Romans 1:18-32
What Is God Angry About?

I. Is God Angry?
A. Our Culture Says No
1. We get angry when we get irritated, something doesn’t go our way, treated disrespectfully.
2. Selfish drivers in front of you, insults, printers that don’t work, customers who don’t pay.
3. We think of anger as a petty, selfish, passing thing, a fit that overcomes us, an outburst.
B. God’s Wrath is a Fixed Fury, an Ongoing Opposition to Sin
1. Jonathan Edwards’ (愛德華滋約拿單（1703-1758）) preached the famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”.
2. People today think it is a bizarre, even perverse, expression of a twisted, false theology.
3. False teachers congratulate themselves that they know better about God.
4. The reality is that the gospel begins by declaring that God is angry.
5. John the Baptist declared “the ax is laid to the root of the trees” (Luke 3:9.)
6. Jesus declared “Repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand;” judgment is coming.
7. In Acts 17, Paul declared that now, “He commands all men everywhere to repent.”
II. The Horrible Exchange (1:18-23)
A. Not Ashamed of the Good News Because the Bad News is Revealed
1. We desperately need to be right with Him because He is angry. “Wrath” means anger.
2. The simplistic idea is that the Old Testament pictures an angry God, judging and punishing.
3. The opposite is the case. Before, God was patient, now He’s revealing His anger.
4. The word for “anger” (“wrath”) is a word that implies passion, fury, heat.
B. God’s Anger Is Against Two Things: (1) Ungodliness And (2) Unrighteousness.
1. Our basic problem is our bad relationship with God (“ungodliness”).
2. Truths about God are manifest, exposed, brought out to the open, so anyone can see.
3. Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, (384 – 322 BC) looked at the universe and saw that there must be One eternal God, whom he called “the necessary Being.”
4. Other scientists have looked through a telescope at space and seen evidence of a Creator or through a microscope at single cells and DNA and seen a Designer.
5. But other, “secular bigots”, suppress the truth. He has enough evidence in nature.
6. So even the isolated tribe that has never heard of God and Jesus has enough evidence in the stars at night, to turn to God and seek Him. So they are not innocent.
7. The horrible exchange: instead of keeping the knowledge of God, they exchanged it for worthless things, like the god of wealth (财神), still followed in our modern age.
8. Americans exchange the true God for money, pleasure, the one “true love”, the fantasy lover.
9. This is like having pure gold and being foolish enough to exchange it for gravel.
III. The Terrifying Surrender (1:24-32)
A. We’ve Been Given Over
1. The worst thing that God can do to you, now, is to leave you alone.
2. Suppression of the truth about God leads to a surrender to perversions.
B. God Gave People Up to Dishonorable Passions (1:26)
1. The prime example of dishonorable passions is the perversion of homosexuality.
2. It used to be that people assumed homosexuality to be dishonorable, unnatural, shameless.
3. Now homosexuality objections to it are commonly categorized as if they were a bigotry like racism but that is bogus. When we object to homosexuality, we’re not pre-judging the people; it’s post-judging the actions.
4. A society that has opened the door to something this plainly unnatural has suffered the terrible surrender.
5. C. S. Lewis said, “A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.”
C. God Is Angry: We’ve seen not worshipped God and so God gives people up to what they want to serve. We want to be left alone and feel there really isn’t much wrong with us after all.
IV. Invitation: God’s anger is our problem. We’ve turned from God and He is angry at us. But the good news is that the anger of God is revealed against our sin on Christ on the cross. Even though Jesus was the one person in all of history who had never exchanged the truth of God for a lie, yet the Father revealed His hot anger on Him, so that He could have none left for us. In the gospel, the anger of God is being revealed. And in the gospel it is being revealed that God solved the problem of His own anger, on the cross. In the gospel now it is revealed that He has no more anger for His people. Has that been revealed to you?