What is the Wrath of God?
A theological faq from the oracles of Revelation 2–3 (Pt. 5--and last)
Audio Version!
For the wages of sin—death (Romans 6:23).
Over the years, I’ve listened to lots of preaching from “hell-fire and brimstone” to intellectual and rhetorically sophisticated, and everything in between.
The range of preaching styles often correlates to views on God: from an angry God ready to zap all who would cross him, to a “loving” God who puts up with everything because love would preclude any sense of judgment for anyone.
I am certainly being basic in this assessment, but the general range holds no matter what the style a message is communicated.
The notion of God’s wrath ranges from those who almost gleefully proclaim an angry vengeful God to those with the horrified response “How could a loving God ever do that?”
The Bible, of course, is much more nuanced about the issue of God’s wrath, and may seem contradictory, especially in the so-called contrast between the Old Testament (vengeful God) and the New Testament (loving God)—the truth is that God is loving in both testaments, and a righteous judge in both.
This complicated theological topic is the focus of the last question in our Theological FAQ from the Oracles:
•What is God’s wrath on sin?
The answer to this question is far from easy—and even the attempt is humbling—but I am going to give what I believe is a fundamental and sound and hopefully balanced scriptural response that (mostly) makes sense of the question.
Of course, I am writing at a time when our entire planet seems to be on the point of implosion through war (mutual justified violence between people groups or countries), political upheaval from a clash of rivalries and competing visions of the world, violence from greed (such as drugs—both illegal and legal) with its mass casualties, and so much else—elections anyone?
I would place all of these examples within the wrath of God.
Natural disasters—often invoked as God’s wrath—are only peripheral at best.
So let’s begin.
(continued)
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Revelation
The ordinary view of Revelation fixates on the idea that it is a book of apocalyptic plagues, violence, and the active wrath or anger of God upon humanity.
But for you who read In Plain Sight regularly, the reality is hopefully quite different: Revelation is the Gospel of the Risen Jesus and about his ultimate victory as the Crucified and Risen King.
While plagues and violence definitely exist in Revelation and there is a connection with God’s wrath, the nature of God’s wrath is a question up for debate.
In the oracles of Revelation 2–3 there are hints of divine action that might be connected to God’s “anger” (wrath and anger are two ways of translating Greek orgē):
• I will come and remove your lampstand from its place if you do not repent (2:5).
• Therefore repent. But if not I will come quickly to you and make war with the sword of my mouth (2:16).
• Look, I am throwing her into a (sick)bed and those committing adultery with her into great distress—if they don’t repent from her works, also I will put her children to death with a plague—so all the churches will know that I am the one who searches kidneys [emotions] and hearts [desires] and I will give to you all, to each one, according to your works (2:22–23).
• Therefore if you don’t stay awake, I will come like a thief and you will never know what hour I am coming to you (3:3).
While stark in their implied actions, these statements are actually all warnings, not true expressions of God’s wrath.
As warnings, however, they hint at some propositions I want to get across in this post—and that will inform everything I say about Revelation from this point forward.
1. Whatever “the wrath of God” consists of, it is never arbitrary.
2. Whatever “the wrath of God” consists of, it is the natural consequence of human freedom to sin.
3. The overwhelming majority of “the wrath of God” is human wrath inflicted on one another.
Paul’s view of God’s wrath is the same as Revelation
Paul’s maxim that I quoted above (“For the wages of sin—death”) is nearly as succinct a statement about God’s wrath as possible, but as with all maxims, his words need unpacking (a maxim is a very compact statement with a moral or, in this case, theological, truth—Paul often punctuates his letters with maxims).
And when we do unpack that statement of Paul, we also find a key to Revelation that not only explains some material in the oracles, but lays a foundation for all that comes in the rest of Revelation.
So back to Paul’s maxim in Romans 6:23 with a journey to Genesis and Ephesians and back to Romans.
To begin, the maxim has two parts:
For the wages of sin—death,
but the gift of God—life eternal in Messiah Jesus our Lord.
The context of this maxim is all of Romans. In essence (essence is the very function of a maxim!) this verse encodes or encapsulates in the fewest of words the first six chapters of Romans and sets the course for the rest of Romans—to say nothing of the fact that this maxim also summarizes the sin and redemption message of the entire Bible!
I do not want to minimize the second and most important half of the maxim (the gift of God); it is just not our concern in this post.
So what does Paul intend by “the wages of sin—death”?
Death as the wages of sin is the state of humanity initiated and explained in Genesis 3, then demonstrated in the rest of the Old Testament.
In Genesis 3, the transgression of Adam and Eve was not eating fruit itself, but the fruit of a particular tree.
All the trees were pleasing and available (Gen 2:9), even the Tree of Life, but only the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was forbidden with a command (Gen 2:16–17).
Why? God forbade that tree as a sign of God’s creational desire for Adam to freely love God back.
This freedom to return love was what set Adam apart from all the animals—he had a free will.
But true freedom and true love do not exist if we do not have opportunity to act opposite of the command.
God loved Adam no matter what, as the rest of the redemption story in the Bible shows, but Adam’s created purpose was to care for creation in response to God’s love and to love God in return—the command made that freedom to love clear.
Adam and Eve were truly free, but they abused that freedom with the idolatrous notion (communicated by the serpent) that they could “be like God, knowing good and evil.”
The natural consequence (wages) of their transgression was death: death of innocence, the initiation of blame (always a lie), the notion of shame, a broken creation, pain, and enmity, and actual cessation of physical life. Soon envy and violence would be added with Cain.
All of these consequences were the wrath of God—we do not (or cannot) “break” God’s commands, we are broken on them when we transgress them. See my post on Matthew 5:17–20.
Since that point, all of humanity is “under wrath.”
Paul put it this way in Ephesians 2:3: “we also conducted ourselves then in the desires of our flesh, doing the will of the flesh and of the thoughts. And we were children, by nature, of wrath, as also the rest.”
“Children by nature of wrath” is a state of our existence—the jealousies, the hate, the rivalries, the violence—that flows out of the rebellion of Adam and Eve, but that each and all of us are responsible for.
Interestingly, Paul does not say we are children by nature of “God’s wrath.”
But he would agree that all of the turmoil among humans is God’s wrath—the natural consequence of rebellion against God—that results in death.
The repeated phrase God “handed them over” to their desires in Romans 1:24–32 vividly describes “the wrath of God” revealed from heaven (Romans 1:18).
God freely allowed humanity to descend to the cesspool of their desires with all of its consequences.
God’s wrath is woven into the fabric of our broken world.
As long as humanity turns from God to whatever idols they follow, wrath will follow in the self-destructive structures of politics, religion, money, and power (including ethnic or national will to dominate others).
The destructive structures exist even in the smallest of relational units such as families.
In this sense, God’s wrath is passive—God allows humans in their freedom to destroy themselves—“death”—yet all the while he actively invites them to a different existence (as the other half of the maxim in Rom 6:23 proclaims and what Paul expounds in Ephesians 2:4–10).
Yet we humans attribute to God, or blame God for, all of the problems that we have brought on ourselves (as the old saying goes, “when you point the finger, three are pointing back”).
(cont.)
God’s wrath in Revelation
So finally I will circle back to Revelation.
What I believe John saw in his visions—beginning with the seven seals—was the revelation of human violence and rebellion against God (multiplied by Satanic influence), and God’s remedy in the cross of Jesus Messiah.
In several of the visions, humanity perceived their suffering as God’s anger, but in fact their suffering was the self-inflicted consequences of evil. The unredeemed response to disasters was to curse God rather than to repent.
Yet the invitation to repent recurs over and over even to the end of Revelation.
In Revelation, God never rescinded humanity’s freedom to remain in wrath or to respond to his love. The final judgment only affirms the choices we have already made—nothing is arbitrary.
The entire New Testament affirms the same.
Practically speaking that is our choice today. Will we be children of wrath or children of God?
[And next week will be test for us all as the election results come in —will we get caught up in the inevitable anger and angst generated by the outcome or will we respond with grace and peace knowing that God is in control no matter the outcome: “Our citizenship is in heaven, from where we expect a Savior, the Lord Jesus Messiah” (Philippians 3:20).]
This “answer” on the wrath of God is my best attempt (for now) at a very difficult topic. As we proceed through Revelation, we will see if this view holds up in the face of so many potential challenges.
That is a wrap for the FAQ. I hope you have learned from the questions and my answers. As always I welcome your comments.
What is next for In Plain Sight? We are now at cusp of the visions! Revelation 4 here we come.
Thanks for reading.
Amen!