Welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the book of Romans. Tonight is study 33 of Romans, chapter 1, and we will begin with Romans 1:17-20:

For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:

I will stop reading there. We were looking at verse 17 at the end of our last study. Just to quickly summarize, it started off, “For therein is the righteousness of God,” which referred back to the Gospel, which is the Word of God, the Bible. There in the Bible is the righteousness of God, who is Christ through His atoning work in God’s salvation program. The righteousness of God is revealed “from faith to faith,” and we were looking at the passage where the woman who had the issue of blood for many years thought, “If only I could touch Him, I would be healed.” So she came close to the Lord and she touched Him. Of course, that was a “no-no,” and it was something an unclean person was not to do in Israel, because if they touched someone, they would make that person unclean. Of course, that is the picture. Her uncleanness was transferred to the Lord Jesus. Then Jesus perceived that virtue had gone out of Him: “Who touched me?” That furthered the picture God was drawing that the “uncleanness” of the woman went to Christ, and His virtue (His holiness) went from Him to the woman, cleansing her. She was healed of that plague, and at that point, she became clean. It was only the issue of blood that was making her unclean, so it was a beautiful picture of what Christ does in salvation. Virtue went out of Him and into the woman. Thereby, she became virtuous.

And, likewise, faith is Christ, and He showed His faith at the foundation of the world through His action or work. That is what James 2 tells us: “Faith without works is dead.” So people can say they have faith, but if they have not works, then it is lifeless – it is a dead faith. It has no blessing. But faith with works is another story. And the statement was made there (in James 2), “I will show thee my faith by my works,” and it is not our work. The natural tendency is to want to do some work, and we think that it is something we have to do after we become a Christian, and then we have to do good works. But it has nothing to do with us. It is really a statement made by the Lord Jesus Christ, “I will show thee my faith by my works,” and He did that work at the foundation of the world. Then He entered into the world in time to go the cross and demonstrate that very thing – to show the work He had performed, which Hebrews 4:3 says was “finished from the foundation of the world.”

So it was “from (His) faith to (our) faith.” His faith goes out of Him and becomes part of the gift of God, the magnificent gift of His salvation to sinners, and we receive faith: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.” From faith to faith. Then after we have the Spirit of God, we began to develop the fruit of the spirit, one of which is faith.

Then it said at the end of the verse, in Romans 1:17:

… as it is written, The just shall live by faith.

I think I mentioned this in our last study, but let us look at Habakkuk 2:4:

Behold, his soul which is lifted up is not upright in him: but the just shall live by his faith.

This is confirmation that we are understanding this correctly. The righteousness of God is revealed from Christ to the sinner, or from faith to faith. He will grant faith along with the whole package of spiritual attributes that accompany God’s salvation.

We will go on to Romans 1:18:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness…

The word “against” is more often translated as “upon” or “on.” It is that kind of idea, but since it is speaking of the wrath of God being revealed from heaven upon all ungodliness, it does carry the sense of being “against” it. Again, it says in Romans 1:18:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;

So “ungodliness” and “unrighteousness” is the object of the wrath of God which is revealed from heaven against these things.

Regarding the Greek word translated as “ungodliness,” the root of it means to “worship” or to be “devout,” and the Greek negative prefix is attached to the word, negating it. So, literally, it means “no worship” or “not devout.” They are men that do not worship God. They are not worshipping God in spirit and in truth. They cannot worship God in spirit because their spirits are dead in trespasses and sins. They have no life in their souls, so neither can they worship God in truth, and the last part of the verse addresses that: “…who hold the truth in unrighteousness.” We will look at the word “hold” a little closer as we move through this verse, but it has the idea of “suppressing” or “holding back.”

But let us look at a couple of verses that speak of “ungodliness.” It says in 2Peter 2:5:

And spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly;

That means that these people wanted nothing to do with God and His Word. They were just like people today. They wanted to live their lives alone, apart from God, in peace. Of course, that is a contradiction, because the Lord Jesus is peace, but they wanted to be left alone: “Just leave me alone. Let me do what I want. I just want to plant my crop and have a family and watch them grow. And, you know, I want to have some good things in life and enjoy some of the pleasures of this life. What is wrong with that?” Well, what is wrong is that they are speaking as though they are free agents that can be their own person, and that they belong to themselves. But that is not true. That is not the case for any human being. We are created in the image of God. God is the Creator and we are the creature. He created us to worship and serve Him. We are to serve righteousness and obey Him. And, you know, it is not an awful thing to worship, obey and serve God because God is good. God is righteous and just and holy, and He is worthy to be praised. He is worthy to receive worship. He is worthy to be served. He deserves these things. We were created to serve God, but in our rebellion, we said, “No, we will not serve God.” And who did Adam and Eve end up serving and obeying instead of God? The Serpent. When they obeyed the lie, they brought the wrath of God upon them and a curse upon creation. They established servitude to sin and to Satan, not to God. They became servants of unrighteousness or servants of sin.

The word translated as “unrighteousness” in Romans 1:18 is Strong’s #93, and it is also translated as “iniquity” in Luke 13:27; as “unjust” in Luke 18:6; and as “wrong” in 2Corinthians 12:13. We can get the idea of what this word is pointing to, but probably the best verse to go to is in 1John 5:17:

All unrighteousness is sin: and there is a sin not unto death.

Basically, that sums it up. All unrighteousness is sin. And God is saying, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness (those that will not worship God) and unrighteousness of men. ” It is the sin of man, and we know the wages of sin is death. As a matter of fact, the Bible says, “For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.” Sin is “unrighteousness.” It is a wrong thing, an unjust thing, and it is iniquity that brings down the wrath of God from above.

And, yet, when we think of the word “ungodliness” or “unrighteousness,” it is a description of everywhere we look in the world. You can look in any direction. You can look at the world’s institutions, and what do you see? You see ungodliness and unrighteousness. You can look at the world’s entertainment industry. What do you see? Unrighteousness and ungodliness. You can look at the education system – the schools and colleges – and you see the same thing. It is everywhere you look, including the sciences that come to ungodly and unrighteous conclusions that are actually not scientific. Therefore, they are lying about them, which is deceitful, as they try to make people believe that theories are facts and proven science, but it is not true. So there is ungodliness and unrighteousness in the scientific world and every place we look. Of course there is because it is “in man,” and Jesus knew what was “in man.” It is ungodliness and unrighteousness. It is sin that dwells in the sinner, and it brings down the wrath of God upon them for these things.

Let us look at “the wrath of God,” and look at a few verses that speak about this wrath. First, let us look at Matthew 3:7:

But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?

This is interesting because we know it was spoken in the first century A. D., and the statement was made that there is a “wrath to come.” We also know it says in John 3:36:

He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.

This is revealing because it is telling us that the sinner that does not become saved has God’s wrath “abiding” upon him. And, yet, it says in Matthew 3:7 that there is “wrath to come,” so this is why it is necessary to point out that right from the beginning of the world, because of sin, God brought judgment, as God had said, **“In the day that ye eat thereof, ye shall surely die.”** And they ate, and they died in their souls. God struck them dead in their soul existence, and from that point forward, the soul of man has been a dead thing. And it was necessary that the few recipients of God’s grace in salvation become born again, and their souls be restored to life. There was a resurrection of their souls, which was God’s salvation, but the majority of mankind has lived his life with a dead soul and the wrath of God abiding on him for his sins. And this means they would die, and when they died, they would go to nothing. In that very day, their thoughts would perish. That is God’s wrath that has brought death to them in the physical part of their being on the day they died, although there remains the (dead) body to deal with later.

So God worked out judgment upon sinners throughout the history of the world in each generation and, yet, He also determined that there would be an official Judgment Day that would come at the end of the world. And at that time, He would bring judgment and pour out His wrath from heaven to judge all mankind in an official way and, finally, completing that judgment with the destruction of the cursed creation and the cursed people (all the sinners that never become saved), and they will be gone forever, including their bodies or the dust and ashes of whatever was left of the people that had died over the many thousands of years of the history of the world. Even their dust and ashes will be burned up and gone forever. That is the official judgment. That is the wrath to come, as well as there could be an aspect of that seen at any point in the history of the world for the individual sinners that lived their lives with the threat of dying unsaved and with God’s wrath abiding upon them. They would not receive eternal life. And, again, their conscious existence would cease forever, and so forth.

So we must make the distinction between the official day of wrath and the normative wrath of God that was abiding upon all sinners. Remember that God even says of the elect, in Ephesians 2:3:

Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.

So before salvation, God’s elect could be classified as “children of wrath.” Why? Because the wrath of God was upon us, as our sins had not been forgiven in the sense that the atoning blood of Christ (the atoning work He made at the foundation of the world) had not yet been applied to us through God’s Word. An example of this would be the thief on the cross who was a child of wrath, even as others. He had lived his life that way all the way up to his going to the cross. He was an ungodly, unrighteous man. Then Christ saved Him, and the shed blood that Jesus had given at the foundation of the world was applied to the thief during the last few hours of his life, and then he was delivered and translated out of darkness and out of the kingdom of Satan. He was translated from under the wrath of God into the kingdom of God’s dear Son and, of course, he entered into heaven. Christ said, “To day thou shalt be with me in paradise.” When he died physically, his soul did not go to nothing and cease to exist. His thoughts did not perish in the sense that he had a living spirit that went up into heaven to be seated in Christ Jesus and to remain until the last day.

Again, we need to recognize this distinction. Now the official day of wrath can be seen in many places in the Bible. I will read a few verses in Revelation. It says in Revelation 6:16-17:

And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb: For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?

Also, in Revelation 11 when the seventh trumpet sounds, we read in Revelation 11:18:

And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come…

That was the wording that John the Baptist used: “Who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” But then Revelation is saying that it is here – it has come. Again, it says in Revelation 11:18:

And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that thou shouldest give reward unto thy servants the prophets, and to the saints…

We know from this language that we are presently living during “the time of the dead, that they should be judged.” It is Judgment Day, and it is also a time when God gives reward to His servants, the prophets or saints, and that will come at the conclusion of Judgment Day.

It says in Revelation 19:15:

And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.

We are familiar with these verses by now, and we could give several more. But it is Judgment Day, and we are learning quite a bit about it at this time because of what God says in Romans 2:5:

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;

The last part of this verse is giving us a lot of information because it is saying that “the day of wrath,” the official Judgment Day, is the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God. This word “revelation” is a Greek word that is Strong’s #602, and it is related to the word we see in Romans 1:18, “…for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven,” and that word translated as “revealed” is Strong’s #601. And it means just what we would think it would mean – it means “revelation.” And in the Bible, revelation involves God revealing truth. God reveals information (from His Word), and when He does so, that is “revelation.”

For example, we see the word #601 or the related word #602 in Matthew 11:25:

At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.

He was referring to truths about Himself. Then it says in Matthew 11:26-27:

Even so, Father: for so it seemed good in thy sight. All things are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.

It says, “…no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father.” It is very similar to the Scripture that says, “Of that day and hour knoweth no man.” But, here, God very carefully says that no one knows except the Son and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him. And God could have said the same thing regarding the verse that says that no man knoweth the day or hour unless He revealed it to them, as He said in Acts 1:7: “It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power.”

Also, it says in Matthew 16:16-17:

And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.

What was revealed to Peter? It was a doctrinal truth, the fact that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the living God. That is what this word “revealed” identifies with – revealing Biblical truth.

Lord willing, we will have to look more into this in our next Bible study.