Terrible as the doctrine of God’s wrath is, it is a doctrine which, perhaps more than any other, wakes sinners up to appreciate the love of God in the gospel. Jesus puts it in these lovely words: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).
The place which these words occupy at the close of the revelation made by God to man, hardly less than the meaning of the words themselves, unquestionably gives to them a very marked and peculiar importance. With the exception of the Apostolic benediction which is contained in the last verse of the chapter, and of the awful threatening against adding to or taking from the words of the prophecy of this book, which occupies the verses immediately following our text, the language before us forms the latest audible utterance of God’s lips to this world.
