Some people resent biblical pictures of God’s wrath. They complain that God is supposed to be nice, so he has no business being mad at anyone.
Somewhere around 1995, I heard a commotion outside my apartment and saw one girl beating up a neighbor girl. Before I could do anything, the abused girl’s mother showed up and ripped the abuser off her daughter. I won’t commend what she did in her anger, but I hope you can appreciate her right to be angry. Love can get angry when the object of love is wronged. Love gets mad at injustice.
Nine times the Bible declares that God is “slow to anger,” but it also affirms that God cares about injustice. Some of the same people who complain that God shouldn’t get angry want to complain that he should do more about injustice. Yet addressing injustice means addressing the unjust—people who mistreat others.
In addition to the wrongs that people do to others, people wrong God himself—a crime of infinite weight because it is committed against one of infinite value. Some people say, “So what? God is big; he can take it.” Or, “God loves me, so he’ll put up with it.” Yes, God is big and can take it—that helps explains why most of us don’t get struck down by lightning very often. But do we go ahead and hurt our mother or our spouse without further consideration just because they’ll probably forgive us? The more that one loves, the more that one can be hurt by the object of one’s love. God is patient, but that’s no reason to break his heart.
Jesus taught us that God created us to enjoy eternal life with him forever. When we choose to blow him off, to want God to bug off while we live only for what we can get out of this world, we wrong not only him but ourselves. We shortsightedly blow off his eternal plan for us and sacrifice what matters forever for the sake of things that, comparatively speaking, don’t matter nearly so much. All the things that we enjoy, such as food and fresh air and relationships, were provided by him. We complain about death while neglecting his free offer of eternal life, purchased by the death of his own Son for us. We complain about death when any of our life at all is God’s gift to us.
God doesn’t lose his temper like we do. He is patient. His anger is not explosive or abusive, which is the only kind of anger that some of us know about because it’s the kind of anger we have experienced from others. But when we mistreat other people made in God’s image, reject God’s love and then blow our own lives by blowing off his kind plan for us, God is angry. It’s the anger of a broken heart, anger at injustice and wrongdoing. It’s an anger inseparable from love.
