⁵ But because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God, ⁶ who will render to each person according to his deeds …

Why in the world would anyone want to spurn the kindness of God? If God is the Creator, and we have come up short of His standards and are due the awful consequences outlined in Romans 1, then who in their right mind would reject God’s kind offer, His open door for returning to Him rather than suffer the eternally damning consequences?

The answer, of course, is that since we have rebelled against God, we are not in our “right minds.” We are fallen. In the words of our passage today, we have a stubborn and unrepentant heart. Life is just fine without God, we think. But we are blinded by our sin, not just passively, but stubbornly. It is not that we cannot see, but that we refuse to see. If you understand this carefully, that was the very problem in the first place. Adam and Eve knew clearly the prohibition against eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but they willingly and knowingly chose to rebel against God.

The nature of temptation is inherent in the first sin. If you give in once to the temptation to willingly disobey God, what could possibly change such that if given the next opportunity to obey God, you would act any differently? The story of Adam and Eve depicts a perfect environment with perfect fellowship with God, and they turned away from Him. Things haven’t improved since then; in fact, the world now is fallen, and we humans are fallen. There is nothing changed for the better that would lead us to obey God any differently than in the garden. If we remain the same as the first time we disobeyed, then we will most certainly continue disobeying. The motivating factors haven’t changed.

Stubbornness is the unchanging heart. This reflects the “stiff-necked” description of Old Testament Israel. There seems to be a law of spiritual inertia: a spiritual body will continue on the sin path unless acted upon by a greater, outside force. The sin nature in us is the constant pull away from God. Later in the book of Romans Paul deals with the question of where this “sin nature” comes from. For now, the first three chapters of Romans are given to demonstrating that we all have the sin nature in us. And it has to do with spiritual stubbornness, as resistance to changing our attitude toward God.

The consequences we must be warned about. To spurn God’s kindness is to consign ourselves to a wrathful judgment—not because God desires this, but because we desire to live without God.

God, I choose to live in unity with You rather than to live with a stubborn heart.