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I spent a lot of my day yesterday trying to understand what the Bible talks about when it talks about God’s wrath.
Most of the “spiritual” people I meet tend to say almost nothing about God’s wrath. I get the impression that they imagine God’s wrath is something that ought to be put in a box somewhere like those ghastly pictures from Junior High.
Wrath is different from anger and different from punishment. They are often connected, but they are distinct. God’s wrath is not something essential to his being, and it is not eternal. God’s wrath is contextual, it is dependent upon a set of circumstances and a series of relationships.
Have you ever been in a situation where there was so much conflict you could almost feel the tension in the room? Have you told someone that this hostility or tension was so real, so thick you could feel it and almost see it? It was a thing dependent upon people, but it was also a sort of a thing in and of itself by virtue of the context and the relationships there. God’s wrath is something like that. Anger is an emotion, wrath is often connected to anger but it is a different thing and sometimes, in a way, a thing in itself in a way anger is not.
The roots of the Greek word that we translate in the New Testament as wrath involves “lavish swelling of sap and vigour, a thrusting or upsurging”. Wrath is a manifestation of a relationship. The ancients usually distinguished between divine wrath and human wrath. Human wrath was more easily known. Someone’s wrath is often manifest when they lose their temper and subsequently act rashly. That is easily embodied in stories. In the Star Wars stories the slaughter of the sand people (and later the young Jedis in training) by Anakin Skywalker is an expression of his wrath. The wrath of a violent hero or villain is often an element of popular movies and stories. The wrath of the ruthless and powerful evokes strong emotions, fear, anger, resentment, envy, etc.
These illustrations of wrath might lead you to imagine wrath is always a negative thing. If you think about positive goods that need to be protected or brought into a context of loss or destruction we think positively of wrath. When we are the victims of injustice or violence our minds naturally seek a rescuer who will overthrow the oppressor and release ourselves, or the oppressed from some tyranny. There are many stories that envision this as well. Prisoners who are being unjustly imprisoned cry out for a strong deliverer who can overcome their adversary. Such a victim fantasizes about the power and the righteousness of their hero who loves them and who will not stop until they are free. You might think of Princess Buttercup (“The Princess Bride”) who awaits her rescue from Wesley. She boldly states to Humperdink that her lover is strong and true and will stop at nothing to rescue his beloved from Humperdink’s evil clutches.
Ideas of wrath are often connected with someone’s jealousy for what is rightfully theirs. We often confuse the jealousy, covetousness and envy. To covet is to want what another rightfully possesses. To envy is to hate the other for what they rightfully possess. To be jealous is to guard that which you rightfully possess from those who wish to wrongfully take it from you. Jealousy and wrath go hand in hand.
When we hear in the Hebrew Scriptures that “I the LORD your God am a jealous God” and when we hear about his wrath we bristle. “That doesn’t sound very nice.” It isn’t nice and it shouldn’t be nice. What God is saying is that he is passionate about things that really matter. He is in fact passionate about things that matter very much to you and to me. When the strong take the weak, when the powerful abuse those who have no defense, when villages are overrun and crops are stolen and women and children are made slaves for the beds, kitchens and fields of the powerful God is jealous, his anger is stoked and his wrath is sure to come. This isn’t alien to any of us. If we watch a movie and we see these kinds of things we feel the same way, too often, however, we realize that we are often unable to right the wrong that has been done and punish those who act in this way. Often when we try we do it unjustly and simply initiate a cycle of retribution.
This we understand, but a reader of the Hebrew Scriptures might ask “why is God’s wrath so large and so powerful?” That’s a good question and the easy answer is that God is so large and so powerful so that his wrath is proportionate to himself. There’s even more to that though. God is not only larger than we are in power, he is also purer than we are in goodness. Human wrath, as we know, is often tragic in consequence because we act rashly usually without judgment concerning justice and outcomes. Human wrath is also limited to what is within our sphere of control. Divine wrath is different by orders of magnitude.
Is God’s wrath eternal? It would seem not.
Blessedness, goodness, purity and joy are in fact eternal. Rebellion, corruption, loss and anguish can never be eternal, the most they can be are everlasting. “Eternal” is a line with arrows on both ends (no beginning, no end), “everlasting” always has a starting point and a vector only going in one direction (a beginning but no end). God and his goodness have no beginning and no end. Grace is foundational, punishment is the abnormality and the exception. Grace is always before, is always older, is always primary.
God’s wrath is not a part of his being, it is a dynamic that results from his goodness, purity and power occasioned by rebellion. Punishment may be everlasting, but wrath is not. God’s holiness plus presence plus rebellion yields his wrath.
The book of Revelation is filled with references to God’s wrath. I understand the series of trumpets in the book of Revelation to not be warning trumpets, like civil defense sirens, but rather war trumpets, as in the siege of Jericho or Gideon’s army. The trumpets are shock and awe intended to strike the hearts of God’s adversaries with fear. The wrath of God is the presence of God coming to save his people and coming into direct confrontation with all that is in rebellion against him.
The results of God’s wrath, or the instruments of God’s wrath are not always godly or godlike. In the Old Testament the “hand” of God’s wrath is sometimes evil enemy armies or natural calamities. In Revelation sometimes its demonic hoards released from the pit in which they were imprisoned envisioned as locusts or armies. Sometimes its disorder and sin reeking havoc in our lives. God’s wrath results from a swelling of his presence resulting in the intensification of rebellion and opposition.
All of this makes the seventh trumpet in Revelation 11 glorious. Bad things escalated dramatically with each of the six preceding trumpets, but with the seventh something glorious happens. The heavenly chorus (angels, elders, creatures, saints) announce the fulfilment of Jesus’ request in the Lord’s prayer that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. The twenty four elders then break into worship with a complex poem:
We give you thanks, Lord God Almighty, who are and who were
FOR you have taken your great power
AND begun to reign (indicative)
AND the nations raged (indicative)
AND your wrath has come (indicative)
AND the time to judge (infinitive) the dead
AND to give (infinitive) the reward to your servants the prophets
AND the saints
AND those who fear your name, the small and the great
AND to destroy (indicative) the destroyers of the earth
AND was opened (indicative) the temple of God in the heaven
AND was seen (indicative) the ark of the covenant in his temple
AND there was (indicative) flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, an earthquake and heavy hail
The wrath has come because this is God showing up in his absolute fullness and bringing an end to the rebellion. After the judgment it will be the end of his wrath.
In the end there are two groups, those who want God and those who don’t. If hell is the place where God anomalously and utterly excludes his presence then God is all-in-all everywhere else. Heaven and earth are one and all that remains is in tune with himself but yet separate (see the post on freedom). God is then finished with wrath because all rebellion is isolated away from his presence along with everything and everyone that persists in opposing his presence.
Our issues with God’s wrath are our own and they are our emotional reactions to his sovereignty. Deep within us all is an impulse that objects and resists God himself and in a Freudian way wishes to replace him. His presence therefore always has this dual nature for us. We are both attracted and repulsed by his power and his beauty, wanting it to be our own, hating it because it is not.
When we read the book of Revelation we read it in the context of our intense splitness. We pray against ourselves. We pray for that the part of us drawn to God, that wishes to submit to him and to enjoy him completely as we were made to do, with all our limitations and smallness. We pray against that part that wishes to be what we were not made to be and could never be, God himself. Somewhere in the dynamic the mystery of his image in us is revealed. We were made to be like him, he put some of himself in us and this can only be found by embracing the submitting creature that can be perfectly joyful.
When we pray for God’s presence we ask for his wrath and we seek the day when that wrath will be no more because the rebellion that elicits it will also be no more, both inside ourselves and in the creation.
