“Escaping the Fire of God’s Wrath”
Joel 2:12, 13
2/6/08 - Ash Wednesday
Yet even now, declares the LORD, return to me with
all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend
your hearts and not your garments. Return to the LORD, your God,
for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in
steadfast love; and He relents over disaster.
Recently we saw in the news how a fire in the Monte
Carlo Hotel in Las Vegas forced the evacuation of everyone in the
building. We were told that the employees of the hotel had to go
from floor to floor, room by room, warning people to get out. One
piece of footage was especially telling, as we saw a wedding party in
the middle of a reception making a hasty exit from the hotel.
These are the images that came to my mind as I was reading Joel’s
words from this evening’s O.T. lesson: “Let the
bridegroom leave his room, and the bride her chamber.” With
these words Joel impresses upon us the urgency of returning to the Lord
with our whole heart, not in a mere show of repentance, but in
sincerity and truth. Like a warning to get out of a burning
building fast, God tells us to drop everything we’re doing, take
His warning seriously, and repent, in order that we might escape the
fire of His wrath. Nothing, not even a wedding, is more important
than humbling ourselves before God, confessing our sin to Him, and
seeking His grace and mercy for the sake of our crucified Lord.
And so, God’s call to repentance through the
prophet Joel is to be heeded, even by Christians. We might think
this warning doesn’t apply to us. We’re already out
of the building; we’ve already escaped the fire through faith in
Christ. And yet, in reality, by way of our sins we keep running
back into it. We’re like a gambler who can’t leave a
winning table even while the casino burns to the ground around
him. The temptation to sin keeps pulling us back into the
condemned building, where there’s nothing but death and
destruction. Like the Apostle Paul, we are sold under sin and we
don’t understand our own actions. We don’t do what we
want, but we do the very things we hate. When we want to do
right, evil is close at hand. We’re wretched people, unable
to stop sinning, unable to return to God with all our heart, let alone
with fasting, weeping, and mourning. We’d rather stay in
the building while it burns than run away from it, run towards our
merciful Lord, and escape with our lives.
Perhaps we don’t take the warning seriously
because we don’t see the fire. In the case of the Monte
Carlo Hotel, everyone saw that there was a fire, and so they listened
to the warnings and got out of the building. But with the fire of
God’s wrath, we hear the words of warning, but where’s the
fire? Everything seems to be going fine, at least in our
particular section of the building. Life is good.
We’ve got money. We’ve got homes. We’ve
got family and friends. God is blessing us. There are no
signs of impending doom on the horizon. Why should we take
God’s warnings seriously? Where’s the fire?
If anyone wanted to know where the fire was in the
Monte Carlo Hotel, all one had to do was point to the top of the
building and say, “There it is!” You couldn’t
possibly miss it. You saw the fire and the smoke billowing out of
the building. Likewise, we can also point to the fire of
God’s wrath. It was seen as it was poured out onto the
cities of Sodom and Gomorra. It was seen at Mt. Sinai, where the
mountain was wrapped in smoke when God descended on it in fire.
It showed up at other times during the ministry of the prophets, for
example, when fire fell down from heaven and consumed Elijah’s
offering on Mt. Carmel, wood, stones, water, carcass, and all.
And the Scripture tells us that the fire of God’s wrath will be
seen again on the Last Day, when what happened to Sodom and Gomorra
will happen to the world and all those who refuse to repent. It
will be a day when the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, the
heavenly bodies will melt as they burn, and the wicked will be thrown
into the Lake of Fire.
But there’s one other place where the fire of
God’s wrath can be seen, and that is at the cross of
Christ. There as the shed blood of Jesus atoned for the sins of
the whole world, God’s fiery judgment consumed Him, just as fire
consumed the animal sacrifices of the O.T. The crucifixion of
Jesus is the clearest picture of the fire of God’s wrath.
That wrath was clearly seen not only in the physical agony that Jesus
endured, but also in the darkness that covered the earth, and in the
words of despair that our Lord uttered from the cross: “My
God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Christ’s
cross clearly shows us exactly what God warns us of as the just reward
for our sins. We all justly deserve the fire of God’s wrath
which Jesus suffered on Mt. Calvary.
But God points us to the cross not simply to show us
what we deserve on account of our sins. The message of the cross
is not simply, “Repent, or this will happen to you, too,”
but more importantly it tells you that Jesus was consumed by the fire
of God’s wrath for you, and that His sacrifice takes away your
guilt and atones for your sin, so that you might not have to experience
the fire of God’s wrath yourself. We have a picture of this
in the O.T. where Isaiah had a vision of God in the temple. He
wrote, “In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting
upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of His robe filled the
temple. Above Him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings:
with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and
with two he flew. And one called to another and said:
‘Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full
of His glory!’ And the foundations of the thresholds shook
at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with
smoke. And [Isaiah] said: ‘Woe is me! for I am lost;
for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of
unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of
hosts!’ Then one of the seraphim flew to [Isaiah], having
in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the
altar. And he touched [Isaiah’s] mouth and said:
‘Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away,
and your sin atoned for.’”
Now, what was the meaning of this act by the angel
of taking a coal from the altar and touching Isaiah’s lips with
it? Why did the coal take Isaiah’s guilt away and atone for
his sin? Think about it... What was burned on the
altar? The animal sacrifices. So, what would the coals have
been? Where would they have come from? The ashes of the
animal that had been sacrificed. And so, the body of the animal
that had been sacrificed and burned by fire, applied to Isaiah by the
angel, took away his guilt and atoned for his sin. What does this
teach us about Christ, then? That Jesus, the Lamb of God who
takes away the sin of the world, whose sacrifice on the cross was
applied to you at your Baptism, has atoned for your sin and taken away
your guilt. We are here tonight with ashes in the shape of the
cross applied to our foreheads to remind us that it was because of the
sacrifice of Jesus, who endured the fire of God’s wrath for us on
the cross, that we, whose bodies have been cleansed with His blood,
will not have to endure that wrath ourselves. Though we are dust
and to dust we shall return, we will not remain in the dust, but will
be raised from the dead just as our Lord was and live and reign with
Him for all eternity. We will not have to spend eternity in the
Lake of Fire under God’s wrath. In Jesus that fire has been
put out. God’s fiery anger no longer burns against you who
are in Christ, because it was spent on His Son. For
Christ’s sake, God is “gracious and merciful, slow to
anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and He relents over
disaster.” We are reminded of the mercy of God over Nineveh
and how He relented of the disaster that He had threatened against them
when they repented in sackcloth and ashes at the preaching of
Jonah. God’s will is not that you be consumed in the fire
of His wrath, but that you confess your sins and trust in God’s
mercy for the sake of Jesus, the sacrifice for your sins, and so be
saved.
This is not just a message for unbelievers to hear,
but for Christians too, since we always remain sinners in this
life. We’re like Lot and his family, who hesitated to leave
Sodom and Gomorra when they were told that God was going to destroy the
cities with fire. It took a couple of angels to seize them by the
hand and lead them out. So, with us... God’s warning to
return to Him in repentance is given out of His mercy towards us.
He wants to spare us His fiery wrath. The messengers He uses
today to do this are pastors and fellow Christians, who with the Word
of God must take us by the hand and pull us out of the fire, pulling us
back to the cross of Christ, in order that we might receive God’s
mercy and forgiveness, so that we won’t be consumed by His wrath.
As the Apostle Paul writes in this evening’s
epistle text, “Now is the favorable time; now is the day of
salvation.” We’re in a period of time now between the
pouring out of God’s wrath on Jesus on Calvary and the pouring
out of His wrath on the world on the Last Day. God is waiting
patiently for us to repent and believe the Gospel. The Apostle
Peter writes that God’s patience means salvation for us. He
does not want to pour out His wrath on anyone. He wants all to be
saved and come to a knowledge of the truth. And we who have been
saved and given the knowledge of the truth in Jesus Christ are called
to continue to confess our sins, to continue to return to the Lord our
God in repentance, so that we might continue to hear our sins forgiven
for Christ’s sake and live under God’s grace and
mercy. We along with the Apostle Paul are indeed wretched people
on account of our sins, but thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our
Lord! He endured the fire of God’s wrath for us on the
cross, so that we might not have to. May the meditation of your
Lord’s suffering and death led you to true repentance this Lenten
season and always, that you might live under God’s abundant
steadfast love now and forever. Amen.