Divine Wrath Against Godlessness and Wickedness
The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men, 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 Romans 1:18,19
Nothing keeps people away from Christ more than their inability to see their need of Him. It would be irresponsible of a doctor to leave a patient thinking they were healthy when they had a physically terminal condition. Christians have a parallel duty to help everyone see their spiritually terminal state before God. This principle lies behind 1:18 – 3:20. Before Paul can show that salvation is equally available to Jew and Gentile he must prove they equally need it. He will divide up the human race into various groups, and then one by one show how each has some knowledge of God but have not only not lived up to it, but have deliberately suppressed it and even contradicted it by continuing to live in unrighteousness. No one can plead innocence because no one can plead ignorance.
The first group is depraved Gentile society in its idolatry, immorality and destructive antisocial behaviour (1:18-32).
‘The wrath of God …’ (1:18). Some Bible translations prefer ‘anger’ to ‘wrath.’ Many Christians feel uncomfortable talking about God’s ‘wrath’ but there is good reason to keep the word. God’s reaction to sin is not the anger of an emotional person. It is the necessary reaction of a holy God to sin. The Old Testament regularly speaks of God inflicting wrath on people, both in the course of history (Exodus 32:10-12; Numbers 11:1) and especially at the end of history. Paul many times depicts wrath following the Second Coming (Colossians 3:6; 1 Thessalonians 1:10). Here he says God’s wrath ‘is being revealed’ (1:18). Paul is probably thinking of the sentence of condemnation that all people stand under – a sentence that God sometimes inflicts in the events of history but will carry out with finality at the end of history. If God is a good God He will not let evil go on without some intervention. His wrath is a sure sign of His goodness.
This wrath is ‘against all the godlessness and wickedness of men’ (1:18). The word for ‘godlessness’ means ‘against God’ while the word for ‘wickedness’ mean ‘against men.’ The essence of sin is godlessness. Once godlessness sets in, the preservation of humanity is lost. Humanity can never be restored to right order and harmony while right order and harmony with God remain shattered. Humanity was always central in God’s plan to rule His creation. This is part of what it means to be made in God’s image (Genesis 1:26-28). So when humans go wrong, the whole earth goes wrong.
Especially important to Paul is his insistence that God’s wrath doesn’t fall on ‘godlessness and wickedness’ as such but on people who ‘suppress the truth by their wickedness’ (1:18). The truth they suppress is the truth about God (1:25) seen in the natural world. We can’t ‘suppress the truth’ without first being exposed to it (‘since what may be known about God is plain to them.’)
God’s anger is not like ours, nor is it like the anger of Greek gods. His anger is like theirs in that it is motivated by our offence against His divine standard, but it is never emotionally capricious because God needs to defend His dignity. God always acts justly, on the basis of His own unchangeable standards revealed in the Bible. But rather than dismissing pagan notions of the wrath of the gods entirely, we can see in them a pale reflection of the truth about the wrath of the real God. In the pagan’s desire to appease an angry deity, in both ancient and modern times, we can see one way in which God has left in the world He created some evidence of Himself.