We tend to project our experience of justice, revenge, and anger onto
the face of God. His wrath, we decide, must look and feel like our wrath. His
justice must be carried out of the constructs of right and wrong that we have
personally adopted. In so doing we have
blinded ourselves to the goodness of God, and painted Him as a schizophrenic
deity that sometimes loves and sometimes hates. God's wrath is other centered,
while ours is self-centered. His justice is carried out with love for every
individual, while our justice is retributive towards those we hate. Our anger
generally revolves around personal or ideological offense; 'how dare they!' It
therefore revolves around hate towards individuals or groups, and our sense of
justice is rooted in our objectification of others. God is very unlike us in
this way. He is love, therefore His wrath and justice need to be understood as
an expression of His passionate desire for our freedom and benefit. He is for
us, not against us.
Wrath
Imagine a parent whose 20 year old daughter is kidnapped
and abused. She is rescued, but is broken on the inside. Fear, shame, and
depression have taken over a once free and joyful spirit. They love their
daughter, and desperately want the best for her. They would naturally be very
angry at the abuser for what was stolen from her. Their wrath is relational,
and it is easy to see that it is birthed from the love they have for their
daughter. God’s wrath is relational too, and we need to see that. Real wrath is
a passionate expression of love. Yet
even the parent’s wrath for their daughters pain fails to fully encapsulate
what God’ wrath is all about.
Wrath is the expression of love in the face of injustice.
Love requires relationship. In our example, the parent’s anger is sourced in
the close relationship they have with their daughter. Have you ever noticed how
we tend to care less about atrocity, injustice, and suffering the further away
it is from those we love? If tragedy strikes home however, if abuse, murder, or
rape happens to one of our ‘special people’, wrath is the natural expression.
God is love, and unlike us He loves everyone and is
intimately involved and invested in each person He has created. God not only
grieves for the daughter of the parents, but for the abuser; both are his
children. He knows all our pain, brokenness, and negative influences. He knows
our choices, our lies, our shame, and our hurt. He knows mine, yours, Mother
Teresa’s, and Hitler’s, while loving us all! God’s wrath doesn’t exist when He
is close to one person and removed from another. His wrath exists while loving
everyone equally!
Justice
We call for justice based on our understanding of what is
good and bad. We generally have a scale in our conscience by which we judge
certain individuals as ‘deserving’ of punishment. This understanding we project
onto God too. God is not into score
keeping. He isn’t interested in a person’s punishment but a person’s freedom.
His justice, like His wrath, needs to be understood with the starting fact that
He loves us all.
Let’s go back to our story. The young woman is broken,
shackled by the shame of what happened to her, she has fallen into depression.
Her parents love her, and constantly give of themselves to help her in every
way we can think of. The love they have for her slams against the shame she
feels inside, torturing her to the point that she runs away from it. She leaves the safety of her loving parents and
tries to fill her deep pain with drugs and meaningless sex.
Do her parents stop loving her? Do they begin to hate her
for the choices she makes? How many bad choices, how many people does she need
to hurt before her parents being to hate her? Is she now deserving of
retributive wrath? Of course not, she is their daughter! This makes perfect
sense to us. We would never hate our children, even if they were destroying
their lives and hurting others in the process. But, for some ridiculous reason
we think that we love better than God does. We think God has a score card, and
that eventually He will disown us for crossing the line too many times. We
think that God’s ‘justice’ overrides His ‘love’. But they do not need to be
mutually exclusive, we just need to stop projecting our sense of justice onto
God.
It seems obvious to us that a loving parent wouldn’t stop
loving their child because of mistakes they were making, even if they were
catastrophic. They might create boundaries to protect themselves and other
people, but they would still love them and yearn for their child to see themselves
as they see them. Everyone is someone’s son or daughter, even those that are
hurting others. God, well, He created everyone! We are blind to what God's justice looks like because we have the unfortunate capacity to love some people more than others. God loves everyone equally, and so for Him
‘justice’ looks and is carried out differently than we think.
In this scenario we actually experience what God experiences
when it comes to wrath. Loving parents would hate the destructive choices their
daughter was making, they would have great wrath towards both the internal and
external influences in her life that are destroying her. The wrath is an
expression of their love, but for her and the ones she was hurting. They would do
anything to destroy the internal and external forces that were destroying her.
This is how God feels towards all of us. His wrath is other centered, it is
love expressed in the face of our hurt and pain. God’s wrathful love is not
against us but for us!
God’s wrath is expressed while attributing equal value to
every individual. He knows each person, He knows the hurts, the biases, the
wounds, and the mistakes. Knowing all these things, his love is a passionate
fire against anything that destroys and abuses his children. He isn’t for some
people and against others, but truly the lover of the human race. Just as we
would separate an abuser from being able to continually cause suffering to
others, so God will ultimately separate destructive people who don’t change
their ways. God will not tolerate any hurt in His Kingdom, but He isn’t doing
so out of vengeance but out of love. Even those he sends away, He loves and
values. His wrath is not like ours.
We have imagined God to be someone He isn’t, and we need our
minds renewed in this area. The more we think like God the more we will be able
to see through a lens of love. God’s wrath is not moralistic, it is not about
keeping tabs, and it is not against anyone. God is love, and He loves you, me,
and every human being we will ever encounter.
The Gospel
Just like the good Father He is, God saw the pain we were in
and did the unthinkable to reach us. He saw the destructive tendencies we had
adopted, the wounds, shame, and depression that ruled over all His children. In
our darkness and blindness we ran from His love, because it hurt too much to be
in it. We fled, hid in the bushes, and embraced a life that results in death.
We would not let Him come near, we convinced ourselves we were hated by God,
projecting our brokenness onto Him; yet God was not deterred. He entered our
darkness, stepped into our blindness, becoming Human He came to reach us
because we could do nothing to reach Him.
Jesus came to us even though we did not want Him, even
though we could not see Him. He entered our lives and brought us face to face
with His loving Father; we could not bear it. In our shame and hurt, we could
not recognize Him as God, so we killed Him. Jesus willfully took our shame, our
hurt, and our anger into Himself. He submitted to our darkness and let us
crucify Him. It was there that He swallowed death, united Himself to us in our
blindness, and birthed new life. There is nowhere we can flee from His
presence, no piece of us that He does not already know, sin and death were
defeated in His resurrection!
There is nothing we can do to stop Him loving us. We can
either surrender to His love, embrace Him, and therefore letting go of all our
shame and hurt, or we can sit in the agony that comes in resisting it. We can
embrace a life of destructing we were never created for, and in the end, in
love, God will not allow us to hurt our brothers and sisters. He will send us
away, where there surely will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Jesus invites us to turn to Him today. To accept His
forgiveness, to release our shame, our pain, and our hate. He is at work even
now revealing Himself to us, inviting us, encouraging us, and loving us into
His kingdom. We can let go and become
who He purposed us to be, or we can struggle against Him, the one who is the
very source all life and goodness.
