“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.
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)