The Love of God and the Wrath of God

In the last year I have had ocassion to spend time with many college students from several different campuses teaching the Bible and answering their questions. These Q & A sessions always end up being both fun and telling. What I mean by "telling" is that students' questions give a good indication just where this generation is focusing their attention. And while there are still some of the basic questions being asked in each session - things like how to know God's will for life, and how to understand predestination! - more and more I am being asked questions about the nature of God. And even more, these questions about God are coming from a "suspicious" starting point. Students are increasingly wondering how the God of today's church can be reconciled with the God of the Bible. Perhaps the most telling kinds of questions revolve around the idea that God's love leaves no room for God's wrath. Or better, the question of how a God who loves us so much, who loves us even more than we love ourselves, whose overwhelming emotion toward all people is sacrificial love, could ever consign those same people to such a terrible place as Hell, where torment and conscious punishment will last forever and ever. Try answering that one in 3 minutes or less!

What lies at the base of this question are several theological assumptions that, while being taught in churches everywhere, are actually false. Let me see if I can unmask them here. But before hitting them head on, how about an illustration that might help put us on the right track.

Suppose that you have a friend who has two small children. Her husband is out of town on business, and - tragically - a desperate young man breaks into her home, rapes her in front of her two children, and then takes their lives. Eventually, the criminal is caught, tried by a jury of his peers, and convicted. The evidence is clear, and the defense attorney doesn't even argue the case. At the time of sentencing, however, the judge shocks the crowd by declaring that he is a man of love, a judge of love. He loves everyone, including the rapist/murderer. His love is so strong that he overturns the jury verdict, and sets the young man free.

Now, I know that this is a made-up story, and won't stand up to rugged assessment, but you get the point. If it were true, you and I and the whole world would be outraged! Articles in the newspaper would pop up demanding justice, demanding that the young man be punished to the full extent of the law. They would further have argued that the judge had forsaken his duty to hand out justice, to promote and defend the laws of the land.

This story aptly describes the view of God as a loving judge that is sweeping our land. The problem is that the church has gone overboard in teaching the love of God to the exclusion of the wrath of God. In so doing, we have left God no room to exercise the rest of His divine attributes which include infinite holiness and justice. The question that has to be answered is this: How does the Bible describe God? Does His love flow indiscriminately? Does His love overrule His justice? And most importantly, what does the Bible say about the wrath of God? Does God's wrath rest on those who break His law or not? Should those who break God's law worry about His wrath? Is it the love of God, or the wrath of God that moves the heart to repentance and faith?
Let's first turn to look at the false theological assumptions being preached and taught in the church today, and then we will try to answer these questions.

False Assumption #1: God's love is indiscriminate: What is falsely being taught or at least caught, is the idea that the love of God flows out from Him to all in the same way. That is, God's love for everyone is the same, and is infinite and unconditional. This simply isn't true, and the false assumption regarding God's love is at the root of this generation's misconceptions about God.

First of all, the word "love" is not a static word. It doesn't have only one meaning. Let me explain: I love my wife and kids; I love the Dodgers; I love children; I love my granddaughter. In these four statements, the word "love" has different meanings, and being English speakers, we all understand the differences. My love for my wife and kids is much diffferent from my love for the Dodgers. My love for children is much different from my love for my granddaughter Kate. Instinctively we understand the differences. But, somehow, when we come to study God, we forget that the "love" word carries a whole range of meanings, and levels of meaning.

The fact is that God's love is seen in the Bible as operating on different levels. John 3:16 speaks of God's love for the "world." Here, John is not saying God has an equal amount of saving love for each individual that ever lived, but rather that God "loves" the cosmos, his creation. When sin came in and wrecked His perfect creation in Genesis 3, God could have turned away from the mess. Why didn't He? Why did He instead determine to reclaim creation, and reform it so that it would once again declare His praise perfectly (which, btw, is the goal of history: God, through Jesus Christ, will reclaim and redeem and reform all that sin distorted and corrupted, including the physical creation, called the New Earth!)? Why did God determine to rescue His fallen creation through the life, death and resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ? John's answer is simple: God so loved the world ... Now, does this verse say that God loved Adolph Hitler, Sadaam Hussein, all the rapists and murderers and tyrants of the world with an unconditional, redeeming love? NO! This verse speaks about the love He had for His overall creation, and His determination not to let sin have the final say. The love for His creation is often referred to theologically as God's "common grace." It is the gracious, benevolent attitude God has toward all, that is "common" to all. In this, He sends the rain on the righteous and the unrighteous alike (Matthew 5:4): He keeps the natural laws working like gravity, and such so that life can continue on earth; He sends the seasons, causes the grass to grow, keeps the hearts of the righteous and wicked beating, etc. This is God's "common love" for His creation. But this is different from His sovereign, electing, redeeming, saving love that is for those who are "in Christ."

This sovereign, electing, redeeming, saving love of God is also a fact of Scripture. Perhaps the greatest example is found in Ephesians 1:3-7:  Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.

Notice a few things in particular: This saving, redeeming love is not directed at all, but only at those God has chosen, and blessed, and are seen to be "in the Beloved." These are the ones who, through the Gospel and the work of the Holy Spirit, have come to see that obeying God is their very best option. They have come to see that their sin merits His wrath (more on that later), but that, through no work or merit of their own, they have been rescued by His gracious and loving power in Jesus Christ. They have come to see their sin, and turned from it to love and serve Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord. Simply put, they are Christ-followers. These are the ones who have come to experience the saving, redeeming love of God eternally.

Paul demonstrates that this is a different level of God's love in Romans 8:28-39:   And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren; and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified.   What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things? Who will bring a charge against God’s elect? God is the one who justifies; who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Just as it is written,
“FOR YOUR SAKE WE ARE BEING PUT TO DEATH ALL DAY LONG;
WE WERE CONSIDERED AS SHEEP TO BE SLAUGHTERED.” But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Again, note a few things: First, see that God's redeeming love is not experienced by all; it is only found "in Christ Jesus our Lord." The locis - the place it is found - of God's saving grace is "in Christ Jesus." Outside of Christ Jesus you will experience the common grace of God, His love and care and continual provision of the stuff of life, but NOT His eternal, redeeming, saving, loyal love. That is reserved for those "in Christ Jesus". Second, see that this love is eternal, never to be ended. Nothing can separate us from this love in Christ! This is a huge piece of peace! But, this is NOT true for those outside of Christ. While God's sovereign, saving, redeeming love is eternal and unbreakable, this is not true for His common grace. All who refuse to acknowledge God's sovereign rule in their lives, who continue to say "no" to Him in their lives, who in this way rebel against His freely offered saving love, and continue to live in rebellion to His commands will find that one day they will be held accountable for their disrespect and crimes against Almighty God. They will find that His common love will no longer be there, but instead, they will experience the judgment His law demands, to the full extent.

False Assumption #2: Our view of what God should be what matters most: Today we have a huge deficiency in Bible knowledge. We also are sadly lacking in an attitude of respect and submission to the Bible. This means that all too often we look at God through our contemporary lens and decide - based on our own preferences - what God should be and how He should act. But, the truth is that we are not at liberty to define God in any way other than the way He defines Himself. He does this in the Bible, and thus, the Bible becomes the starting point for any definition of God.

Our problem usually begins when teachers and preachers start portraying God in ways that are human. This is particularly true when it comes to our subject here - God's love. We see God as a Father who loves, and this is certainly in line with the Bible. But, we go beyond the biblical picture to characterize God as the Father we want, rather than understand that the "Father" motif is just one of the many ways the eternal and Almighty God has seen fit to describe Himself. He is also a Mighty Judge, a Holy God, a Warrior King, and a host of others pictures used to let us understand who God is. The problem with pictures is that we tend to gravitate toward the one we like best, and use that picture to frame God in His entirety. But the Bible does not let us do this. Rather, we are to take all the pictures together, and come to understand the many facets of God's nature.

For our purposes here, let's just remember that God is Almighty Creator and Righteous Judge and Holy God, in addition to being Loving Father. As Creator, He has ultimate authority over all creation. The great Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar found out the truth of this the hard way. You can read the story in Daniel 4, but here is Neb's conclusion: Dan. 4:34   “But at the end of that period, I, Nebuchadnezzar, raised my eyes toward heaven and my reason returned to me, and I blessed the Most High and praised and honored Him who lives forever;
For His dominion is an everlasting dominion,
And His kingdom endures from generation to generation.
35 “All the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing,
But He does according to His will in the host of heaven
And among the inhabitants of earth;
And no one can ward off His hand
Or say to Him, ‘What have You done?’

God is the Almighty Creator, and reserves the right to lay down the laws for His creation. He has done this, and has every right to rule His creation, including the affairs of mankind.

God is also the Righteous Judge. His justice is impecable. He does not let sinners go unpunished; His justice will not allow it. Paul makes this clear in 2 Corinthians 5:10 For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be recompensed for his deeds in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad. Isaiah the prophet sums it up further when he declares what God has said: Is. 13:11 Thus I will punish the world for its evil
And the wicked for their iniquity;
I will also put an end to the arrogance of the proud
And abase the haughtiness of the ruthless.

God is a righteous judge, and His justice and integrity demand that all sin be punished. So, at this point, we find that we're all guilty before God - if we're honest! - and since He must punish sin, the question remains: How can I ever come to live within His love? The answer of course, is that Jesus stepped in on the cross, and took our punishment! God did not fail in punishing our sin; It just fell on Jesus instead of us. That's the core of the gospel: Jesus, our substitute, took the full, unobstructed wrath of God for sin on Himself, so that we - in Him! - could become the eternally loved children of God.

God is also a Holy God. That is, He cannot abide sin. Those who believe that the "love of God" translates to acceptance on God's part of all people, regardless of their lives and practices, have never grappled with the concept of His holiness. God cannot tolerate sin. He hates it, and as a function of His nature, must deal with it. What we do see is that in His grace, God postpones the final dealing with sin until the Day when He has decided He will bring history to a close, open the books, dole out justice, and set everything to rights. Until then, it is important not to assume that a lack of judgment means that God is "accepting" of sin and sinners. Rather, the wrath of God "abides" on them (John 3:36) until that time when, in repentance and faith, they surrender their hearts and lives into His care and keeping, and follow Christ.

False Assumption #3: A loving God cannot also be a God of wrath: I often hear that folks like Jesus, but aren't too sure about the God of the Old Testament. That OT God seems quite full of wrath and judgment, and doesn't seem all that loving. When I hear this I know I'm speaking with someone who hasn't really read the OT. The sections in Exodus where God explains that He has chosen Israel to be His own, even though they are a sinful, stubborn people, are some of the most amazing expressions of unconditional covenantal love ever written. Furthermore, God's longsuffering, patient love for Israel is really the story of the OT, as they disobey over and over, but He remains true to them. Yes, God judges His people, and often quite severly, but only after He has repeatedly warned them for years and years and years through the judges, the prophets, and kings. He asks them to trust Him, to obey Him. When they do, they prosper. But, their wicked hearts run away from Him over and over, and eventually, He brings judgment and discipline down on them, as any loving Father would.

The fact remains, however, that the Bible does not shy away from the fact that God, as Mighty Creator and Righteous Judge, has every right - in fact, has an obligation! - to judge those who break His law, disobeying His commands. Those who do find themselves facing the wrath of God. The wrath of God is something we seldom hear about these days. The church is so committed to believing that the love of God is all people need to hear that we give God's wrath little time.

The fact is, we ought to be preaching God's wrath in equal parts to God's love. The reason? The "good news" is only good when seen against the backdrop of the "bad" news that our sin deserves God's wrath! We've forgotten that in the "saved" formula, what we're saved from is the wrath of God! Never forget, Hell is God's idea; it isn't the place Satan calls home, like the comics portray in the Sunday paper. Rather, hell is God's place for those who refuse Him in this life; in death, they get their way. Hell is the place of eternal wrath, and it is the destination of all who break God's law, unless they turn to Christ for rescue. Remember: We have been saved from the wrath of God, by the grace of God, for the glory of God!

False Assumption #4: The story of God and His redeeming love is centered on mankind, and our well-being: This is perhaps the most dangerous myth being broadcast today. The church all too often has made us - humans - the center of God's attention, the focal point of the Gospel, the reason for everything. But, this isn't true. When we make God and the gospel man-centered, we tend to elevate ourselves, and our well-being, to the highest rung on the spiritual ladder. We make God out to be here for us. We shape Jesus into our personal friend who is here to help us be all we can be. We make the church a place where religious consumers come to shop for whatever they believe will meet their needs. And we turn the Bible into a self-help manual. All of this is not only wrong, but dangerous.

First of all, the center of God's focus is not us, but Himself. It must be this way, or else God is commiting idolatry! He has to be fixated on His own Glory, and is in fact, the only righteously self-centered being in the universe. God's highest passion is that His own glory be seen. This might be hard for us to take, since it seems so self-centered. We have no earthly models of righteous self-centeredness, and so we tend to class all self-centeredness as harmful (except for our own, of course! LOL). But, if you think about it, God deserves to be the center of all things, the focus of all praise and glory, the goal of everything, the purpose for everything. And this is true for Him as well as us.

Secondly, this means that the whole plan of salvation, the rescue planned by God and accomplished by Christ and the Holy Spirit, must not center on our well-being, but on the glory of God. Of course, a byproduct is certainly our eternal and temporal well-being, but the goal of the Gospel is really God, not us. We're just the vehicle through which God's glory is being demonstrated time after time after time. If we forget this, we gravitate toward a man-centered gospel, filled with the idea that Jesus owes us something when actually, we are forever in His debt. The fact that God is at the center, and the gospel is really about His glory not ours, means that the church ought to be a group of redeemed folks who are surrendered to His will, to His praise, to His glory, to His mission rather than to meeting our temporal whims and stylistic preferences. The fact that we argue about music, and lighting, and programs only shows how skewed our vision is. Chirst-followers all over the world, in countries where persecution is a daily threat, worship with gladness and tears on dirt floors, with one or two Bibles, under the constant threat of discovery, and certainly without all the "stuff" we think is so necessary to our comfort and convenience. Why? Simply because they understand that God, not themselves, is at the center.

We simply must restore God to the center, His wrath to its rightful place in the story, the gospel to its original form in which the bad news of sin and wrath come first, only to be overwhelmed with the declaration of the love of God in Christ for all who surrender their hearts and lives to Jesus.

So, in light of all this, how do we answer the questions posed back at the beginning of this blog? Well, here they are:

How does the Bible describe God? Answer: As Mighty Creator with total rights to rule His creation as He sees fit (and it is a joy to know that God never makes mistakes, and always does what is best and right.).

Does His love flow indiscriminately? Answer: In terms of His common grace - His care for all creation - the answer is yes. God's care to send the rain and all that makes for life is showered down on all people, regardless of their obedience to Him. But, in terms of His sovereign, electing, saving, redeeming, reforming love, it is only found in Jesus Christ.

Does His love overrule His justice? Answer: No. All of God's attributes are infinite and eternal. He never acts out of keeping with them all. Thus, His justice will never be in conflict with His love. In fact, it was the combination of these two that made the cross necessary. God's love for those He had chosen to save drove Him to deal with their sin. His justice demanded that the sin be punished. Thus, God's love and justice came together in the person of God the Son - Jesus Christ - as He went willingly to the cross to bear what justice demanded of us, so that love could be lavished on us.

And most importantly, what does the Bible say about the wrath of God? Does God's wrath rest on those who break His law or not? Should those who break God's law worry about His wrath? Is it the love of God, or the wrath of God that moves the heart to repentance and faith? Answer: God's wrath is found throughout Scripture (John 3:36; see also Romans 1:18; 2:5; 2:8; 3:5 and especially Romans 5:8,9). Those who break God's law should certainly worry about the inescapable wrath of God. In fact, it is the knowledge that our sin merits God's eternal wrath that begins to open our eyes to our brokenness, our precarious position as sinful rebels living on God's earth, breathing His air, and still shaking our fist at Him. And when this happens, and then we hear the precious story that this God of Justice has, in love, provided Jesus to be our Rescuer, it just may be that faith - true, saving, redeeming faith - will rise in our hearts, and the scales will fall from our eyes, and we will see that giving our lives to Jesus is our very best option, not only to escape eternal wrath, but also to come to know life as it was always meant to be.

Hope this helps,

David