Are there aspects of God's nature and character that you would prefer to ignore? Are there doctrines that are difficult to accept? This is the other side of God, by the way. That they want to leave out. They want it kept quiet.
This sight of God we'd rather not talk about. And Satan is constantly grooming his teachers and his preachers and his authors and his leaders to keep that truth about God out of the public marketplace. Keep it quiet.
So just what is this other side of God that Satan wants to keep quiet? and wants us to ignore. What is it that he's hoping teachers don't talk about?
Well It's God's wrath. You see, Satan has no problem with the world thinking that God is loving. That doesn't bother him at all. It's easy to ignore and take for granted a loving God. But if God is also wrath, and if he acts upon his wrath, There are obvious implications to that.
We're going to study this today here on Wisdom for the Heart. Here's Stephen Davey with the message he's calling the wine of his wrath. Carlos Santana has sold more than ten million. copies of one Album alone. His album entitled Supernatural.
He has been interviewed often. Of course, I've read some of them. He openly informs people of The influence of an angel in his life. Santana often hears this angel's voice as he meditates in front of his fireplace. For several years, he claims to be in contact with his spirit God, whose name is Metatron.
Metatron, he explained in one interview, is an archangel, a guide for him. In fact, there are a lot of people that evidently believe Metatron is the highest angelic being created.
Now, obviously, that would raise flags for those of us who believe the word because we know that the highest angelic being created. Fell, right? Satan, Lucifer, is his name, according to the scriptures, Isaiah 14 and 2 Corinthians 11. He's the angel of light.
Well, here with candles lit, a yellow pad, legal pad at one side, Carlos Santana sits in his room, softly chanting, incense burning, candles flickering, and all of a sudden he explains, I hear a voice. An inner voice, and I know that I can trust it. It is the voice, of course, of Metatron. His voice has told me that I would be able to connect molecules with light over radio frequencies so that my music would be popular again. And then he said, with perfect confidence.
confidence to this reporter. You can trust his voice. His voice will never take you. to the desert. It might not.
But it might take you to hell. which is far worse. than any desert. In our last study, we reintroduced the thought that angels come and deliver messages, and they have since the beginning of time. The Apostle Paul warned the Galatians.
Not that an angel might deliver the gospel, but that he might deliver a different gospel. And so he warned them not to follow it. In fact, if they come to you bringing a different gospel than the one delivered by Christ through his apostles, let him be accursed. Galatians chapter 1, verse 8.
Now for some time we have observed in our study through Revelation That the world has been captivated now by a man empowered and energized. By an angel. The fallen angel. This man we have come to know as the Antichrist. And he has effectively been channeling the message of Satan to a gullible world that wants nothing to do with God, and of course they're set up then for anything.
This fallen angel through the Antichrist and the false prophet, this fallen angel then is deceiving the entire world. And at the height of his influence, at the height of the popularity of the Antichrist, somewhere just past the midpoint of the tribulation, John the Apostle records that. Angelic messengers arrive, and they have a message for the entire world. And we're able to contrast or compare their message with the rest of Scripture to, in fact, determine they are indeed from God and they are telling the truth. The first angel we encountered in Revelation 14, verse 6, circles the globe, preaching that the human race needed to fear God and worship Him.
Why? Verse 7: Because He is worthy of the worship of creation, because He is the God of creation. He created all there is. This is a dramatic scene. You can only imagine this angel flying high in the sky.
He's booming out with His voice that mankind happens to be worshiping the wrong God. They're listening to the wrong angel.
So to speak. Then another angel appeared. We looked at him briefly in verse 8. He announces the coming collapse of the world kingdoms, referred to here as Babylon. This angel delivers a warning to all the nations that are drinking the wine of Babylon, he says.
They are literally partying with the Prince of Darkness. You remember in Babylon of old, a man's hand suddenly appeared. There in the dining room of the king, and he wrote upon a wall strange words. And of course, the king Belshazzar ran or had his messengers run for Daniel, who came and delivered to him the interpretation of the message that basically said to this powerful, this most powerful kingdom of Babylon: you've been weighed in the balances by God, and you lack. What is necessary to please him?
In other words, you are in trouble with God and you will fall. And that night, Babylon fell. Fell to an invading army.
Now, here, the message appears, only this time it's not a hand writing it on a wall, it's a voice. A loudly crying from heaven. saying Babylon You're in trouble with God, again, weight in the balances, and you lack what is necessary to please God. Effectively saying, you are in trouble. With God.
You can only imagine how these angels held the attention of the human race as they circled the globe. Preaching one after another. And now a third angel appears. For our study today, verse 9, saying with a loud voice: If anyone worships the beast in his image and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, verse 10 of Revelation 14, he also will drink the wine of the wrath of God. In other words, if you worship the enemy of God, you will experience the wrath of God.
Look further, their inverse. 10 As he delivers this message, he also will drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is mixed in full strength. In the cup of his anger, And he will be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the angels. Imagine this terrifying message. He is revealing the doom of those who follow, in this context here, those who follow the Antichrist.
And he effectively is delivering a message that is intended to frighten the world. The most part of which has yet to receive the mark. Of the Antichrist. That would be the signature statement they are choosing to walk away from God the Creator and follow Antichrist.
So the angel comes out of the grace of God to deliver one more time. In fact, everybody on the planet will hear the message. Don't take that man's mark. If you do, that will seal your doom, that act of blasphemy. Obviously, in that act, they will choose to follow the Antichrist and choose to rebel against God.
And God we're told earlier in the letter to the Thessalonians, will send such strong delusion, they will, in fact, believe the lie.
So they will be condemned, and their condemnation will be Illustrated visually by the acceptance of this mark. And so he's warning them. You're going to drink the wine of the wrath of God, which is mixed in full strength in the cup of his anger. There are those who say are preaching. Or teaching should never scare unbelievers with the reality of hell.
Well, then neither study this this angel's message. That's exactly what's happening. Besides, how do you preach about a hell without scaring people? Hell is Scary. It's frightening.
It's terrifying. You can't expound on the reality of hell without. frightening those who choose not to believe in God. Whether it's uncomfortable or not, it's the truth. Maybe you've come in here today believing that hell is a figment of somebody's imagination.
Or maybe it's the creation of some religion to keep people civil and nice or honest. or that hell is just a bad day stuck in a traffic jam and you get a flat tire. No, hang on. In fact, I'm glad you're here. You might not be sure at this moment, but I'm glad you're here.
The gospel, listen, is not just believe in Christ. And repent of your sin in order to go to heaven. It is also believe in Christ, repent of your sin in order to not go to hell. Avoiding the wrath of God, by the way, is a very good thing, and I'm going to spend three hours today recommending it to everybody. Avoid the wrath of God.
Okay? It's as simple as that. This is the boiled down message. Of this angel, and I highly. Recommend you listen.
His message is intended to frighten those tempted to take the mark of the beast. You know, it occurred to me in my study that the contemporary angels of today. You can go to Christian bookstores and read what they've said through people. It's interesting to me that the angels that make their way in and out of seances and musicians' living rooms and from the lips of New Age gurus and false preachers. Have nothing To do with affirming the creative power.
and handiwork of God. They instead will tell you that you are divine and you have power to create your own reality. You just speak it to the universe. And this first angel delivered the gospel that God alone is creator. I don't know how many angelic messages I have heard or read about, but none of them talk about the coming collapse of the world's kingdom.
For those who don't believe in Christ, they'll be caught up in the wrath of God. Bad things are going to happen, but never appointing to Christ. Never. Most of the messages I've read about from supposed angels. Basically, say that God loves everybody, and in a sense, that's true.
But have you ever heard a message about or from an angel that says, God is angry with you. And you are in deep trouble with God. That's this message. That'll pack him in. Judgment is coming, and God is really angry.
That's my. Text for today. This is the message of the third angel. But this message, ladies and gentlemen, is the message our world needs to hear. In fact, if you go back in history a little bit, you discover that this message sparked a great awakening.
It all began with a man named Jonathan Edwards, who was instrumental in this. Used tremendously by God. to light the fires of of conversion. He preached the message, the signature message. Entitled sinners in the hands of a happy God.
Oh wait, no. You're a little slow on the uptake now. I'm coming back with one more here. No, no, it's not. No, no, here it is.
Victims. In the hands of a therapeutic God. I think it is funny, actually. How about How about this? And this isn't really funny, but here's another one.
People who've just made bad choices. In the hands of a loving God.
Now, don't you hear that? Those are being preached today in our cities. And it's little wonder why there is no awakening.
Now, Jonathan Edwards preached an authentic gospel message entitled, If You Can Imagine It: Sinners in the Hands of God. and angry. God. And here's an excerpt from his sermon manuscript, which he read, by the way. Without ever looking up.
The pit is prepared. The fire is made ready. The furnace is now hot. and ready to receive them. The flames do now rage and glow.
The glittering sword is sharp and held over them, and the pit has opened its mouth under them. O sinner, consider the fearful danger You are in. That's the gospel. of this angel. and those who truly represent God.
We typically don't think of God as angry or furious. or wrathful and if he is, it certainly wouldn't be with me. Or with you. Besides, we're in church. That ought to be some kind.
of safety now. No, evidently. The anger of God and the fury of God happens to be part of Satan's strategy, I believe, to keep it all quiet. In fact, when angels are sent to deliver messages from God, they usually have to tell people to stop being afraid. They represent the Holy One they've come from.
And now here they're creating terror in the ears and eyes and hearts of those who hear and see them. This is the other side of God, by the way. That they want to leave out. They want it kept quiet. This sight of God we'd rather not talk about.
And Satan is constantly grooming his teachers and his preachers and his authors and his leaders to keep that truth about God out of the public marketplace. Keep it quiet.
And so, the message of positive thinkers and positive word movement preachers refuse to talk about sin and judgment and repentance and certainly the wrath of God. Michael Horton, who is an evangelical author and teacher, recently reviewed and summarized the messages that dominate. Christian TV and Radio. He said, You can boil down the basic premise of their message to this. God is nice.
You're nice, so be nice. There's truth to that. And you could add this: if you will be nice, God will be nicer to you. That gospel then is nothing more than behavioral modification. That somehow manipulates God to be good.
In your direction. This is, ladies and gentlemen, another gospel. I agree with one author who wrote a shallow gospel presentation that does not present the reality of eternal judgment, the reality of the law of God, the reality of condemnation, eternal hell, does not warn of God's wrath, that does not crush the sinner under the weight of his violation of the law of God, that does not make him stand before God guilty and without excuse. The gospel presentation that does not do this is not a true gospel presentation. And as I thought about why this message would be so absent today, it has to track back to the loss of the authority of the Word of God, right?
The reason that I'm even now just basically spending time. Implicitly defending the biblical gospel. And explicitly defending both sides, as it were, of the nature of the gospel and the nature of God, which tracks back then to what we believe to be the authority of Scriptural's definition of the doctrine of God's wrath and eternal judgment, is because if I didn't spend this time, for the most part, very little is ever said about this, and for the most part, coming in from perhaps the world system, you frankly would not believe what we are going to spend time dissecting. You're just not going to believe it. The mind of even the Christian is shocked by it.
Meditate on it sometime. Think about the reality of what we've already read: drinking the unmixed wrath of God as wine. Being tormented in fire forever. And I will tell you, ladies and gentlemen, this: if it were not for the Bible, I would not believe it. I don't want to believe it.
But I do. Because the Bible So clearly tells it. And I believe the Bible is the Word of God. And the angel will here deliver. Four characteristics.
of the expression Of the wrath of God. I wanted to get through all four, we're going to get through two. The first characteristic Is that the wrath of God is personal. Notice the personal pronouns that appear in this text, beginning with verse 9 about the middle part, and you could perhaps circle them. If anyone.
Anyone worships the beast in his image and receives a mark on his forehead or on His hand. He also will drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is mixed in full strength in the cup of his anger, and he will be tormented with fire and Brimstone. This is not metaphorical. This is not metaphysical. This is not ethereal.
This is personal reality. This is literal experience. The individuals, and this peak is given to us here, but it will be fleshed out later on as all the unbelievers are judged before God and cast into the lake of fire. God gives us a body that is able to enjoy eternity and its glory, and He gives the unbeliever a body capable of experiencing the horrors of what we've just read. This is This is the horror of a person here.
Who experiences this literal submission to the Antichrist? And it will find its way back into the book of Revelation in a literal place of torment, of literal fire. brimstone. And many I can't believe it, but many evangelicals within the church are now denying that this is the truth and they are effectively sc scrambling for loopholes. How do you deny What we just read.
How do you sort of wash it out of the gospel? How does it just become God really does love you? Don't worry about all that, and everybody's eventually going to get in? You don't arrive at denying a literal eternal hell without doing several things first and foremost. You don't deny any key doctrine or start there.
You simply begin with redefining it. You redefine it. In fact, you start by redefining scripture. And one of the most popular ways to redefine scripture in your generation. And mine is in terms of this keyword, relevance.
In other words, the only parts of the Bible that matter are parts that we have decided are relevant. And if we don't think they're relevant, We're not going to worry about them. Never mind that The Bible makes it very clear that all of it is the Word of God and all of it is profitable in some way. If you're thinking to yourself, yeah, you know what, I do hear a lot about that word today. And I've heard the church talk about it a lot in recent years.
Actually, if you back into American history, you'll discover where the stage was set for our generation, and we're still feeling the effects. In our modern American scene, they go back to the early 1900s and one particular messenger who preached another gospel.
So, why don't you just sit back and let me give you a little.
Okay. tour of American church history. In the 1920s, a liberal Baptist pastor named Harry Emerson Fosdick was extremely. Extremely popular. Even though he was a Baptist, for some reason, he was pastoring a Presbyterian church and was called up on charges in the session for heresy.
He avoided the charges of heresy by simply resigning. from the church. And with the full funding of John D. Rockefeller. And all of his money.
A new interdenominational church called Riverside Church was built overlooking the Hudson River, and he was placed as pastor, and it was soon. Pact. to capacity. Fozik was a best-selling author of books related to positive thinking. and the generous grace of God.
These are terms that are still bantered about by even newer authors. He literally influenced seminaries and pastors across the country. In fact, at the height of his fame, his picture graced the cover of Time magazine in 1930. In an interview in 1928, which sort of set the whole thing ablaze, his words became the standard for American pastors who wanted to be accepted. They wanted the church to be accepted by culture.
They wanted the church to be viewed as something other than hellfire and brimstone and instead be welcomed by culture. And so his words were especially meaningful as they walked away from Bible exposition and verse-by-verse teaching. In this rather seminal interview, in fact, you can read all of it online, Fosdick said these words. Preachers who pick out texts from the Bible and then proceed to give their historic settings, their logical meaning in the context, their place in the theology of the writer, with a few practical reflections. are grossly misusing The Bible.
Nobody he said, who speaks to the public, assumes that the vital interests of the people are located in the meaning of words spoken two thousand years ago. Which led immediately a lot of ministers To say, you know, we've felt that way all along and now we've got our champion. Of course, that's true. I mean, how could we have been so old-fashioned to do what Paul told Timothy to do in preaching the what? The word.
2 Timothy 4:2. I mean, we're well past believing, and we should be now as sophisticated as we are, in believing that the words of Scripture are actually inspired by God and profitable to effectively, that is, thoroughly equip the believer for life. There's got to be something than this old book.
So we're way past that. Trouble is Fosdik was heard. and created a movement. Another movement was founded to try to battle it. It was called fundamentalists.
Movement. the fundamentals, as they simply clearly laid out the fundamentals of the faith. And Fosdik preached a message that was trumpeted by Rockefeller's own money, put into print, and it circled the globe, called, And Shall the Fundamentalists? When He became the inventor. In modern terminology, what we call today the seeker-driven church.
For many, today it is a badge of honor. To me, it is a horrifying badge. In the seeker movement, The desire to relate to the unbeliever in the assembly, in church, in worship. is more important than the desire to convict the unbeliever. The desire to be relevant overshadows.
The command to be biblical. And so preaching, if it can be called that, begins with the needs of the audience. Rather than the scripture, which leads to the transformation of the audience. There's a world of difference. With almost Prophetic precision.
Fosdick wrote these words that are now considered gospel truth in the evangelical church, and I quote him: Who seriously supposes that one in a hundred in our congregation cares what Moses, Isaiah, Paul, or John meant in those verses?
So the preacher should not end, but start with thinking about the audience's vital needs, and then let the whole sermon be organized around a constructive endeavor to meet those needs. Needs. All this is good sense. and good psychology.
Sound familiar? The church growth methods of the late 20th century that bought his lies that took people away from the Word of God in the pulpits. Void of the Word of God. Are really nothing more now than the repackaging of the lies of Harry Emerson Fauste. Preaching that begins with human need, instead of beginning with God's word, is misguided right from the start.
Preaching that honors God begins with God and His Word. Of course, when you start with God's Word, you end up studying difficult texts like the one we've been studying today. looking at the wrath of God. But God has revealed this truth about Himself to us and and we need to understand it accurately. We're out of time for today, so we'll conclude this message next time.
Join Stephen Davey right back here next time to discover more wisdom for the heart.
