An Unfortunate Beverage

“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, she who made all nations drink the wine of the wrath of her sexual immorality.”

It’s not enough for the chronic sinner to quietly sin in a corner. Whatever tattered shreds of conscience he retains will trouble him just enough that he must rationalize his behavior, and that requires seeking the validation of others.

To secure their approval, he needs them to be thinking the same way he does. The quickest way to pervert their intellects along the same lines as his own twisted reasoning is to introduce them to his favorite sin, so they can experience the very same sort of moral tension with which he is struggling. So the sinner in the corner becomes the cause of stumbling in the public square, and sin spreads. Maybe if everybody’s doing it, it won’t feel so bad.

Wrath and Discipline

Back in May 2018, the Southern Baptist Convention had a series of what appeared to be #MeToo moments: accusations of an “avalanche of sexual misconduct” and alleged institutional cover-up that put the Convention squarely under the media microscope. Al Mohler wrote a confessional sort of op-ed in which he said, “The terrible swift sword of public humiliation has come with a vengeance.”

He entitled the piece “The Wrath of God Poured Out”.

Mining the Minors: Nahum (3)

It has been observed that verses 2-8 of Nahum’s first chapter are a poem or hymn about the wrath of the Almighty that appears to have been written in the acrostic style of some Psalms (9-10, 25, 111, 119), which is to say each clause usually begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet. I say “appears” because scholars only noticed this pattern in Nahum a couple of centuries ago, mostly because the acrostic is incomplete (three letters are missing, and only the first half of the alphabet is used at all) as well as somewhat irregular (the expected letter is not always first in its clause).

We might sum up Hebrew scholar Aron Pinker’s conclusions about it by simply saying the pattern is too consistent to be accidental and too inconsistent for his peers to agree about.

Mining the Minors: Hosea (34)

The wrath of God is an established fact of scripture, the Holy Spirit making reference to it in excess of 300 times. But we should not think of God’s wrath as merely emotional, as if it comes and goes depending on his mood. Rather, the wrath of God “abides” or “remains” on sinners who refuse to take God’s provided way of escape. God’s anger never abates, never lifts and never loses its intensity unless it is met with the appropriate response.

After all, he is not a man that he should change his mind.

No Way to Think About God

“Put back the staff of Aaron before the testimony, to be kept as a sign for the rebels, that you may make an end of their grumblings against me, lest they die.”

“You shall keep guard over the sanctuary and over the altar, that there may never again be wrath on the people of Israel.”

Throughout history, when God has made his dwelling with men, he has always made gracious provision for our fallen state and inevitable sinfulness. Proximity to perfection is a dangerous thing, a fact God has stated repeatedly. Yet somehow, the idea continues to circulate that God’s holiness is some sort of optional feature of his character, one that may be turned off and on at will.

Nobody puts it quite that way, of course.

Persecution and Wrath

A great number of Christians believe the Church will go through the Great Tribulation.

Reasons for this vary. For some it’s all about heavenly trumpets: how many there are, and when they sound. For others, the teaching of the apostle Paul that the godly “shall suffer persecution” and the words of the Lord himself that “in the world you will have tribulation” tip the scales in favor of a Church that will suffer through the end times along with the world. Others compare the order of events in John’s Revelation visions with the future described by the Lord Jesus in the gospels, leading them to anticipate martyrdom like so many of our fellow believers throughout history. Still others believe the doctrine of the Rapture originated in the 16th century counter-reformation teaching of Papal Rome, and therefore consider it discredited.

All these are arguments from detail.