Title: We Need Rescue From Idolatry
Scripture: Romans 1:18-23
Speaker: Nathan Miller, NathanM@cckc.church

"God’s wrath in the Bible is never the capricious, self-indulgent, irritable, morally ignoble thing that human anger so often is. It is, instead, a right and necessary reaction to objective moral evil." - J.I Packer

> You can’t have God’s love without God’s wrath

"I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them.

My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry…

How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love." - Miroslav Volf

> God’s wrath is worst when we scorn His best

> We scorn His best through willful blindness

"In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't." - Blaise Pascal

" I had long wondered from an epidemiological and clinical perspective if some types of depression might be a symptom of a person’s craving for spirituality and a call for the spiritual self to awaken. Now we could see in a physiological, material way that spirituality is a consciousness for which all our brains are wired; and that, long-term, the spiritually engaged brain is a healthier brain." - Lisa Miller

> We scorn His best through foolish arrogance

> We scorn His best through empty exchange

> There’s only one way to be rescued