Thursday 27th April - Romans 2

Today’s chapter is Romans 2

Tom writes:

There will be wrath. The bible is very honest in acknowledging a soul-crushing flaw in creation; Ecclesiastes and Job put a magnifying glass up to the agony of injustice in this life. Bad people often do better. Even good people - like Abraham or David - can do Very Bad Things. Being human is more than annoying. The Old Testament prophets saw no easy solution to this, but they promised a fix would one day come from God’s own hand. They named this fix “the wrath of God”. This wrath would release God’s decisive “no” to all injustice. This wrath would compensate all who had suffered from injustice, it would hold to account those who had caused the injustice and it would remove every potential source of future injustice in the world. Or in more poetic language; Justice would roll like a river across the land, even seeping into every long-forgotten loss of the dead, carrying rebuke and restitution along in its flow. Paul wholeheartedly affirms this doctrine. But then he takes this truth to its terrifying conclusion; if every potential source of future injustice needs to be removed then God’s Wrath needs not only to tackle big and obvious wrongs but also every secret instance of stubbornness or sin.

The unnoticed lie of a parent does injustice to the child deprived of the truth and can yield painful fruit for generations to come. The stealing of stationery by an employee subtly subverts trust as essential to human relationship. Lustful looks at a lady may not be spotted but they have already turned her from a creature of God into a commodity for my glee. So the wrath must come. It’s like trying to remove an infection from a fish tank; not only must the very visible causes of the problem be dealt with but - to safeguard the lives of the fish - every slightest hint of future infection must be thoroughly cleaned up and removed. And so Paul wants you to be honest with yourself. He wants you to look in the mirror and - even though you’ve done many beautiful and wonderful things - he wants you to admit that, for the future of the world, the wrath of God needs to do its work on you. This is tough food. But in the coming chapters there are miracles in store (where we discover how the necessary wrath is taken by Jesus and not by us), but we only can receive these miracles when we acknowledge the necessity of the wrath of God.

Question for reflection

Can you acknowledge the necessity of the wrath of God?

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