Read the following,
Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” 20 To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” 21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.( Romans 12: 19-21)
God eyes are everywhere, he is seeing the just and the unjust. Wait on him and you will receive the desire of your heart. The key word to God vengeance, watch and pray.
Here we have in verse 19 the phrase “wrath of God.” “Never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’” Last time we focused on the psychology of this verse and how it works to free us from the burden taking justice into our own hands. We focused on implications of the word “for” in verse 19: “Never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’” Since God is going to take up your cause and see to it that justice is done, you can lay it down. You don’t have to carry anger and bitterness and resentment and revenge. Indeed you dare not. Jesus warned that an unforgiving heart will destroy you in the end (Matthew 6:15; 18:35).
The Reality of God’s Wrath
But today I want to focus not on the psychology of the verse but the divine reality that makes the psychology work, namely, the reality of God’s wrath. Paul says in verse 19, “Leave it to the wrath of God.” Then the wrath of God is defined further as God’s vengeance, “Vengeance is mine.” So wrath is connected with God’s response to something that deserves vengeance. And then it says, “I will repay.” So God’s wrath is treated as a repayment to man for something man has done.So just taking this verse alone, with its pieces, we could venture a definition of the wrath of God like this: the wrath of God is God’s settled anger toward sin expressed in the repayment of suitable vengeance on the guilty sinner.
Four Characteristics of the Final Wrath of God
The reason I use the word anger to define part of what wrath is that the two words (orge and thumos) are used over a hundred times in the Bible side by side. Some of them are parallel so that you can hardly distinguish them. For example, Psalm 6:1, “O Lord, rebuke me not in your anger, nor discipline me in your wrath.” Psalm 90:7, “We are brought to an end by your anger; by your wrath we are dismayed.” Hosea 13:11, “I gave you a king in my anger, and I took him away in my wrath.” Romans 2:8, “For those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury [anger].”When you try to distinguish these words the closest you get is something like this from A. T. Robertson: God’s anger (thumos) is his vehement fury or boiling rage. His wrath (orge) is his settled indignation or his settled anger. In other words, in God’s anger the emphasis falls on the emotional, boiling intensity of it. And in God’s wrath the emphasis falls on the controlled, settled, considered direction and focus of its application. But we dare not draw a hard line between them. God’s anger is never out of the control of his wisdom and righteousness, and his wrath is never cool or indifferent, but is always a wisely directed fury. The wrath of God is never less than a perfect judicial decree, but is always more than a perfect judicial decree because it is always full of right and fitting fury.
And then we see from the word “repay” and “vengeance” that God’s wrath is his response to sin. God does not take vengeance on the innocent. When he repays with vengeance, we know there has been sin—there is something to repay. And since he is meticulously just, that repayment will be a suitable vengeance, a proper vengeance. It will not be more or less than his perfect justice demands. So here is the definition again: The wrath of God is God’s settled anger toward sin expressed in the repayment of suitable vengeance on the guilty sinner.
What shall we say then about this wrath? Perhaps in the limits of one message we can take note of four things. If we focus on the wrath of God that falls on human beings at the final judgment, we can say at least these four things about it: 1) It will be eternal—having no end. 2) It will be terrible—indescribable pain. 3) It will be deserved—totally just and right. 4) It will have been escapable—through the curse-bearing death of Christ, if we would have taken refuge in him.
1. The final wrath of God is eternal—having no end.
In Daniel 12:2 God promises that the day is coming when “many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.”Jesus spoke of the eternity of God’s wrath in numerous ways. Consider three. In Mark 9:43-48, he said,
And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. 45 And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life lame than with two feet to be thrown into hell. 47 And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell, 48 where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.So twice he calls the fires of hell “unquenchable” that is, they will never go out. The point of that is to say soberly and terribly, that if you go there, there will be no relief for ever and ever.
Second, in Mark 3:29 Jesus says, “Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.” This is a startling statement. It rules out all those thoughts of universalism that say, even if there is a hell, one day it will be emptied after people have suffered long enough. No. That is not what Jesus said. He said that there is sin for which there will never be forgiveness. There are people who will never be saved. They are eternally lost.
Third, in Matthew 25 he told the parable of the sheep and the goats to illustrate the way it will be when Jesus comes back to save his people and punish the unbelievers. In verse 41 he says, “Then [the king] will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’” And to make crystal clear that eternal means everlasting he says again in verse 46, “These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” So the punishment is eternal in the same way that life is eternal. Both mean: never-ending. Everlasting. It is an almost incomprehensible thought. O, let it have its full effect on you. Jesus did not intend to speak this way in vain.
After the teaching of Jesus, the apostle Paul put the eternity of God’s wrath this way in 2 Thessalonians 1:7-9:
The Lord Jesus [will be] revealed from heaven with his mighty angels 8 in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. 9 They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.Destruction does not mean obliteration or annihilation, any more than the destruction of the enemy army means the defeated soldiers do not exist any more. It means they are undone. They are defeated. They and stripped of all that makes life pleasant. They are made miserable forever.
Finally, the great apostle of love, the apostle John, who gives us the sweet words of John 3:16, used the strongest language for the eternal duration of the wrath of God: “And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night” (Revelation 14:11). And Revelation 19:3, “The smoke from her goes up forever and ever.” These are the strongest phrases for eternity that Biblical writers could use. So the first thing we must say about the wrath of God at the end of the age that comes upon those who do not embrace Christ as Savior and Lord, is that it is eternal—it will never end.
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