The Blood and the Wrath of God

Scripture Reading: Romans 3:9-26

“whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed.” Romans 3:25

Propitiation is almost a foreign word to us in our culture, but an act of propitiation is a sacrifice that turns away wrath.

God’s holy wrath is turned against our sin. Can God be angry with us? Of course God has the right to be angry at our sin, to take our betrayal and rejection personally. It is personal! We have sinned not just against “the rules,” but against God. Yet God’s anger is not like our anger. God doesn’t throw a tantrum or seek revenge. God’s wrath is His firm opposition to sin and His righteous determination to punish the sinners responsible. His wrath is an expression of His holiness and His love. “God does not love us because Christ died for us; Christ died for us because God loved us. If it is God’s wrath that needed to be propitiated, it is God’s love that did the propitiating.”¹

In pagan religions people offer a gift or sacrifice to appease the anger of their god or gods. Not so in the New Testament. God provided His own sacrifice. Jesus Christ is our propitiation. When Jesus shed His blood, His sacrifice was the gift that satisfied God’s righteous wrath. All our sins were placed on Christ and all of God’s wrath was unleashed on Him. That’s why Jesus cried out on the cross (Mark 15:34), “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Don’t miss the importance of the shed blood of Jesus. When God sees the blood of Jesus, that blood satisfies His justice and turns away His wrath against our sin. The propitiation does not procure God’s love or appease Him; it covers our guilt and renders it justified for God to exercise His loving mercy towards sinners.

Over 200 years ago, William Cowper was deeply depressed and lived under the fear of God’s wrath. One day he flung himself into a chair by a window and saw a Bible there. He wrote: “I opened it up and my eyes fell on Romans 3:25, which says of Christ, ‘Whom God has made a propitiation through faith in his blood.’ Then and there I realized what Christ’s blood had accomplished and I realized the effects of His atonement for me…and then and there I trusted Jesus Christ and a great burden was lifted from my soul.” Looking back on that day, Cowper wrote a hymn several years later with these words:

There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Immanuel’s veins;
And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,
Lose all their guilty stains.

Today, take some time to read through Romans 3. Ask God to show you the deadly disease of sin and the all-sufficient cure in the blood of Jesus Christ.