God’s anger at our ungodliness is our main problem in life. If God is resolved to pour out his wrath on us we are in a terrifying position.
Imagine the power of God behind his wrath! When you look up into the sky on a clear night you can see what is called the Milky Way, the name of our galaxy. It has about 200 billion stars in it, they say. You can see maybe a 40-millionth of them on a good night. The disk of the Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across (about six hundred thousand trillion miles) and 2,000 light years thick. Our sun will take about 200,000 years to make a circuit. And besides our galaxy there are, some estimate, 50 million other galaxies.
Now, the God we are talking about here in Romans made this universe with a mere command. He simply spoke and all the galaxies came into being. And he holds them in being by the word of his power. This God is so great that any attempt to portray his greatness falls infinitely far short. But what we can see and feel is this: that if such a great God is angry at us, and has such indescribable power to back up his anger, then we are in the worst of all possible conditions. Nothing could be worse than to be opposed by the wrath of infinite power.
And that is our situation. God is revealing his wrath against our ungodliness now and will bring it to a climax in the last day of judgment (Romans 2:4). Our only hope is if God may provide a way of reconciliation. Verse 10 says that he has: “We were reconciled to God through the death of his Son.” This happened because Christ bore our sins and fulfilled our righteousness. Now by faith we are united to Christ, so his righteousness is imputed or credited to us. And the result is peace. God is no longer angry with us. We are reconciled. There is no condemnation.
John Piper