The wrath of God is admittedly not a popular subject. But it is an absolutely critical and central subject to any understanding of the gospel. Now, there are a number of different aspects to the wrath of God.

There is what we could call eternal wrath, because it is the punishment that God brings on unbelieving sinners forever in hell. There is also eschatological wrath. That is the wrath of God that is released at the end of the world.

There is what we could call cataclysmic wrath—like a tsunami, a volcano, a hurricane, an earthquake, a plane flying into the Twin Towers resulting in thousands of death. And there is what you could call consequential wrath. Consequential wrath is the sowing and reaping—you live a certain kind of life, and you set in motion certain forces that will produce judgment.

But there is one other kind of wrath, and that is the wrath that is presented in this passage. It is the wrath of abandonment. It is that wrath exhibited by God when He turns His back on a society.

Biblical Examples of Abandonment

One of the most tragic scenes of the wrath of abandonment in Scripture involves the strongest man who ever lived, the mighty Samson. He is the original Superman, and a real one. We read in Judges 16:

When Delilah saw that he had told her all that was in his heart, she sent and called the lords of the Philistines. . . . And he awoke from his sleep and said, “I will go out as at other times and shake myself free.” But he did not know that the Lord had departed from him. And then the Philistines seized him and gouged out his eyes and they brought him down to Gaza and bound him with bronze chains and he was a grinder in the prison, a job for a mule (vv.18-21).

Because of his sin, the Lord left him—the judgment of abandonment. We find a similar sentiment in Proverbs:

Because I called and you refused, I stretched out My hand and no one paid attention and you neglected all My counsel and did not want My reproof, I will even laugh at your calamity. I will mock when your dread comes, when your dread comes like a storm and your calamity comes on like a whirlwind, when distress and anguish come on you, then they will call on Me but I will not answer. They will seek Me diligently but they shall not find Me. Because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the Lord. They would not accept My counsel, they spurned all My reproof. So they shall eat of the fruit of their own way and be satiated with their own devices (1:24-31). 

There comes a time when God abandons men. God comes to a point where He lets a people go, to the consequences of their own sinful choices. They will not accept His counsel; they spurn all His reproof. Of the Pharisees Jesus said, “Let them alone, they are blind leaders of the blind” (Matt. 15:14).

Terrifying words, “Let them alone.” It’s frightening to think about that. Frightening to think that you might be abandoned by God, that the opportunity for salvation is past, that the day of grace is over.

The passages I referred to point out that the wrath of abandonment happens to both individuals and nations. This is the story of history. All the nations of history go their own way. And like the nations of old, America is following the same cycle of having the truth, rejecting the truth, and being abandoned by God.

The Cycle of Abandonment

No Scripture more directly confronts this abandonment and its consequences than Romans 1. Here is the most graphic and the most comprehensive discussion of what it means to be abandoned by God.

It is also the best passage I know of to explain the moral chaos and confusion we are experiencing in our own nation right now. God’s wrath is already at work in our culture. We’re not waiting for it; we are currently experiencing it.

In verses 24, 26, and 28, you have the statement, “God gave them over.” This term paradidomi in the Greek can be used of a judgment made on a criminal who was then handed over for punishment. Each of these phrases expresses the fact that the wrath of God has acted judicially to sentence sinners. It is God letting them go to the uninterrupted cause and effect their sinful choices produce.

When this judgment falls, there is a depriving of restraining grace, and sin runs rampant through a society. Sin is both the cause of this and the effect . . . and the next cause and the next effect . . . and it goes on and on and on.

Notice the wrath of abandonment in its progression. It follows three sequential steps. First, “God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity that their bodies might be dishonored among them” (v. 24).

The first indication in a society of the wrath of abandonment is sexual immorality. When a society becomes pornographic, when the general character of a society can be seen to be immoral, this wrath is in effect. When man is abandoned by God, it operates only out of the passions of its own impure heart. The heart is wretched, and the body follows.

We can go back pretty readily in our own country to the sexual revolution connected to the hippie movement, connected to the Playboy empire’s beginning. Since then, our society has become increasingly pornographic, until even the Internet is dominated by millions and millions of immoral and pornographic websites to feed the insatiable lusts that dominate our culture.

This leads to the smashing and crushing of marriage. This leads to horrific and horrendous abuse of children, pedophilia, and all kinds of child abuse that continues to run rampant because restraining grace has been removed. As sex runs rampant, marriage becomes a minor option as people engage in immoral behavior readily and constantly without commitment.

Step two is found in verse 26, “For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions.” Now we’re not just talking about passions; we’ve added degrading. We’re going down. There is a greater debauchery here. The degrading passions can be defined as gross affections, vile desires, perversion. And here it is, “Their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural.”

The second step in the progression is lesbianism and homosexuality. The Holy Spirit refers first to the degradation of women because they are usually the last to be affected in the decay of morals. This is because they have a protective mothering instinct over their own children. But when the wrath of abandonment is in force, even the women fall to degrading passions.

But there’s a third step, in verse 28: “Just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind.” What is a depraved mind? The word literally means “tested and found useless, disqualified for its intended purpose,” a non-functioning mind. The third step in the progression is that reasoning is so corrupted that it is crippled.

The moral law of God written in the heart has been literally stomped and replaced with cultural immorality. The conscience cannot function. So immorality goes in every direction, and the mind is so corrupt it can’t find its way back. People don’t think right. Their brains don’t follow the paths they should. They advocate wretched things and depreciate virtuous things.

What flows out of this pornographic, homosexual, depraved culture? According to verse 29, “All unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice, gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful inventors of evil.” They even come up with new forms of evil. It’s like somebody opened the sewer of sin and let it run through society.

This is just any day in the newspaper, any day on the cable news network. This is just life in the world, in all its sinful forms. Without conscience, without reason, without restraint, a society becomes like lustful, immoral beasts running wild. It gets to the Jerry Springer level, where it’s just so bizarre and so corrupt that we laugh at the unconventional corruption. This is what happens when God abandons a society.

Why God Abandons

We’ve seen what it looks like when God abandons people and nations, but why does He do it? Verse 18 says, “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” God has abandoned our society because our society has first abandoned God.

There is no surer or sadder evidence of a corrupted, wicked, abandoned society than when that society will not tolerate anger against sin. Our society won’t tolerate anger against sin. Our society feeds on sin and wants no one to deny it its iniquities. The major reason God abandons is summed up in one statement: “We suppress the truth.”

In the western world, we’ve had the Word of God for centuries. In America we’ve had it for centuries. But this nation and the world have suppressed the truth in unrighteousness; we have crushed it under our preferences for sin. You cannot plead ignorance in our country.

So we look at a society today, particularly here in America, and we see a people amazingly influenced by the gospel; yet we see a people who do not honor God. Go back to verse 21, “They do not honor Him as God, they do not give thanks.” That is to say, they do not thank Him for being the source of everything they have.

Man’s problem is not that he can’t find God or that he can’t recognize God. Man’s problem is not that he can’t find the truth or recognize the truth. It is that he will not. They don’t want to honor God. To honor God would then cause them to be accountable to Him and to His law. Man would rather live without God in view at all.

Five Lies  Sinners Love

Man likes to live with five dominant lies. These are very comfortable to the sinner.

1. Life is random.
We’re all products of evolutionary chance—no purpose, no creator, no accountability. No one made us, we have no reason, and that’s why we are free in this random world to do what we want.

2. Truth is relative.
No absolutes, no standard. Ethics can be changed if you have enough clout and power and persistence, but there is no absolute truth. We’re all free to possess our own truth and demand the freedom to live our lives according to our own truth which is of our own invention.

3. People are basically good.
If they go bad, somebody else is to blame. Somebody abused them. They lack self-esteem. They have psychological problems based on environmental failures. But people are basically good. “I’m a good person.”

4. Everyone can change their own life.
Get control, take charge, become the person you want to be. You have the power to be whatever you want to be. That’s the biggest lie ever: “You can be everything you want to be.” There are certain things you can’t ever change. You cannot do anything you want to do, that’s ridiculous. But that fits the mantra of this maniacal kind of freedom in a sin-saturated culture.

5. The goal of life is self-satisfaction.
You hear people say, “This is who I am, take it or leave it, and I’m happy who I am.” And you want to say, “Well, we wish you weren’t; just go somewhere else.”

It’s this blatant kind of brash self-illusion. Life is random, truth is relative, people are basically good, everybody can change his own life if he chooses to, and the goal of life is self-satisfaction.

The truth is opposite that. God is sovereign, and nothing is random. The Bible is absolute truth. All people are basically sinful. Only Christ can change your life. And selfless submission to Jesus Christ is the goal of life. They’ve got it completely wrong.

So why would they honor a God they deny? Why would they give Him thanks? They think they’ve achieved everything on their own.

They can look at the beauty of this world, with all the good things that God has placed in it by His common grace, and they can’t thank Him for a sunset, for love, for children, for a baby, for a good meal, for a vacation, for rest, for sleep, for a comfortable chair. They can’t thank Him because then they would be acknowledging that He’s the source.

And into this vacuous self-centeredness is sucked deeper darkness. Go back to verse 21, “But they became empty in their speculations.” Futile. Empty. Useless. The end of verse 21 says, “Their foolish heart was darkened.”

They wouldn’t know, and now they couldn’t know. The darkness dominated. The light went out. Intellectual darkness and moral darkness turn to deadly spiritual darkness.

Becoming Fools

The wrath of abandonment comes to societies throughout all of human history because they will not acknowledge God, who has revealed Himself. And when there comes rejection, the light goes out. The darkness comes, and then rationalization sets in.

If it weren’t so sad, this would be funny. Verse 22 says, “Professing to be wise they became fools.” Their darkness is so profound that they can’t assess their true condition. So they profess to be wise.

It reminds me of the lady who went to the psychiatrist. She had a duck on a leash. The doctor said, “How can I help you, Ma’am?” She said, “It’s not me, it’s my husband. He thinks he’s a duck.”

You say, that’s ridiculous. It’s no more ridiculous, no more absurd, no more bizarre than congratulating yourself for your wisdom and knowledge and insight and achievement when your heart is black and shut out completely of true knowledge.   

Fools here is the word from which we get moron. We have a society of proud morons flaunting themselves as if they’re significant, as if they’re wise. They’re on endless talk shows, driveling out their folly.

The final straw comes in verse 23: “They exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.” Men create their own gods to accommodate their own useless ideas. False religion is man at the bottom.

You see, man does not ascend from the muck of paganism and ignorance up to the truth of God. That’s not how it works. Man is not evolving up. He is descending. He falls from the truth of God into the slime of satanic counterfeit. The ultimate insanity is to reject God and create a non-God that doesn’t exist, and to worship that.

Is it any wonder, then, that as a society we are struggling with our ethics? Is it any wonder that we’re struggling with our morals? We’ve rejected God. We have abandoned God, and God has returned the favor.

Our Only Hope

That brings the question, Is there any hope? Is there any hope for this country? Is there any hope for the western world?

All I can say is, there is a word of hope in Psalm 81. Let’s look at verse 11: “But My people did not listen to My voice and Israel did not obey Me so I gave them over to the stubbornness of their heart to walk in their own devices.” That’s Romans 1. This happened to Israel.

But notice verse 13, “O that My people would listen to Me, that Israel would walk in My ways. I would quickly subdue their enemies and turn My hand against their adversaries.” And I love verse 16, “And I would feed you with the finest of the wheat, and from honey from the rock I would satisfy you.” This is a plaintive cry from God who says He would turn from abandoning them to defending them and protecting them!

The key is in the phrases “listen to Me” and “walk in My ways.” The only hope for this or any other society is to hear the Word of the Lord and obey it.

I would suggest that this is not a good time for weak men to be preaching weak messages in weak churches. This is a time for bold, powerful, strong, biblical ministry that calls people to hear the Word of the Lord and respond. This is the only hope for any people or individual.

It’s not too late until Jesus comes. We can keep preaching this word to the ends of the earth, so that those under this wrath may be saved and escape the final and eternal wrath.

Oh, Lord, may there be a great revival of Your Word, and may people listen to it and obey it! To Your glory we ask these things, amen.

From a sermon by John MacArthur, found online at www.gty.org/Resources/Sermons/80-314.