Will we receive wrath from God?

Does God ever send His wrath on His own people? Usually, I’d be the first to affirm that He does not. A well-known Bible verse tells us, “God has not appointed us to wrath but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 5:9). Trials, tribulations, even sufferings—those are things that a child of God can and does experience. But wrath is evidently not something He sends against His people.

Or does He?

I was looking over verses I’ve memorized throughout my life today, and I came to this one: “But they mocked the messengers of God, and despised His words, and misused His prophets, until the wrath of the Lord arose against His people, till there was no remedy.” That’s from the last chapter of 2 Chronicles, describing the final state of the inhabitants of Jerusalem and Judah as the fearsome forces of Babylon came against them for the third time, around 586 BC.

Then I thought about a prophetic verse that evidently refers to a time soon to come, from Revelation 18: “And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, ‘Come out of her, My people, that you be not partakers of her sins, and that you receive not of her plagues‘” (Revelation 18:4). This has to be the voice of the Lord, clearly speaking to “My people,” the saved believers of the last days, imploring them to “come out of her.” And the “her” referred to here is Babylon the Great, the mysterious end-time entity, “that great city which rules over the kings of the earth” (Revelation 17:18).

There’s a case to be made that these verses in Revelation can be applied even now, to the people of God in this present age. Some say that Babylon the Great is now fully formed and manifest in our time, and that the people of God must “come out of her”, if they are not to receive her plagues, both now and in the times soon to come.

A strong comparison could be drawn to Lot, the nephew of the patriarch Abraham, some 4,000 years ago. Lot and his family were increasingly “vexed with the filthy lifestyle of the wicked” (2 Peter 2:8) as they continued living in Sodom and Gomorrah. In Lot’s case, the Lord finally sent angels physically to escort Lot and his family out of Sodom, evidently in the final hours before God poured fire and brimstone upon what had become Lot’s hometown.

But what about now? God says in Revelation that the day will come when the sins of Babylon the Great will have reached unto heaven, and He implores His people to come out. But what if they don’t? What if they are like the impudent, stiff-necked people who inhabited Jerusalem and Judah in the days of Jeremiah? That man was God’s voice to the nation for forty years. And, as we read in that verse from 2 Chronicles, they mocked the messengers of God, despised His words, and misused His prophets until the wrath of the Lord arose against His people. In this case, when God’s own people have so hardened their hearts and shut their ears, He sometimes allows them to suffer the consequences of their grievous sins.

The good news is that there were a few, even in Jeremiah’s time, who took heed to the warnings of God and the voice of His Spirit. Daniel and his friends were carried away to Babylon as young men, and Daniel went on to become one of Israel’s greatest prophets. In fact, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel all lived during that period, with Jeremiah being the oldest by about a generation.

But we don’t know much about the vastly larger number of people who were the mockers and scoffers, the hardened people who were called by His name but perished in the flood of judgments that the Lord had been warning them about for decades. And the thought has come to my mind: Will there be multitudes of believers in the coming judgments of God upon this earth, described in Revelation, who will be in such a state of lukewarmness, complacency and indifference that they simply will not obey when the Lord says, “Come out of her, My people”?

What is going to happen to disobedient Christians, those who are so joined to modern Babylon that they will be much like Lot’s wife, who had to be virtually dragged out of Sodom, the Babylon of her day? If the modern lukewarm do not “come out of her” (Babylon), do those verses imply that they will then “receive of her plagues”?

I believe that “God has not appointed us to wrath.” That is clear from Scripture. But what about half-hearted Christians who have spent their whole lives, in one form or another, within the allurements of Babylon the Great? These thoughts came to me this morning, and they are unsettling.

There is certainly Scriptural precedent for God allowing severe punishment to come upon those of His people who have hardened their hearts and mocked the messengers of God. May the Lord help us all.