The title of this sermon may not inspire a lot of people listen to it. The title is The Wrath of God. I think it is fair to say that a lot of people don’t see what God has to be angry about. Why in the world would God be so mad about some of the things going on out here in the world? He may be a little bit annoyed about it all; but angry, wrathful? When people read scriptures about the wrath of God, they shiver a little bit; but I think, they really, really, don’t understand.
Someone asked the question, Why did God have to kill the firstborn of Egypt, just to get the Israelites out? After all, he is God. He is sovereign. He is all-powerful. Couldn’t he have found a better way to get the children of Israel out of Egypt than have to kill all the firstborn of Egypt? The kids had not done anything had they?
To us, the generations of Israelites held in slavery is just so many words on paper. We read it. We open the Bible, we know what’s there, and we forget. I think we don’t have a grasp for this, to really understand why God did what he did: not only why he did it, but why it had to be done that way.
I am going to take a shot and try to help you understand the wrath of God, to understand the anger of God, and I want you to turn back to the first chapter of the Book of Exodus, to a passage of Scripture that is very familiar, I think, to most of us, but one which I think has not been explored in the kind of depth that it needs.