wicked!

do skaters even say, "wicked"?

"The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness..."

- Romans 1:18

This past Sunday at United Life we talked about how the wrath of God could ever be good news. Among other things, what I hoped we saw as a church is how the opposite of a loving God is not a wrathful God, but an indifferent one. In light of the undeniable brokenness of our world, a wrathful God who isn't willing to just stand by and watch the whole thing go down in flames is good news.

One thing I really wanted to address this Sunday but didn't, however, was this interesting word that the NIV translates as "wickedness." When we read that word in English, especially in the context of Romans 1:18, there are probably a number of images that come up, ranging from the fictional Wicked Witch of the West harassing Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz", to the all too real example of Michael Vick executing and torturing dogs as part of his dog fighting ring. With that in mind, Romans 1:18 could be read a few different ways, the most likely for us as modern readers being something like, "God's anger is now showing up against everyone who does bad or evil."

Now if you're someone who's never done anything bad, then this verse sounds pretty good to you. But if, like me, you know you're not perfect, then this verse might even be the cause of some anger. Everyone does wrong, why does God have to go and be wrathful about it? Didn't he make us like this in the first place?

There are two things to be said about this, the first having to do with the word here translated as "wicked." The word Paul actually uses is adikia, which has a much more specific meaning than "wickedness." Adikia isn't so much about general evil as it is about injustice. In fact, coming from the same root as the word that Paul uses the verse earlier which we translate as "righteousness" or God doing what is "right", adikia is like the opposite of that. In other words, Romans 1:18 isn't about God's wrath coming against general evil, it's about God coming against the forces that actively oppose his mission to heal the world through the redemptive work of Jesus Christ. This calls to mind news headlines of UN humanitarian aid workers being executed in different hot spots around the globe.

The second thing to say about this is to remember that Paul is going somewhere with all of this, a destination you can clearly see if you simply read ahead. Paul is going to come back later in the letter and stun the Romans by identifying them not with the perfect and righteous, but with the unjust and opposition of God's healing and redemptive mission. But instead of this being bad news, it is actually a piece of larger good news for one reason only: Jesus Christ.

The truth is, we are worse than we think. We may all admit to doing some bad things, to not being perfect, but, when you boil it down, our actions are probably closer to adikia than they are to simply just doing some wrong things from time to time. But the truth is also that God's love and Christ's redemptive power are greater than we could ever hope to imagine. Even though our actions are good reason for God to be wrathful, instead of crushing us he goes to the cross to be crushed by us, all simply because he would rather pay the price himself than abandon us.

We are way more opposed to God than we think we are. But He is way more in love with us than we think he is.