The Wrath of God – Conclusion
What a journey! Several months ago I began a series on the love of God. When I finished I felt called by God to write about the wrath of God, which is not the opposite of the love of God. God is love. The wrath of God is the opposite of God’s grace or God’s mercy. When I set out to write about the wrath of God I thought it would be relatively simple – a few short posts. I should have known better.
This journey has taken me deeper into God’s heart than I have ever gone: explaining why the wrath of God is tied to the holiness of God, looking at the wrath of God and the amazing holiness of God in Scripture, writing about God’s creation and asking the question: ‘Whence Evil ?’ (in 3 parts!). That led me deeper into who we are. Are we totally depraved, as some theology suggests, or is there more to us than that (in 4 parts !!)? Quite a meandering, sometimes wandering journey, but always I believe under the direction of the Holy Spirit. As I wrote before, to paraphrase John Steinbeck: “You don’t take a journey, the journey takes you”. Amen!
Until we understand how serious sin is to God, how deserving we are of God’s wrath we cannot understand how desperately we need a savior and the depth of God’s amazing love for us manifested on the cross. If we deny the reality of the wrath of God, we deny the need for a savior, the work of the cross, the holiness of God, and the presence of sin. Where there is no sin, there is no wrath.
God’s wrath is real! God justly judges, condemns, and punishes sin and sinners but He is slow to anger and rich in love:
“The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and plenteous in mercy and loving-kindness. He will not always chide or be contending, neither will He keep His anger forever or hold a grudge” (Psalm 103: 8, 9 AMP). “He has not dealt with us according to our sins nor punished us according to our iniquities” (Psalm 103: 10 NKJV).
That is good news. God is love – agape love or unconditional love – love is His essential nature. God is also holy. God’s holiness is manifested in God’s perfection, including the perfection of all of His works:
“I will proclaim the name of the Lord. Oh, praise the greatness of our God! He is the Rock, His works are perfect and all His ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is He” (Deuteronomy 32: 3, 4 NIV).
God’s wrath is directed at ‘that’ which seeks to dethrone God, attack His holiness, and destroy His perfect creation. ‘That’ is sin and sinners. The cliché God hates sin but loves sinners is correct in the sense that “God so loved the world” and sinners and wicked people are definitely part of the world; and “while we were yet sinners Christ died for us”. But God’s wrath is still directed at sin and the people who sin. Here are two passages out of many in scripture:
“You are not a God who takes pleasure in evil; with you the wicked cannot dwell. The arrogant cannot stand in your presence; you hate all who do wrong (Psalm 5: 4, 5 NIV).
“The Lord examines the righteous, but the wicked and those who love violence His soul hates” (Psalm 11: 5 NIV).
Lest you think the wrath of God directed at sinners as well as sin is an Old Testament phenomenon, here are two verses from the New Testament:
“Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on him” (John 3: 36 NIV).
“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness” (Romans 1: 18 NIV).
Sin, and the lies, deceptions, and fears that inevitably announce and accompany sin, are the tools or methods the anti-God force called evil, manifested in the quasi-personal presence called satan, uses to try to kill, destroy, and corrupt God’s creation. Satan’s lies are intimately bound up with murder. When deception fails, satan resorts to murder. Satan’s plan is to use sin, and its corrupting influence on God’s creation, especially human beings, to “destroy the covenant basis for the way God the creator has decided to work on earth . . . and to replace God and His anointed Messiah and to retain absolute control of the earth” (Brad Long, ‘Discerning the Times’, pg. 63).
Sin is more than ‘that which separates us from God’ or ‘missing the mark’. Sin is: 1) a demonic power or force; 2) worship of that which is not God as if it were; and 3) disobedience or the breaking of God’s laws and commands. All of these are separate from God and His creation, and under the influence of evil, separate us from God. God’s wrath is directed against all three and those whose lives are given over to these sins. Why? I can think of 6 reasons:
1) God is Jealous for His creation and His name. “Do not worship any other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God” (Exodus 34: 14 NIV). Also in Exodus 34 God describes the love/wrath tension in God’s jealous character:
“And He passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, The Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet He does not leave the guilty unpunished; and He punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and forth generation” (Exodus 34: 5 – 7 NIV).
D.A. Carson describes this tension:
“God in His perfections must be wrathful against His rebel image-bearers, for they have offended Him; God in he perfections must be loving toward His rebel image-bearers, for He is that kind of God” (Carson, ‘The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God, pg. 69).
2) The one who worships idols tells God: “You are not good enough (echoing the lie satan has placed in this person’s heart), I don’t need you, I can do this on my own”. God’s wrath is directed at this rebellion or pride that devalues and attempts to marginalize or minimize God.
3) God is not indifferent to His creation and His created ones. God knows satan’s plan to murder His children. That is not part of His plan, hence His wrath directed at the demonic.
4) God will never give His glory to another – not to satan, and certainly not to you or me as we worship other gods. “I am the Lord; that is my name. I will not give my glory to another or my praise to idols” (Isaiah 42: 8 NIV). God will judge and punish any activity or person who attempts to take His glory for themselves.
5) God is holy. His holiness is manifested, at least in part, in the beauty of His perfection and the original perfection of His creation. Sin is like a cancer that attacks God’s creation from the outside in and from the inside out. It is a flaw, a brokenness, and a corruption of what He made. He will not allow His perfection, His holiness to be compromised. To deny the wrath of God is to minimize the holiness of God.
6) To not judge, condemn, and punish sin is to give sin and satan status, power, and prestige over creation and therefore over God’s omnipotent power and authority. That will never happen and so God’s wrath is directed at sin and sinners.
D.A. Carson writes:
“Where God in His holiness confronts His image-bearers in their rebellion there must be wrath, or God is not the jealous God He claims to be, and His holiness is impugned. The price of diluting God’s wrath is diminishing His holiness” (Carson, ‘The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God, pg. 67).
It makes sense that the God who is love is also the God who judges, condemns, and punishes even as He loves. What parent does not punish the children they love? We grow best and become the people God created us to be when we experience both unconditional love and conditional, demanding love. But God’s wrath has even deeper dimensions and contains at least one mystery. Here are two observations:
First, the root of the sin of disobedience like lying, murdering, stealing, gossiping, etc. is idolatry – the worship in the kingdom of the world of something other than God as if it were God to find our value, acceptance, fulfillment, and belonging. When we worship an idol we commit four offenses against God:
1) As I wrote above, we tell God “you are not good enough; you are inadequate to fulfill me”; 2) We trade away our true inheritance for the empty, false promises of satan and the world; 3) We place ourselves under the influence and power of evil and give satan power to unleash evil in other people and places; 4) We relinquish our God-given roles as rulers and priests over God’s creation in partnership with Him, and subjugate ourselves to the god we have chosen to worship.
For me, the metaphorical picture that connects the sins of idolatry and disobedience is a tree. The root of the tree is our idolatry. The leaves of the tree are our sins. Many of us repent of the sins (leaves) and think we are good with God, but never recognize that there is a deep root of idol worship in our lives. What good does it do to repent of the ‘leaves’ if the root remains in place? God judges, condemns, and punishes idolatry. Next to evil, it is the sin God hates the most. We need to identify the idols in our lives and repent of these deeper sins in our hearts.
But if the root is dug up and burned – symbolized by repenting of finding our value in the kingdom of the world and accepting God’s gracious offer of living with Him in the Kingdom of God – we receive the indwelling Holy Spirit, and are washed in the blood of Jesus – the ultimate and only effective antidote for sins (the leaves). Our sins past and present are washed away; we have the power of the Holy Spirit to defeat the power of satan in our lives and to sin less as we walk with Jesus and become more like Him.
The soil in which idolatry grows is evil, personified in satan. Satan has two powerful weapons – deception and lies. He deceives us when he cloaks his true nature – murderer – as an angel of light and our savior. He lies when he tells us “I am here to help. I can totally fulfill you”, and “You can be like God. He is unnecessary”. We sin when we accept the deceptions and lies and order our lives accordingly. In effect, we are worshiping satan and acting to release evil into the world. Here is a tension –God hates evil and he hates evil-doers. God hates? Yes! But isn’t God love? Yes, both at the same time – God loves and God can hate, and his hate is not only directed at evil, it can also be directed at people who embrace evil, those He calls wicked.
Here are some passages from the Old Testament that describe God’s hate. The Hebrew word in these passages for ‘hate’ is sane (pronounced saw-nay). Sane means, “to hate personally, to hate an enemy or foe, to be hateful or odious”. The word means what we think it means – hate.
“You are not a God who takes pleasure in evil; with you the wicked cannot dwell. The arrogant cannot stand in your presence; you hate all who do wrong” (Psalm 5: 5 NIV).
“The Lord examines the righteous, but the wicked and those who love violence His soul hates. On the wicked He will rain fiery coals and burning sulphur” (Psalm 11: 5, 6 NIV).
Because of Israel’s idolatry and injustice – her disobedience and hypocrisy – God speaks to Israel:
“I hate, I despise your religious feasts; I cannot stand your assemblies. Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I cannot accept them” (Amos 5: 21, 22 NIV).
It is easy to assume that God in the Old Testament is harsher and more prone to hatred than the God in the New Testament. But God is immutable — He does not change over time. It is true that there are more passages in the New Testament using the word ‘hate’ to describe what the world will do to Christians rather than God’s attitude toward us or what we are not supposed to do to the world. And then there is the famous passage in Romans 9.
Paul writes: “Just as it is written, Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated” (Romans 9: 13 NIV). Some interpret this passage in Romans to mean that God preferred Jacob over Esau — “Jacob I chose but Esau I rejected”, or “Jacob I loved but Esau I loved less”. The Greek word for ‘hate’ is miseo. According to Strong’s and Thayer’s concordances it means “to detest, to pursue with hatred, to hate”. But according to these concordances it also means, “to love less”. So, take your pick: in Matthew 10: 22 “all men will hate (miseo) you because of me” does not mean, “will love you less.” It means they will “hate you.” But in Luke 14: 26 “If anyone comes to me and does not hate (miseo) his father and mother, his wife and children . . he cannot be my disciple” almost certainly means “love them less than me.”
So, does God ‘hate’ Esau or does God ‘love Esau less than Jacob’? The Greek does not make this clear. If we want to know, and I think this is important, we need to look elsewhere for a clue. Paul precedes that love/hate passage with the words “Just as it is written”, referring to the Old Testament. Let’s look there to see if we can clarify this question in my next post: ‘God Is Love; God Hates Evil!’.
Blessings,
John
P.S. By the way, the notes in my study bible say that in this passage about love/hate “Paul is clearly dealing with personal and not national election”. This passage is one of the key passages in scripture used support the doctrine of election and double predestination — God loves some people and hates others. The next post will suggest that using this passage to support double predestination and individual election is not consistent with the whole witness of scripture – Paul seems to be referring to a group and not individuals. Jacob = Jews and Christians, the righteousness; Esau = Edomites, the wicked.