Rector’s Reflections
“The
Wrath of God and the Son of God”
The last few Sundays of the
Christian year and the first Sunday of Advent have readings that are filled
with the note of judgment: “He will separate them as a shepherd separates the
sheep from the goats;” “Watch, therefore, for you do not know when the master
of the house will come;” “Prepare the way of the Lord!” The Bible says that when the Lord Jesus
returns, he will assemble the nations before himself and judge every
individual. To some he will say, “Well
done, good and faithful servant!” To
others he will say, “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared
for the devil and his angels.” God is a
God of justice, and there will be a day when all wrongs are ended and
everything will be put right.
The judgment of God flows out of
the wrath of God. We often focus on the
love of God, and remember his compassion to the troubled and his mercy to the
guilty who turn to him for forgiveness.
It is easy to think that God’s love means that he has set aside his
wrath, as though God has decided that since he cannot scare us into being good he
should try to “schmooze” us into acting as we should. Most angry people we meet are people who
seethe with anger most of the time, or who can erupt into a fit of anger at a
moment’s notice. It is very hard for us
to think that both wrath and love can exist in the same person at the same
time.
That, however, is exactly what the
Bible says is true of God. His wrath and
his love are both present at all times.
Even more, the wrath of God is part of his love. If you are a parent, you can understand
this. It is not just that you love your
child even when you are angry with her or him.
Think about threats to your child: what do you think of leukemia? What do you think of a bully who would make
the life of your child miserable? What
do you think of a drug dealer who would lure your child into dependency simply
for the sake of his own financial profit?
You would resist each of these
things with all the power you had, because each is capable of doing harm to
your child and preventing your child from being what he or she can and should
be. That is what the wrath of God is – a
resisting of what is harmful to his creatures and to creation at large.
Human anger can be diffuse and
spread over onto elements of life that do not deserve judgment. Indeed, human anger can be entirely
misdirected and have no basis at all.
The wrath of God, however, is always accurate, aimed at what is harmful
and not what is good. God is never “in a
bad mood,” when it would be dangerous for anyone to approach him. He always hates sin and the light of his
holiness cannot tolerate the stain of sin for an instant. However, he always loves the sinner, and
seeks what is best for him or her. God
always wants and seeks the best for all of his creatures.
I am dealing with a complex subject
and trying to do so as clearly and concisely as I possibly can. I will not be able to answer all the
questions you might have, but want to deal with the heart of the matter as best
I understand it from Scripture. God
hates sin because it harms his creation, particularly that part of his creation
that was created in his own image, the human race.
That is good news for us. Sin hurts us.
Indeed, it would destroy us if left to work its complete results upon
us. Consider the recent economic
upheavals: the meltdown of the credit system of the last few months came about
through a combination of several things – the desire of Congress to increase
the percentage of homeownership in the population, which led to loans being
offered to people who would never be able to repay them; the huge increase in
“bundling” mortgages into investment instruments; the practice of selling and
re-selling these bundles for a fee; and the invention of the “default credit
swap.” Any one of these might have
caused some trouble if it went sour, but they all went sour together and
financial corporations that held much of their assets in mortgages became untrustworthy. No one would lend them money because they had
unreliable assets. That lack of trust
spread, and credit dried up – and our economy is so credit-dependent that has
come to a crashing halt.
For the last several decades,
creative people were making new investment instruments that promised large
returns. Other people were reaching for
“the American dream” of owning their own home.
Real estate values were appreciating very rapidly, and many people
tapped into the rising equity of their homes, and were able to buy things –
some important, some simply pleasant – that they had long hoped for. Everything seemed very positive in many
ways. But there were some greedy people
in the midst do all this and we now see a painful halt to what had been an
expanding economy and increasing wealth for many.
Greed is one of the Seven Deadly
Sins, and greed has been at work to build a house of cards and then to knock it
down. It is hard to know how many people
who were not in any way involved in the activities that led to the credit
collapse who have nevertheless been hurt by it – lost homes, lost jobs, perhaps
even marriages that collapsed under the financial pressure. Sin hurts us.
That is why God hates sin. At any
given time, we may think that something God calls sin is really God being a spoilsport
– the thing seems pleasant and we do not see how anyone would be hurt. We, however, are ignorant of the
ramifications of the particular activity.
An addict may have a few good experiences with a drug and think that he
can use it as he pleases and stop any time he wants, yet the reality is that he
is on the way to slavery. God created us
and he knows what is helpful and what is harmful, even though as we see things
they may appear exactly the opposite.
God hates sin because sin hurts
us. Our sins may hurt only ourselves, or
they may hurt others as well – but sin brings pain and decreases our joy –
indeed, I would say that sin decreases our humanity, for, whether we sin
against others or are sinned against, we become other than, and less than, what
God created us to be.
God’s wrath is not an
indiscriminate anger that boils over without explanation or warning. It is a hatred of sin and of all that sin
does to hurt us. Of course, if we decide
that we prefer the way of sin to the way of God, we will wind up clinging to
the object of God’s wrath and experience that wrath ourselves. That indeed is the human dilemma: we were
created to enjoy unbroken fellowship with God, but ever since humanity rebelled
against God in the Garden and lost that fellowship, we have been trapped in
rebellion – wanting to be on our own, and yet aware that something vital was
missing. Left to ourselves, we do cling
to sin – and so we are slated to experience the wrath of God, if nothing is
done.
You may be thinking, “Here it is,
almost Christmas, and he is reflecting on the wrath of God and on the mortgage
crisis!” Well, the mortgage crisis is
why Jesus was born, for behind the mortgage crisis is Greed, Pride, and a host
of other deadly things. That crisis is
just the latest manifestation of how we human beings hurt one another and
ourselves and live apart from God and his loving plans for his children.
God hates sin, but he loves
us. He wanted to break our attachment to
sin and restore us to fellowship with himself, so that we will move from being
hurt by sin to being joyful in his presence.
He cannot ignore sin because the painful results of sin will last
forever unless sin is dealt with. God
the Father, in his love for us, sent God the Son to us. In a few weeks, we will be celebrating the
reality that the Son of God entered his own creation as a human being to
experience it from the inside. God hates
sin because sin hurts us – and sin hurt him when he walked among us. Jesus did not experience the ill-effects of
his own sin, for he committed no sins – but he certainly experienced the
ill-effects of the sins of others: the pain of betrayal by his own friend, the
angry opposition by those whose pride he revealed, the injustice of a ruler for
whom peace was worth more than a human life – all these and more Jesus
experienced in his flesh. He knew the
pain of sin’s results.
But the Son did not enter the world
simply to share with us the pains of living in a broken world. It is enormously encouraging to know that God
the Son knows what life is like not only from observation but from direct
experience. But Jesus did far more than
experience the pains of life in a world filled with sin and brokenness.
Jesus was born in great humility,
so poor that he was housed in a stable and put to bed in an animal feeding
trough. The humility of God the Son in
coming to earth is so amazing and so touching that we rightly wonder at such
humility, and we worship and rejoice.
The taking on of human nature by the very Son of God is a weighty and
joyful thing. God was not compelled to
enter his own creation; that he did so when we had become sinful is staggering.
What is even more staggering is
that he not only took human flesh and experienced the results of humanity’s
sinfulness as the results of human sins came upon him, but he also experienced
the spiritual results of sin: spiritual death.
Over the manger hung the shadow of the cross, for he was born to
die. Jesus, of all human beings,
deserved to live forever – his life was everything it should have been. Jesus, however, had not come primarily to
teach us and to show us how to live a life that honors and pleases God. Jesus had come to endure what sin deserves,
the wrath of God. Since he deserved no
such wrath himself, when he bore the wrath of God, he took what we deserve, so
that we would not need to experience such wrath.
In Jesus Christ, the love of God
and the wrath of God meet. God hates sin
and its dreadful effects upon us. He
cannot let go of his wrath – if he did, there could be no justice, and the ills
of this world would continue on forever.
In his love, he must deal with sin and drive it away from his beloved
creation. Jesus came to earth and on the
cross experienced the fullness of the results of sin – suffering from the sinful
acts of others who condemned him, and suffering the spiritual results of sin as
though he had sinned himself. He did not
sin at all – but he received what we deserve so that we can receive what he
deserved in his utter obedience: the joy of being with God forever.
We do not like to consider the
wrath of God. It sounds too negative,
and too angry. God’s wrath, however, is
not the same as human anger, but the response of a loving creator to that which
harms his creation. Because of the wrath
of God, we have hope of a better life – for God’s wrath will do away with all
that harms and distorts his creation – and all that harms and distorts us. As sinful people, we will either experience
God’s wrath, if we cling to sin, or the presence of God, if we cling to Jesus,
thanking God that his wrath passed over us and came upon Jesus for us.
Christmas cards will show many
beautiful scenes of the stable and the manger, with shepherds and wise men
gathered around in adoration. Jesus is
to be adored and worshipped because he came to earth, the Son of God in human
form. But even more, he is to be adored
because thirty-three years later, he absorbed the wrath of God for us. It is not pretty, but it is true – and it is
the ultimate source of our Christmas joy.
“Today in the city of David is born to you a Savior, who is Christ the
Lord!”
