The wrath of God is very unpopular and hard to even think about. What is God’s wrath? Generally speaking in the Bible God’s wrath is vengeance or punishment as the result of His righteous anger. This aspect is hard think about because we like to think that a loving God doesn’t get angry or punish. Also, if God is infinitely loving and infinitely mercifully why does he get angry in the first place? The answer is that a God without wrath is a God without love.
Important Note: Occasionally you will see references to Scriptures throughout this blog. If you hover over the link the scripture text will pop up in a small window. Please read the scriptures. They are very important to understanding God and His attributes.
Anger Management
There are two things we need to understand about God’s wrath, anger and punishment. God gets angry. There are several places in the scripture that backs this up (Deut. 9:20, Ex. 32:9-11, Rom. 1:18, an many more) In the bible there are a variety of things that make God angry, worshiping false gods (Ex. 20:3), defying his created order (Eph. 5:6), and disobeying his commands (Gen 3:17-18.) There are, I’m sure others, but these are the most ordinary. They have a common denominator and that is they all assume we can do better than by following God. God, being our creator knows what is best for us (Matt. 6:31-33) so naturally God gets angry when we try to deviate from His will. Some think that this makes God sound like an omnipotent baby. He seemingly says, “You’re not doing what I want, I’ll show you!” But this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Tim Keller often says that, “the opposite of love isn’t anger it’s indifference.” For example, a father gets angery with his son when the son disrespects his wife. The father is angry. Not because he hates the child but with the child’s sinful behavior is leading him towards wrong. What would become of the child if the father did nothing when he misbehaved? It is precisely because God loves us that he gets angry with our sinful behavior. Next comes the punishment.
Punishing us is one of the primary ways that God show his love (Heb. 12:7-11). That sounds strange doesn’t it? I’ll go one step further and say that if God doesn’t punish us then he doesn’t love us. Think about it, why did your parents punish you? So that you would eventually be good! This is a simplistic example but I think that it is correct. God punishes us so that we can realize our errors and turn back to following Him. Ultimately God’s wrath is for our good. But God wrath isn’t good for everyone.
In church we love to sing songs about how great it is going to be when we eventually meet God after our death. And, for the Christian, it will be great to meet God. But for the non-Christian meeting God isn’t going to be all that great. God pours His wrath out on those who disobey his will (Ex. 22:21-24, Rev. 6:15-17). If God wasn’t wrathful we could all look forward to an eternity in heaven with Josef Stalin, Charles Manson, and Adolf Hitler. Is it loving to give everyone entrance to heaven even if they disobey God’s will? The answer is no.
God’s Wrath and the Man of God
A question that we are fond of asking on Fully Man is what can this teach us as men? As it turns out, a lot! We can see that God loves us when he punishes us. He only punishes us because he wants us to be more like him. The practical advice is that when you feel like life is tough man up and ask yourself, “what is God trying to teach me?” The other, less obvious, application is that it is okay to be angry. Just like when we talked about zeal, anger can be a good or a bad thing. Men show their anger more frequently than women. I think the reason is because God created us to be leaders (more on that in a later post). So we naturally need to get angry but only in the righteous sense. That means, we only get angry when others offend God not when they offend us. Finally, it’s a good thing that God punishes evil. So when people ask you, “why would a good God send people to Hell?” You can explain to them that if He didn’t He wouldn’t be good because he wouldn’t be punishing evil.
Part 1 down only 2 to go! I hope you enjoyed this post, I know I enjoyed writing it. If you have questions or comments leave them below. Or send them here.
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