The Wine of His Wrath, Part 1

Are there aspects of God's nature and character that you would prefer to ignore? This is the other side of God, by the way, that they want to leave out. They want it kept quiet. This side 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. 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. It's easy to ignore and take for granted a loving God. We expect God to be loving. 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. Stay with us as Stephen Davey opens God's Word to Revelation 14 in a lesson he's calling, The Wine of His Wrath. Carlos Santana has sold more than 10 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 guide. His 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 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 one, verse eight. 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 six circles the globe, preaching that the human race needed to fear God and worship him.

Why? Verse seven, 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 eight. 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 hands suddenly appeared there in the dining room of the king, and he rode 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 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 loudly crying from heaven saying, Babylon, you're in trouble with God again, weighed 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 nine, 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 there in verse 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 there, 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 our preaching or teaching should never scare unbelievers with the reality of hell. Well, neither study this this angel's message.

That's exactly what's happening. Besides, how do you 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.

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 up.

Here it is. Victims in the hands of a therapeutic God. I think it is funny, actually. 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 a little wonder why there is no awakening. Jonathan Edwards preached an authentic gospel message entitled, if you can imagine it, Sinners in the Hands of an 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. Oh, 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 net. 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 side 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. And 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. Yours is 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, ladies, 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 a verse nine 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, 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 and 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 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 to go back to the early 1900s and one particular messenger who preached a nother gospel.

So why don't you just sit back and let me give you a little 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 on the overlooking the Hudson River, and he was placed as pastor and it was soon packed to capacity. Fosdick was a bestselling 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 2000 years ago. Which led immediately a lot of ministers to say, you know, we 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 second Timothy four to 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 equipped the believer for life. There's got to be something than this old book.

So we're way past that. Trouble is Fosdick was heard and created a movement. Another movement was founded to try to battle. It was called fundamentalists movement.

The fundamentals as they simply clearly laid out the fundamentals of the faith. Fosdick preached a message that was trumpeted by Rockefeller's own money put into print and it circled the globe called and shall the fundamentalists win. 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 over shadows 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 not 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. All this is good sense and good psychology.

Sound familiar? The church growth methods of the late 20th century that took people away from the word of God and the pulpits void of the word of God are really nothing more now than the repackaging of the lies of Harry Emerson Fosdick. Preaching that begins with human need instead of beginning with God's word is misguided right from the start. If you tuned in late and missed part of this lesson or if you want to go back and listen again you'll find it posted on our website which is wisdomonline.org. Perhaps even more convenient is the wisdom international app which contains the complete archive of Stephen's teaching. You can listen to each day's broadcast but you can also access the full length messages going all the way back to the beginning of Stephen's teaching ministry. The wisdom international app is available in the iTunes and Google play stores. We're out of time for today so we'll conclude this lesson tomorrow. Join Stephen Davey at this same time tomorrow right here on Wisdom for the heart. Survey.