Under A Storm Cloud

Anyone who doesn’t obey the Son will never experience eternal life but remains under God’s angry judgment.   John 3:36

John the Baptist didn’t say that on the last day God’s “angry judgment” (or wrath) would suddenly come, but rather that it would remain. The wrath of God toward sin is like a great storm cloud that hangs over us. It stays there unless and until sin is taken away.

Jesus came into the world to take this judgment away from us. He will do this for all who come to him in faith. But where Christ is rejected, the storm cloud of God’s wrath remains.

The rest of the Bible story bears witness to God’s relentless hostility toward all evil. God is determined to destroy evil, and on the day Adam sinned in the Garden, God pronounced a curse on the serpent. Evil will not stand forever.

The Old Testament records that sin kept growing, and God kept cutting it back. But at the end of the story, God will destroy sin altogether. When the apostle John was given a glimpse of this future judgment of God, he saw that the enemies of God will “drink the wine of God’s anger. It has been poured full strength into God’s cup of wrath” (Revelation 14:10).

Many people miss God’s warning, not by denying what he said about judgment, but by ignoring it. When that happens, the message of Christianity will undergo a subtle change. The emphasis will be on coming to Christ to find a more fulfilling or satisfying life.

But that is not the heart of the gospel. Jesus came into the world to bring us from death to life. He died to deliver us from hell and bring us into everlasting life in his presence. God’s salvation is about more than your experience of life; it’s about where you will spend eternity.

Nobody ever spoke more clearly or powerfully about God’s love or about God’s implacable hostility toward evil than Jesus did. He never manipulated people’s emotions, nor did he embellish the joys of heaven or exaggerate the pains of hell. Jesus is the Son of God, so I have to take seriously every word he spoke. If you claim to be a Christian, so do you. It’s part of following him.

For further reading, see Revelation 14