"For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who hold the truth in unrighteousness." (Rom. 1:18.)
The Bible is the Word of God, not only contains the Word, but is the Word of God. You believe it? Yes? But how many are living as though it is? How many are living the Word? The criticism of the Chinese as they see men from America, supposing that all are Christians, is, "You are not as good as your Book." God speaks to us in this Word. How much attention are you paying to it? If your children disobeyed you as persistently as you have disobeyed God, what would you do to them? Your life is a continual disregard of the claims of God. We call Nero a monster because he murdered his mother; but the sinner is crucifying the Son of God, counting His blood a common thing, and putting Him to an open shame, and repeating it every day, all the time.
This Book tells us of heaven -- says that heaven is for the righteous. The pure in heart shall see God. I go to prepare a place for you, my disciples, that where I am there ye (my disciples) shall be also. Do you expect to get to heaven? Do you really mean it? Are you sure that you are not confused, taking a desire for a hope? You know there is a vast difference between a desire and a hope. You no doubt desire a million dollars, but you have no hope of getting it. Let us examine and see upon what your hope is based. The Word says, "Blessed are they that do His commandments; they shall enter in through the gates into the city." The first commandment to all is, Repent. John, the forerunner of Jesus, preached Repent. They took his head off, and I really think that more preachers would have their heads taken off if they would preach repentance. Jesus came and the first thing He preached was repentance, and they criticized Him. The Apostles on the Day of Pentecost preached, "Repent and be ye converted." And only one of them died a natural death. Repentance is not the easy thing that some folks think. It means something to repent. Let me ask you, Have you repented? When did you repent? Do you remember? God says in this Word to us, He that covereth his sins shall not prosper, but he that forsaketh and confesseth shall find mercy. If we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. When the Prodigal came to himself he said, "I will arise and go unto my father and I will say unto him I have sinned" -- in other words, I will go unto him and confess. How much confessing did you do? This is one of the commandments, and we cannot evade it. Men do not like to confess. They are like Dr. Juniper, an old colored herb doctor in Baltimore. He was attending a revival service, and being under deep conviction, he went to the altar and prayed earnestly. The folks at the altar were getting through finely, and the old doctor did not know what to make of it that he did not get through; so he said, "O God, I guess you don't know who I is; I is Dr. Juniper." But the Lord did not pay any more attention to Dr. Juniper than before. And still the others kept praying through. The old doctor really wanted God and was now almost heart broken, and lifting his hands and voice he cried, "O God, I isn't Dr. Juniper; I is nothing but a poor old sinner." And that very moment he got through. Have you confessed your sins to Him? I was in a meeting in an Ohio town and after the meeting a woman came to me and said, "I have done everything but one. I must go to a woman I lied about and tell her." She seemed to think it was her duty to go and tell the woman, and I did not say her nay. The Word of God says, "Let the sinner forsake his ways and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him return unto the Lord, for he will find mercy." You expect to get to heaven? Have you forsaken all sin and sinful associations? How much forsaking did you do? Did you leave the card table, the dance, the moving picture show, the theater, the snuff and tobacco)? You see it says, "his ways." Was this one of your filthy ways? A clean case of religion gives a man a clean mouth. It will change the color of his spit. Oh, yes, God demands forsaking on our part. Have you forsaken the old crowd? I remember of a case where a young woman went to a revival meeting accompanied by her escort, and during the meeting she arose, left him and went to the altar. He was so angry lie left her and went home. A real gentleman would have waited. The next day she received a letter in which she was told, "If you are going with those people, you cannot go with me." And that little woman sat down and wrote him one of the sweetest little letters he ever had received, and it said just one thing, "Good-bye." She left all things, associations and associates to go with God. This was very different to a case at Shephardsville, Mich., when a young woman came to the altar. There were a number of young persons at the altar, and they were praying through, too, and she prayed so earnestly that I was ready to shout for the victory that appeared to be in sight. All at once she stopped praying, wiped away her tears and rose up and said, "The Lord shows me that my friend will be saved." I saw it at once and I said to myself, "Tricked by the devil." She was keeping Company with an ungodly man. The Lord told her to give him up. The enemy came and said to her, "Your friend will be saved; that is all right." And she listened to him; the thing suggested was in harmony with her own inclinations, and she was caught with the guile of Satan and missed the experience that God wanted to give her. If any man will be my disciple let him do as did Matthew of old; he arose, left all, folks and everything else, and followed Jesus.
It is better to go with God than folks. Abram went with God, but Lot went with Abram. Lot went to Sodom, and lost his wife and some of his children; but Abram walked before God and received the promise of all the land. Be ye holy is a command. This is the will of God even your sanctification. Rejoice evermore, pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God concerning you. If any man will do my will he shall know the doctrine. Do you have the experience? Have you got a hope of heaven? Repented and know you did? Confessed clear through and know you did? Forsaken all sin and all sinful associations, all secret sins and secret places, come out from among them and are separate and clean and you know it. Then to you comes with power the Word of God, "Blessed are they that do His commandments for they shall have a right to the tree of life and enter through the gates into the city."
There is a heaven and there is a hell. Believe it? Oh, I do not know so surely about that. Where did you get your knowledge of heaven? From the Word of God? Yes and nowhere else. I know there is a heaven on the authority of God's Word, and on the same authority I know there is a hell. If thy right arm offend thee, cut it off. It is better to enter into life maimed, than having two arms to be cast into hell fire where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched. Who said that? Jesus did. In hell the rich man lifted up his eyes being in torment. Who said so? Jesus did. Hell from beneath is moved to meet thee at thy coming. God's Word for it. The wicked shall be turned into hell with all the nations that forget God. Oh, just as surely as you make a map of the universe you write down "heaven," so surely write down hell, for there is one and it will be the eternal home of the sinner who refuses to repent and go with God. There is wrath, and my text tells us of wrath revealed from heaven; the wrath of God against sin and the unrepentant sinner. And I would say here, the Word tells us of wrath to come, not as a threat, but as a warning. Because there is wrath. Beware!
Now to our text. Wrath revealed in the Word. Why did God drive out of Eden our first parents? Because they did what you are doing every day -- they sinned against Him. Why did God destroy the Antediluvian world? Because they sinned against Him. Why were the cities of the plains destroyed, and left in ruins by the fires of heaven that God rained down upon them? Because they sinned. Oh, sin is no joke -- no dream. Sin is the thing that God hates, whether in an angel or a man. If the angels who kept not their first estate were cast down to be reserved in chains of darkness unto the judgment of the great day, how shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation. Achan took a wedge of gold and a Babylonish garment and was stoned to death by Divine command. God hates sin. Uzzah put out his hand to steady the ark, and God killed him, for he violated the law God gave. The Word of God teaches there is wrath against sin, and this Word came from heaven. Holy men of old spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.
The wrath of God against sin is revealed in conscience. Charles the Ninth of France yielded to the entreaties of his queen mother and signed the paper that meant the death of his Huguenot subjects. He afterward sat in the window and saw them shot down -- men and defenseless women and little children, until the streets of Paris ran red with the blood of the innocents. In a few years he was on his death bed, his very pores ran blood, and before his eyes were the sights he saw on that awful night when he permitted his subjects to be murdered, and he cried, "O doctor, give me something to take away this blood from my eyes." But the doctor could not by any mendicants reach the conscience of the dying king. The wrath of God revealed in conscience against the sins of the past. A woman was dying in Michigan, and as she laid on her bed she kept crying, "Take away those little fingers, they are pinching my face -- they are pinching my face!" What was the matter? The wrath of God in the conscience. She had murdered more children before they were born than she ever brought into the world. The brethren of Joseph saw him coming across the fields and said, "Here comes that dreamer; now we will get even with him." And they planned to put him in the pit, and they did; but seeing some Ishmaelites coming along the road, they sell him to them and down into Egypt he is taken while they go home with a coat dipped in blood to deceive their old father. They were adepts at deception, forgetting "what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive." The years roll along and the whirligig of time brings God's revenges. There is a famine in the land of Canaan and corn only in Egypt, and these brethren go down there to get some corn and get into trouble, for there is a man there that knows them, though they know him not, and they get together and say one to another, "Verily, we are guilty of our brother's blood." No one has said a single word about their brother. What is the matter? Simply this, the wrath of God revealed in conscience against the sin of years ago. Belshazzar trembles at a handwriting on the wall -- trembles, though he cannot understand a single word that is written. What is the matter? Just this, conscience condemns him; he knows he is guilty, and that is enough to know. "A guilty conscience makes cowards of us all."
The wrath of God is revealed in His providences. Nations have proved this in the past. The Jew was to give the land a rest every seventh year, but led on by their greed, like the profiteers of America today, they robbed the land as these do the citizen who is at their mercy and cannot help himself. And they did this for four hundred and ninety years, apparently forgetting that God can count, and that He is a jealous God. But the time came when He stepped out of the shadows and took notice in a practical manner, for the Babylonians came into the land, and carried them off into captivity and there they had to endure captivity until the land rested seventy years, the number of years in which it had been robbed. You cannot cheat God at all. The land belongs to Him. He says the earth is mine. And when you rob even God's earth you may expect Him to visit you in wrath. We might take the time and tell you of nations now decadent, decadent because they violated the laws of God and had to pay the price. Rome, Spain, once the mightiest empire on earth, Babylon, Greece, all sinned against Him, and now are paying the price. It is said that no denomination that ever missed its opportunity and went to decay and death, ever was restored, and it is eminently true of nations, when they fall they fall like Lucifer -- never to rise again.
The wrath of God is revealed in nature against sin. A sin against one's own body is a sin against God, for He who wrote the laws on Sinai, who gave us the Decalogue, also gave us the laws that govern our bodies, and to violate the laws of the body is to sin against God. He who does it must pay the price. The hospitals for the insane are filled today with young people who have indulged in secret vices until the mind has become deranged, reason dethroned and they are shut in as a menace to society and a reproach to humanity. There is no escape. God may forgive, but nature never does. The young man who has the cigarette habit is doomed to shorten his life, wreck every nerve, and curse his progeny. A young fellow one day entered the office of a physician and said, "Doctor, I am all in." The doctor said, "I see you are. How many cigarettes do you smoke in a day?" He answered, "About forty." The doctor asked him to bare his arm, and taking a leech from a bottle he put it on the fellow's arm, and in exactly two minutes it dropped off dead. "Young man, if you think that was an accident, I will put on another." And he proceeded to put on another and in two minutes the same result. "That is the result of your cigarette smoking," said the doctor. And the youngster did not say I will quit at once, but like the slave of habit that he was, he merely said, "I will not smoke so many." There are more women going to the operating tables than there are men, and one reason is they are lying nightly by the side of husbands who are poisoning them gradually by the nicotine in their blood. I once made this statement on a camp. ground where was a man who was a constant user of tobacco. He was talking to his wife earnestly as I passed by and she called me saving, "My husband wants to talk with you." I went to them, and to say he was angry is to put it mildly. He at once began: "I do not see how a man by the use of tobacco can poison his wife." I replied, "I have not the authority with me, but let me have your name and address, and when I return home I will get it and send it to you." I went home and one day entered the office of Dr. Leslie, and I said, "I am called into question because of a statement I made in reference to the use of tobacco." He asked me to be seated and went to his bookcase and took down a book called "Woman the Eternal Sufferer," and turning the leaves over rapidly he called my attention to the chapter and page that revealed the facts. It was written by an eminent Jewish physician on the Pacific Coast I copied it and sent it to my wrathy friend, and the next time I went to that place he came to the altar and quit his tobacco, and today is preaching and practicing a clean Gospel.
"Do you see that home we just passed, doctor?" "Yes, I do, and I know the family." "Well, doctor, I think a man with a home like that and a proportionate income could be a happy man." "Well," said the doctor, "that man is poisoning his wife -- killing her by slow degrees. He is a tobacco fiend." The medical man knows that tobacco is an evil that will shorten the days of the man who uses it. Nothing good can be said of the weed, and nothing good comes of using it, and God's curse is upon the use of it and upon the user. During the Spanish American war, half of the young men who applied for enlistment were rejected on account of the "tobacco heart." No sentiment here, just hard common sense, aided by medical science. Be sure your sin will find you out is true of all sin, whether it is sin against the body or sin against the law as revealed to us in the Word.
The wrath of God as seen in the past is terrible. The blasphemers who were slain the night the angel of the Lord passed through the Assyrian ranks knew that he but did the Divine will on them. They knew it when it was too late. The men who sneered at the Missionaries on the island of Martinique knew when too late that God was capable of wrath. Only a few days before they had told these men of God they were not wanted on the island, and must get off. They took a pig and nailed it to a cross and carried it through the streets of the city, and said to the Missionaries, "Here is your Christ." But very soon God rose in the might of His power, shook the island as with an earthquake; Mount Peelee blew its head off and there came out mud and steam, hot water and stones, burning lava and ashes, and forty thousand people were hurried into eternity. They did not want God, and said so, and God showed them that He was through with them until Judgment Day. Out in San Francisco the drunken mobs with their political processions could parade the streets with red fire and blare of bands, cheering and hooting, and nothing be said about it; but when the Salvation Army, and the little bands of Holiness people appeared on the streets, they were told they were disturbing the peace of the city, and must stop, and when they kept right on and sang and prayed and testified, they were told they must stop or go to jail -- and they stopped. But God knew, and sometimes He uses measures that are quite convincing. The city had retired to rest for the night, but He never slumbers, and He just put out His little finger and shook the Pacific Coast, and San Francisco went down in ruins. Then some of them at least wanted God, and they prayed and wept and cried aloud on the streets to God to have mercy. Wrath revealed in nature against Sin and Sinners.
There is only one way to avoid wrath, and that is the way that God has appointed. Repent. When God was aroused and sent a prophet to Nineveh to cry, "Forty days and Nineveh shall be destroyed!" the king and the nobles and the people all put on sackcloth and ashes, and God saw their repentance was real, and He heard their cry and spared them. Repent and be ye converted, that your sins may be blotted out. Though they be red like crimson, yet shall they be whiter than snow. Whoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. I believe with Dean Alford, "All man's salvation is of God, and all of his damnation is of himself." God in Christ has done all that He could do to prevent the consequences of sin. Each man makes his own hell and fixes his own eternal destiny. Man as a free moral agent can do as he pleases. To whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are. It is not in the power of Omnipotence to save a man against his own will. Man can resist all the influences of Divine Love, all the strivings of the Holy Spirit. Peter once said, "As did your fathers so do ye; ye do always resist the Holy Ghost." But there comes an end; an end to probation, and Sin loved and persisted in will send a soul to where it is forever separated from God. Then evil character is fixed beyond the power of change, and wrath forever is wrath against sin. May God keep all who hear these awful truths from the wrath to come.
