0718021606 (CNTY) by Joshua Ryan Butler

Author:Joshua Ryan Butler
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2016-05-03T07:00:00+00:00

FLOPPING ON THE DOCK

Paul looks around in the Roman Empire of his day and observes:

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people. . . . God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity. . . . God gave them over to shameful lusts. . . . God gave them over to a depraved mind.4

Notice how Paul’s not saying here, “If you do these things, then God will eventually pour out his wrath on you.” He says rather, “When you do these things, God’s wrath is being revealed against you.” The emphasis here is not that the wrath of God will one day be revealed (though this shows up in other passages), but that it is being revealed today. And God’s wrath shows up in the very things folks do.

Notice also how the phrase “gave them over” shows up three times, structuring the passage—after each one, Paul gives a laundry list of naughty behaviors we run after. God is giving the people what they want: distance from him. People are jumping out of the ocean of God’s love into the dry and distant land of sin. When the fish gets its desire for dry land, its flopping around is the wrath of God. When Don Draper winds up isolated and miserable, he is receiving the due penalty for his pursuits.

God has an interesting way of showing his anger; he gives us what we want.

Thomas Aquinas, one of history’s most famous theologians, observed how when we attack God’s loving order, we unleash injustice, or disorder, into the way things are supposed to be. A husband’s affair affects not only him but shoots a cannon into his marriage and family. Wall Street’s bad loans impacted not only greedy bankers but threw a sledgehammer into the global economy. The BP oil spill not only hurt the company but wreaked havoc throughout the gulf. Sin lets loose ruin.

Think of the Artist in the painting image, with the dark decay we’ve unleashed in the painting. When creatures deface the masterpiece they’re a part of, that they were called to steward, the destruction unleashed is punishment. Like ripples spreading out from the stone’s splash in the water, sin ripples out, leaving devastation in its wake. The destruction we unleash infiltrates the created order, working its way through the painting and disrupting the harmony of the whole.

But sin also does something more. It impacts not only the world around us—it impacts us. For Aquinas:

The order of creation is such that when we rebel against this order, we disorder ourselves, losing our interior order and justice to ourselves . . . When humans turn away from this divine love and refuse our debt of justice, humans lack the justice we were created to have, that is inscribed in the created order . . . the resulting disorder is itself a punishment.5

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