“I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come.
According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over three million were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the last century where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days!
How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a god who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil.
God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.” – Miroslav Volf
No one is getting away with anything. Preachers do not talk about the Judgement today. We have made Jesus harmless. He isn’t. I know the selfishness and murder that too often dwells in my own heart. If there is no final judgement what hope is there for the world? if there is what hope is there for me? The time to throw yourself on the mercy of the court is now, in this life. Mercy is everything. It is folly to believe you are not in need of it.
If we do away with wrath, we do away with judgement.
If we do away judgement, we do away with justice.
If we do away with justice, we do away with mercy.
If we do away with mercy, we do away with God.
If we do away with God, we do away with ourselves.
And we are left with only nihilism.
Because then we will be made in the image of nothing.
Be careful what you give away with your doctrine.