We continue our series on knowing God and today we come to one of the more difficult characteristics of the God that we worship. Today we are looking at concepts that are perhaps unpopular, or ignored, or are even actively disowned by people not just outside the church but also inside it. Today we will be looking at God’s wrath, his anger, his jealousy, his need to punish sin. These are concepts that all of us would prefer not to think about. We are ok with the concept of God as love, but God as wrath?

And yet this is something that we need to come to terms with because the Bible often speaks of God in this way and if we are Bible people and open to it as God’s word then we cannot be selective. The God that many of us worship is perhaps not the God of the Bible but a neutered version of our own imaginations; are we guilty of making a God in our image?

Sometimes people have two Gods in their minds – a God of the Old Testament who is serious and frightening and full of wrath, and a God of the New Testament who is loving and gracious and merciful. This is not a true and fair picture however, for the God of the New Testament is exactly the same as the God of the Old and there are just as many references to God’s wrath in the New Testament as in the Old, and indeed of God’s grace and mercy revealed to us in the Old Testament. A verse I came across some time ago represents this balance well and it is in the NT in Romans 11:22 “Consider therefore the kindness and the sternness of God “. There you have that balance – we worship a God who is kind and yet stern, merciful yet judges sin, loving yet who disciplines wrongdoing. We have these two sides of God again in the OT verses we read – “The Lord is a 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”. Ex.34:6-7

JI Packer in his book says that we are troubled by the idea of God as a God of wrath because in some ways we think that this is unworthy of God. “To some wrath suggests a loss of self control, an outburst of “seeing red” which is partly if not wholly irrational. It speaks of wounded pride and plain bad temper”. Is this the sort of God that we want to follow and worship?  The problem here is that we tend to place on God aspects of our own nature. As human beings we are imperfect and so often our wrath is indeed just bad temper, unreasonableness, or a loss of self control. But God is perfect, if he is angry he has good reasons to be angry, just as sometimes we can have a right or a righteous anger. If someone were to abuse your son or daughter would you not have the right to be angry at this violation. Yes you would. If someone seduces your wife would you not have the right to be angry – yes you would  - indeed there would be something wrong if you were not angry. If you felt nothing I would say that you are unfeeling and uncaring and there was no love there.

A Jealous God

Often in the Old Testament God’s wrath and anger against sin is set in the context or the language of marriage. God is married to his people. We are in love and we declare that we should be faithful to our creator, he has set his love upon us. But if we wander after other lovers, other idols, and we replace our worship of God with worship of another – usually worship of ourselves or of things – then he is jealous. In the Bible jealousy is a good thing for again it is in the context of a covenant love, a married love. God is jealous for us and he is jealous for his glory. He has made us and we are to worship him as our creator.

As sinful human beings we cannot fully understand this because our motives are so twisted and full of selfishness and sin. We find it hard to fully understand God because we are sinful, thus the language of worship and glory goes through a sin filter. We say well why should God get all the glory, is that not selfish of God? Why should God get angry if we do not worship him, has God such a big ego that he needs to be worshipped. But this is to come to this issue as sinners, for we cannot accept worship of us without actually getting false ideas of how great we are. We are not the creator, we are just creatures and pretty small and insignificant ones at that when we look at the size of the universe. Habakkuk 2:20 “God is in his holy temple, let all the earth be silent before him”.

When Job went through all he did and finally he was granted an answer from God, and God actually spoke to him, God did not even give an explanation for what had happened, and of all people surely Job was entitled to one; God just gave Job Himself and God talked about himself and the wonder of his creation and Job responded by saying “My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you, therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes”. (Job 42:5)

A Hatred of Sin

Most of us say we worship an awesome God and yet do we really understand God and how majestic he is and how small we are? Do we really understand how much he hates sin? Today in our culture most right thinking people have a hatred of sins like child abuse. The paedophiles have a hard time in the jails. We cannot understand how people would do such things. But there are other awful crimes like murder and rape, these are serious things. Are they more acceptable in our eyes? Surely not. Then there are other sins like adultery and lying which may not even be crimes.

You see we grade sin but perhaps we need to get into our minds that the small sins and the big sins are still sins in the eyes of a holy God. What we feel about child abuse God feels against sin per se – it grieves him, it angers him, it dismays him. What we feel about our wife being raped God feels when we turn our worship to other gods and other things. You see because of sin our minds and our understanding of God is so twisted that we do not see things as God does. But sometimes the light breaks through and we start to see how God thinks. We begin to see that if God did not punish sin, especially if sin to him is like child abuse to us, we are left with a God who turns a blind eye to wrong, and to injustice, and to racism, and to murder, and to theft, and to greed, and to lust, and to rape. Is this really the sort of God we want to worship – a God who does not get angry at such sins but ignores them or winks at them? This is not really the sort of God that I want to worship when I really think about it.

No, I want a God who is strong for justice, who stands up for the innocent, the abused, the vulnerable, the widow, the persecuted. I want a God who will exercise fairness and justice and who will put wrongs to right. Even in my own twisted and fallen sense of justice I want God not to ignore the murderer, the terrorist, the racist, the bully. But you see that has implications. If God says “It is mine to avenge, I will repay” I have also to acknowledge that I am not without sin. I need to admit that I fall short of God’s glory, I need to see that I have stolen things, I have committed murder and adultery in my heart. And what shall God do with me? Shall he wink at my sin?  No he cannot, and he must not for it goes against his very nature as a holy, sinless, perfect God.

Objects of Wrath

The New Testament reminds us time and again of how God sees us and that is often not the way that we see ourselves. Yes we would admit we are not perfect, we are less perfect than we even think. We have a massive problem, we are born in sin, we are natural born sinners. We are born with this bent away from God. He has made us and he calls us to worship him but there is something within us says well I will do it my way God, there is something than within us makes us stick our heels in. And because of this as Paul says we are not only naturally disposed to sin but we are under God’s wrath, indeed he calls us “objects of wrath” in Eph.2:3. Jesus says in John 3:36 “Whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on him.” In Romans 1:18 Paul says that because men and women chose godlessness and wickedness and sexual immorality and worship created things rather than the creator “the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven”.

We can choose to ignore these statements, choose to say this is not true, or we can begin to see the truth of them and acknowledge that we have a God who gets angry at sin and because of these things the wrath of God is coming and there will be no escape and we perhaps see that a God who expresses wrath at sin, who intensely hates all sin, is a God who makes sense and maybe this is the way that it should be. Behold the sternness of God.

The Kindness of God

But of course this is not the whole picture for the verse in Romans also says Behold the kindness of God. God in his love, in his grace, in his mercy, has provided a way through all this talk of wrath and anger and justice.  He cannot ignore sin, yet he is a loving God. Yes we are more wicked than we ever realised, but we are more loved than we ever dreamed. Sin must be punished or else God would deny something within himself, He would deny the essence of his character which is justice and righteousness, and yet he loves us. We are his creation, we are special, we are loved by him.

And so he determined that sin would be punished but the punishment would be placed upon his Son. Jesus agreed to take that punishment. “We all like sheep have gone astray, but the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Is.53:6). “Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, the punishment that brought us peace was upon him”

You see God’s wrath against sin is a settled wrath, it is not the anger of a moment; God is patient, God is loving, but he still cannot ignore sin and its consequences. Sin has to be punished and it will be punished but there are only two people who can take the punishment for our sin. We can choose to take it or we can allow Jesus to take it.  We can take it on our shoulders, or we can allow the force of God’s wrath against sin to fall on His Son’s shoulders. This is our choice. The cross is a propitiation – which means a sacrifice that turns away wrath.

In the book of Romans we are reminded time after time of how God deals with our sin through the cross “At just the right time when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly” (Rom.5:6). “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” 5:8.  “There is no difference for all have fallen short of the glory of God and are justified feely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus” (3:23-24). “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (8:1)

In Revelation 14 we are reminded that there will be no escape, there will be no hiding place, and the full extent of his wrath against satan and all who follow him will be poured out. This is the gospel, the good news, but first we must acknowledge the bad news. We are sinners, we are under God’s wrath and to escape that we need to run to the cross. This is God’s appointed means to get right with him. Our God is a righteous God, he is jealous for his people and jealous for his glory. He is so, so patient with us, he is full of mercy, and yet, and yet he cannot and will not let the guilty go unpunished. This is the God that we worship for he will not give his glory to another.

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