Daily Devotional Details

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Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” Romans 12:19

In his book Christ and Culture, written in the 1950s, Richard Niebuhr described modernism: “A god without wrath brought man without sin into a kingdom without judgment through a Christ without a cross.”

There is nothing new about modernism. As early as the 2nd century, Tertullian spoke of revisionists who said that “A better god has been discovered, one who is neither offended nor angry nor inflicts punishment, who has no fire warming up in hell, and no outer darkness wherein there is shuddering and gnashing of teeth: he is merely kind.”

There was a story in both the Washington Post and the Economist that illustrates this instinct. It is a story about the hymn “In Christ Alone,” by Keith Getty and Stuart Townend.

Till on that cross as Jesus died
The wrath of God was satisfied.

One major denomination in the U.S. wanted to include this hymn in their hymn book, but they wanted to change Getty and Townend’s words to read:

Till on that cross as Jesus died
The love of God was magnified.

This is wonderfully true. The love of God was poured out at the cross. “God demonstrates his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). But the reason the cross is such a marvelous outpouring of the love of God is that, at the cross, God dealt with our deepest human problem, by satisfying the wrath of God.

In which of these areas are you most tempted to be a revisionist? When it comes to our sin? God’s wrath? The cross? Or hell? Why?