by W. J.
Grier
One of the evidences of decay and departure in the
professing Church is the large-scale rejection of the teaching of the
Scriptures on the wrath of God. Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones in his
recently-issued Exposition of Romans draws attention to this and shows
that it is not only among Modernists and Ritualists that this attitude
prevails; it is evident too among some who are evangelicals by repute.
Dr C. H. Dodd, for some 14 years professor of Divinity at
Cambridge and chairman of the panel of translators of the New English
Bible [New Testament section], deals in his Commentary on Romans with the
phrase ‘the wrath of God’ in Romans 1.18. He speaks of it as ‘an archaic
phrase’ which ‘suits a thoroughly archaic idea’. In other words, he looks
on the idea of God’s wrath as out-of-date, antiquated. Early in 1931 there
was a dialogue in the pulpit of Elmwood Presbyterian Church, Belfast, two
prominent ministers Drs Frazer-Hurst and Hyndman taking part. The former
quoted from a Catechism he was taught in his boyhood. The question was:
‘What are you by nature?’ and the answer: ‘I am an enemy of God, a child
of Satan and an heir of hell’. Dr Frazer-Hurst described such teaching as
monstrous and Dr Hyndman supported him by saying:
‘These ideas belong to the mentality and outlook of
bygone ages.’ It would seem as if these men believed that we come into the
world as little cherubs sprouting wings.
To adopt such views one would have to repudiate a large
part of Scripture from Genesis through to Revelation. In Genesis 3 we find
Adam and Eve thrust out of the garden for their sin and a flaming sword
set to keep them from the tree of life. Not only were they affected, but
the sentence of condemnation fell upon the race [Romans 5.12, 18, 19]. In
Genesis 6 we find God saying: ‘I will destroy man whom I have created from
the face of the earth’ — and the deluge ensued. Then in Genesis 19 we have
the destruction of the cities of the plain by fire and brimstone from
heaven.
I might go on citing countless examples of the
manifestation of divine wrath right through the Bible. Dr Leon Morris says
of the Old Testament in his The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross:
‘There are more than 20 words used to express the wrath conception as it
applies to Jehovah’ and ‘these are used so frequently that there are over
580 occurrences to be taken into consideration’ [p 131]. He adds
that this conception ‘cannot be eradicated from the Old Testament without
irreparable loss’ [p 156]. So the Old Testament is full of the
concept of the wrath of God.
In his Commentary on Romans Dr Dodd says that the wrath
of God ‘does not appear in the teaching of Jesus’. One is reminded of John
Newton’s reply to Dr Taylor of Norwich when the latter said: ‘I have
collated every word in the Hebrew Scriptures 17 times, and it is very
strange if the doctrine of the atonement you hold should not have been
found by me.’ Newton’s reply was: ‘I am not surprised at this; I once went
to light my candle with the extinguisher on it.’ He meant that prejudices
from education, learning, etc., often form an extinguisher which must be
removed and which only God can remove.
Dr Dodd speaks of the thought of anger as an attitude of
God to men as disappearing and adds: ‘His love and mercy become
all-embracing’. This really smacks of universalism. One suspects that
universalistic presuppositions are really in many cases responsible for
the rejection of the concept of the wrath of God.
Jesus spoke of the rich man in the torments of hell and
He warned again and again of ‘the weeping and the gnashing of teeth’ and
of hell fire and the unquenchable fire and the undying worm and the outer
darkness. Describing how He would act as King at His coming one day to sit
on the throne of His glory He pictures Himself as saying: ‘Depart from me,
ye cursed, into the everlasting fire which is prepared for the devil and
his angels.’ Surely the extinguisher is functioning when Dr Dodd claims
that the idea of the wrath of God is absent from the teaching of
Jesus.
Nor is the wrath of God absent from the teaching of the
apostle Paul. He pictured that wrath as like a dark cloud overhanging a
guilty world and he proclaimed Jesus as the only deliverer from this
coming wrath [I Thess. 1.10]. He also describes this wrath as evident in
the heathen world of his day — evident in God’s giving them up in the
lusts of their hearts to uncleanness and vile passions and a reprobate
mind [Romans 1.24, 26, 28]. And in Romans chapter 2 he warns of ‘wrath in
the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God’. These
are but a few of the citations which might be given from Paul’s teaching.
We have the same testimony from John, the apostle of
love. What a tremendous picture he gives of Christ coming as King of kings
and Lord of lords ‘treading the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of
God the Almighty’ [Rev. 19.151! How can anyone that has read Jonathan
Edwards’ comment on this verse ever forget it? ‘The words’, he says, ‘are
exceeding terrible. If it had only been said ‘the wrath of God’, the words
would have implied that which is infinitely dreadful: but it is ‘the
fierceness and wrath of God’. The fury of God! the fierceness of Jehovah!
O how dreadful must that be! Who can utter or conceive what such
expressions carry in them? But it is also ‘the fierceness and wrath of
Almighty God’ — as though there would be a very great manifestation of His
almighty power in what the fierceness of His wrath would inflict, as
though omnipotence should as it were be enraged and exerted as men are
wont to exert their strength in the fierceness of their wrath.’
Many more Scriptures could be appealed to, but sufficient
evidence has been produced to show that the witness to the idea of the
wrath of God is pervasive in the Scriptures.
When the doctrine of the wrath of God is denied, other
great truths are affected by this denial. First among these is the
historic doctrine of the inspiration of the Scriptures.
I. THE INSPIRATION OF
THE SCRIPTURES
Anyone who denies the wrath of God strikes a blow at
divine revelation — for, as we have seen, God’s wrath is plainly revealed
in His Word. His holy indignation against sin is one of the great
‘burdens’ of Scripture, one of the Bible’s great oracles; and he who
denies this holy indignation is flouting the verdict of the Judge of all
the earth, a verdict repeated times without number in His Word. Professor
T. J. Crawford was right when he said: ‘A great part of the Bible would
need to be written over again before we can expunge from it the broad and
palpable evidence of God’s holy displeasure against sinful men and of His
righteous purpose to inflict judgment for their iniquities.’ The effect
then of the denial of the divine wrath then would be devastating in its
effect upon the doctrine of the inspiration of the Scriptures.
II. THE DOCTRINE OF
GOD
If we preach the wrath of God, we are sometimes accused
of representing God as a Being of fitful passion and vindictive fury. In
other words, we are accused of blackening the character of God. But we
plead ‘Not guilty’. The God of the Bible is not subject to sudden and
irrational fits of anger. His wrath is His settled indignation against
sin. Dr Leon Morris rightly speaks of it as ‘a burning zeal for the right
coupled with a perfect hatred for everything that is evil’.
When men reject the idea of the wrath of God, it is
evident that they really do not believe in the perfect holiness of God,
for that holiness involves a settled and burning indignation against sin.
Moses could say of the adversaries of Israel: ‘their rock is not as our
Rock’ and we can say the same of men who reject the divine wrath. Their
god is a flabby sort of being, not the God who is holy in all His ways and
righteous in all His works.
III. THE DOCTRINE OF
SIN
There is a close connection between the denial of God’s
wrath and a light view of sin, as Dr J. G. Machen said: ‘The modern
rejection of God’s wrath proceeds from a light view of sin which is
totally at variance with the teaching of the whole New Testament and of
Jesus Himself’. It is the sight of the infinite holiness of God which
leads a man to a true sense of his sin and depravity. When Isaiah viewed
God as sitting on a throne high and lifted up, and worshipped as the
perfectly Holy One by the seraphim, then he cried ‘Woe is me, for I am
undone’. When men see God’s righteousness and His wrath, it is then that
they become earnest seekers after grace.
Once when Whitefleld was preaching at Norwich, a
thoughtless youth was led by a gipsy’s forecast of his future to go and
hear the great preacher. The sermon was based on John the Baptist’s appeal
to the Sadducees to flee from the wrath to come. As he preached Whitefleld
burst into a flood of tears and then cried with all his might: ‘O my
hearers, the wrath is to come, the wrath is to come’. The
words sank into the young man’s heart; they followed him for days and
weeks and he could think of little else but ‘the wrath to come’. He later
became, as Andrew Fuller tells us, ‘a considerable preacher’. Such
conviction of sin followed by genuine conversion is not likely to occur
where the note of divine wrath is muted; sin is no longer regarded as ‘the
abominable thing which God hates’.
IV. THE DOCTRINE OF THE
ATONEMENT
In his commentary on Romans chapter 1, Dr Dodd denies
divine wrath. It is small wonder that he proceeds in his commentary on
chapter 3, verse 25-26, to repudiate the idea of ‘the propitiation of the
wrath of God’ and of ‘the satisfaction demanded by His justice and
afforded by Christ’s vicarious endurance of the penalty of sin.’ Small
wonder too that the word ‘propitiation’ was removed from the New English
Bible as well as from the Revised Standard Version. One of the RSV
translators, Dr C. T. Craig of Oberlin School of Theology, commenting on
the omission of the word ‘propitiation’, said: ‘Any attempt to show that
there was something in the essential nature of God that demanded
satisfaction for sin ends only in blackening the character of God.’ So the
doctrine of the atonement must go in the interests of the Modernist view
of a flabby deity!
Dr Dodd admits that in classical Greek and in the Koiné
[or Hellenistic Greek] the word ‘propitiate’ has the idea of placating or
appeasing wrath. But he seeks to argue from the Septuagint [the Greek
translation of the New Testament made a few centuries before Christ]
that a change had taken place in the meaning of the word. Dr Roger Nicole
of Gordon Divinity School has produced 21 arguments against Dr Dodd’s line
of reasoning [see the Westminster Theological Journal, Vol. XVII,
No. 2]. Dr Nicole’s article is simply devastating in its force; he seems
to have shot Dr Dodd down entirely.
Dr Leon Morris in his The Apostolic Preaching of the
Cross says that Dr Dodd ‘totally ignores the fact that in many
passages there is explicit mention of the putting away of God’s anger, and
accordingly his conclusions cannot be accepted without serious
modification.’ Indeed, Dr Morris produces arguments to show that ‘it is
manifestly impossible to maintain that the verb [propitiate’] has been
emptied of its force.’
One must be supremely thankful for the labours of these
two fine scholars of a younger generation for their labours in putting up
such a capable defence of, and devastating argument for, the historic
Christian doctrine of the atonement as a propitiation of divine wrath and
a satisfaction to divine justice.
V. THE DOCTRINE OF THE
LOVE OF GOD
Those who reject the wrath of God often plead that their
rejection is in the interests of the love of God; but actually their
rejection of divine wrath inificts a grievous wound on the doctrine which
they profess ardently to espouse. This is so because Christ’s propitiatory
sacrifice to satisfy divine justice and propitiate God’s wrath is the
greatest exhibition of divine love. We read in Scripture: ‘Herein is love,
not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the
propitiation for our sins’ [1 John 4.10].
Dr James Denney said: ‘If the propitiatory death of Jesus
is eliminated from the love of God, it might be unfair to say that the
love of God is robbed of all meaning, but it is certainly robbed of its
apostolic meaning’ [Denney’s Death of Christ, p 152]. And this is
the meaning that supremely matters.
VI. THE DOCTRINE OF THE
JUDGMENT
If there is no wrath of God, then the tremendous terrors
of the judgment are eliminated. Then that ancient hymn loses its
significance which says:
That day of wrath, that
dreadful day When heaven and earth shall pass away! What
power shall be the sinner’s stay? How shall he meet that dreadful
day? |
Take away the concept of the wrath of God and we strip
the great day of assize of much of its tremendous awe.
VII. THE DOCTRINE OF
HELL
In 1930 there was a book issued with the title What is
Hell? There were twelve contributors. Among them were two novelists, a
Spiritist, a Theosophist, a pagan, a Roman Catholic, a Congregationalist
who became a Roman Catholic two years later, an Anglican bishop and an
Anglican dean. The dean, Dr W. R. Inge, though not thoroughly orthodox,
could be quite caustic and penetrating in his comments on the Modernists
and he had many true words to say about hell. Indeed, he was the one in
this volume who came closest to the Scripture doctrine. He said that
‘heaven and hell stand and fall, together’ and pointed out that our Lord
spoke in perfectly plain language about its duration. He added: ‘Modernist
Protestantism, though it may be reluctant to admit it, believes in
Purgatory, but not in hell.’ When Dr Inge ceased to be dean of St. Paul’s
in 1934, his successor was Dr W. R. Matthews and it is interesting to note
that he says in his book The Hope of Immortality that to him
purgatory ‘has great attractions’; he also says that he believes it
‘right to pray for the dead’ and it would seem that universalism also has
‘attractions’ for him. So it again appears, as we have already noted, that
many of the objectors to the concept of God’s wrath are really
universalistic in their outlook. A distinguished theologian of the
Presbyterian Church, U.S., who is a member of his Church’s Permanent
Theological Committee stated in a church paper: ‘God does not have two
different purposes for men — that is, punishment for some and reward for
others — but only one’. This is just brazen universalism.
In conclusion, I would point out that when men deny the
wrath of God, they are cutting one of the vital nerves of evangelism. It
was the thought of the wrath of God, as well as His love, that lent such
earnestness to the pleadings of the preachers of the gospel. The thought
of the overhanging cloud of God’s wrath lent earnestness to the preaching
of Paul. Knowing the fear of the Lord, he persuaded men. It was the same
with Whitefield and Brownlow North and R. M. M’Cheyne and Henry Martyn. Of
North his biographer wrote: ‘The immortality of the human soul and its
endless existence in a state of holiness and blessedness, or of corruption
and misery, were subjects constantly on his lips.’ Listen to M’Cheyne also
as he says: ‘As I walked in the fields, the thought came over me with
almost overwhelming power, that every one of my flock must soon be in
heaven or hell. 0 how I wished I had a tongue like thunder, that I might
make all hear; or that I had a frame like iron, that I might visit every
one and say, ‘Escape for thy life’. Ah, sinners! you little know how I
fear that you will lay the blame of your damnation at my door.’ And it was
he who said that the preacher should never speak of everlasting punishment
without tears.
What gratitude should surge in our hearts because God has
not appointed us unto wrath but to the obtaining of salvation
through our Lord Jesus! R. M. M’Cheyne stressed this too when he
wrote:
Chosen not for good in
me, Wakened up from wrath to flee, Hidden in the Saviour’s
side, By the Spirit sanctified, Teach me, Lord, on earth to
show, By my love how much I
owe. |
By nature we were once ‘children of wrath’ — exposed to
the dread wrath of God [Eph 2.3]. But we have been saved by grace through
faith, that we might do the good works which God has before ordained for
us [Eph 2.8, 10]. We are under a tremendous obligation. This was how Paul
saw himself. He said: ‘I am debtor both to Greeks and barbarians .
. . So, as much as in me is, I am ready to preach the gospel to you also .
. . . for I am not ashamed of the gospel: for it is the power of
God unto salvation . . . . : for therein is revealed a
righteousness of God from faith unto faith . . . . for the wrath of
God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of
men’ [Rom 1.14-18]. Note the four ‘for’s’, especially the last one —
‘for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven’. The divine wrath
was revealed in God’s judgments on the heathen world of that day and it
overhung that world like a dark cloud. That same wrath is evident in the
world of our day and overhangs it like a dark cloud. We too should have
the tremendous sense of obligation which Paul had. We too are debtors —
debtors to men of every race and condition. May the spirit of concern fill
our hearts as it filled the heart of the apostle — that we may give an
account of our stewardship one day with joy and not with grief. Amen.
[The above address was given at the opening session of the
Leicester Ministers Conference, March 1971.]
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