Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Uncomfortable with God's Wrath? | New Testament | Revelation 16

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

God's wrath and judgement is a topic many Christians steer clear from, especially when they're sharing the gospel with unbelievers. But what if God's wrath actually proves his love? In today's episode, Keith turns to Revelation 16 to share six important facts about God's wrath. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Prepare your heart to celebrate Jesus. Sign up to have the 'I Am Your God' Advent Devotional delivered directly to your inbox starting Sunday, Dec. 3, 2023. Join the TMBT community in reading the entire New Testament in one year. Get your FREE reading plan here. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Revelation 16

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. Okay, today we're in Revelation 16, and the first verse tells you what this whole chapter is about. So let's dive in. Revelation 16, verse 1. Then I heard a loud voice from the temple saying to the seven angels, go, pour out the seven bowls of God's wrath on the earth. The rest of this chapter uses allusions to the Old Testament and lots of vivid imagery to describe what happens when God's wrath is poured out on earth.

I think it's safe to say that a lot of us are uncomfortable talking about God's wrath. We'd rather focus on God's love or God's forgiveness or God's mercy, but not so much as wrath. When is the last time you heard a sermon on God's wrath or read a book on that subject? Do you ever praise God for his anger and judgment against sin? When God's wrath comes up in a conversation, especially with someone who doesn't follow Jesus, We are often embarrassed or feel like we have to apologize for God. But here's what the prophet Nahim said. The Lord is a jealous and avenging God.

The Lord takes vengeance and is filled with wrath. The Lord takes vengeance on his foes and he vince his wrath against his enemies. J.I. Packer wrote a book that's considered a classic. It's called Knowing God. Now, the book is a little dense, but it is very good if you have the patience to work through it. He devoted a whole chapter in that book on The Rath. of God. And in that chapter, he writes this. Clearly the theme of God's wrath is one about which the biblical writers feel no inhibitions whatsoever. Why then should we? Why, when the Bible is vocal about it,

should we feel obliged to be silent? J.I. Packers asking us if we are embarrassed of God, are we more merciful than God? I don't think so. Let's think about God's wrath together for a few minutes. First, God would not be good if sin didn't make him angry and if he didn't judge sin. God's love demands that he be opposed to evil and sin. God is wrathful, not in spite of his love, but because of his love. We know this from our own human experience. What parent isn't angry when their child is hurt? When a crime is committed, we demand justice for the victim. We feel anger toward injustice because we care about people. Miroslav Volf is a Christian theologian from Croatia who now teaches at Yale. Wolf said he used to reject the concept of God's wrath. He thought the

idea of an angry God was barbaric, completely unworthy of a God of love. But then his country, Croatia, experienced a brutal war. People committed terrible atrocities against their neighbors and their countrymen. And living through that changed his mind. He wrote this, My last resistance to the idea of God's wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed, and over 3 million were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed. My people shelved day in and day out. Some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. He continues. Or think of Rwandan the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people

were hacked to death in 100 days. How did God react to that carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandfatherly fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrator's basic goodness? Wasn't God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God's wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn't wrathful at the sight of the world's evil.

God isn't wrathful in spite of being loving. God is wrathful because God is love. The second thing I want you to know about God's wrath is that God is slow to anger. Exodus 34 tells us of how God appeared to Moses on the mountain. We pick it up in verse 6. And he passed in front of Moses proclaiming, and this is God's name, the Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.

Now, it continues, but I want to just stop for a second and say, did you hear that God is slow to anger? God isn't hot-tempered. He doesn't easily lose his cool or fly off the handle like you and I do. God is patient and kind and merciful. He holds back his anger giving people time to repent of their sin and turn to him. Third, God's wrath against sin doesn't just happen in the future at the final judgment. His wrath is being revealed right now. That's what we learn in Romans 118. It says, the wrath of God is being revealed. from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people who suppress the truth by their wickedness. Now, I'm sure you noticed it said, is being revealed? In other words, right now, Paul goes on to say in

Romans 1 that God's wrath is demonstrated when he gives people over to their sins. It's not just that God will one day punish people for their greed, their envy, their strife, their violence, and all other sins. It's that those sins and the emptiness, the grief, the despair that come with them are part of the punishment of sin. Fourth, we should speak of God's wrath humbly, never vengefully. When I was in seminary in Chicago, one of my professors told me a story about a radio host on the radio station WGN. He was a professor of the psychology of religion at the University of Chicago, so he liked to

have people of different faiths on the show, including Christians. One time this professor from the University of Chicago, who hosted this radio show, had a professor on from Moody Bible Institute. And one thing the host liked to do is ask difficult questions. So he told the Moody Bible professor that he didn't believe in Jesus and then asked him if he believed the Bible said that he would go to hell. He said that as he asked that question, he was looking away, maybe at his computer or his notes or something, and it was kind of silent for a second. And you know, on the radio, silence is never good. So he looked up and he saw a tear in the professor's eye.

Tears started coming down his cheeks, and he nodded his head, yes. The radio host said it had a tremendous impact on him. Because here, this moody Bible professor was trying to be faithful to what the Bible teaches, and yet was doing it with compassion. He wasn't celebrating that this professor who didn't believe in Jesus would face God's judgment. He mourned and grieved over that fact. We should never be rooting for anyone to experience God's wrath. We should always be hoping that people will humbly repent of their sins and cast themselves on the mercy of God.

Five, you should always listen to the warnings the Bible gives you about God's wrath. That's what we see in Revelation 16. It's a warning of God's wrath that is being poured out now and will be more fully and finally poured out in the future. Tilly Smith and her family were relaxing on the beach in Thailand. That morning, 10-year-old Tilly, her parents and her sister, had gone for a walk along the beach, enjoying the warm breeze and the sand squishing between their toes. Two weeks prior to that holiday, Tilly had learned about tsunamis in her geography class. She didn't find geography that interesting, but the video her teacher showed her had caught her attention.

So as Tilly and her family walked the beach, she noticed the waves going out, but not coming in. Tilly alerted her parents that they were surrounded by signs of something unusual. At first, they were dismissive. they didn't pay attention to her, but Tilly's passion and persistent paid off. She began shouting, there's going to be a tsunami. Now, what would you do if you were on vacation with your family and your 10-year-old daughter started screaming on the beach that a tsunami was about to strike? Tilly shouted louder and louder and her panic frightened her younger sister, who began to cry

hysterically. I imagined the volume increasing with her parents saying something like, Tilly, calm down. It'll be okay. You're scaring your sister and get yourself under control right now. Tilly's dad took the younger sister Holly back to the hotel to calm her down, but Tilly looked around and saw the people in the ocean, and she just knew that everyone was in danger. So Tilly ran back to the hotel to find her dad talking with the security guard.

He said, I know this sounds completely crazy, but my daughter says there's going to be a tsunami. The security guard listened, not to a PhD candidate, not to a brain surgeon, not to a NASA scientist, but to a passionate plea coming from a 10-year-old British schoolgirl. The guard listened and then shouted, for the people to get off the beach. The people scattered all over the place as pandemonium set in. The hotel lobby was on a higher floor and everyone gathered there. They were saved from the

tsunami that came because they listened to the warning of a 10-year-old girl. Revelation 16 tells us that God's wrath is coming. Will we listen to the warning? Sixth, and the final thing we'll say, is that Jesus absorbed God's wrath against sin on the cross. All God's wrath against sin was poured out there so that all those who believe in him will not have to endure the wrath of God for all eternity. Jesus took God's wrath against sin so that we wouldn't have to. Put your hope in him.