Wrath at Christmas
Romans 1:18
“16 I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. 17 For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.
18 [For] the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness.”
We wish you an innocuous Christmas
If you were here last week you might remember I spoke briefly about the great Christmas present purchaser’s dilemma - the dilemma that we all face one a year, when we have to go out and purchase expensive gifts for people who have everything that they could possibly need already.
This week I want to start by speaking about another Christmas dilemma, and that is the Christmas evangelism dilemma. You may have noticed this one too. It’s the dilemma that we face as Christians at Christmas time, as we try to communicate the message of the gospel. On the one hand, Christmas is the time of the year when we have maximum exposure and maximum audience. The whole society stops, ostensibly to celebrate the anniversary of the birth of Jesus. We get to send all our friends and relations little cards, with messages on them to do with the birth of Jesus. The shopping centres play songs about the baby Jesus, song after song, for the whole month of December. It seems like an evangelist’s dream come true.
And yet there’s a dark side to it all, isn’t there. Because at Christmas time this message about Jesus that gets maximum exposure gets miniumum penetration. It washes off the backs of the shoppers in the supermarket like water of the back of a duck. And it’s no surprise, because it seems like there’s this unspoken rule that says: You can say as much as you like about Christmas as long as anything you say is completely innocuous. So it’s the little drummer boy, followed by Mary’s boy child, followed by Walking in a Winter Wonderland.
What sort of message do people take away from Christmas? If you put aside all the food and drink and presents and so on - and everyone says that’s not what Christmas is all about, whether or not we practise what we preach - if you put all those things to one side and try to get back to the heart of what Christmas is about, what are you left with? I think if you asked most people what we are left with, the answer would come back as some sort of platitudinous message about how good human beings can be. Christmas is the season of sharing; it’s the season of peace and good will. It’s the season where we all pretend to be nice, where we make a token donation to charity, and go to the various Christmas functions and pretend that we like all the people that we work with and all the members of the extended family. And Christianity is there somewhere in the background of it all, quietly reminding us of the goodness of the human heart and urging us all to be a little kinder to each other through the rest of the year. Or something like that.
That’s what I think the essence of the ‘Christmas message’ and the ‘Christmas spirit’ is in our society today, and a lot of the time I suspect that as Christians we reinforce that. We know that if we’re allowed to say something at Christmas time it has to be warm and positive, in keeping with the spirit of the season. That’s the rules. So we go along with it and we wish the world around us a happy and innocuous Christmas.
The missing ingredient?
One thing we almost never talk about is the wrath of God. That would have to be one aspect of the Bible’s message that is almost completely absent from Christian communication at Christmas time. And that’s no surprise, I guess. I’ve never really contemplated making it the theme of my Christmas cards, for example. What would you say? “Dear Auntie Jean, God’s wrath is soon to be poured out upon your head. Have a happy Christmas, love from David.”
So we filter that aspect of the Bible’s message out almost completely, and what we’re left with is the birth of a Jesus who came to save, but we don’t want to tell anyone what he came to save us from. The Christmas gospel ends up sounding a lot like Reinhold Niebuhr’s summary of the gospel according to liberal Christianity in nineteenth century America - a gospel in which “a God without wrath brought a people without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministry of a Christ without a cross.”
Wrath in Romans 1
When we turn back to the New Testament - and it’s the New Testament as much as the Old - we find a very different message. What we keep finding is a message about Jesus the Saviour, and a stark, clear picture of what it is the he came to save us from. So the angel in Matthew chapter 1 tells Joseph: “You will call his name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” Jesus grows up in Nazareth and Capernaum, and Matthew tells us, this was to fulfil the words of Isaiah: “the people living in darkness have seen a great light.” Jesus grows up and he is constantly warning people of the coming judgement and wrath of God, and he keeps saying things like “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” A tower collapses in Siloam and kills eighteen people, and there’s a brutal government crackdown in which Pontius Pilate mixes the blood of a bunch of Galileans with their sacrifices, and Jesus’ response is: Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.”
That’s the message of Jesus throughout the gospels, and the rest of the New testament is very similar. The message of about the salvation of God in Jesus is hardly every spoken about without some accompanying words about the predicament that he rescues us from - the pit of our sin that he lifts us up out of, and the coming judgement and wrath of God that Jesus dies to save us from.
And here in Romans chapter 1 it’s much the same, expect it’s explained and put into context a little bit more carefully. If we are going to understand this concept of the wrath of God and the connection that it has to the message of the gospel, these opening chapters of Romans are one of the key places to turn to. I’m not going to expound Romans 1 in any sort of detail at all here this morning, but what I want to show you is the place that the wrath of God has in the backdrop to Paul’s thinking as he writes in this letter about the gospel of Jesus - what Paul means by God’s wrath, what the scope of it is, what the reason is that he sees for it, and what the way is that he sees God revealing it in the world around us. And I want to do that by pointing out just four key words in this second half of Romans chapter 1.
Let’s have a look at it together. Romans 1 verse 18: “the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness.”
“For” (v.18)
The first word that I want to point out is a word that isn’t actually there in the translation that most of us have in front of us, but it is there in the original. It’s the little word “for” that is supposed to be there at the beginning of verse 18. Paul writes - picking up at verse 16: “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. 17 For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.” 18 [For] the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness.”
In Paul’s mind, there is a logical connection that follows through these sentences from verse to verse. The reason reason why the righteousness - the saving, rescuing righteousness of God - comes to us by faith, from first to last - by faith and not by human goodness - is because we are in a much worse predicament that we would like to think we are in; our present situation is that we are under God’s anger and condemnation. God’s wrath is being revealed from heaven.
The point that Paul makes about God’s wrath in verse 18 is one of the essential foundations for the points that he makes about God’s righteousness and the gospel in verses 16 and 17. If the gospel in verses 16 and 17 shines out very brightly, that is partly because it stands against the very dark backdrop of verse 18. That’s the first word - the invisible word “for” that connects the verses about God’s wrath with the verses about the gospel.
“all” (v.18)
The second word is also in verse 18, and it’s the little word “All”. “the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men.” This is a point that Paul is going to hammer home in the verses and paragraphs that follow. It’s not that God’s wrath and judgement is against the egregriously awful people - Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler and so on. No - it’s all the godlessness and wickedness of men, the religious and the irreligious, the notorious and the respectable. There is something about our whole mindset and attitude and way of life - all of us, each of us - that is deeply, deeply offensive and wrong and deservedly under God’s anger and condemnation.
“although” (v.21)
What is it? Verse 21, the third little word “although”. “Although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him.” That’s the heart of it. It’s not necessarily naked, blatant, fist-shaking rebellion against God; it’s not necessarily murders and rapes and frauds; it’s just utter, contemptuous thanklessness. It’s taking all the stuff that God has created - including life itself - and living as if it was somehow ours by deserving. It’s not living with every breath to thank and glorify and delight in God. As a human race we don’t do that - in fact, we do the opposite. And Paul says, that is deeply, deeply wrong.
“therefore” (v.24)
What does God do? Verse 24: “Therefore God gave them over...” Four times in the verses that follow, Paul repeats that phrase. “God gave them over.” The way God reveals his wrath - and this is really important, I think for how we start trying to explain it to others - the way God reveals his wrath is by handing us over to the consequences of our choices. We choose to build a life and a society without God at the centre, and God lets us do that. And what we end up with is a horribly distortion of every aspect of life and society. Everything is broken - our sexuality, our relationships, our families, our society. God hands us over to the consequences of our choices, so that the those who have eyes to see will realise that all is not well - that there is something fundamentally wrong right at the centre.
Wrath at Christmas
What does all this mean for how we celebrate Christmas and communicate about Christmas to others? Can I make three brief suggestions.
First, can I suggest that it doesn’t mean that we should stop communicating the gospel as good news - that we should stop talking about the love of God, or the salvation that comes through Jesus, or the hope that he brings into the world or the forgiveness that comes through knowing him. I don’t want to suggest for a moment that we tone done the brightness of the Christmas lights, that we sing the songs a little softer, that we rejoice a little bit less exuberantly. That’s not the point at all.
But I do want to suggest, secondly, that we make a point of spending some time ourselves in meditating and reflecting on the blackness of the backdrop that stands behind the light of the gospel. Take a phrase from the Bible like that one from Isaiah - “the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light” - and just ponder it for a while. Think about the darkness of the world that we live in, the darkness of the world that jesus was born into, the dark shadows in your own life - think about all the reasons why we need a saviour, and let that put some real depth and reality into the joy that you feel and sing and speak about at Christmas.
And then thirdly, and finally, I want to suggest that we start thinking about how we talk about this sort of stuff with our non-Christian friends and family and work colleagues. That will take real wisdom, I think, and real depth of understanding. There is so much room to be misheard, to miscommunicate - to give people the impression that God is just grumpy or perfectionistic, that God hates them, that God hates everyone except us, because we’re the good people... there is so much room to get the message wrong. But that shouldn’t stop us from praying that God would help us to get the message right; that our family and friends and colleagues would begin to see that we belong to a human race that is actually in desperate need of salvation, and that we ourselves are to, and that the news about Jesus is not just a nice story but the best thing we could ever hear.