God is love. For an eternity, we will never finish exploring the depths of His mighty love for us.

Many of us grew up reciting John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…for God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” In this, we see God’s Fatherly desire not to judge us, but to rescue us. If so, how are we supposed to trust God and draw close to Him when we see so many instances of God’s anger and wrath in the Hebrew Scriptures?

Some people think God is eagerly waiting to catch us in our sins so He can prove Himself holy and remind us how sinful and evil we are. Is God an uptight perfectionist who cares more about the rules than relationships? Our perceptions often reveal our human biases more than the reality of God’s nature. Still, to truly know and trust God, we need to be healed of our fear of His anger and come to understand what it reveals about His passions and values.

How are we to understand God’s wrath?

Imagine, as a parent, walking into a room in your house, and discovering two of your children have tied up the third, and are mercilessly tormenting the poor kid. Whimpering, ashamed, and powerless, your child pleads for help. How would you feel in that moment? Or imagine a neglectful neighbor who lets his pit bull run across your property line and attack your child while she is innocently playing. Or, imagine if your spouse was trying to help someone in need quietly and, instead of gratitude, a slanderous lie was spread around town maligning your spouse’s character and portraying him/her as a selfish and malicious person. How would you feel about that defamation of their character? In all of these stories, we feel an instinctual zealous anger to put an end to what is wrong.

What makes God loving is His persistent and consistent desire to “put an end to what is wrong.” In dealing with selfish humans, God’s justice is what makes Him loving towards all. His standard is perfectly and equally impartial, just, and protective of all people. He wants His children to stop using and abusing one another.

Here are a few Biblical and theological ways to understand God’s wrath:

1. God’s anger and wrath are His burning zeal for justice and truth.

In Deuteronomy 4:24, the purity of God’s nature is symbolized as a devouring fire. Everything that isn’t truthful and holy, as He is holy, will be burned up, torn up, thrown out, spit out, rejected, and eternally destroyed by His purging fire. That’s good news. It means sin, injustice, abuse, sorrow, calamity, narcissism, curses, deceit, neglect, evil human desires, fraud, death, and tyranny will all be destroyed in God’s coming government. Revelation 6:16 says people will cry out, “hide us from…him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb!” God will once and for all purge away evil. “The great day of his wrath has come, and who can withstand it” (Revelation 6:17). God’s wrath is synonymous with God’s justice. Just as you would want to protect each of your children from being abused by another child or a neglectful neighbor, so God wants justice for all His children. So obedience to His laws and commands is paramount to walking out His holy love towards your neighbor (Leviticus 19:18). God’s wrath is the guarantee that justice will be done.

2. Wrath is a state of existence outside of God.

To remove ourselves from the Life Giver is to experience lifelessness (Genesis 2:17). To remove ourselves from love is to experience the terminal disease of withering away in our selfishness apart from God. That was a condition we brought upon ourselves. 1 John 3:14 says, “Anyone who does not love remains in death.” Notice how we are already in a state of death and have to come out of a state of death and back into a state of “life” through Jesus Christ. Listen to Jesus speaking in the Gospel of John, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on them.” In Paul’s letter to the Romans, he describes a piece of pottery so stubborn and resistant to change that the potter gives up on it and throws it in the trash. The idiom Paul uses for that rebellious pot is an “object of destruction/wrath” (Romans 9:22). God’s wrath was a condition of separation we brought upon ourselves in our stubborn rebellion. It does not necessarily indicate God’s heart inclination.

3. Hell is the final state of separation from God.

Hell was created for “the devil and his angels”—those spirits in rebellion against God (Matthew 25:41). Unfortunately, people who are not willing to surrender to God’s good government of love and justice, those who will live in rebellion against God, will be united with the leader they follow, the devil, in his final demise: “The one who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work” (1 John 3:8). The Final Death (in Hell) is the ultimate state of separation and destruction God grants to the rebellious who want to be free of His oversite. Hell is simply God accommodating your personal choice.

4. God doesn’t desire for us to experience His wrath but rather His grace.

God does not want any of His children to live eternally separated from Him (2 Peter 3:9). “For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 5:9). In this sense, wrath is like a person sitting on railroad tracks while an oncoming train is barreling towards them. Wrath is the state of calamity the person is in, not necessarily God’s desire to see them experience that calamity. God wants all people “to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:3–4). Though it’s not His will that His children perish, He will not override their will for autonomy and independence. C.S. Lewis says, in the end, there will be two kinds of people: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, ‘Thy will be done.’

5. God does feel anger, but His emotions are measured and warranted.

God is not a stoic. He loves deeply and passionately. He is passionate about things that are important. If people are constantly thumbing their nose at God’s family values, living in a state of belligerence, degrading other people, or having idolatrous affairs with other gods, then God feels the depth of profound betrayal, hurt, neglect, disregard, and justified anger. You can feel the heat in Deuteronomy 29:28: “In furious anger and in great wrath the Lord uprooted them from their land and thrust them into another land, as it is now.” As a dad, I have expressed justified anger at my rebellious children from time to time. They needed to understand how strongly I felt about their irresponsible behaviors. Yet, in my anger, I still loved them and desired for them to walk in a way that our family could live in relationship and harmony.

6. God’s anger is not like human anger.

Just because God gets angry doesn’t mean we need to live in fear that God will fly off the handle and rage against us. Exodus 34:6–7 says God is a “compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.” God provided a means for the Israelite who sinned to go to the temple and receive God’s forgiveness. His wrath is usually expressed in response to the people’s flagrant hating on Him and His laws—and sometimes only after hundreds of years. Those people no longer cared to be forgiven or to live in a manner God asked them to. They had completely disregarded the Lord altogether. If you are worried about God’s anger, then it’s probably a sign that you are not living in the kind of rebellion that deserves God’s anger.

God’s emotional anger is different than human anger. People often aren’t in control of their emotions; their emotions are in control of them. They say cruel words or hit someone in a state of rage. God is always in perfect control of Himself. His anger is always a perfect expression of His justice. When God expresses His anger, there’s no doubt that the person was inviting God’s appropriate response. In the book of Deuteronomy, immediately after God promised blessings for those who pursued Him, and curses for those who disregarded Him, Moses described God, “his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is he” (32:4). Even when He is angry God’s anger does not cloud or warp His justice.

7. God provided ways for His holiness not to destroy people in their uncleanness.

As a patient Father, God loved us enough to provide ways that His holy fire wouldn’t consume us in our sinfulness. Through the Mosaic Law, God was providing a system by which a Holy God could dwell among an unholy people. In the book of Numbers, the “wrath” of God reminds us how perfect He is, not necessarily how angry He is. God was taking measures to guard humanity in His process of redeeming us from our sinfulness. For example, the Levites had the job of being mediators so that “wrath (of God) would not fall on the community (1:53; 16:46; 18:5). Again, we kind of miss the broader point. God had come to “dwell among them” (Exodus 25:8, see also Leviticus 26:11) and wanted to mature them not destroy them.

8. Jesus absorbed the fullness of God’s wrath for us so that we could experience God’s mercy.

God has done everything in His power to alleviate His own wrath (just punishment) towards us by directing it towards Himself—Jesus Christ—as our substitute. Listen to Romans 5:8–9: “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him!” (See also 1 John 4:10; 1 Timothy 2:5-6; 1 Peter 2:24)

Summary: 

We have trouble understanding the anger of God because we often have flawed human examples and self-serving motivations. But God’s anger is connected to His love and justice for all His children. God’s wrath is the condition of division and separation from our Life Giver. Just as evil and rebellion will not last forever, God’s wrath will not last forever because it is not inherent in His nature of love. God is a loving Father who does not want His children to be thrown into the Final Death with the rebellious evildoers.

If you are seeking to honor the Lord with your whole heart, you don’t have to live in fear of God’s wrath. You can be confident in God’s passionate love and patience for you—even in your sins and mistakes. “Good and upright is the Lord; therefore, he instructs sinners in his ways. He guides the humble in what is right and teaches them his way.” (Psalm 25:8) God is merciful and provides ways for his flawed children to repent and grow. How blessed we are that instead of wrath, God has poured out forgiveness. He has replaced curses with blessings. Instead of abandonment, He has reestablished a relationship. And instead of condemnation, He has given us His smile of peace!

Tags: holiness, jesus, mercy, judgment, existence, grace, forgiveness, salvation, peace, hell, anger, emotions, condemnation, separation, wrath, uncleanness