The righteousness of the wrath of God

I took an hour yesterday afternoon with my wife and watched the live feed from the Ligonier Conference. It was the final session and of course R.C. Sproul was speaking. He spoke on the holiness of God, which was the theme of the entire conference with a particular emphasis on His holiness in wrath and judgment.

This is the description of his talk...

There have always been those who have argued that a truly holy God could not or would not consign anyone to eternal punishment. Such, they say, is inconsistent with God’s love. In this lecture, Dr. Sproul will explain why the holiness of God is not inconsistent with eternal punishment of sin, but in fact requires it.

There is something about a senior saint, close to eternity, that is really sobering because you see what is foremost in their minds. Sproul continues to look frail, but when he gets behind a pulpit and expounds on God's Word he seems to come alive. Not because he gets some sort of perverse delight in speaking about God's wrath but because, I believe, he recognizes how absent it is in the church today. "God loves you and wants the best for you" is kind of the mantra. But it look at only part of who God is. All of this talk of God's love, absent from equal time on God's wrath, justice and holiness makes a presumption upon grace. Only a truly wrathful God can be a loving God, for a God who has no holiness, wrath and justice is not a God at all.

Dr. Sproul used the text from 1 Chronicles 13: 6-14 as his base, and he did so because it is such a troubling text for modern believers. Give us John 3: 16 and YEAH GOD! We love us some God when He is being merciful. When we read 1 Chr 13:6-14 or Leviticus 10: 1-7, it can be easy in our minds to divide the God in the Old Testament with the God of the New. Like one flippant person commented once, the God of the New Testament is the God of the Old after anger management therapy. But it is the same God. He is not less just, or less holy or less wrathful but His mercy stems from the fact that His justice has been fulfilled in the cross. As Dr. Sproul pointed out, 1 Chronicles 13 is not showing a capricious and mean God who struck a man down for an innocent reaction. It shows a God who struck a man down for pride, pride is thinking that the Ark would be less defiled by a sinner touching it than by it being in the dirt.

It was sobering stuff, but we need to sobered on a regular basis.