Do We Deserve the Wrath of God? - Romans 1

God’s Wrath Against Sinful Humanity

18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.

I hope you liked the provocative title of my post.  It's one way to get readers.  LOL.  Seriously we don't and/or I don't usually talk much about the wrath of God.  We would rather talk about the God of love who sent His Son Jesus into the world to save it from sin.  And, of course, we should talk about God's love a lot and we are all lost without it.  But I also think we can't completely God's wrath against sin, wickedness, and ungodliness as this passage mentions.  

But what hits me most about this passage is that it is not as if God's wrath is arbitrary, or capricious.  It is not just God randomly getting really mad and destroying things to show off His power.  As we see in the passage God's wrath comes about due to the wickedness of people.  These are people made in God's image that do really bad things to other people made in God's image.  These are people who have suppressed the truth of God and exchanged it for a lie.  Importantly the passage says that the people who do this are without excuse because what can be known about God is obvious in Creation and to them.  

After all, when you look around and see all of Creation around you it points to a Creator.  Or else it just came about by random chance, or some cosmic explosion some have called the "Big Bang". This passage uses the Creation we see around us as justification there is a God that we are accountable to because he has given all of this to us a gift. 

So the passage is suggesting that everybody has basic knowledge of God just by being born on this planet.  And each person can do one of two things with this knowledge.  One, they can use it to worship God. Two, they can make other images and bow down to them, whether those images are of humans, animals or other things.  Paul concludes though that everyone has an equal chance to choose if there is a God, so that all people are "without excuse". 

I take this to mean it is not God's fault that some people choose to worship some form of the creature rather than the Creator.  You can read the rest of the passage for what happened as people chose to the creature over the Creator God.  Their wickedness and darkness only increased.  So when God saw this He got mad.  The people he had created to worship him and love one another, worshipped idols and degraded their bodies. 

In the context of the whole letter to the Romans, Paul is setting up the case that all of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  We all deserve God's wrath.  And guess what?  We can't really argue that it is unfair. We really don't have an excuse. Thank God this is not the end of the story only the beginning!