Episode 145 - God’s Anger Is Rational And Holy

The Bible does not describe God as indifferent. It describes Him as alive, personal, and fiercely committed to goodness, truth, and justice and that commitment has a shadow side we often avoid: wrath. We explore why Scripture reaches for words like heat, burning, and fire when it speaks about God’s anger, and why that is not an unstable temper but a settled, rational opposition to evil. 

We walk through texts that many modern Christians rarely hear preached, from Proverbs’ list of what the Lord hates to the prophets’ scorching images of judgement, and the Psalms’ warning to “kiss the Son” before rebellion collapses into ruin. Along the way, we confront an awkward question: have we become so comfortable with sin, both out there and in here, that we no longer recognise what holiness looks like? We also push back on an Enlightenment-flavoured faith that prefers a vague, harmless benevolence and treats judgement, fear of God, and damnation as embarrassing leftovers. 

Then we turn to the New Testament where wrath is “revealed”, even “stored up”, and where Hebrews calls God a consuming fire. Revelation’s phrase “the wrath of the Lamb” forces the issue: Jesus is not only gentle, He is also the cosmic Lord who sustains the universe and will finally deal with evil. That brings us to the closing tension that shapes everything: if God must destroy evil, how can the sinner be saved? That is where the necessity of atonement, forgiveness, and reconciliation becomes unavoidable. 

If this stretched you, challenged you, or clarified something you have struggled to name, subscribe, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review. What do you think we lose when we stop fearing God?

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

Transcript

Anger As Heat In Scripture

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The English word anger is used to translate various Hebrew words that all convey the idea of heat or burning. There's nothing impersonal or cold about the living God. The Living God is the vibrant life or has this vibrant life with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, passionate for goodness, truth, and justice, reveling in their wonderful works and love, spilling over from the one life to the whole creation with holiness, righteousness, and truth. And we are told that this one living God actually hates the crimes we commit against him, sins of what we do, what we fail to do, what we think, imagine, and feel what we have become, how we don't feel shame about shameful things, and so on, our idolatry, our selfishness, all these things. Now we might be have become so full of indifference and cowardice that we allow evil to simply roll over us, we coexist with it, we excuse it, we harbour it in ourselves. Yet this glorious God is so full of character and strength and zeal and goodness that that cannot happen with God. There's a relentless opposition to evil that will not tolerate the presence of evil. Proverbs six, sixteen to nineteen there are six things the Lord hates, seven that are detestable to him haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies, and a man who stirs up division among brothers. Now we may think of ourselves as insignificant creatures in a vast universe, and yet the Bible constantly tells us we provoke a hot reaction in the infinite God with even our proud looks. Do you see that? The first thing that the Lord hates and that is detestable to him is haughty eyes, just a kind of attitude he detests and he hates that. There is a judge with flaming eyes who sees even our deepest thoughts and desires, our attitudes, our motives, and he becomes hot when he sees this because all of this is so anti the divine nature. Now the Bible begins with strong examples of this divine hatred of sin and sinners, and then it just continues it all the way through. I've got a selection of verses by no means exhaustive, but uh fairly representative of the whole pattern of the Bible. Now we can think of Noah's flood, which brings about almost the total destruction of humanity as a whole, with only eight survivors, then we can think of that very kind of personal destruction brought on Sodom and Gomorrah, where the Lord personally comes down from the highest heaven in order to oversee and bring down this burning sulphur upon the inhabitants of these two cities. But here's some more Exodus thirty-two, verse ten, where the Lord says, Let me alone that my wrath may burn hot against them, and I may consume them. A fire is kindled by my anger, and it burns to the depths of shale, it devours the earth and its increase, and it sets on fire the foundations of the mountains. So there this kind of the heat of the divine anger

What God Hates And Why

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is like affects the very the world itself, the very cosmos. And again, the the fact that the Bible uses this language of heat and fire and burning is so uncomfortable for this sort of enlightenment thinker. Or even even from the 17th century onwards, where you have this kind of rationalist, despicable religion, really, that's so based on don't care, don't care about evil, don't worry about atonement and things like that. Just live your own life and be the captain of your own destiny. It's this foul religion that you find it from the 17th century and really strongly in the 18th century, but it it provides the polluting atmosphere for modern theology right into the 19th century and beyond. But look, think of Psalm 2, verse 12. We're advised to deal with Jesus and be affectionate towards Jesus because He uh His wrath is real, and that we need to kind of find peace with Him, the the the the divine anointed Emperor over the universe. We must get peace with him because His wrath is is to be feared. So Psalm 2 verse 12, kiss the Son, lest He be angry, and you perish in the way, for His wrath is quickly kindled. And that's the the whole all the nations of course living in rebellion against him and shaking their fists at him, and the advice of the Psalm is don't do that, find peace with him, because his wrath can quickly be kindled and destruction will come. Psalm seven verse eleven. God is a righteous judge, a God who feels indignation every day. Every day he has this indignant wrath against the world, humanity, our sinful humanity. Psalm ninety, verse eleven, it's Moses' psalm. And he just asks the question who considers the power of your anger and your wrath according to the fear of you. So Moses is saying we should fear the living God because of this wrath, this anger. And we need to take that seriously, says Moses. Isaiah thirty verse twenty seven. Behold, the name of the Lord comes from afar, burning with his anger, his lips are full of fury, and his tongue is like a devouring fire. And then it's still in Isaiah chapter sixty three, verse three, the Lord says, I trod them in my anger and trampled them in my wrath. Their lifeblood spattered on my garments and stained all my apparel. It's that terrifying image of him treading down the wicked like a person would tread grapes in a vat. And it's it's a sort of image that I it just doesn't have a place in so much of modern Christianity. Not only does it it's not merely that it's forgotten, it's actually opposed and preached against. And it is disturbing. We've got to be honest about that, but it's a consistent, relentless aspect of the Bible. Jeremiah 4, verse 4. He warns that is make sure your hearts are circumcised, make sure you're born again, says the Lord, lest my wrath go forth like fire and burn with none to quench it, because of the evil of your deeds. Again, so it's not that he just flies into irrational rage, and no there's no explanation for it, and everyone treads on eggshells around God because he just flies into a rage. It's not that, it's very rational, very calm, very collected, very focused, and it is driven by evil. The evil of humanity causes indignation, wrath, anger in God. He uh, he he he could say, I don't care about humanity. It means nothing to me. Like your your actions are insignificant in the vastness of the universe. I I don't have to care. It's not that he it's not that we force a reaction upon him, but he has chosen to take us seriously, chosen to love us and to actually make us his bride for all eternity, to be his covenant partner, and by choosing to treat us so seriously, to treat us as if any human soul is worth more than the world, to take our actions so seriously means that he ha he becomes extremely angry about our evil in all its forms. Lamentations two verse four. He has bent his bow like an enemy with his right hand set like a foe. He has poured out his fury like fire. Ezekiel chapter seven verse eight, he says, Now I will soon pour out my wrath upon you and spend my anger against you, and judge you according to your ways. Nahum chapter one verse two. Nahum has a lot of this imagery of the fire of God's wrath. We'll have a couple from Nahum. Naum one verse two and then Nahum one verse six. The Lord is a jealous and avenging God. The Lord is avenging and wrathful, the Lord takes vengeance on his adversaries and keeps wrath for his enemies. Who can stand before his indignation? Who can endure

Fire And Judgement In The Old Testament

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the heat of his anger? His wrath is poured out like fire, and the rocks are broken into pieces by him. In the fire of his jealousy all the earth shall be consumed, for a full and sudden end he will make of all the inhabitants of the earth. I mean that one, Zephaniah has that kind of cosmic day of judgment very much in frame. And there the fire of his jealousy, so he's jealous for human affection. He's made us for himself, he's purposed, that we are to live with him forever and ever, to be his bride, and for us to be united with him in to share the divine nature and all of this, and that when we not only reject that, but prostitute ourselves with gods and idols that are not worthy of that, it this jealous, the fire of his jealousy, he demands he demands the love that belongs to him as our he is the uh the husband. And this wrath is poured out like fire. Let's go to the New Testament, Romans 1, verse 18. Of course, we know that one. The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of humanity, or the wrath of God is being revealed. It's manifest that God is angry or should be. Are we, you know, when we look at the world, do we see in the way that the world is? Like in the old testament, so often the storms and earthquakes and shattering of rocks and all these things are understood to be manifestations of divine displeasure. Whereas so often now people, and that was well understood by the church of ancient times, whereas now people I've I even recently heard someone say that they felt all those things like earthquakes, weather, extreme weather, everything like that, had no meaning at all. No meaning. It says in its it's dealing with human beings who are self-righteous. Self-righteous and judgmental, and the behavior, it says, you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God's righteous judgment will be revealed. Notice that that's another thing that comes up sometimes in these Bible verses. The idea that wrath is stored up, God stores it up for to be poured out upon wicked, or when when we do what is wicked and provoking, it is building up this wrath. So the idea is not that that God instantly reacts to our evil behavior, that he restrains that and waits patiently to give an opportunity for sin to be atoned for, for sin to be expiated, forgiven, for there to be propitiation, for all these things. So he gives us space for that, but whilst whilst the waiting for the day of judgment, or this or the or the outpouring of his wrath, the wrath is accumulating. So it's not merely that the Lord just waits, but it's a static situation, it isn't a static situation. He him waiting and postponing the day of wrath. In the the flip side of that is that there is a build-up of judgment and wrath in that time. Hebrews 10 31 just it's that famous verse, it just it's a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. It's a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. And Hebrews 12 29 is often purred with it, for our God is a consuming fire. But let's just end with a couple of verses from Revelation. Revelation six, sixteen to seventeen. Hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and hide us from the wrath of the lamb. For the great day of the wrath has come, and who can stand? So that's the final day, the great day of judgment and justice. The that five that day is the day of the wrath of the Lamb and the wrath of the Father. But and the wrath of the Lamb is very specifically stated there. Revelation fourteen verse ten. He also will drink the wine of God's wrath, poured full strength into the cup of his anger, and he will be tormented with fire and sulphur. Wine of wrath into the cup of divine anger, which leads to torment. We won't explore all the imagery there for now, but just finally Revelation 19, verse 15, where the rider on the white horse, he will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. Now that is a quite a small selection of the verses that I had isolated, but there they are. And again, let's just feel that why those verses were once loved verses, celebrated verses in Christian culture, even in the Western world. They would occur in artwork, in hymns, in poetry,

Modern Discomfort With Divine Wrath

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in sermons. It was a it was a a celebrated aspect of the living God that he that the evil cannot win, and that there is no place for evil, and there's this relentless, passionate fury of God against evil, and that there will be a day in which this wrath will be fully unleashed against all evil, cosmic and human. That was a that was a a glorious truth to be celebrated. Now it's really greeted with embarrassment. Embarrassment, really. Even quite traditional Christians don't celebrate these truths or don't it don't treat them with awe and reverence. Very rarely are they ever preached on. Very, very rarely. And if you're a preacher and you're listening to this, think when did you last truly preach on the wrath of God from any of those verses, or from there's another I've got another hundred that without even trying. When did we do that? So the it's because we are deeply diluted and undermined by that enlightenment folk religion, pagan religion, that has affected the Western world, in which there is no room for personal encounters with the Lord God, no room for a unique divine saviour like Jesus, no room for a for a God who hates or a God who's angry. And the Enlightenment God, if if if if if that can even be described as any sort of meaningful God, kind of just has a benevolence, a benevolence, that's all. So when the Bible and church history constantly talked about God's anger or judgment or damnation, well, that's terribly embarrassing, and it needed to be apologized for and replaced with something much more civilized and comfortable. But what we've ended up with is not a God who is feared, and I think let's just sit with this for a moment. How many of us genuinely fear God? I mean, sometimes people say, oh, but by fear it's just meant like respect. I don't think that's true, actually. I do think when the Bible says fear, it actually does mean fear, genuine fear of the living God, which also includes respect and awe and wonder and so on. But even that, even let's go for the weakest form of it that are a kind of genuine, like visceral trembling in respect and awe and wonder. How often is that part of our own devotion, our own church life? So the Bible, because the Bible, you see, the ancient pagan, or even the modern pagan, who you know, genuine pagan who cowers down in abject fear before the shrine of his angry. God and tears the head off a chicken and drips out some blood onto the shrine. In many ways, they are much more in tune with deep reality than the modern rationalist or psychologist who trusts their own reason reason and and is utterly self-occupied with their own feelings, their own psychology, their own religion, which is it which is a choose your own spirituality, all of that. But the Bible, right from the earliest chapters, wants to confront us and the Enlightenment religion with very difficult stories, not only with creation and fall, but also that intensely disturbing story of the global near-extinction

Wrath Stored Up In The New Testament

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event of Noah and then the Sodom and Gomorrah, Fire and Brimstone, all of that. And these stories don't fit in the pagan framework of enlightenment Christianity, if we can call it that. And what that does is just wring its hands in embarrassment and hostility about this. But you see, again, the picture needs to be seen as a whole. As we keep repeating, this Lord God, who is indignant and jealous, and wrathful and angry and is so full of hatred about human sin, the reason he is like that is because of his own utter holiness and goodness and beauty and truth. But all of that is because he created us to be his friends, to share this wonderful universe with him. He invites us to talk to him, to walk with him, to share his very nature, his life forever and ever. And instead we betray him and we provoke this hot reaction from him as we trample on the things that are most precious to him. To the courts of heaven, we are like the most unrepentant hardened war criminals, careless, even laughing about sinful atrocities, hard-heartedly refusing to even acknowledge the divine worship that is constantly going on around us in all creation. The Son of Man, the Lord Jesus, the Lamb whose wrath is finally revealed, He is the one through whom all things were created. He holds everything together. The universe is sustained by his very words, it belongs to him as his own inheritance. And so you know, if we cannot get away from the person we have wronged, if if they are living right with us all the time, because this is the intensity of the whole thing. And that we might even say they are dead to us. We may handle it like that. But that isn't an option for the living God because we are in this universe that he has created and he holds it all together. The Lord Jesus holds it all together and sustains it all by his powerful word, and we are with him. We live and move and have our being within the Lord Jesus Christ, the cosmic Christ. We cannot get away from the person we have wronged, and we are he is with us all the time. So the problem of aggravation, indignation, offence, and also the need for atonement, forgiveness, reconciliation, it all is so intense. Can we finally and permanently live with someone, live with someone if we are serious enemies? The Son of Man fills the whole universe and confronts us in every detail of the heavens and the earth. There will come a day when we stand before his flaming eyes to give an account of all we have done, all we said, all we've thought, all we've desired. Although we can be exiled from him in a limited sense right now, in the way we think, the way we live, the way we exclude him from our society and routine, but his glory does fill the universe. And though we turn our backs on him, we commit our offences against him in his very presence. So can we sense the heart of this living God? The words the Bible uses to describe the attitude, the affection of the living God to sin. Strong words. He hates, he detests, he loathes the things that come so naturally to us pride, cowardice, greed, grumbling are all sins that are abominations, vile to the living God. Now we might feel something of this stomach churning revulsion about certain extreme crimes, the abuse of innocent children, the brutal torture of evil regimes, and so on. Now, perhaps we were once repulsed by more things than that. Once we may have been repulsed by many sins, many forms of evil,

Fear Of God And Lost Reverence

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but we've become hardened as the years have gone by, and now only the most extreme of all sins really bother us at all. We don't care. We don't care. But can we imagine how the Lord God might be so good, so good, that he feels extreme revulsion and s feels sickened about many things that we think and do and say, things that we don't even think are wrong at all? We've never thought were wrong some of these things. But can you imagine that we you might recall a time when once you were more sensitive to evil than you are now? But can you what must it be like for the living God who's never become hard-hearted at all? Can we imagine for a moment the glorious God who created us with such high ideals? And he recoils in horror at the things that violate his nature, his character, his everything he loves. So when we go back to the roots of it, our evil thoughts, words, and actions are so bad to the living God that he cannot endure our presence near him for a single moment. The Bible says he is so pure that he cannot even look at the evil things we do. He cannot look at them. He cannot see what we're doing. It's wrong for him to contemplate at all the thing the kind of things we do. It's a s it's strong language. How would we feel about sharing life with someone who was extremely evil, even by our standards? Imagine if you had to. I remember watching something recently, and a wife discovered that her husband had been committing terrible, terrible crimes, evil things for years, and suddenly it came out into the open, and the police arrived, and she said you could see how she suddenly realized she'd been sharing life with someone who was actually everything that was most revolting to her, and there was this like horror, and then literally she was sickened, physically sickened by all the realization of that, because we could we cannot share life

Revulsion At Evil And The Need For Atonement

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with someone who is so evil to us. So think about the things that make us shudder. With like we might say, I could we can't how would we share life with a murderer, an abuser, a traitor, a liar, a thief, a drug dealer, an arms dealer, whatever are the things that still make us feel revolted. A coffee brewer, a tax collector, whatever. We shudder with disgust and recoil in horror at the very idea of people who would do such things. The thought of being comfortable with that kind of company makes us feel sick. So it's not even just the thought of thought of us personally sharing a home with people who were committing terrible atrocities. But the even if we thought, imagine if I became so comfortable with that that I didn't care with it about it anymore. Even the thought of that is detestable to us. The thought of being comfortable with that kind of evil is detestable. Even if we didn't do it. But even if but to share life with such people and to be comfortable with them is detestable. Now you think about the sins that the sins and crimes and evil that m still are able to make you feel sick. Don't think about them too much, but just there be aware of them. Think of that. We can't we cannot live comfortably with these evils, and we shudder to think what we would be if we were comfortable with such things. And in that way, the living God cannot be who he is if he were to come to terms with any of the dark and selfish things that we do say or think. And sometimes people say, well, he should just destroy it. Get rid of it. But how do you get rid of evil such that the person can be saved? That's exactly what we're grappling with, with this big notion of atonement. How is that done?