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God

God’s Love, Wrath, and Judgment

“God’s Love, Wrath, and Judgment”
  by brian rushing

Two of my recent posts have dealt with some of these words that we don’t like to think about in connection to God – specifically we don’t like the words wrath & judgment. Before I leave these two words, I want to share a few final thoughts that Dr. Packer provides that help us to realize something important about God’s key characteristic of love. Because of that love, there must also be wrath and judgment. A key characteristic of love is to always seek the very best for the object of love. Therefore, someone who loves another will have wrath toward anything or anyone who attempts to harm the one he loves. Someone who loves another will see malicious acts aimed at the one he loves as something to be judged as evil. Therefore, when we realize that God loves us with utmost intensity, we should also realize that it will require God to have wrath and judgment toward any people, things, behaviors, or attitudes that would cause us harm or problems.

It was not man…who took the initiative to make God friendly, nor was it Jesus Christ, the eternal Son, who took the initiative to turn his Father’s wrath against us into love. The idea that the kind Son changed the mind of his unkind Father by offering himself in place of sinful man is no part of the gospel message — it is sub-Christian, indeed an anti-Christian idea, for it denies the unity of will in the Father and the Son and so in reality falls back into polytheism, asking us to believe in two different gods. But the Bible rules this out absolutely by insisting that it was God himself who took the initiative in quenching his own wrath against those whom, despite their [terrible behavior], he loved and had chosen to save.

God, in His Trinitarian nature, loves us supremely. There is not one person of the Trinity that loves us more than another. God – in all aspects of who He is as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – loves us more than we can ever understand. In regard to that love, He must judge…
a wooden judge's gavel symbolizing judgment and possibly wrath

The judge is a person identified with what is good and right. The modern idea that a judge should be cold and dispassionate has no place in the Bible. The biblical judge is expected to love justice and fair play and to loathe all ill-treatment of one person by another. An unjust judge, one who has no interest in seeing right triumph over wrong, is by biblical standards, a monstrosity. The Bible leaves us in no doubt that God loves righteousness and hates iniquity, and that the ideal of a judge wholly-identified with what is good and right is perfectly fulfilled in Him.

This loving God has determined to love what is good and right to provide us with good and perfect gifts – the chief gift being Himself. Therefore, He must judge those things that harm us or our relationship with Him as bad, wrong, immoral, evil. Our culture (and world) does not want anyone telling us how to behave or think, but God’s absolute love requires that there be an absolute truth – which requires wrath and judgment.

“To an age which has unashamedly sold itself to the gods of greed, pride, sex, and self-will, the church mumbles on about God’s kindness but says virtually nothing about his judgment.”

Let’s keep thinking deeply about who God is and what He requires!


        (Quotes in today’s post are from Knowing God by J. I. Packer)


Categories
God

The Wrath of God Shows His Goodness

“The Wrath of God Shows His Goodness”
  by brian rushing

I recently mentioned Jesus as intensifying our understanding of God – including God’s judgment and wrath. We don’t like to think of the wrath of God. But I think J. I. Packer does a great job of helping us understand the importance of the concept – especially as it relates back to God’s goodness. He states:

The root cause of our unhappiness seems to be a disquieting suspicion that ideas of wrath are in one way or another unworthy of God.

…Would a God who took as much pleasure in evil as He did in good be a good God? Would a God who did not react adversely to evil in His world be morally perfect? Surely not. But it is precisely this adverse reaction to evil…that the Bible has in view when it speaks of God’s wrath. God’s wrath in the Bible is always judicial — that is, it is the wrath of the Judge, administering justice.
thunderstorm clouds symbolizing the wrath of God
God’s wrath in the Bible is something which people choose for themselves. Before hell is an experience inflicted by God, it is a state for which a person himself opts by retreating from the light which God shines in his heart to lead him to Himself. When John writes, “Whoever does not believe [in Jesus] stands condemned [judged] already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son,” he goes on to explain himself as follows, ”This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil” (In 3:18-19). He means just what he says: The decisive act of judgment upon the lost is the judgment which they pass upon themselves, by rejecting the light that comes to them in and through Jesus Christ.

The unbeliever has preferred to be by himself, without God, defying God, having God against him, and he shall have his preference. Nobody stands under the wrath of God except those who have chosen to do so. The essence of God’s action in wrath is to give men what they choose.

…Thus, God’s love, as the Bible views it, never leads him to foolish, impulsive, immoral actions in the way that its human counterpart too often leads us. And in the same way, God’s wrath in the Bible is never the capricious, self-indulgent, irritable, morally ignoble thing that human anger so often is. It is, instead, a right and necessary reaction to objective moral evil. God is only angry where anger is called for. Even among humans, there is such a thing as righteous indignation, though it is, perhaps, rarely found. But all God’s indignation is righteous.

Some of our ideas about God seem to be formed more by what the culture says God should be like and what we think we want God to be like than by what the Bible says. We must continue to think deeply, and most importantly, BIBLICALLY about God. If what God’s Word says and what we think are at odds, then we must trust the Bible to be the truth and realize that we are the ones who are wrong, even if we have not yet completely understood all the meaning and implications of His Word. His thoughts are much higher than our thoughts, and as we stand on His Word as truth, more so even than on our own thoughts, we will find ourselves in a more secure place than we ever thought possible.

        (Quotes in today’s post are from Knowing God by J. I. Packer)