose to let his love overcome his wrath. This passage shows us that God chose, key word, to let his love overcome his wrath. There's a contrast that is set up here in the presentation of God's name. Keeping steadfast love for thousands, visiting iniquity and sin all the way down to the third and the fourth generation.

Those of you that wrote your Hebrew Bible have already noticed that in Hebrew, there is no word generation, because this is a poem, and verse seven is a poem in Hebrew, and there's a parallel structure set up between the first phrase and the last phrase so that they're supposed to compare. So it just says a thousand and the third and fourth. Really, it should say keeping steadfast love for a thousand generations, and then keeping iniquity of the third and fourth generation. In other words, God's mercy is greater than his wrath by a factor of 250 times.

Now, here's the other phrase. It says he is slow to anger, slow to anger. Those of you who are extra credit and have not only your Hebrew Bible, but also your Aramaic one, which is called the Targum, which would have been what Jesus would have memorized and quoted from, you'll notice that when the Targum translates slow to anger, it translates it this way, the one who makes anger distant and brings compassion near. Slow to anger means he made anger distant and he brought compassion near. God felt two rightful emotions when he saw us in our sin. The first rightful emotion was anger, and the second rightful emotion was compassion. And sovereignly, of his own free choice, he chose to bring one close and push another away. He didn't have to do it that way. God was fully justified when he felt wrath for our sin.

He would have been fully justified to push us away forever. But he chose to push away that wrath, and he chose to bring compassion near. It's one of the greatest mysteries of the universe. And just so you don't take it for granted, Peter says the angels are still confused by it. The angels are like, I didn't see that one coming. I felt for sure that God was justified in his wrath. In fact, they're still, they look into it, they see God's face every day, and they're like, we don't get this.

It doesn't add up. The Apostle Paul, in one of the most remarkable passages of Scripture, maybe the most remarkable passage in the Bible, Paul says this, Romans 5, watch this. You see, when we were still powerless, it was then that Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though maybe for a good person, someone might possibly dare to die.

In other words, it's very rare that you see somebody actually die for somebody else. But we know of situations where somebody's died for their spouse or their kid or a good friend, but they're always somebody that they love and you think of as a good person, but God, but God demonstrated his love for us, and this, while we're still sinners, Christ died for us. You see, while we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his son. I've used an analogy over the last several weeks about God's anger that breaks down, and I need to show you where it breaks down, because until you understand where it breaks down, you'll never understand the depth of God's love for you. And so I'm going to critique myself, but all analogies break down, so I've compared God's anger toward our sin, like my anger toward my kids' sin when they lie, and I just, I love them, so I want them to be purified of their anger, but here's where that analogy breaks down. Even when my kids sin, they're still my kids. This passage in Romans says that our sin and rebellion made us God's enemies, not like his enemies or his disobedient, confused, wayward children. It says our sin made us his enemies. So God choosing to push anger away and bring compassion near was not like me wanting to see one of my kids be free of dishonesty because I loved him. His choosing to push anger away and bring compassion near would actually be like me choosing to love and adopt into my family an ISIS member who beheaded my daughter.

You say, well, we're not that bad. We're in awe of our good works. I've told you before, it's kind of like imagine that an ISIS soldier really did behead one of your kids, but imagine that one of these ISIS soldiers later is in a foxhole with another ISIS soldier, and this other guy has forgotten to bring his lunch, and he's hungry, so this one ISIS soldier shares his lunch and takes what he has and divides it in two. That's a genuinely generous act, right? It is, but it's hard for you to call that act good because the whole mission that these guys are on is so evil that even their good works are cloaked in the shroud of evil.

Does that make sense? You and I, we look at good works that we do, and they are genuinely good, but our whole lives are spent in rebellion against God, living for our glory instead of his, living with ourselves as our authority and rejecting his authority. Our rebellion killed Jesus, and that shrouds even our good deeds in a cloak of evil, so there is no greater wonder in the universe that the angels can comprehend and that the apostle Paul feels like he can't describe than the love of God for you and me. In fact, there's a song that we love to sing, and can it be the hymn? There's a verse we always skip. I'm not getting mad at this church. I'm saying every Christian, nobody knows this verse. You probably sang it once when you were in a little Baptist church, and you're like, I don't even know what that means, so we skip it.

It's awesome. In vain, the firstborn seraph tries to sound the depths of love divine. You're like, what in the world? Like, nine words in there, I don't know what they mean. All right, so seraph, angel. What the hymn writer's doing is basically restating what Peter said.

There's an angel that's trying to sound, get the depth of the ocean of God's love, but no matter how powerful their radar, they can't ever discover the bottom because it has no bottom. So the hymn writer continues, "'Tis mercy all, let earth adore, let angel minds inquire no more." In other words, there comes a time where we just can't explain and where you just stand before the ocean of God's love, before the depths of his mercy, and you say, I cannot understand it, but and can it be that I should gain an interest in my Savior's blood. Died he for me who caused his pain to me, for me who him to death pursued. One day when you get to heaven, you will be as confused, if not more confused, than the angels. Right now, you take God's love for granted, like, well, of course he loves me, what else would he do?

Because I'm awesome. If you saw it with any clarity at all, you fall to your knees with the angels and say, I do not understand why he chose to push anger away and bring compassion near, but praise God, and I'll spend the rest of my life praising him for what he did. Which brings me to number five. We can escape God's wrath only through Christ. We can escape it only through Christ. I pointed out the very first week that there's a contradiction in verse seven. Contradiction is this.

He keeps steadfast love for thousands. He forgives iniquity and transgression and sin, but he will by no means clear the guilty, and I explained that the contradiction is this. If God will not clear the guilty, then whose sin is he forgiving? Right, because guilt and sin are the same thing, so if he won't clear the guilty, how could he be forgiving anybody's sin? It's a contradiction, and the people who read that in the book of Exodus said that's a contradiction. There's two things cannot be, but we understand that God resolved the contradiction in Christ, because in Christ, God laid on Jesus the penalty for our sin.

He didn't clear the guilty. God punished sin to its fullest measure on Christ so that he could forgive us on Christ's behalf. The way Isaiah says it, I love the imagery, is that God laid on Jesus the sin, the iniquity of us all. Here's how I'll illustrate that to my kids.

Sometimes things that help kids help adults too, right? I'm like, okay, so let this Bible represent sin. I know that's kind of weird because it's the Bible, but the law, okay? So this represents our sin. I was like, your sin separates you from God, and no matter how close you try to get to God, it's always between you and God. It doesn't matter if you don't ever think about God at all and you're not religious at all. It's still between you and God, and if you try to pray every day and you read your Bible and do your best, it's still between you and God. So what God did with Jesus is he laid on Jesus the penalty of our sin, and Jesus died and put it away so that there's nothing now that separates me from God, that in him I am fully forgiven not because that God just is in a good mood but because Jesus has put away my sin forever. So now the Bible says that Jesus stands as an advocate before the throne of God on my behalf.

Advocate means lawyer. It means he stands there and pleads with God for us. And I used to, I told you, that never really brought me that much comfort because my image of Jesus standing as my advocate before the throne of God was always basically Jesus standing right there by God the Father, and when I would sin, Jesus, God would be like, all right, Greer's done it again, and Jesus would be like, oh, wait a minute, come on, come on, let's give him another chance.

I mean, he's not that bad of a guy. He's trying hard, a little misunderstood, but God, please, you owe me. I mean, I went and did the whole death thing, so could you just like, just give him another chance, and God would have that lightning bolt, and he'd be like, all right, all right, I'll give Greer another chance.

But it never brought me comfort because I knew, I knew there were certain things that I just would do, and then I'd mess up and do it again. And I knew that God would be like, one time God was gonna be like, all right, no, no, no, Greer has done it for the last time. He's at like 918 on that one, and we're way past the 70 times seven thing, prepare for wrath, right? And so here was gonna come, and Jesus wasn't gonna be able to prevail, but it's, listen, Jesus does not stand before the throne of God and ask God to give me a second chance. In fact, Jesus stands, pardon the sacrilege and the way this is gonna sound, Jesus stands before the throne of God and says, Father, you may not punish JD for that sin because you punished me for it.

And it would be unjust for you to bring two penalties for the same sin. And because Jesus paid it all, there is no condemnation that is left for me in Christ because he has taken it away in entirety. You see, we wanna minimize the wrath of God because it makes us feel safe. But there's something in your heart that will never let you minimize the wrath of God and you may never have come to terms with this, but God stamped that into your conscience. You know there's condemnation.

I've explained, he goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden. It was one of God's first mercy to us is that after you and I had rejected God, the first thing Adam and Eve felt, we've been over this like a million times. What's the first thing Adam and Eve felt after they sinned? They felt naked and shamed, the shame because of their name. Now, truth is I've told you, they were actually naked before they sinned, but their nakedness didn't bother them. Why didn't it bother them?

If you don't know this and you've been at this church for like five years, my feelings are really hurting now because I've said this like 100,000 times. Why did their nakedness not bother them? Because they were clothed, they had this sense of being clothed in the love and the acceptance of God and that's all that mattered to them. But now having been stripped away of the love and the acceptance of God, they felt naked and exposed. So what do they do?

It's a permanent image given to you. What do you do when you feel naked if you're a normal person? Told you if you show up at Walmart and you have a problem sleepwalking and you wake up and you're butt naked in Walmart, what do you do? You go find clothes, you don't shop while you're there.

Right, because there's something that wants to be clothed. The human heart feels this sense of condemnation and so we're looking for exoneration, we're looking to be clothed again. What's fascinating is when you see somebody who doesn't believe in God or is not a Christian, figure this out. The playwright Arthur Miller, who wrote Death of a Salesman, in his biography he said, I quit believing in God when I was in college and I thought that when I got rid of God I would get rid of guilt. He said, but I've realized I've spent my entire career as a writer trying to get people to say that I was okay and that I was not gonna be condemned essentially. He said, I realized that all I did was switch the person, what I used to look for in God, that approval, I now look for in other people, but I've never been able to get rid of the guilt and condemnation that just plagues my soul.

It is a permanent part of the human condition. God has put that in your heart and you cannot deny it and when you come to Jesus, listen, what you do is he takes that subconscious feeling of guilt and he makes it conscious and then he says, though the voice that condemnation whispers in your soul is accurate, I'm gonna speak a louder word over that voice and I'm gonna say it is finished. It is, to summarize Tim Keller, it is that though we are more wicked and guilty than we ever imagined, we are also more loved and accepted than we ever dared hope because Jesus paid it all. Martin Luther, Keller's just ripping off Martin Luther. I rip off Keller, Keller's off Luther, Luther goes all the way back to Jesus, so stop judging, all right? Martin Luther, the way he said it was this, is he says the voice in our heart speaks condemnation and the voice is true.

The voice is accurate, but God in the gospel speaks a louder word and where sin says you are finished, Jesus says it is finished because he has delivered us from our sin. God's wrath is overcome in Christ. Number six, we see that God's wrath comes slowly but surely. We see that God's wrath comes slowly but surely.

Those of you with your Hebrew Bibles, you also noticed this phrase where it says, well I'll just give it to you. The phrase translated slow to anger is literally long of nostrils. Now you say well how, when you were reading this in your Hebrew Bible during your quiet time, you're like how does that mean slow to anger? Great question.

Hebrew is such a colorful language, so much more colorful than English. What happens when you get angry? Your nostrils flare. If you're quick tempered, your flaring nostrils get going right away. But if you're slow to anger, what do you do?

You close your mouth and you breathe through your nose slowly. The phrase means this, you can make God mad, but you really have to work at it. He is slow to anger because he wants you to repent.

Because he has pushed away anger and because he's brought compassion near, he wants you to repent, he wants you to wake up. The apostle Peter says that one of the things that characterizes the human race is we twist what God intends to be, a space to repent, and we confuse that for the absence of God's anger. Peter's example in 2 Peter 3 is the flood. God told mankind that because of the wickedness he was going to destroy the world in a flood and then he waited 100 years. And during that 100 years everybody said, oh, you're crazy Noah. Yeah, there's going to be a flood. That's like 100 years ago. Are you still on that stupid, you know, and when the flood actually came, just like God said it would 100 years later, only the gladiator and Hermione Granger were able to be saved, right?

And Peter then says, Peter says, here's what happens in our day. People say, where is the promise of his coming? You Christians still talking about Jesus coming back?

Seriously? When are you going to get over that gig? I mean, he's going to come back on a white horse? Oh, yeah, that's going to happen. He's just going to come right through that cloud on a white horse with all the, yeah, that's right, and other fairy tales, and I bet you put your tooth under your pillow at night and there's a tooth fairy.

Yes, would you give up that stupid racket? And God says, do not let what I intend to be mercy and space for you to repent. Do not confuse that with my absence. The flood came.

I will return. In fact, the proof of it is that I raised Jesus from the dead, and throughout the book of Acts, whenever they talk about the resurrection, that's always the first thing they say with it. We always think the resurrection just means that Christianity's true. It is, but what it also means is that God's judgment is sure and that God has given us a space for you to repent, and he wants you to wake up. Don't confuse his slowness to anger with his absence. Even now, you look at the plagues, right?

Think about the plagues. They got progressively worse. It was like God's voice just kept getting louder, saying wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up.

Is that happening to you? Several years ago, in fact, I got out of seminary. One of the first jobs I was able to secure was a job in landscaping.

Not typical for a seminary degree, but I had a landscaping job, and I worked with this crew that, let's just say, did not all go to seminary. Let's just leave it at that. There was one guy on the crew. He was six foot six. We called him Ivan.

That wasn't his real name, but it looked like Ivan Drago in Rocky IV, and so we called him that. That dude would cuss. That dude had a mouth on him. I don't cuss, but the stuff he put together was creative, and I was like, wow, that's some brilliance there.

But one day, I'd been there about two or three weeks. He let out a string of expletives that invoked the name of God. It was the filthiest thing I'd ever heard, and I just got filled with this sense of holy rage. I felt angry, and I was filled with the Holy Spirit, and I walked up to six foot six Ivan in the middle of everybody, filled with the Holy Spirit, and I put my finger in his face, six foot six face, and I said, Ivan, one day you're gonna stand before God, and the last thing you want when you stand before God is to have a record filled with you cursing God's name that way, and then the Holy Spirit totally left me.

I'm done. I turned, and I walked away, and I heard his big old feet coming, and he stood in front of me, and he stopped, and I looked up at him, and he said, say that again. Say that to my face again, and I said, well, and this time a little more humbly, I, you know, kind of walked through what it meant to be in the judgment of God, and then it was the weirdest thing, you know, just inexplicably, at least I thought inexplicably. He gets emotional, and he said, last week, I went to the doctor, and they have diagnosed me with skin cancer, skin cancer. He says, and I'm scared, man. I'm gonna be honest, and now you're talking to me about the judgment of God, and we kept talking, and then we talked. Every break we had that day, we talked, and toward the end of the day, we were on our last break, and my back was to this, like, field, probably 100 yards across, and he was standing in front of me, and we were talking about judgment and gospel and mercy, and all of a sudden, as we're talking, I see his face get really, like, confused, and he just takes off running across this field. I'm like, I don't know what's going on, so I turn around, I chase him, and I follow him, and then I see what he sees, he's seen. While we were talking, about 100 yards away, there's this car had come through an intersection and went through a stop sign, and the cars tried to avoid each other, and they hit, and one flipped over, and there were a couple guys that had ran off the side of the road were trying to push over this car because, well, they weren't budging.

He gets there, he just hits it. I mean, just a huge guy just hits it, and you just see this car just turn, flip over, and it was, y'all, it was one of the most gruesome things I've ever seen, this kid that had just been, part of him had just been mangled underneath this car just, and it comes up, and they called EMS, called the ambulance, and he and I had to stay there because we were witnesses to the accident, and we stayed there for like two hours, and for the first 20 minutes, we just stood there in silence, and he never looked at me, he was just staring kind of at this scene, and then he sort of speaks out on the other side of his mouth, and he says, he says, skin cancer, you kind of randomly talking to me about the judgment of God. He said, I see a kid who either died or might die, or he said, J.D., do you think God's trying to speak to me? I said, no, man, I think God's screaming at you, and I think you know that, he said, I do. And we talked, and we talked the next day, and two or three days later, I had the privilege of leading him to faith in Jesus Christ.

I share that because I feel like maybe it's not as dramatic for some of you, but I think probably for some of you, the same thing is happening. And if you're paying attention, he's speaking to you, and he's starting to scream at you, and the voice is getting louder, and what it's saying is, you've got to wake up, you've got to repent. The Lord is not slow concerning this promise, but he's not willing that any should perish. He wants all to come to a place of repentance. Don't confuse this season of mercy, don't confuse it with God's absence. The last person who wants you to experience the wrath of God is God.

God took your place, he absorbed the wrath for you, but he's not going to force it on you. The strangest Supreme Court case I've ever heard about, read about it this week, 1833, United States versus George Wilson. George Wilson was a man who committed a series of crimes, and for those crimes, he received the death penalty. But because his crimes were politically motivated, the sitting president at the time, Andrew Jackson, decided he was going to pardon George Wilson and everybody that was a part of it, gave him a full and complete pardon. The warden brings it down to George Wilson, and George Wilson says, I will not receive the pardon. We don't know his motivations.

Maybe he just felt like he believed in his cause or whatever. And the warden says, what do you mean? I've got your pardon right here. He says, I refuse to receive. He fought it in court. I will not receive the pardon. It went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. And in 1833, the United States Supreme Court made a decision, one of the oddest ones I've ever heard. They said, a pardon is only good if the person to whom it is issued receives it. A pardon is an agreement between those who are extending justice and those who are receiving justice, and it is not valid unless it is received. And George Wilson was executed in 1833 with a pardon for his full release sitting on the warden's desk.

I don't know where the Supreme Court got the idea. I don't know how they came up with that, but I do know maybe it came from understanding what God has done for us in Christ is that he has paid for your sin. He has issued that pardon. And the tragedy is that some of you are going to go into hell and face the wrath of God with your sins paid for. The last voice you might hear as you step off earth into hell is the voice of Jesus saying, you don't have to do it.

But he won't force it on you. You have to receive it. You have to receive it. Have you ever received it? Have you ever repented of your sin and received Christ as Lord and Savior?

If you have, has it transformed your life? How could you and I understand this pardon? How could we understand wrath and mercy and not just always be talking about it to people, saying it's been paid, it's been done, it's finished?

All you've got to do is trust and receive it. We know that the gospel is only good news to people if it gets there in time. You want to know why we as a church go all over the planet telling people? Because we know that the pardon has been extended and we want to see people embrace mercy because God has made a way of salvation.

Have you received it and are you talking about it? Why don't you bow your heads at all campuses? Bow your heads with me. Do you know that you've repented and trusted Christ? If not, you could do it this weekend through a very simple prayer, if you mean it. God, I've lived in rebellion against you and I'm sorry. I surrender to you right now and I receive you as my Savior. Thank you, Jesus, for saving me. In Christ's name, amen.