How
do you reconcile God’s wrath with God’s love? Is one primary and
the other secondary? Are they the flip sides of the same coin? Or is
there no way to bring consistency out of these two natures of God?
(Serendipity Bible 10th Anniversary Edition, page
1298).
I
see the wrath of God as basically flowing from the truth of God. The
prime instance of this is when God sent Jesus (the Word) into the
world. This can be seen as the wrath of God because Jesus confronted
the forces of darkness head-on then and remains a merciless gadfly
against those forces to this day. Of what forces do I speak?—the
forces of falsehoods and deception, the forces of hypocrisy and
cruelty, the forces of self-righteousness and greed. In the face of
blindness and self-deception Jesus’s weapon was uncompromising
truth. Many of us would say that he treated the scribes and
Pharisees with other than love as we would define it…..but not as
God defines it. We insist that tolerance include the attributes of soft indifference and cool detachment, a studied and remote polite political
correctness. This is and never has been God’s view of love or
tolerance. We see that the wrath of God inflicted in the person of
Jesus against the scribes and Pharisees was in a huge sense brought
on by the scribes and Pharisees themselves. God is light and when
people besmirch God’s deepest core convictions, they are setting
themselves up for exposure by that light. God’s redemptive,
revelatory love intervenes in history with uncompromising sometimes
harsh illumination cast upon human affairs. God’s judgment visited upon the world is thus
bifurcated—the result of God's love and man's idolatry.
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