Episode 144 - When God Gets Angry

Atonement talk can get strangely tidy, as if sin were only a broken rule and salvation were only a cancelled debt. We refuse the shortcuts and face the messier biblical picture: sin creates corruption, shame, guilt and real alienation from the holy God, so any faithful account of the cross has to be more than a single legal metaphor.

We then step into the thorny question of punishment. Should justice aim at restoration, reconciliation, restraint or retribution, and what happens when modern culture loses the “mental machinery” to confront serious evil? We bring George Bernard Shaw into the room, weigh the suspicion that punishment is just vengeance, and argue that Scripture treats judgement as something deeper than a personal grudge or a cold balancing of a cosmic ledger.

From Psalm 11 to the language of divine wrath, we explore why the Bible speaks of God examining humanity, loving justice, and hating violence. That forces a direct challenge to the comforting slogan “hate the sin, not the sinner”, and it raises the philosophical pushback about God’s emotions, immutability and impassibility. We make the case that righteous anger is not a defect in God, and that the intensity of divine anger may be driven by divine love because what we do truly matters to him.

If you want a more serious, Scripture-shaped way to think about Christian atonement, divine justice, and the wrath of God, listen through and share it with someone who enjoys big questions. Subscribe, leave a review, and tell us where you think the line sits between vengeance and justice.

The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

Transcript

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Well, welcome to the Christ-centered cosmic civilization. As we continue to think about atonement, and we need to sort of draw this together and try and arrive at a conclusion. If we violate the heart and ways of the living God, it's obvious we are cast out from the presence of God, disconnected from him, alienated from him. Our holy God cannot bear our presence when we're so filled with the very

Why Atonement Is Not One-Dimensional

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things that he detests. And what we want to acknowledge is that dealing with the problem of sin, corruption, alienation, shame, guilt, all these aspects of what our problem is, the problem of sin, it's not simply a one-dimensional problem. And so sometimes if we use the metaphor of like a judge paying the debt, paying a fine for a criminal, for example, that is helpful to get at one aspect, but the judge isn't personally angry at the offence. The law has been broken, the system has been breached, the civic code of behaviour, and then the law, the judge is enforcing this system and then may pay pay the fine in place of the criminal. So the cr the judge will set the sentence and then pay the sentence. And as we see, the Bible constantly teaches us all these different aspects of sin, and that we reap what we sow, there are deep consequences to our actions, whatever harm our wrongdoing causes, well, it is visited onto us, and we've explored what that means. And the the way that heart that sins are visited onto us,

The Limits Of The Judge Metaphor

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that can be through the punishments carried out by civic powers, like a judge or police arresting a person, and then then they're prosecuted by the the government effectively, the state. So the there can be punishments through the civic powers. There can also be consequences of what we've done. And if you remember, Schleiermacher put totally bet everything on just that understanding of punishment for sin, that there are bad consequences to bad actions, and they, although they don't normally fall onto the perpetrator, don't always fall entirely onto the perpetrator of the evil, those consequences nevertheless are felt by people at large. But what we also need to deal with is that in the Bible, repetitively and insistently, bad effects or punishments are visited by the Lord himself directly. So he doesn't simply leave it to civic authorities, though the Bible teaches that civic authorities are supposed to punish wrongdoing and bring bad consequences onto wrongdoers so that society has a kind of stability and order with respect to good and evil. And he neither neither does he only leave it to natural consequences, so that if you go around insulting people and stealing from people and punching people, you are gonna be socially isolated, people may punch you back, you know, all those kind of kind of natural consequences to doing things wrong. He doesn't leave it to that to just though to either the civic consequences or the natural social consequences, rather, the Lord directly himself visits sin and punishment and trouble upon those who who are sinners, on sinners and the wicked. And the idea that the Lord does this, like punishes evil,

Civic Consequences And God’s Direct Judgement

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causes some people, they struggle with that because they ask, what's the purpose of punishment? Is it nothing more than vengeance? And quite often in discussions about this, there's this assumption that any punishment of evil is a petty thing, a personal vengeance, it's a primitive thing. Primitive, petty, and personal. And is it nothing more than vengeance? Or it or is it is it about balancing a cosmic moral account? And that uh I think Anselm explored that, and other people have done that, that it is like the judge is enforcing some sort of cosmic system of morality. Is that it? Or is there something deeper than that? Well, and and and then sometimes when people explore crime and punishment, the question is asked, should punishment be for the restoration of the criminal as well as the victim? And in this podcast, we've sometimes explored the way righteousness in the Bible. For God to be to do what is righteous includes the possibility of redemption of the wrongdoer, help for those affected by sin and evil, possibility of redemption for the wrongdoer, but also in the end, vengeance. Vengeance in a limited way, sometimes in this present age, but then fully and definitively and finally on judgment day, on the day of justice. But this idea of restoration, and also is the idea of crime and punishment deterrence or restraint to protect wider society from the criminal. All these are different aspects of crime and punishment in human systems of crime and punishment. But sometimes people say, look, if a criminal has killed a member of our family, what good does it do to punish the criminal? It can never bring back the one we miss so deeply. So what's the purpose of punishment? Is it just a matter of personal vengeance? Because punishment cannot take away the crime. George Bernard Shaw, always ready to explain why he rejected Christianity and especially the cross of Jesus. George Bernard Shaw, in his preface to Androcles and the Lion, said the primitive idea of justice is partly legalized revenge and partly expiation by

George Bernard Shaw On Punishment

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sacrifice. It works out from both sides in the notion that two wrongs make a right, and that when a wrong has been done, it should be paid for by an equivalent suffering. So for him, the wrong being visited punishment and suffering being visited onto the criminal, the sinner, the wicked, is a wrong. But the idea is, and he regards this as a silly idea, a primitive idea, that the two wrongs, the original wrong, and then the wrong of visiting consequences onto the criminal. This is this is all wrong. Now, in in especially in modern times, when we don't have to live with or ever be reconciled to our enemies, and we don't really address the problem of serious evil, society at least my experience has been in the main throughout my adult life, very serious evil in in say British society anyway, is never addressed properly. It is it the my my general experience is it's covered up, and part of the reason for that, I think, is because there isn't a mental machinery for how to address very serious and some systemic evil. And the idea of really trying to deal with evil and confront it and deal with it in all the different aspects that are required. I I think once the modern Western world kind of turned away from Christian foundations, it's been adrift really in crime and punishment and periodically extremely egregious miscarriages of justice wake us up a little and rear and make us realise how how uh how bad we've we've got on this. Now, when crime and punishment is analyzed, there are several components. This idea of restoration, so that's to repay or restore the harm done. So some the what sometimes in the cr in crime the modern justice system it's called compensation. And again, that has raised enormous concerns where huge compensation payments are made

Restoration Reconciliation Restraint Retribution

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out. Extraordinarily large compensation payments are paid out, which has created a whole separate problem of is that really about justice or is something else going on? Anyway, restoration. There's also in the Bible, anyway, this idea of reconciliation. The Bible is crazy idealistic to imagine that there could be a path for the criminal and the victim to actually be reconciled, to be restored to friendship, even. Now, the crime, the criminal justice system rarely gets into that, and and and perhaps doesn't even have mechanisms for that, mental mechanisms to even understand such a thing. But it is something that the Bible talks about. Also, restraint. So we've had restoration, reconciliation, restraint. The idea now this has become very dominant. The idea that if we can't really address evil and we don't know how to label it or confront it or answer it, the best thing to do with criminals is simply restrain them. So prison has become this hugely overused tool in confronting sin and evil. So the idea is here is a criminal, they've done something wrong, let us restrain them in a prison for a certain amount of time, and then this costs enormous amounts for the modern state, huge amounts, and creates enormous problems by kettling all the criminals together into a kind of very confined space which rarely achieves any of the outcomes that might have been dreamed of, whereas the idea of inflicting punishments of a much wider variety and a more rapid response that has definitely fallen out of favour. But there's restoration, reconciliation, restraint, revenge, simply that the person is able to express their own personal burden and anger against the criminal. But really, I think it's better to talk about retribution, and retribution is this idea of the visiting back upon the criminal, upon the sinner, the weight, the burden of what they the pain, so that they have given out, they have caused suffering, and then that suffering is instead of it resting upon the victims or on society, it's as if we with retribution, it's an attempt to gather up that suffering and send some or all of it back onto the source, return to sender. We thought about that. Now then, what what how do we how do we assess all this? If we reduce punishment to mere personal vengeance, atonement is not achieved. People do not find they are at one with each other through personal vengeance, and we are aware of many stories in history where cycles of vengeance just run on, sometimes for generations, because it doesn't lead to at one moment. New chapters of division may be written, simply adding more crimes and more violence to the fire, and that doesn't reduce the heat. But what what if it's not about personal vengeance but something bigger and deeper? And I want us to chew on these words from Psalm eleven. The Lord is in his holy temple, the Lord is on his heavenly throne, he observes the sons of men, his eyes examine them. The Lord examines the righteous, but the wicked and those

Psalm 11 And The God Who Hates Violence

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who love violence, his soul hates. On the wicked he will rain fiery coals and burning sulphur. A scorching wind will be their lot, for the Lord is righteous. He loves justice. Okay, that's that's it, that's an intense depiction of the way that the Lord examines humanity and he hates wickedness and especially violence. He hates that and will bring violence and barrenness and s and and a kind of scorched dryness, a deadness to the wicked because of this. He will he does that, and and the explanation is because the Lord is righteous, and that is, as we've seen, a vital aspect of his righteousness. Now the Hebrew scriptures tell us how the Lord God is angry about the way we live, our selfishness and pride, our evil desires and greed, our lies and deceit, our idolatry and immorality, and so on. What do we make of this? God is angry so much so that the scriptures can say he hates sinners. And no and and and it's very, very common now to say he hates the sin but not the sinner. As if it was simply the abstract concept of the evil that that he's angry about, but that he himself, but the the doer of it is is not hated. But I I've I've tried to think that way and read the Bible with that perspective, but I find it unsuccessful in that I don't I don't find that the Lord does make that distinction, that he he restricts his hatred and anger only to the abstract concept of the sin, but not to the sinner. In fact, the language is really consistent that he is angry with the people who commit sins. And I just can't see that we can honestly read the Bible and just say it's only the sin, not the sinner, that is hated and that is the object of anger. Now, this business then of the anger of God, we've got to address it. There's a very human tendency to reduce thoughts about the living God down to a very human level. And we get that a great deal in thoughts about the emotional life of God, as we've explored in earlier episodes of this podcast. Some philosophers well, and just a lot of people say this, they cannot understand

Does God Hate The Sinner

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how there could be multiple emotional reactions going on in God. They can't imagine, like, for example, they'll say, Is if God is angry about Sodom and Gomorrah, but what about what does he feel? Is he simultaneously angry with Sodom and Gomorrah and also rejoicing in the repentance of a sinner somewhere else in the world and singing in some other situation and grieving in another? The idea then that is the father, God the Father, experiencing multiple even strong emotions simultaneously with respect to is it that he even has let's even set this extremely does is is there an individual, is there an emotional react set an individualized emotional response to every human being? Well, let's put straight stated as strong as that, and the the thing is philosophers and others will just say, I can't imagine such a thing. I can't imagine how God could have like many different strong emotions all at the same time, and they think I can understand why why people would find that hard to grasp or accept because we as we are fallen sinful human beings and we get overwhelmed by our emotions and we get controlled by one affection or emotion at a time, and sometimes we we know we may know what it's like to have multiple emotions vying within us, and we want we're happy, we're sad, we're angry, we're jealous, and sometimes all of these things are vying within us, and it and it can feel like there's a war within us of all these emotions, and then we struggle to express them, to contain them, and sometimes it's too much for us, and we have to go and lie down or something. So people would say we can't handle such levels of emotion, and therefore the perfect being, God, mustn't have either any emotions or certainly can't have them in multiple ways. So that's one ri way. Um others, and and I would contend that that it's not we we mustn't attempt to we mustn't do do that, project our own emotional limitations onto God and say, because we struggle with this kind of emotion, so must God. I think we mustn't do that. We must accept the revelation as it is without attempting to get to say, oh, but it it I can't imagine that. That is not it we're not required to imagine it. We're it's more to do to accept it. But others can see how a perfect no well they'll say a perfect God cannot have negative emotions to trouble. Him in any way. So God cannot have negative emotions like anger or grief or sorrow. And this is another very human way of reducing the living God down to a human-sized level. First, it may be a bad mistake to classify affections or emotions into negative and positive. I remember years and years ago the first time I came across that vocabulary, because I'd always felt emotion all emotions have a proper place and a proper function, and that they're all necessary in the right time and place and context. But I remember I was a teenager and someone said in relation to they said, ah, you need to get rid of negative emotions. And at the time I was like, What? What I thought they meant like sinful. We mustn't uh allow emotions to become sinful, but they didn't mean that. They meant that there's certain emotions that aren't simply negative intrinsically, and they they listed some emotions as good and some emotions as bad. And I and at the time I remember being quite shocked by that because all emotions or all affections, and we perhaps prefer the word affection, but uh have a right and proper place. The perfect response, the perfect response to evil is anger, sorrow, grief. And and and if a if um a perfect being, I don't hate all that perfect being nonsense, but a perfect being, sure, if a perfect being does not respond to evil with anger, sorrow, and grief, they're not perfect. That's the there's something deeply wrong with them if they don't respond in the in a in the in the in a good way. Any person who doesn't experience uh hatred and anger with respect to wickedness is well is in is at least imperfect and possibly worse. To experience jealousy when a spouse gives their love to another is a perfect and good response and to have no emotional reaction to evil or betrayal is imperfect. Another way of trying to contain the living God within our own human levels of perception is to think that if

Why Anger Can Be A Perfection

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if a divine if a divine person first has anger towards a sinner and then later has love towards the same person, this means that the divine person has a varying emotional reaction over time. That they they are changing, in other words, they're there's a change of emotion within them with respect to this person. And again, if those that have got caught in that dead end of a false view of immutability and impassibility, they can't imagine a perfect God having a variety, a ver a varying emotional response to anything or anyone. Again, it's it's obviously trying to measure and contain the Father, Son, and Spirit by the limits of fallen, sinful human experiences and projecting those limitations onto the divine perfections. Now, these concerns about any of the Trinity having negative emotions become strongest when we read the many, many Bible verses about the wrath or anger of God. We might have experienced an angry human father or have all kinds of very bad experiences with angry human beings, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, colleagues, strangers. And so we find it hard to imagine, some of us anyway, may find it hard to imagine how anger within God could ever be a perfection, ever be good and praiseworthy. So it's good to confront this early on to acknowledge why we might struggle with all the Bible verses that talk about the anger of the Lord God and the anger of Jesus Christ, the the at the wrath of Jesus, the Lamb, is is explicitly spoken about because sometimes people divide the Trinity and say, oh well, the Father's angry Jesus isn't, and silly things like that. But of course, we know the Bible talks about the anger of God the Son very explicitly and and directly. And in addition, we might feel that the love of God is incompatible with the anger of God, and we might genuinely feel that if God the Father loves humanity, then he should not or even could not ever be angry with humanity. So sometimes people suggest that the statement that God is love disqualifies or invalidates any Bible verse or statement that God is angry. Yet it may well be that the strength of the divine anger comes from the divine love. If the living God cared nothing at all for humanity, then nothing we do would be of any interest. If there is no love for the world, then there can be no real anger for the world because we just would not matter to God. We'd have no significance in this incomprehensibly vast universe. Yet God so loved the world and therefore this third rock from the sun is of incomprehensible importance to the life of God, and therefore what we do matters more than we can ever imagine. We know this even in our own limited experience. Those we love most cause us or are able to cause us the most grief, anger, and sorrow. And and those we care nothing for cause us the least. The English word anger then. So what we're gonna do next is we're gonna explore how the Bible some just the way the Bible deals with the wrath of God. And we need to think about exactly what does the Bible say. How strong is this language and what does it mean?