“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…
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)