The love and wrath of God

If we just loved people more, maybe more people would be saved.

If we just weren’t so offensive and hypocritical, maybe more people would be saved.

If we just defended Christianity better, maybe more people would be saved.

If we would just avoid social issues maybe more people would be saved.

I think a lot of Christians tend to assume that if we could just do more of the above, people would respond positively and love God. I don't think that's true!

I think most people, including many “cultural Christians,” have drunk so deeply from the wells of our culture that if they were truthful with themselves, they would have to admit that they really don’t much like the God of the Bible at all.

They want God to be an all loving, all tolerant, all accepting God of compassion. They want a God who will accept them just as they are and leave them that way. They don't like the idea of a God of wrath who calls people to repentance. But both the idea of God's love and God's wrath are found in the Bible.

 According to the story-line of the Bible, Adam and Eve rebelled against the command of God and they were expelled from the Garden of Eden.

When every thought and intent of the people in Noah's day was wicked, God destroyed them all.

Because of the wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah God destroyed those two cities as well.

God had been patient with the evil and wickedness of the cities of Canaan for 400 years, but when his patience finally ran out, he sent Joshua to destroy them.

The repeated theme in the Book of Judges is that when the people of Israel rebelled against God, He would allow their foreign neighbors to conquer and oppress them until they repented.

God was patient with the northern kings of Israel for 200 years before finally allowing the Assyrian government to conquer and deport them.

A little over one hundred years later God sent the Babylonian government to conquer the southern Kingdom of Judah.

When people rejected Jesus, he predicted that Jerusalem would be surrounded by armies and destroyed. That actually came to pass in AD 70.

And most people are familiar with the catastrophic destructions described as the judgment of God in the Book of Revelation.

But this is a God we don't want to think about. This is a God that many Christians are embarrassed by. This is a holy, righteous God whose patience and long-suffering can run out –

And when his wrath finally falls it can be truly catastrophic.

So where is the love of God in all of this? God's love or grace was seen in that he did not destroy Adam and Eve but provided for them.

He saved the family of Noah from the flood.

He saved the family of lot from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

He rescued the children of Israel from Egypt and gave Israel the Promised Land.

Despite the repeated rebellion of the children of Israel during the time of the judges, God rescued them when they repented.

Despite the hundreds of years of rebellion by all the Kings of Israel and many of the kings of Judah, God did not ultimately destroy the nation, but preserved them in exile and eventually brought them back to their homeland.

But God's ultimate expression of love was, in the words of Paul, when “God commended his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.”

Or as the Gospel of John says, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in him would not perish but have everlasting life.”

In other words, God’s love is demonstrated in the fact that even though the entire human race metaphorically spit in his face and gave him the finger, he did not crush us like bugs but “became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” He willingly subjected himself to die an agonizing, torturous death to save us from the penalty of our own rebellion.

In the Chronicles of Narnia CS Lewis portrayed God as the lion Aslan. Aslan was a loving and compassionate lion, but he was not a tame lion. You didn't pull his whiskers or yank on his tail. He was not to be mocked. He was powerful and could be dangerous. I think this is an apt expression of God's character.

The God portrayed in the Bible is a kind, loving, compassionate and patient God—A God who is not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9). But he is not a God to be messed with. As Paul wrote, “Be not deceived. God is not mocked” (Galatians 6:7).

He is a holy and righteous God who hates rebellion and wickedness. The same chapter in the Gospel of John that says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son” (John 3:16), also says, “whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on him” (John 3:36).

According to Romans 1 the wrath of God has been poured out on this world precisely in the fact that he has allowed people to go their own way and reap the terrible consequences of their own sinfully rebellious behavior. The result has been man's terrible inhumanity to man. 

I would suggest that most people hate the God of the Bible with a passion. They either deny that such a God exists at all, or they cherry pick the Bible to create a god in their own image— An all-loving, all-tolerant, all-accepting God of compassion who either approves of their sinful behavior, or at least accepts them as they are and approvingly leaves them that way.

Such a God is a figment of people's imagination, no less an idol than those made of gold, silver, wood, or stone.

There is no amount of sugar-coating or spin-doctoring that will make the biblical view of God palatable to modern culture. Our job is not to convince people to be saved as if we could change people’s hearts if we just tried harder. Only the work of the Holy Spirit will change someone’s heart. Our job is simply to present the Gospel. If people reject that, it doesn’t necessarily mean you failed or “didn’t do it right.”

The wrath of God

While watching some TV preachers before church yesterday (Nov. 13, 2005), I was reminded that there appears to be a growing movement in contemporary Christianity which seems to downplay or ignore anything having to do with judgment. The idea seems to be, just focus on the positive, be tolerant, tell people how God loves them and wants to improve their lives so they can be healthy, wealthy, happy and prosperous.

Contrary to the impressions left by some preachers, God’s judgment is a significant theme in biblical literature. The Garden of Eden story is a story of people who rebelled against their Creator and came under judgment (Gen 1-3). The story of Noah’s flood is a story of God’s judgment on human rebellion (Gen 7-8), as is the story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11), Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19), the plagues on Egypt (Exodus 7-11), the golden calf (Exodus 32) and the rebellion in the wilderness (Numbers 14). The Book of Deuteronomy warns of terrible judgments for persistent rebellion against God. The story of the conquest of Canaan is also a story of God’s judgment (Joshua) and the theme of judgment thoroughly pervades the book of Judges. God’s judgment is seen throughout the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, in fact, the stories end with the forcible deportation of Israel from the Promised Land in a devastating act of God’s judgment. And of course the prophets, from Isaiah through Malachi strongly and repeatedly warn of divine judgment for idolatry and rebellion against the Creator.

Don’t even think about dismissing this theme of judgment as if it were only in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament! In the New Testament, John the Baptist is consistently presented as a fiery preacher of judgment. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus ends his Sermon on the Mount with warnings of eternal judgment (Matthew 7:13-29) and many of Jesus’ parables warn of future judgment, including weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 13). What is particularly sobering to me personally is Jesus’ scathing denunciation of self-righteous religious leaders and scholars, with names like hypocrites, blind guides, whitewashed tombs, snakes, vipers and sons of hell (Matthew 23)!

St. Paul follows Jesus’ example in warning of judgment. For example, Paul sums up his argument in the first three chapters of his letter to the Romans by quoting from his Hebrew Bible: “No one is righteous, not even one…no one does good, not a single one. Their talk is foul, like the stench from an open grave. Their tongues are filled with lies…they have no fear of God at all” (Romans 3:9-18). In those same three chapters, Paul says “a day of anger is coming, when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed” (Romans 2:5), and that God “will pour out his anger and wrath on those who live for themselves, who refuse to obey the truth and instead live lives of wickedness” (Romans 2:8).

Similarly, in his letter to the Galatians, Paul speaks of “sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealously, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these.” Paul continues, “Let me tell you again, as I have before, that anyone living this sort of life will not inherit the Kingdom of God” (Galatians 5:19-21). In Second Thessalonians the author speaks of the return of Jesus “with his mighty angels, in flaming fire, bringing judgment on those who don’t know God.” The writer says, “They will be punished with eternal destruction” (Second Thessalonians 1:9).

The writer of Hebrews warns of “the terrible expectation of God’s judgment and the raging fire that will consume his enemies” (Hebrews 10:27). The writer of Second Peter warns of a coming judgment in which “the heavens will pass away with a terrible noise, and the very elements themselves will disappear in fire, and the earth and everything on it will be found to deserve judgment” (2 Peter 3:10). The letter of Jude is filled with judgment and damnation, and of course almost everyone is familiar with the graphic depictions of divine judgment in the book of Revelation (which, by the way, sounds less and less far-fetched now than at any other time in history in light of the terrors of Islamofacism, state-sponsored terrorism, and the consequences of global warming).

Regardless of whether you dislike or disbelieve these stories, the fact remains that the Bible is, from cover to cover, filled with stories of divine judgment on human beings who, metaphorically speaking, have extended their middle fingers in the face of their Creator, saying, in effect, we will not worship or serve you and we will not follow your rules—we will do it our way!

The rest of the biblical story, of course, is about how God patiently and consistently warns people of the consequences of their rebellion and calls them to repentance. In the Bible, the story of God’s love is not about some abstract, warm-fuzzy feeling. It is a story about how, in spite of the fact that humans have essentially spit in the face of their creator, he patiently and persistently calls people to turn back to him in repentance and faith. The New Testament in particular is about how God enters humanity to save those who will genuinely repent of their rebellion (sin) and turn to Jesus Christ, the Son of God, in sincere loving devotion (faith).

The New Testament never commands believers to engage in holy wars to execute God’s judgment, but rather to warn people of divine judgment, with the goal of calling people to faith and saving them from this wrath. The whole point of this little theology lesson is that preachers who only preach about the love of God, without also warning about the wrath of God, are simply not telling the whole truth about the message of the Bible. On the other hand, some people today are no different than those over 2,500 years ago who, according to Isaiah 30:10-10, told their prophets, “Don’t tell us what is right. Tell us nice things. Tell us lies. Forget all this gloom. Get off your narrow path” (All quotes are from the NLT).