What is God’s Wrath?
Explore the intricate relationship between wrath, love, and God's attributes. This blog explores why God's wrath isn't a contradiction to His love but rather a response that upholds justice and heals brokenness.
What is wrath?
Wrath, per definition, is extreme anger. When we think of wrath, we think of intense anger in response to wrongdoing. From our humanistic understanding of the word, we think of wrath as uncontrolled, cruel, unloving, irrational, or hot-tempered.
Our perception of wrath is often attributed to retribution and someone flying off the handle in rage.
What is God’s wrath? Is it one of His attributes?
As established from our definition of wrath as extreme anger, we can also declare that wrath is not one of God’s attributes. Throughout Scripture, when we see God’s wrath unfurled, it is always righteous anger in response to sin, evil, and brokenness. John Stott said, “It’s a steady, unrelenting, unremitting, uncompromising antagonism to evil in all its forms and manifestations.”
Wrath is God’s reaction to everything wrong in this world.
Scripture tells us that God is holy and He is love. (Leviticus 19, Isaiah 6, 1 Peter 1) 1 John 4 doesn’t say God is wrath, but He is love. So, instead, the wrath we see is a response to our fallen world that emerges from His love and holiness.
When we think of God in eternity, in perfect communion with Himself within the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, wrath is not present. Love and holiness are all that’s present unless love is being harmed.
So it’s important to make that distinction; no, it’s not one of His attributes. God is holy and can’t be in contact with things in darkness; therefore, His wrath arises in response.
If God is love, why must He be wrathful?
A God without wrath is bad news because if He isn’t wrathful in response to sin and evil, meaning injustice exists, what has to happen? We have to take that wrath on ourselves. We are left as the ones that have to respond and fix the evil and injustice in the world, which leads to escalation.
Only if we believe that God will right all wrongs will we accept that we don’t have to right all wrongs. Only when we know that everything sad becomes untrue will we accept that we don’t have to be the ones that have to make everything sad, untrue. A God without wrath cannot answer the world’s suffering, evil, and injustice.
In His holiness, God has to respond to these things with wrath. What hope do we have in the face of injustice if there isn’t judgment? What hope is there in the world if God is indifferent to our pains and evil?
Imagine all the injustices and brokenness in your life and city. Now, imagine a God without any hatred toward those things. God would cease to be who He is because you cannot separate holiness and wrath.
If God is love, yet He is wrathful, does that mean those two ideas are at odds?
Our culture often flips that verse from “God is love” to “Love is God. When love is God, the idea of wrath is difficult, and it seems they’re at odds.
But wrath is a response to His love and how much He loves us and His creation.
Tim Keller makes this point in The Reason for God. He says, “All loving persons are sometimes filled with wrath, not just despite of, but because of their love.” Therefore we believe that wrath and love can’t coexist. We say those things are at odds with each other, but our experiences show that wrath must come out of love.
If someone you love, your child, spouse, best friend, or someone else is being harmed, your heart responds and flames with anger because you love them.
On the flip side, indifference to harm is not coming from love. Therefore love and wrath are not at odds with each other because God’s wrath is a righteous response towards His love being harmed.
It seems cruel for God to be so wrathful. How is it not?
J. I. Packer makes this point in Knowing God that God’s wrath is always judicial. It’s the wrath of the judge administering justice. The absence of God’s action and wrath is to give people what they choose in all of its implications. Nothing more, nothing less.
If we sin, which Romans tells us that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and if sin is departing from God’s perfect plan into brokenness, His response isn’t irrational and a blown temper. His response is that of the judge.
You may say, “Well, I don’t want the judge because I don’t like to think of Him in a right/wrong manner. Instead, I’d rather think of Him like a power you bump up against if you transgress, and you’ll get shocked.”
C.S. Lewis discusses this idea in Letters to Malcolm. While discussing God’s judgment, Malcolm brings up the idea that he doesn’t like the idea of a judge. “I would rather think of God’s wrath in terms of a live electricity wire where I know I’ll get shocked if I mess up.”
Lewis rebuts, “My dear Malcolm, what do you suppose you have gained by substituting the image of a live wire for that of an angered majesty? You have shut us up in despair, for the angry can forgive, and electricity can’t.”
We must remember that this wrath isn’t impersonal shocking, or abstract. There is a judicial human responsibility and choice concerning God’s holiness that’s in play, and we play a role in it.
What is the good news of God’s wrath?
We must acknowledge that without wrath and judgment towards sin and brokenness, what hope is there for the world? What hope is there for me?
The problem is that sin, brokenness, and evil are not just of the world; it’s within us.
We have to acknowledge and see that the sin, brokenness, and evil in the world are not outrunning the world. It’s within us. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said that the line dividing good and evil doesn’t run through political parties, nations, or races. It runs through every human heart.
If we give people what they choose, including its implications, we know what our heart will choose because we know what it’s bent toward. But when we see what Jesus does for us through the Gospel, we see an end to sin.
1 John 2:1 says, “My dear children, I write this to you so you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One.
Jesus is the propitiation for our sins, including the world’s sins. We have God in the person of Jesus, not being distanced from our sins, our brokenness, and the evil of this world, but entering into it and taking it all on Himself on the cross. When we think of the wrath of God, if we are in Christ, there’s none left. It’s all been taken by Christ.
As 1 John 2 just shared, for Jesus to be our advocate to the Father, it would be unjust for God to pour His wrath on us if we are in Christ. Jesus stands before the Father to proclaim, “I have taken the penalty for this sin.” That’s the good news!
That’s where we get the conversation with Wrath wrong. We often believe God’s wrath is still towards us even though we’re in Christ when we mess up—except it’s gone! Christ is advocating for us to the Father right now, saying that none of that is in play anymore.
Dane Orland talks about this idea in Gentle and Lowly too.
“To those who do belong to him, sins evoke holy longing, holy love, and holy tenderness; if you are apart, are a part of Christ’s own body, your sins evoke His deepest heart, His compassion, and pity. He takes part with you. That is, He’s on your side. He sides with you against your sin, not against you because of your sin. He hates sin, but He loves you. When God looks at his people’s sinfulness, his transcendent holiness, His goodness, His very divinity, that about God which makes Him, not us is what makes him unable to come down to His people in wrath.”
We tend to think that because God is holy, it renders it so that He will send wrath on His sinful people. But we are brought out from our natural ways of creating God in our image when we allow God to tell us who He is.
As the Body of Christ, we have to see that our human perceptions of wrath are completely gone. Jesus is advocating with and for us to the Father. He hates sin but loves us. He’s not against you because of your sin. He’s on your side, with you, in the face of that.
How relevant is God’s wrath to a Christian’s daily walk?
It’s highly relevant.
In a Seedbed article, Rev. Paul Lawler shares how as Wesleyans, we shouldn’t be running from God’s wrath; we should be embracing it and calling ourselves back to John Wesley’s usage. Wesley began countless meetings with this topic by asking, “Do you desire to flee from the wrath to come and to be saved from your sins?”
With a clear understanding of wrath, how the good news of the Gospel frees us from sin, and how we have an advocate with the Father on our behalf, I think we can answer that question cheerfully to a world that needs it.
We must preach good news to it by not distancing ourselves from the realities of wrath painted in Scripture but by bringing a full picture of God’s holiness and wrath. By understanding God’s wrath, we magnify a view of God’s grace, and that’s a picture the world needs.
TL;DR
We tend to understand wrath as uncontrolled, cruel, unloving, irrational, or hot-tempered.
However, in Scripture, when we see God’s wrath, it is always righteous anger in response to sin, evil, and brokenness.
God is holy and can’t be in contact with things in darkness; therefore, His wrath arises in response.
A God without wrath cannot answer the world’s suffering, evil, and injustice.
If sin is departing from God’s perfect plan into brokenness, His response isn’t irrational. His response is that of the judge.
By understanding God’s wrath, we magnify a view of God’s grace, and that’s a picture the world needs.
Related Reading
What is the Fear of the Lord? by Rev. Paul Lawler
What is Sanctification by Rev. Paul Lawler
What is Social Holiness? by Rev. Paul Lawler
