Understanding the Passive Wrath of God, Part 1

All of life's problems come from sin. And while sin may initially seem enjoyable, Dr. Tony Evans warns it has a consequence. The pleasure of sin has side effects, and those side effects are called the wrath of God. Celebrating 40 years of faithfulness, this is the alternative with Dr. Tony Evans. Author, speaker, senior pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas, Texas, and president of the Urban Alternative. When people think of the wrath of God, all kinds of traumas and tragedies come to mind. But today, Dr. Evans points out that God has another kind of wrath that's not quite as obvious, but every bit as devastating.

Let's join him as he explains. What would you say to a father who did not warn his children about the dangers of drugs? What would you say to a doctor who, after discovering that you had a tumor on your brain, simply said, take 2 aspirin and go home and rest? He'd assume he's not taking this seriously as he should.

What would you say to a policeman who, when he saw young men breaking into your home, simply said, Well, you know, boys will be boys. You would say he's not doing his job. What would you say about a preacher or pastor who only told you about God's love and never said anything about his wrath?

And you should conclude that he has not done his job. This is a part of God that people don't want to talk about. We will sing, God is good all the time, and all the time is God is good. When's the last time you heard a song, God is wrath? All the time. And all the time, God is wrath. Haven't heard that one. It's because it's a hard subject.

It's an unpopular subject. But yet we skip it to our detriment, because we then do not fully define God as He is. We just simply keep Him as we want Him to be. Over and over in the Scripture, the Bible talks about the wrath of God, His displeasure, vehement displeasure against sin. In Romans chapter 11 verse 22, for example, Paul says, knowing both the goodness and the severity of God, he says both. In Nahum chapter 1 verses 2 through 7, he again and again and again talks about how devastating the wrath of God is. In Exodus chapter 34 verse 7 and in Ezekiel chapter 33 verse 11, he says that God can't ignore sin.

Even though, like a parent, He hates to have to react to it. The Bible says He takes no pleasure in it. So it is while God has as part of His makeup, His attribute, His perfection includes wrath, He doesn't take pleasure in that part of Him, yet He cannot deny that's who He is. Today I want to talk to you about the passive wrath of God. In the Old Testament, you find the active wrath of God. You find a flood because rain is coming down from heaven, wiping out the whole earth. You find Pharaoh's army after the Red Sea has been opened, swallowed up because God opened it and then God closed it. You find the earth opening up so that Korah and those who followed him in rebellion against God are swallowed down into the bowels of the earth.

You find fire and brimstone coming down from heaven to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. So you are finding the active wrath of God where He does it directly and judges directly. You find it also at the end of history in the book of Revelation, which is filled with the active wrath of God, where God opens up heaven and does it Himself.

But today, you and I live in what we call the Age of Grace. In this Age of Grace, predicated on the death of Jesus Christ, God's relationship to the world between the Old Testament and the end times, the book of Revelation, was shifted. 2 Corinthians 5.19 says that by the death of Christ, the world was reconciled to God because God did not count their sins against them. So the death of Christ rerouted the wrath of God.

It did not deny it or cancel it, but it rerouted it. So that now, while God is still a God who has wrath, you and I live in a day of the passive wrath of God. What do we mean by the passive wrath of God?

The passive wrath of God refers to God's built-in, necessary, just, and righteous retribution and reaction to sin. Because of God's perfection and His holiness, He cannot enter into a relationship with sin because they are mutually exclusive to one another. But because He loves His creation and has been satisfied or propitiated by the death of Jesus Christ, He no longer has to do it directly. Now the consequences for sin are built into the sin itself. So it's not that heaven is opening up and you're seeing fire and brimstone.

We don't see that today like you see in the Old Testament, like you see in the book of Revelation. Verse 24, Therefore God gave them over. Verse 26, For this reason God gave them over.

Verse 28, the middle of the verse, God gave them over. The Greek word, give them over, means to release them to something. Picture a person with a dog on a leash, but the dog doesn't want to go where the person is trying to lead the dog. So you've seen the dog pull back on the leash, not wanting to go where the leader or owner of the dog wants them to go. And they pull back.

They resist. So that word means the owner of the dog lets go of the leash and let the dog be free to run wild. To give them over means that God lets go of the leash of our rebellion and therefore lets our rebellion go crazy. When you watch TV, they tell you if you take this medicine, you will feel better. Now never mind, it might kill you. In other words, they tell you this healing feeling you're going to get will produce side effects. God is saying in the passive wrath of God that the pleasure of sin has side effects. And those side effects are called the wrath of God. Look at verse 18 of chapter 1 of the book of Romans.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. This is God abandoning us to our sin so that our sin spreads like a cancer. It is when he lets an individual go. He says, okay, you don't want me?

I'm going to release the leash and let you live life without me. It's like in Judges chapter 16 verse 20 when it says, And God left Samson, the original Superman. But God says he left him and therefore all of his strength dissipated. The Bible even says that God does this with nations.

He leaves nations. In Acts chapter 14 verse 16, whole nations get abandoned by God. In the passive wrath of God, sin is the cause and sin becomes the consequence of the same cause. So when you inject sin, you're injecting with the sin side effects. Because built into the sin is the consequence.

The two are inextricably tied in the passive wrath that is God releasing or abandoning men to life, live in rebellion against him. Please notice verse 18 says the wrath of God is revealed. It's not hidden. It's not secret. It's going to be made manifest or made visible like side effects of a medicine.

And notice how comprehensive it is. The wrath of God is revealed against all unrighteousness and ungodliness. Ungodliness means irreverence toward God. Unrighteousness means rejection of the divine standard. He says the wrath of God is revealed.

Let me explain something. All of life's problems come from sin. All of life's problems come from sin. Now that may come from our sin. It may come from somebody else's sin that was perpetrated against us. Or it can come from an environment that's been contaminated with sin. Sin is the reason the world does not work like it was created to work. That is the one reason why our lives, our world, our families, our society does not work like the Creator intended. It is because of sin and its built-in consequences. So once you take the sin medicine, you have injected the sin consequence. You can't separate the two because the consequence is built into the sin. And so the passive wrath of God is not hidden, it's revealed because it is against God's nature.

It is a judicial, that is a legal act that God has put them and tied them inextricably together. Dr. Evans will tell us more about God's passive wrath when he continues in a moment. Don't go away. And while you're there, be sure to check out our current featured resource, Dr. Evans' popular booklet, 30 Days to Overcoming Emotional Strongholds.

It's a step-by-step plan that over the course of a month will teach you how to heal the hurts you've been dealing with for years. We're offering it as a special bonus alongside Tony's current sermon series, Consequences, which counters our culture's tendency to think of sin as no big deal or even nonexistent. Just help support our ministry here on the air and around the world with a contribution, and we'll send you both of these powerful resources as our thank you gift. But this special offer runs out later this week, so don't wait. Contact us today at tonyevans.org to get the details and make the arrangements. Again, that's tonyevans.org, or give us a call at 1-800-800-3222, where there's always someone standing by in our resource center to help you. I'll repeat that information for you after Dr. Evans brings us part two of today's message.

Let's join him. He says the reason why the wrath of God is revealed in verse 18 is because men suppress the truth in unrighteousness. The word suppress means to hold it down, like trying to push a beach ball in water.

You don't want it on top of the water, so you get on top of it to hold it down. It says the wrath of God is revealed because men don't like or don't want what God has to say about a subject. And because they either don't like it or don't want it, they get on top of the truth and they push it under, or like putting a cap on something because you don't want it to come up, so you suppress it, you cap it, so that it does not get revealed.

We live in a day when truth has been dumbed down because people don't like it. They reject it because they don't want the divine standards interfering with their life. When you suppress the truth, what you do is inject the wrath, because the wrath is embedded in the sin, in the passive wrath of God. Verse 19, because what is known about God is evident within them, for God made it evident to them. He says the first reason it is revealed is because the truth about God is within them. Every baby born is born with divine DNA.

You have to be educated into atheism because it ain't natural. He says it is not only within them, he said it is evident to them. For, verse 20, since creation of the world, his invisible attributes, his eternal power, his divine nature has been clearly seen, being understood through that which has been made so that they were without excuse. The reality of God is not only in every person that they may reject, but it's around every person. Could you ever conceive of a watch without a watchmaker? Could you ever conceive of a painting without a painter?

The Bible says that the existence of God is clearly seen. How do you explain an acorn becoming an oak tree? How do you explain birds navigating by stars?

I mean, how do you explain 25,000 breaths a day that you and I take and we still haven't run out of oxygen? If you were to go to a forest and see a ball laying in a forest, you're gonna raise a natural question. Who put that here? You're not gonna assume a ball appeared in a forest on its own. And if it's a real big ball and really heavy, you're gonna figure a really strong person brought it here.

What do you do when the ball is the size of the earth? Do you just say, well, it just arrived? The Bible never argues for the existence of God. It simply says the fool has said in his heart, there is no God. Cause you gotta be a fool to be an atheist or maybe a college graduate, whichever comes first.

And so he says, they are without excuse. There is no reason for any sane person to deny the existence of God, either within them or around them. For though they knew God, verse 21, they did not honor him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling beast. When you reject the true God, it says things go dark. It says when you reject the true God, the creator God, their foolish hearts were darkened.

Not only is their foolish heart darkened, but he said proclaiming themselves to have a BA and an MA and a PhD, proclaiming themselves to be wise, they became educated fools. Science exists to let you in on the secrets of how the creator created the universe. The only reason to study science is to discover how awesome the creator is.

That's the only reason. They have come up with a way to study science to tell you there is no creator. When God has created systems that develop consistency leading to laws of hypotheses so that there can be a thesis of conclusion that can lead to dependability of actions because science determines what is legitimate by its consistency. So the one thing science should be learning from its conclusions is how consistent the creator is.

And the reason why science shouldn't put all that they think they know in the science is because they keep changing. You can drink coffee. You can't drink coffee. This will give you cancer.

It's not going to give you cancer. They got to study on this and then study on that. Proclaiming themselves to be wise, they became fools. And he says, and to show you how foolish they were, they exchanged, verse 23, they exchanged the true God for an image. They went to idolatry.

So guess what? They didn't give up religion. They just changed who was going to be worshipped. An idol is any noun, person, place, thing, or thought, any noun, person, place, thing, or thought that you look to as your source. Why do people create idols? There's one reason people create idols. Because they want a God they can control. See, if I can create my own God, then I can control the God I create. So because people do not want to answer to the true God, they create many gods. You know, over in third world countries, they may be animals or may be systems. Over here in America, we got designer gods.

We got American idols. Anything that becomes your ultimate source is your idol. And so people create idols so they don't have to deal with the true God, because if they have to deal with the true God, they got to be accountable to somebody they can't control. So I don't want God to be telling me how to live my life. I don't want God to be making my decisions. I don't want God to be controlling me like a rebellious teenager. They say, leave me alone.

I don't want anybody telling me what to do. I want to move out here, out of here, and God says, you can go. I release you to my passive wrath. I don't want to release you, but since you don't want to live here, since you don't want me to be God for you, then you create little gods that you can manipulate, and not only a God you can manipulate, but a God who will okay what you're doing, a God who will give sanction to sin.

And so the passive wrath of God works because of the rejection or suppression of the true God. Dr. Tony Evans, with a cautionary message about the importance of accepting God's divine standards. In just a moment, we'll hear from a longtime listener who shares a word of encouragement on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the ministry of Dr. Evans and the Urban Alternative. But first, a quick reminder about that special offer I mentioned earlier. If you can help us keep Tony's teaching on this station by making a contribution toward his ministry, we'll say thanks by sending you, on CD and digital download, all six messages in his current series, Consequences, along with the insightful booklet, 30 Days to Overcoming Emotional Strongholds.

This is a limited-time offer, so don't put it off. Drop by our website, tonyevans.org, where you can get all the details and make the arrangements. Or give us a call at 1-800-800-3222.

Resource team members are standing by 24-7 to help you with your requests. Again, that's 1-800-800-3222. If we insist on living our lives independently of God, he won't stop us. But tomorrow, Dr. Evans explains why that should be the last thing we want. Right now, though, we want to share this memory a listener recently sent to help commemorate 40 years of God's faithfulness to the ministry of the Urban Alternative. Hi, my name is Matthew Greenwald, and I wanted to mention that I've been listening to Dr. Evans since he was on AM radio in Houston back in the early 80s when I was just a young boy, 12 years old, delivering the penny advertisement papers on my bicycle.

His was the only station I could get on my AM radio while I did that. And his voice came across like God's then, and it continues to do so today. And I wanted to let him know that he has been an absolute instrumental voice in my life, now more so than ever as I am 51 years old. But I did want him to know that he has touched the other little bones in his world that he may not even know exist. So thank you so much. God bless. The alternative with Dr. Tony Evans is brought to you by the Urban Alternative and is celebrating 40 years of faithfulness thanks to the generous contributions of listeners like you.