Sermon Tone Analysis

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*1*Then what advantage has the Jew?

Or what is the value of circumcision?

*2 *Much in every way.

To begin with, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God.

*3 *What if some were unfaithful?

Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? *4 *By no means!

Let God be true though every one were a liar, as it is written, “That you may be justified in your words, and prevail when you are judged.”

*5 *But if our unrighteousness serves to show the righteousness of God, what shall we say?

That God is unrighteous to inflict wrath on us? (I speak in a human way.)

*6 *By no means!

For then how could God judge the world?

*7 *But if through my lie God’s truth abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner?

*8 *And why not do evil that good may come?—as some people slanderously charge us with saying.

Their condemnation is just.

*9 *What then?

Are we Jews any better off?

No, not at all.

For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin, *10 *as it is written: “None is righteous, no, not one; *11 *no one understands; no one seeks for God.

*12 *All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.”

*13 *“Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive.”

“The venom of asps is under their lips.”

*14 *“Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.”

*15 *“Their feet are swift to shed blood; *16 *in their paths are ruin and misery, *17 *and the way of peace they have not known.”

*18 *“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

*19 *Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. *20 *For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

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Last week we noted that the Bible’s central message, the gospel, is constantly in danger of being confused or lost or at least gravely misunderstood.

That’s not because it is particularly complicated.

In fact the gospel, at its most fundamental level, is quite easy to understand and articulate.

It is not, however, easily accepted.

There is an offensive element to the gospel that we would all much rather reject.

It is this offensive part of the gospel that we are tempted to minimize or soften.

Perhaps we can make the good news even better by not bringing any bad news into the conversation.

But this tendency to ignore the bad news has the reverse effect.

It makes the good news not so good, certainly not as good as the Bible says that it is.

So in order for us to understand the gospel we must embrace the offense of the gospel.

What is it about the gospel that causes it to be rejected by some and redefined by others?

We can think about it in three sets of couplets.

The offense of the gospel is seen in the themes of judgment and wrath, creation and accountability, and sin and God’s righteousness.

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JUDGMENT AND WRATH

Here in our text we are told that God will judge the world (Rom 3:6).

We cannot escape the reality that according to the Bible there will be a day of reckoning and that it is to God that we will have to give an account.

!! God judges the world

The Bible repeatedly affirms this.

In Genesis 18:25 God is referred to as “the Judge of all the earth.”

The Psalmist says that the heavens declare the righteousness of God, “for God himself is judge!” (Psa 50:6).

According to Ecclesiastes 12:14, “God will bring every deed into judgment with every secret thing, whether good or evil.”

Second Corinthians 5:10 states that “we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ,” and Hebrews 9:27 declares that “it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment.”

!! God judges the world in wrath

What would it be like to stand before God as your judge?

What kind of a judge will God be?

Will he be like Randy Jackson or Simon Cowell?

The Psalmist answers the question this way: “God is a righteous judge, and a God who feels indignation every day” (Psa 7:11).

God is not a judge of talent, looking for the best of the best among us.

He is a judge of criminals, and his punishment of them is severe.

Just as often as we read that God is the judge of the world, we read that God judges the world in wrath.

This is not a picture of God that we like to dwell on, but it is nevertheless the picture of God that the Bible gives us.

Here in verse 5 we read that God “inflicts wrath” when he judges.

!! We need to be saved from God and his wrath

So when we talk about salvation we ought to ask ourselves what it is we need to be saved from.

We might answer with Matthew 1:21 and say that Jesus came to save his people from their sins.

Or we might cite from James 5:20 and say that we need to be saved from death to new life.

But we should say more.

Sin is the /reason /why we need to be saved and death is the /consequence/ from which we need to be saved, but the real danger we face and the threat from which we need to be saved is stated bluntly in Romans 5:9: “Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.”

We need to be saved from God and the hell with which he punishes the guilty.

Now it is true that God can punish in this life, but the emphasis is usually on God’s coming wrath.

So when we say things like “hell on earth” and we talk about salvation being from a sense of meaninglessness or our own self-inflicted pain, we are missing the crucial point.

As the author of Hebrews tells us, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of an angry God” (Heb 10:31).

The wrath of God that is coming is far more severe than anything that can be experienced in this life.

(See Rev 6:15-17.)

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CREATION AND ACCOUNTABILITY

But why is God so angry?

And what gives him the right to judge the world in the first place?

It is important for us to answer these questions, lest we get the wrong impression about God’s wrath.

You see, God is not capriciously angry.

He did not wake up on the wrong side of the bed.

His anger is not like that of pagan deities whose anger often looks like that of a spoiled child being denied their wishes in a candy store.

!! God the Creator

In order to understand the source of God’s anger, we have to go back to the beginning.

All the way back to the beginning.

The Bible opens this way, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1).

It’s one of the most controversial verses in the Bible to this day because the Bible presupposes both the existence of God and his agency in bringing about the material universe.

We are also not told precisely when God created nor do we know exactly how he did so, though we do know it was all done “by the word of the LORD” (Psa 33:6) meaning that the world was created by the decree of God.

It was his plan.

He is fully responsible for its existence.

!! The beginning of the gospel

And this is where the gospel begins.

If we miss this we will struggle to understand the good news.

In the beginning God created.

And creation implies purpose, so we are invited to ask, “Why did God create?

It was not to fulfill a need for himself.

God is not “served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:25).

So why did God create?

We find the answer in Isaiah 43 where God says,

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/Fear not, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you.

I will say to the north, Give up, and to the south, Do not withhold; bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made./

(Isa 43:5-7)

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There it is.

God created for his own glory which means he created in order to show how wonderful he is.

If that sounds arrogant and egotistical remember this: God /really is /wonderful, more wonderful than anything or anyone else.

And if that is true then creation was one of God’s loving acts to his creatures.