Many Christians have never even thought about this idea. “Wrath of God? That’s not something that happens anymore” is typically the response I hear when I pose the question. If you are a Christian and you wake up every morning without fear of God, how do you do it? Just think of the past 24 hours. You know your heart; you know the sins you’ve committed; if you know anything about Isaiah 6, you know that even the holiest man on earth at the time understood he was unworthy when standing before God. So why did you not fear the wrath of God? It’s because one of three things:
- You simply don’t care.
- You don’t believe that God is holy and that you are a sinner.
- You understand that “since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:1).
Justification is the very ground by which we can claim that we have peace with God; but many people today don’t even care about having peace with God. It’s not because they don’t want to have peace with God; it’s because they are so numb to our undeniable mortality.
Think about the reformation. People were all about being at peace with God! Martin Luther, the leader of the Protestant Reformation, was driven nuts in Catholicism because he could never find peace with God. Who knew that one search for peace would start a reformation that reshaped the history of the world as we know it? Here’s another thing to consider; it was on average that a woman would have to give live birth to 10 children before one would live long enough to reach adulthood. Infant mortality was running wild in those times. The Black Plague that killed over 1/3 of Europe was just a couple centuries before the reformation. Mortality was real, and people knew that. But what about today? We can watch a two hour movie in the theatres where 23 people are killed or die, but by the time the movie ends, everyone is fat and happy again. We have lost our grip on the reality of our mortality.
We don’t seek peace with God because we don’t feel the pressure of the importance of actually being right with God. We see death around us all the time, but we really don’t see it for what it truly is. The mauled cars on the side of the road; the picture on Facebook of someone’s child dying from cancer; the murder rate of Chicago in recent years; we look it, say, “That can’t happen to me,” and continue on with our day. We are self-deceived and that is why we have no passion for evangelizing to the lost and dying world outside of our little safe bubble.
How do we solve this problem? Well, for one, I would tell you to get on your knees and repent to God of taking this matter lightly. Make sure you let him know that you understand that you have peace with him through Christ and actually understand that. Then, get out there and start telling the rest of the self-deceived world that you either 1) have peace with God, or 2) need to find that peace through Christ. Make sure that now every time you wake up in the morning, you look at the reality of your mortality, but also that you comfort yourself in the truth that your mortality might be real, but your God’s grace is sufficient to make this mortal put on immortality (1 Cor 15:54).
