Digesting the Wrath of God
Holding on to a hard truth
I don’t eat super-spicy foods – I’m not a good candidate for Hot Ones – because every time I venture toward “Thai spicy” territory, it’s not just painful for my mouth; it roils my stomach for hours or a day after. It’s hard to digest, so I keep away.
Similarly, many of us find the wrath of God hard to digest spiritually. Between Christianity’s appropriate emphasis on God’s grace and our culture’s value of nonjudgmental tolerance, passages illustrating God’s hatred of sin can be hard to stomach.
And to some extent, that’s the point: passages like these are supposed to grab us viscerally.
Thus shall my anger spend itself, and I will vent my fury upon them and satisfy myself. And they shall know that I am the Lord—that I have spoken in my jealousy—when I spend my fury upon them. Moreover, I will make you a desolation and an object of reproach among the nations all around you and in the sight of all who pass by. (Yahweh, speaking in Ezekiel 5:13-14)
I gave her time to repent, but she refuses to repent of her sexual immorality. Behold, I will throw her onto a sickbed, and those who commit adultery with her I will throw into great tribulation, unless they repent of her works, and I will strike her children dead. And all the churches will know that I am he who searches mind and heart, and I will give to each of you according to your works. (Jesus, speaking in Revelation 2:21-23)
Efforts to “unhitch” the Old Testament from the New or to imagine that Jesus replaces the “angry Old Testament God” image with one of grace don’t work: Jesus very clearly connected himself with the God of the Old Testament, and he spoke about Hell more than every other person in the Bible combined. If biblical Christianity is our meal, God’s wrath is on the plate.
What can help us digest that wrath, and God’s threats of it?
Remember the utter holiness of God
When Isaiah, who was both a prophet and a priest – a holy human if any could be holy – saw a vision of God in the Temple, he responded,
“Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”
Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.” (Isaiah 6:5-7)
Upon seeing God in his holiness, Isaiah’s first response wasn’t joy – it was terror and the belief that he was too “unclean” to bear God’s presence. And look how God responded: the seraphim didn’t say, “No, you don’t understand, God is love! You’re okay!” It assumed his sinfulness and his guilt and atoned for them by touching Isaiah’s lips with the ashes of the sacrifice. Isaiah’s first evaluation of his situation was right!
GK Chesterton said somewhere that children are innocent and love justice, and most of us are wicked and prefer mercy. While we could dispute the “innocence” of children, Chesterton captures the idea that knowing our own wickedness makes us gravitate toward mercy – which usually means excusing our own evil, or comparing it to others to make it seem less bad. We can convince ourselves that we don’t really deserve God’s wrath.
But facing God’s utter holiness – his absolute moral perfection, and his burning, settled opposition to sin – strips that illusion away. When we accept that “God is a consuming fire” and every shred of sin is stubble that will be consumed by that fire, it reframes our perspective.
Own your own wrath against evil
Miroslav Volf is a Croatian theologian. In the country where he grew up, one ethnic group - Serbs - systematically targeted and killed Croats, Volf’s people. In the introduction to his book Exclusion and Embrace, Volf writes:
After I finished my lecture, Professor Jurgen Motmann stood up and asked one of his typical questions, both concrete and penetrating: “But can you embrace a četnik?” It was the winter of 1993. For months now the notorious Serbian fighters called “četnik” had been sowing desolation in my native country, herding people into concentration camps, raping women, burning down churches, and destroying cities.
I had just argued that we ought to embrace our enemies as God has embraced us in Christ. Can I embrace a četnik - for me at the time the ultimate other, so to speak, the evil other? … It took me a while to answer, though I immediately knew what I wanted to say. “No, I cannot - but as a follower of Christ, I think I should be able to.”
Volf goes on in his book to make a case for Christian nonviolence - that we should “embrace” others, even others who do us evil - even četniks - because of our faith. Instead of grounding his argument in a theory that God himself is nonviolent - in the sense of never judging evil - Volf makes the opposite case. We can be nonviolent, because we know God is a perfect judge who will avenge all wrongs done. Volf goes on to say:
My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologians in the West. To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone (which is where a paper that underlies this chapter was originally delivered). Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude toward violence. The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God’s refusal to judge.
You have seen things that stirred righteous wrath in you: not a sinful desire for revenge, but a just hatred of evil and desire to see it eradicated. Rape. Child abuse. Oppression of the poor. You have seen things that you knew, viscerally, deserve wrath.
This is a truth we have to pair with the transcendent holiness of God. Because the way we feel occasionally, about some evils committed by [usually other] people, the perfectly holy God feels about all evils, committed or just indulged, from all people. Like the psalm says, “God is a righteous judge, and a God who feels indignation every day” (Psalm 7:11). If even we evil people know there are things that deserve righteous fury, how much more would the perfectly righteous judge who sees every human heart completely?
Threats of wrath are meant to provoke repentance
Jeremiah 18 has the famous “potter and clay” passage that Paul quotes in Romans 9, which is about God’s right to predestine some to wrath and some to grace. And that’s true, but look how God interprets the image in Jeremiah (which Paul would have known too):
“O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? declares the Lord. Behold, like the clay in the potter's hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it. And if at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, and if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will relent of the good that I had intended to do to it. Now, therefore, say to the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem: ‘Thus says the Lord, Behold, I am shaping disaster against you and devising a plan against you. Return, every one from his evil way, and amend your ways and your deeds.’” (Jeremiah 18:5-11, emphasis added)
Jeremiah records some of the most visceral threats of divine wrath in the Bible; but look what God says about them! Just like I sometimes threaten my kids with consequences in the hope that, if my love won’t motivate them to obey in the moment, self-interested fear of punishment might, God warns us against sin in the hope that the threat might awaken a sleeping conscience. Jesus does the same thing in the Gospels: see Matthew 25 for three parables with examples that warn against God’s judgment.
God’s wrath is utterly real; but in a sense, no one faces it unless they choose it themselves. And God himself doesn’t want us to experience it, as the next point affirms:
God’s love is closer to his heart than his wrath
For the Lord will not
cast off forever,
but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion
according to the abundance of his steadfast love;
for he does not afflict from his heart
or grieve the children of men. (Lamentations 3:31-33)1
This passage, also written by Jeremiah, shows us the “relative values” of wrath and love in God’s heart, as it were. Causing grief and afflicting – which in this context are judgments against sin – are part of who God is, but mysteriously, they are not “from his heart” in the same way that his steadfast love is. In other words, wrath and love aren’t in equal proportions in God’s nature; his love is “deeper,” as it were, than his wrath.
(I keep putting things in quotes because we’re in theologically murky territory; sorry, but I don’t know how else to proceed)
The opening and closing chapters of the Bible drive this home for me. God doesn’t create a world populated with “vessels of wrath” from the beginning; he makes a good world (Genesis 1-2) with the potential for evil, and then responds to the evil that corrupts the spiritual, human, and natural orders (Genesis 3). Likewise, he puts sin and evil away (Revelation 19-20), so that he might enjoy eternal goodness with his people in the new creation (Revelation 21-22).
Our God drank the wrath of God
Wake yourself, wake yourself,
stand up, O Jerusalem,
you who have drunk from the hand of the Lord
the cup of his wrath,
who have drunk to the dregs
the bowl, the cup of staggering. (Isaiah 51:17)
Isaiah and Jeremiah both use the image of a “cup of wrath” that God holds, which is a symbol of the judgment against sin. This is a visceral reminder of how God has the power to “serve out” judgment, as we’ve discussed already; but it also makes a few passages from Jesus’ life stand out more sharply.
And [Jesus] withdrew from them about a stone's throw, and knelt down and prayed, saying, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.” … And being in agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground. (Luke 22:41-44)
After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), “I thirst.” A jar full of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, “It is finished,” and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. (John 19:28-30)
What is the “cup” that Jesus seems afraid to take? Why does he drink bitter wine to fulfill the Scriptures? I think these words make most sense when we recognize that on the Cross, Jesus experienced not just the physical agony of Crucifixion but the much more intense spiritual agony of draining the cup of God’s wrath against sin. He took that cup, which we deserved, so he could offer us the cup of the new covenant that only he deserved.
This core idea was made clear to me in Dane Ortlund’s book Gentle and Lowly, and most of the points in this section were made by him.