NOTE: This is an unedited transcript and, therefore, contains imperfections and is not for publication or quotation in whole or in part by anyone without the express written consent of Pastor Conley. The audio tape of this message delivered in the evening service on May 30, 1999, is available and may be purchased from the Church.

RICHES OF GOODNESS, TREASURES OF WRATH

Romans 2:4-5

Dr. J. Drew Conley, Pastor

Kennerly Road Baptist Church, Columbia, South Carolina

On this Memorial Day weekend we honor those who gave their lives to preserve our freedoms. Certainly of all the nations on earth, we have been richly blessed. How many men and women, boys and girls, have died to gain freedom, but failed to do so in many other lands throughout history. As the songwriter has written, "Blessed with victory in peace, may the heaven-rescued land praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation." Of all the nations on earth, with perhaps the exception of God’s chosen people, Israel, we have been a nation blessed indeed in so many ways. I would like to talk to you this morning about the riches of God’s goodness and their relation to the treasures of His wrath.

Romans 2:4-5, "Or despiseth thou the riches of His goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance? But after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up unto thyself wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God." First, see with me "the goodness of God." Look with me at its content: The term goodness used here refers essentially to "kindness." It is often translated that way. It is not only a kind disposition of heart—it is a kindness that is expressed in doing favors for people. Certainly at whatever time a man lives and in whatever nation, God has done good. He is the author of good and He showers good on all people. "The earth is full of the goodness of the LORD," testifies the psalmist in Psalm 33:5. In Psalm 52:1, he says, "The goodness of God endureth continually." You can drop down into any point of history and find there displayed "the goodness of God" to human beings. In Psalm 107:8, the psalmist calls upon men to "Praise the LORD for His goodness and for His wonderful works [His miraculous works—works too great for man to achieve, but works that God, as God, can do] to the children of men." And then in Psalm 145:9, he says, "The LORD is good to all: and His tender mercies [His compassion] are over all His works." Psalm 145:16, "Thy openest Thy hand [speaking to God], and satisfieth the desire of every living thing." The fact that there is food for you to eat this day—the fact that the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and the animals of the field had something to eat is due to God’s benevolence. Continuing in verse 17, "The LORD is righteous in all His ways and holy in all His works"—there is no one like Him; He is set apart from them all. The great Psalm 103:2 calls upon us to "Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits."

Consider with me for a few moments this morning, "the goodness of God." In Psalm 24:1, "The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof" —it’s His: all its productivity (everything that makes it good to dwell on the earth) is because of God’s goodness. He made all things: the sun, the moon, the stars, the vast galaxies of space. "He hath made us, and not we ourselves" (Psalm 100:3). He made our minds, our bodies, our emotions, our imagination—he gave us the power to love and to laugh and to live—for our breath is in His hands. He makes the sun to rise on the evil and on the good—His sun shines not just on those who through Jesus Christ are righteous, but it shines on all sinners, and it shines for free. His rain falls on our fields, His earth yields its harvest. We make clothing from His cotton and His flax and His wool and His silk. We mine His iron and silver and gold. If you enjoy a happy marriage today, He is the one who gave it to you. The precious children growing up around you are loaned to you by Him for He is the sole giver of life. Your joys and your triumphs—the powers of intellect and of art, of music and of science, all these are gifts from a good God. "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning" (James 1:17). Whatever day you might choose, God is good on that day.

Someone will say, "But I have suffered and innocent children die; and people, as we have seen on the news, are driven from their homes as war and famine ravage the nations. How can you say that God is good?" Let’s consider that a moment. First, most of what people think of when they list such terrible things, are clearly traceable to the wickedness and cruelty of man—not the goodness of God. The Scriptures teach that all of the misery that rips through this earth harks back to sin’s entrance into the world—and that sin entered through man. Sickness, death, disorders, natural and national disasters are but bitter harvests of that first wicked seed. Have you considered that these calamities testify to you most certainly that all of the good things that you enjoy this day do not just happen—that they are, in fact, given you by God, and that they, in fact, can be taken away by God—even as you have witnessed in the lives of others. God’s bringing calamities and judgment—even death—gives us powerful reminders that there is most certainly a day when the enjoyment of His benefits will end. What will I do then? Amos, the Prophet, laments that his nation did not recognize their calamities as from the Lord, when he says in Amos 3:6, "Shall there be evil [calamity] in the city and the LORD hath not done it?" It was calamity from the Lord for the sins of the nation, and yet they did not see the hand of God trying to discipline them and turn them back to righteousness and blessing.

Today we enjoy even greater blessings in physical health and financial prosperity. You who sit here live in a land that has enjoyed great spiritual blessings: the Word of God is available to you as it has been to few generations that have ever lived upon the earth. God has called preachers and teachers to proclaim its truth to you, and how many times have you been privileged to hear and to understand it. You are perhaps a son or daughter of Christian parents who has grown up in a moral home and enjoyed an intact family in great distinction from many families in this day, and you did nothing to enjoy such blessings. They are sovereign gifts from God. He did not owe you these treasures—millions have not enjoyed these favors, but you have. In the context of this chapter in Romans, Paul is addressing the Jewish nation. He has already established that the Gentile nations (the nations of the earth to whom God did not initially reveal His Word) were nonetheless accountable to God, for they had a law written in their hearts that did not excuse them but condemned them before God. No man will be justified by the law, yet He now turns to address the Jews: those who had received the Scriptures and knew right from wrong—those who often stood in judgment of the Gentile nations who didn’t seem to know the difference and would say, "Those are wicked people, and we are righteous people—we have been favored by God with God’s special treatment and, therefore, we are safe." They were accorded in the words of one commentator, "An official nearness to God in the working out of the world’s redemption," but they misunderstand the purpose of those blessings as we will see. God has given us that kind of goodness as well: we have the Word of God, we have been taught as few people have been taught—just as the Jews that Paul addresses in this chapter.

God’s goodness consists not only in kindness, it also consists of forbearance. This is what we generally think of as "patience"—it means "to hold oneself up," and in this case it is God’s suspending of His wrath for a time: it is like a truce that He has with man—a cessation of war against man who is hostile to God and an enemy of God and running from God. Yet God says, "I am giving him a space of time. In Genesis 2:17, God told our first parents of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and said, "Thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Certainly in the day they ate of it they became mortal beings, but in grace God did not kill them that day, and in that sense Satan was telling them the truth—but it was a truth that he twisted: it was a truth that was actually a commendation of serving the Lord with all your heart, mind and strength, because the Lord was so good that He did not kill them on the day they ate of the fruit. He gave them time to repent.

One sin plunged the human race into misery and death, and when any of us commit even one sin, God has every right to execute us on the spot for it is an attack on our Creator—it is rebellion against the One who has made us—it is the height of ingratitude. When Adam and Eve sinned, He could have struck them dead in their tracks, but He did not. He could have ended the human race right then, but He did not. He was under no obligation to offer hope of rescue to any of their offspring, but He did and at great cost. The bloody sacrifice of Jesus Christ, His unique Son, paid the price. The second Person of the Godhead (God, all pure) became sin for us that we might be the righteousness of God in Him. God who is light took on darkness. God who is life died that we might have life. Nothing I could suffer on earth measures up to what I deserve as a sinner against God’s goodness and God’s righteous law. The question is not why God allows bad things to happen to seemingly good people, but why God allows so much good to come upon certainly bad people. Some times, in fact, it is the wicked man—the man known for his wickedness—who prospers most in this life. David testified in Psalm 37:35, "I have seen the wicked in great power spreading himself like a green bay tree." It is not unusual to see some of the most blasphemous and wicked people on earth live to a ripe old age in great abundance. Perhaps some of you (many of you stood today) have served our nation in the armed services and your lives were spared through many a battle in war while your fellow soldiers were cut down. Have you ever had a loved one in the hospital for a long time where you were visiting all the time? It gets to be that there in those vast houses of disease and death is where most of the world is, and when you drive away from the hospital, it seems the people driving about in good health are the exceptions. God has preserved your health; and despite the fact that many around you have died by accident or disease, you are alive today: His forbearance.

Now we will look at His longsuffering. It literally means "to be long tempered," and refers to that long holding out of the mind before it takes action. God has demonstrated over and over again His patience and His mercy—He grants us opportunities and encouragements to motivate us to repentance time after time after time. We have seen its content—its amount is described in one word, "riches." It is impossible to measure the value of His gifts—riches are that which is valuable—and it is impossible to count the number of them either: riches implies abundance. What would you pay for life? and yet it is yours today. What would you pay for sunlight? and yet God gives it to you free. What would you give for love—both the receiving of it and the giving of it? What would you pay for the ability to think? This just scratches the surface of what God has given you. They are immeasurable in value—you could not quantify their value, and you could not replace them if God takes them away. What would you give for what many of you hold on your laps this day? The words of God bound for the most part in leather, translated in your language, available to you with explanatory notes, and legal for you to possess and peruse. You say, "What’s the big deal? everybody has a Bible and most people have lots of Bibles." Well, many men for many generations gave their life blood to possess even a portion of what you have on your lap, and yet you may read it at leisure; and you may study it day in and day out and suffer no ill consequence whatsoever. The riches of God’s goodness.

What is the purpose of all this? "The goodness of God," in the second part of verse 4, "leadeth thee to repentance." Spurgeon put it this way, "The goodness of God to a man of evil life is intended to encourage him in his sin, but is meant to woo and win him away from it." It leads you "to repentance." What is repentance? Repentance is more than sorrow for sin, or the alarm about the punishment that comes from it. Repentance is that fundamental change of mind, a reversal of thinking. It is not a separate response from faith, but it is the flip side of it. You cannot turn to God without turning from sin, or other objects of confidence. To repent, Biblically defined, is to place faith in your God through Jesus Christ. You must turn, or you will never be saved. There must be a reversal, or you will never know eternal life. The fact that God leads us to repentance by showering us with the riches of His goodness, tells us that there is something in our nature that is wrong. There is something in our direction that needs reversal: we are thinking the wrong way—we are headed for trouble. Whatever class we are a part of, whatever religion, whatever nation, whatever age, we must repent and all of this showering of blessings: the sun, the crops, the health, the life, the Word, the family, all these are gifts of God to turn our hearts to Him. He leads you to repentance.

In Luke 24 and also in Acts 1:8, we are taught that the gospel is essentially that message of preaching repentance and remission (forgiveness) of sins. Jesus said in Luke 24 that it was to be preached first in Jerusalem. To us, Jerusalem is the center of the holy land, but let us recall that when Jesus Christ said these words, He was but days out of a tomb and had been put in the tomb after crucifixion organized and driven by Jewish leadership that hated Him and Roman soldiers that went along. In other words, this was the place dominated by those who murdered Jesus—this was the place so hard to the preaching of Jesus that for some time before the last week of His life, Jesus avoided Jerusalem altogether. This was the place where His most determined enemies held sway, and yet this is the place the gospel was first to go: "beginning in Jerusalem, preach repentance and forgiveness of sins." What a display of the grace of God. What a display of His power to convert the soul. What a demonstration of His goodness that overleaps the brutal hostility of man—the hatred of Him. Indeed, as you read those beginning chapters, we are swept away by the thousands that turned to Him—among them even the priests who just weeks before had conspired to see Him dead. They were to preach not only in Jerusalem, but they were to preach this message to all nations, to every created being, to the uttermost part of the earth—for all must repent and all need forgiveness. The goodness of God leads you to turn around. There is not a soul here who has not drunk deeply from the well of God’s goodness, but yet how many still have to turn. I can only see with the eyesight of man—I can only evaluate with the mind of man—but God knows. In any group of this size, there are many who sit here recipients of God’s great blessings who have yet to turn. You think His blessing means something different: you think His blessing means everything is okay. No, it leads you to repentance—to turn around.

That is what our text tells us next, that in the face of this goodness of God, there is the stubbornness of man. Matthew Henry, pastor and great commentator, said, "There is in every willful sin a contempt for the goodness of God"—the stubbornness of man. This stubbornness is given to us in three major phrases. At the beginning of verse 4 note the words, "Despiseth thou the riches of His goodness." The word despise means "to think down on"—it has the idea of devaluing or ignoring, of counting something as less valuable than it is. In other words, man has a problem first with his affection, and with his desires. He does not consider valuable what God pours out in goodness in his life. He considers God’s goodness to him, in the words of one man, "either indulgence or indifference"—either that God is just going to indulge you forever, that He really doesn’t care what you do, He’ll just keep pouring in this goodness with no purpose or design; or that God is indifferent—He doesn’t care what you do with it. Neither is true. The fact is that most people do not even consider that life could be any other way. We develop a sort of "I deserve it" mentality (when it is generally the most comfortable who complain the most) and we do not, in fact, deserve it. When it comes to spiritual truths and blessings most people have no time or interest in them—they consider them irrelevant and time consuming, taxing and restrictive: God is but a convenient myth, or impersonal force, or a heavenly Santa Claus, or just a useful curse word. Man’s affection is messed up. Man’s affection is stubborn in resisting God’s goodness.

Man’s stubbornness is not the only problem man has, he has a problem with his intellect. Notice, it says in the second part of verse 4, "not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance." The term translated "not knowing" is the term we get agnostic from—the person who says, "Well, I just don’t know whether there is a God. There is just not enough evidence for me. I am just holding off in intellectual self-control. I’m not going to plunge myself into this just yet—I just don’t know." Perhaps there would be fewer who claim to be agnostics if they knew the literal translation of the word is "to be ignorant, or to ignore." Certainly it is to be ignorant (ignorance is different from stupid) which means to "not be informed," but it also means "to ignore" which seems to fit better. A man who is agnostic is ignoring the evidence: "not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance." We worship man’s mind this day. Men set themselves up in great arrogance. [One of the telling marks of a false teacher, no matter what title he bears or whatever camp he is in, is the mark of great arrogance—he looks down on other people and uses terms that diminish other people and their worth and exalt himself.] Ephesians 4:18 describes the state of man’s natural mind when Paul speaks of the Christians there before they were saved as "walking in the vanity [the emptiness] of their mind, having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them." Why are they ignorant? Because of the blindness (hardness) of their heart. They are willingly ignorant—they are stubbornly ignorant. Man’s problem with God—his intellectual problem with God—is not a problem of capacity, it is a problem with his will: he will not face reality. Some of you sitting here have yet to face reality. The goodness of God has been poured out on you, and you have yet to turn. What will it take? What more could He do on your behalf?

The third area of man’s difficulty is that of his will. Even this text lays down that man’s intellectual problem is rooted in a heart problem. Verse 5, "But after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up unto thyself wrath"—the heart, that is the level to which God’s judgments go. His justice is not superficial justice; His evaluation is not an inaccurate evaluation—it reaches right down to the depths of who you are: God sees it, God knows it, you cannot give Him an excuse that will wash. The term used here for "hardness of heart" is a term we use in medicine: sclerosis meaning "hardness"— "callousness"—it has the idea of being insensible. In other words, you are not sensing what you ought to be sensing—you are insensitive to God’s love, you are insensitive to reason, you are insensitive to His warnings, your heart is hard. Christ would have gathered His people to Him like a hen gathers her chicks, but they were not willing—and so it is with many of us today. Just as the Jews have been blessed with God’s Word and God’s favor (most of us here have been blessed with the same sort of blessings), and yet how many still do not want Christ nor His salvation: they are determined to do their own thing, their own way, even if that way inevitably leads to eternal death. Romans 1:28-32 describe current day America in our unwillingness to even retain God in our thinking: "And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge [It literally means ‘they did not approve of God’. We do not approve of God. How descriptive of our day. Some judge in a robe says, ‘I do not approve of God’], God gave them over to a reprobate mind [That means, ‘a disapproved mind.’ God says, ‘You do not approve of me, I will give you over to a disapproved mind—I do not approve of you.’ Who is in a worse state—the man who says, ‘I do not approve of God,’ or God who says, ‘I do not approve of you’? What is the evidence that a man has thus been given over?] to do those things which are not convenient [not appropriate, not proper]; being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness [this reads like the description of the movie industry in the TV Guide this week]; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity [the divorce courts]; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents [your family life], without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful [your political life]; who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them [in fact, they make it illegal if you don’t celebrate it too]." Hardness of heart.

We, like the Jews a couple of millennia ago, take comfort in the fact that God has created our nation—He has blessed our nation—God created the Jewish nation, He chose their nation, He gave them His Word, He set His temple among them. These gifts squandered become pieces of evidence for the prosecution, and so it shall be with us: individually and as a nation, God’s brighter light given will prove our greater ruin if we do not use it.

I would have you see, finally, the certainty of judgment. Verse 3 says, "And thinkest thou this, O man, that judgest them which do such things, and doest the same, that thou shalt escape the judgment of God?" In other words, it is very easy for human thinking to drift into the "I thank God that I am not as other men" mode. There is hardly a person to whom I have talked to about the Lord who cannot find someone who is worse than he is—and usually says something like, "Well, I’m not so bad," or is quick to find fault with someone even if it is with the person who is giving him the gospel. One commentator puts it this way, "It is now, as it was of old, only too possible to read or to hear the most searching and also the most sweeping condemnation of human sin, and to feel a sort of false moral sympathy with the sentence: a righteous indignation against the wrong and the doers of it; and yet wholly to mistake the matter by thinking that you are righteous though the world is wicked. You listen as if you were allowed a seat beside the judge’s chair, and can listen with grave and yet untroubled approval to the discourse preliminary to his giving of the sentence. Ah, such a person is the assessor of the accused. [How often we will sit around and assess the righteousness, or lack of it, in other people, yet the fact is that we are an accomplice of our fallen fellows. We are poor guilty sinners ourselves.] Let him awake to himself and to his sin—in time." Man tends to judge others in self-confident importance, when the fact is that it is just a matter of degrees, and all of us are sinners so bad that we cannot recover ourselves—only God can save us.

How serious is even the smallest sin? You say, "I belong to God and have been in a family that were Christians, I have gone to church all of my life, and I am a lot more moral than most people are—in fact, I am a lot like those Jews were in Christ’s day." Consider this, Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God. He is a member of the Trinity, and yet when He took sin on Him, "God spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all." Despite the relationship, when sin was heaped upon the Son of God, He had to endure the wrath of God. It is presumptuous for us to think that any of us will escape, if the Son of God by taking sin on Himself had to suffer God’s judgment. Verse 5 says, "But after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up unto thyself wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God." That word, treasure is the word we get "thesaurus" from (a book that is a treasury of words and synonyms so you can find a different word and not use the same words over and over again when you write your English theme). This is a treasury, and in the Scriptures it is used of any kind of treasury: treasury of gold or silver. But in this case, it is a treasury of wrath. When you treasure up something, it means you "store it up" or "treasure it up" by gradual accumulation—by definition, it means there is an abundance there. In the words of Matthew Henry, "This is a treasure that will be spending to eternity but never exhausted." It is a treasury indeed, but it is a treasury of wrath. You will notice he uses the present tense: "treasurest up unto thyself," in other words, this is something that is ongoing this very moment. Every blessing you receive—every blessing you enjoy at this moment—you continue to treasure up this wrath unless you repent. Notice further that he uses the reflexive [verb having an identical subject and direct object], "unto thyself"—in other words, it is your own doing: you are doing this for yourself to yourself.

What is wrath? It is not the sudden outburst or fleeting anger; it is a settled abiding condition of mind with the purpose of revenge. Remember, the Lord said, "Vengeance is mine." There is a day coming—God has settled it, He is planning for it, He is storing up for it—when His wrath will be unleashed on those who will not repent. It is already determined—it’s not just a fleeting fancy; it’s not that He just loses control: it is something He has settled on and will certainly bring to pass. "The sinner himself," in the words of one commentator, "is amassing like hoarded treasure, an every accumulating stock of divine wrath to burst upon him in the day of wrath." There is a definite time: it is in the day of wrath—it is in the day of the Lord’s appearing: a major theme in the Old and New Testaments. Luke 17:28-30, for example, "Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded [in other words, they were living life just as you do]; but the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all. Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed." There is a day, there is a time, it is on God’s calendar, and wrath will come. It will be the revelation, the unveiling, of the righteous judgment of God. In other words, it will be according to correct standards. There will be no one who can cry "foul," and there will be no appeals. We are sure that the judgment of God is "according to truth," as verse 2 says, "against them which commit such things," and it is a decision. In fact, righteous judgment is one word in the original language and refers to God’s perfect distribution of justice. Remembering that to judge means not to just "condemn" but to "pick out, separate, approve, determine, render a decision;" and in this context we know that that decision will be condemnation on those who will not repent. You say, "Pastor, that is a pretty dark picture. I don’t like thinking about things like that." It is best you think about it now. Do not mistake the goodness of God to be a guarantee that His wrath will not fall. It is a guarantee of just the opposite: it is leading you to repentance, and it heightens your guilt if you will not turn. If you will not turn, you will never be able to say to God, "God, You never gave me a chance." You will never be able to say, "God, You treated me wrong." No, the goodness of God has led you to repentance; it has led you to turn to Him. You will have no excuse. In Romans 3:19 we read, "Every mouth will be stopped." We will all be guilty before God unless we turn—unless we place faith in Jesus Christ.

Let me say, Do not despair; for your judgment has not fallen yet. There is a day of wrath coming, but it is not yet for you—you are here. God’s grace, God’s forbearance, is still offered to you. "Judgment is a strange work," according to Isaiah 28:21, and God designs even His warnings of certain judgment to move you to turn to Him. If His goodness will not do it, perhaps His warnings will. Perhaps you are among those who think it is too late, that you have lived too long and sinned too great, that God would never grant you mercy. Such is not the case, you are precisely the person that He addresses in this text. His goodness even in preserving you to this day proves that He would receive you if you would turn in faith to Him. In fact, the reason He has not ended human history yet by coming in glory and judgment is not that His promise of coming is slack, but His mercy is great: He is "not willing that any should perish, but that all would come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9). All includes you. His Word says He delighteth in mercy. He says, "as I live . . . I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live" (Ezekiel 33:11). If you would turn, you would live; and despite the fact that to this time you have turned away the goodness and the grace that He has offered you; you have shut your eyes; you have made your heart stubborn; you have made your intellect hard against Him. God would forgive you even of that if you would turn. Today is the day of salvation. Jesus Christ says these marvelously comforting words in John 5:24, "Verily, verily [this is the word we get ‘Amen’ from which means ‘indeed, indeed, it is so, you can bank on it’] I say unto you [with the authority of Jesus Christ Himself], He that heareth my word, and believeth on Him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation [that word is ‘judgment’—you will not even come into judgment if you will turn today]; but is passed from death unto life." You ask, "How is that my turning can cause me to escape this wrath that I deserve?" Because God’s judgment has already been poured out on Christ at Calvary, and those who are in Christ are safe from wrath for judgment will not fall there again. Let God’s goodness turn your wayward heart and lead you safely home to His embrace. Be reconciled to Him through Jesus who died in your place and calls you by His goodness to enjoy His eternal forgiveness.

In the words of John Newton, "God knows the thousands who go down from pleasure into endless wrath and, with long despairing groan, blaspheme their Maker as they go. O fearful thought be timely wise. Delight but in a Savior’s charms and God shall take you to the skies embraced in everlasting arms." The goodness of God leads you to repentance—now which will you have: the riches of His goodness or the treasures of His wrath?

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