Celebration of God's Judgement

Their word for justice, and similar ones like ‘justify’, and their word for ‘right’, and others like ‘righteous’, ‘righteousness’ and so on, came from the same root.

Tom Wright, Paul for Everyone: Romans Part 1: Chapters 1-8 (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2004), 13.

God’s covenant with Abraham was always intended as the means by which the creator God would rescue the whole world from evil, corruption and death

Tom Wright, Paul for Everyone: Romans Part 1: Chapters 1-8 (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2004), 14.

Romans 1:17 HCSB

17 For in it God’s righteousness is revealed from faith to faith, just as it is written: The righteous will live by faith.

Faith to faith

God’s faithfulness meets our faithfulness to him

The righteous will live by faith

Paul for Everyone, Romans Part 1: Chapters 1–8 Good News, Salvation and the Justice of God (Romans 1:14–17)

Paul quotes a key passage from the prophet Habakkuk (2:4), who was faced with a great catastrophe coming on Israel and had to learn to hold on and trust God, to have faith in his faithfulness.

Paul for Everyone, Romans Part 1: Chapters 1–8 Good News, Salvation and the Justice of God (Romans 1:14–17)

That is the position he now urges on his readers. In Jesus the Messiah, God has shown himself faithful to his covenant purposes and promises, and those who believe the good news about Jesus will find that this faithfulness reaches out and embraces them with a salvation which can never be taken away.

Romans 1:18–32 HCSB

18 For God’s wrath is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and unrighteousness of people who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth, 19 since what can be known about God is evident among them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For His invisible attributes, that is, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what He has made. As a result, people are without excuse. 21 For though they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became nonsense, and their senseless minds were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man, birds, four-footed animals, and reptiles. 24 Therefore God delivered them over in the cravings of their hearts to sexual impurity, so that their bodies were degraded among themselves. 25 They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served something created instead of the Creator, who is praised forever. Amen. 26 This is why God delivered them over to degrading passions. For even their females exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 The males in the same way also left natural relations with females and were inflamed in their lust for one another. Males committed shameless acts with males and received in their own persons the appropriate penalty of their error. 28 And because they did not think it worthwhile to acknowledge God, God delivered them over to a worthless mind to do what is morally wrong. 29 They are filled with all unrighteousness, evil, greed, and wickedness. They are full of envy, murder, quarrels, deceit, and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, arrogant, proud, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 undiscerning, untrustworthy, unloving, and unmerciful. 32 Although they know full well God’s just sentence—that those who practice such things deserve to die —they not only do them, but even applaud others who practice them.

The wrath of God from the perspective that God as Father and he longs to make the world right.

God does not make the rules hard to read so that he can delight in punishing his children

Celebration of God's Judgement

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