Harmonizing Love and Wrath
God is Love • Sermon • Submitted • Presented • 38:44
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· 227 viewsGod is glorified in the condemnation of the wicked and He is glorified in the salvation of His people. We must understand both His wrath and His love, in harmony with each other, in order to understand God’s true glory.
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Introduction
Introduction
God’s love and goodness are persistent themes in both the Old and New Testaments. On almost every page of Scripture, we see divine goodness, mercy, kindness, patience, and grace.
All these virtues are expressions of God’s love.
To understand God’s love is not a simple task. Often, every answer raises another question.
For example, some of the most commonly asked questions are similar to these:
If God is so loving, why does He send people to hell?
Why does He allow sin and suffering and pain and sorrow?
How can holocausts and natural disasters and other forms of mass destruction and human suffering exist in a universe designed by a God who is truly loving?
Why did God allow humanity to plunge into sin in the first place?
We need to be honest and acknowledge the difficulty of questions like these. All of us have asked them at some point.
God simply has not seen fit to reveal full, detailed answers to some of those questions in Scripture.
Instead, He reveals Himself as loving, wise, righteous, and good - and requires us to trust Him.
This will become easier as we better understand what Scripture teaches about the love of God.
In fact, love is the best known but least understood of all God’s attributes.
Almost everyone who believes in God professes that He is a God of love.
Even agnostics will readily make the statement that if God exists, He must be benevolent, compassionate, and loving.
All these things are infinitely true about God, but not in the way most people commonly think.
Due to influence from modern liberal churches, many suppose that God’s love and goodness ultimately override and nullify His righteousness, justice, and holy wrath.
They envision God as this obliging heavenly grandfather who is
tolerant,
lenient,
permissive,
devoid of any real displeasure over our sin;
A God who will completely disregard His own holiness and benignly pass over our sins and just accept people as they are.
Their characterization of God is more fitting to a hippie at Woodstock than to the all-powerful Creator of the universe.
When we disregard balance, Scripture is not understood accurately.
When we disregard balance, Scripture is not understood accurately.
In contrast, I want to read a portion of one of the most famous sermons ever preached in America, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, by Jonathan Edwards:
O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in hell. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you have no interest in any Mediator, and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment.
The biblical truth of God’s wrath points us to the truth of His love.
Our generation, raised on “Jesus loves me, this I know”, finds Edwards’ sermon shocking. Most people today would be horrified that someone would describe God in such graphic and terrifying terms.
However, Edwards stood on solid biblical ground when he characterized God as an angry Judge.
Psalm 7:11
Psalm 7:11 tells us:
God is a righteous judge,
a God who displays his wrath every day.
Deuteronomy 32:35-36
Similarly Deuteronomy 32:35-36, which was the subject of Edwards’ sermon that night, says:
Vengeance is mine, and recompense,
for the time when their foot shall slip;
for the day of their calamity is at hand,
and their doom comes swiftly.’
For the Lord will vindicate his people
and have compassion on his servants,
when he sees that their power is gone
and there is none remaining, bond or free.
Edwards was not reluctant to preach the universal, biblical truth of divine wrath.
However, it should be noted that he ended his message with a tender appeal to flee to Christ for mercy.
Edwards saw conversion as the loving work of God and knew that the truth of Scripture was the means by which God converts sinners.
God’s wrath loses it’s divine purpose without God’s love.
Unfortunately, later generations of preachers were not so balanced in their approach and not very sound in their theology.
“Fire and Brimstone” Evangelicals
Charles Finney believed that people should be psychologically manipulated into responding to the gospel.
Finney believed it was the preacher’s task to evoke a response, through
artful persuasion,
browbeating,
manipulation,
or whatever means possible.
He found that terrorizing people with threats of God’s wrath was a very effective method of arousing response.
Finney’s repertoire was filled with sermons designed to heighten the fears of unbelievers. As a result, the subject of God’s wrath against sin was preached solely without mention of God’s love.
God’s love has no meaning without connection to God’s wrath.
But with the rise of liberal theology the pendulum swung opposite too far.
Modern Liberal Theology
Liberalism, also called modernism, was a corruption of Christianity based on the wholesale denial of the authority of Scripture.
While retaining some of the moral teachings of Christianity, liberalism attacked the historic foundations of the faith.
Liberals denied
the deity of Christ,
the historical accuracy of the Bible,
and the uniqueness of the Christian faith among other world religions.
Instead, they proclaimed a brotherhood of all humanity under the fatherhood of God; and consequently insisted that God’s only attitude toward humanity was pure love.
In fact, if a passage didn’t reflect their definition of love, it wasn’t allowed to be used as Scripture. Liberal theology simply would not tolerate a God whose righteous anger burned against sin.
A failure to balance God’s love and wrath undermines His holiness.
In the early part of this century, liberalism took Protestant churches by storm.
Evangelicalism, which had dominated Protestant America since the days of the founding fathers, was virtually driven out of denominational schools and churches.
Evangelicalism has managed to survive in relatively small denominations and non-denominational churches.
But liberalism has virtually destroyed the largest Protestant denominations in America and Europe; as evidenced by the impending split of the United Methodist Church.
One of the most popular spokesmen for liberal Christianity was Harry Fosdick, pastor of Riverside Church in New York City.
Fosdick, while remaining strongly committed to liberal theology, nevertheless acknowledged that the new theology undermines the concept of a holy God.
He correctly saw that liberalism led to a warped and imbalanced concept of God.
God’s love must be understood in consistency with His holiness.
God’s love must be understood in consistency with His holiness.
Sadly, evangelicalism has gone the route of liberalism in order to try and gain back influence. Evangelicals have lost the reality of God’s wrath. We have disregarded his hatred for sin. The god evangelicals now describe is all-loving and not at all angry.
We have forgotten Hebrews 10:31:
It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
It’s only when we fear God’s divine wrath that we are able to grasp the depth of His love.
Scripture tells us repeatedly that fear of God is the very foundation of true wisdom:
Proverbs 1:7
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge;
fools despise wisdom and instruction.
Psalm 111:10
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom;
all those who practice it have a good understanding.
His praise endures forever!
Micah 6:9
The voice of the Lord cries to the city—
and it is sound wisdom to fear your name:
“Hear of the rod and of him who appointed it!
People often try to explain these verses away by saying that the fear called for is a devout sense of awe and reverence.
Isaiah 8:13
Certainly, the idea of fearing God includes awe and reverence and it is often used in that sense, but the term does not exclude holy terror.
But the Lord of hosts, him you shall honor as holy. Let him be your fear, and let him be your dread.
Psalm 38:1-3
We need to remember the message of Psalm 38:1-3; that God’s wrath does burn against unrepentant sinners:
Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger
or discipline me in your wrath.
Your arrows have pierced me,
and your hand has come down on me.
Because of your wrath there is no health in my body;
there is no soundness in my bones because of my sin.
This is the very thing that makes God’s love so amazing.
It is only against the backdrop of divine wrath that the full significance of God’s love can be truly understood: God’s wrath against sin is real and you will suffer punishment unless you repent and accept Christ as your Lord and Savior.
That is precisely the message of the cross of Jesus Christ. If God has no wrath against sin, the cross has no meaning.
God’s love of the righteous is consistent with His hatred of the wicked.
But certainly, we can affirm this truth without going to the opposite extreme and concluding that God’s attitude toward unbelievers is utter hatred?
The argument goes that if God loves everyone, he would save everyone. But since unbelievers are not saved, God does not love them.
John 3:16
People with this view jump through theological hurdles to try and explain how “the world” in John 3:16 does not mean the whole world.
The confusion all centers around the folly of thinking that God loves all alike, or that He is compelled by some rule of fairness to love everyone equally.
While we regularly see and exercise differing levels of love in our various relationships every day, we somehow fail to connect that God can certainly love in various degrees as well.
Malachi 1:3
However, explaining God’s love towards unbelievers is not a simple task. After all, God did say:
but Esau I have hated. I have laid waste his hill country and left his heritage to jackals of the desert.”
The context reveals God was speaking of a whole race of wicked people.
So there is a very real sense in which Scripture truly teaches that God hates the wicked.
Many try to dodge the implications of this by suggesting that God hates the sin, not the sinner. Why, then does God condemn the sinner, and not merely the sin, to eternal hell?
God’s hatred for the wicked is not any kind of blemish, rather it is fully consistent with His love of the righteous and His character as a whole. It is perfectly consistent with His incomprehensible holiness.
God’s glory is realized in the harmony of His love and His wrath.
God’s glory is realized in the harmony of His love and His wrath.
The benefits of God’s love extends even to those who choose evil.
In fact, we know from human experience that love and hatred are not mutually exclusive.
It is not unusual to have simultaneous feelings of love and hatred for the same person. We often speak of people who have a love-hate relationship with each other.
There is no reason to deny that in an infinitely purer sense, God’s hatred for the wicked is accompanied by a sincere and compassionate love for them as well.
The fact that God will send all sinners, who persist in sin and unbelief, to eternal hell proves His hatred toward them.
On the other hand, the fact that God promises to forgive and bring into His eternal glory all who trust Christ as Savior; and even pleads with sinners to repent, proves His love for them.
Matthew 5:45
In Matthew 5:45, Jesus clearly characterizes the Father as One who loves even those who purposefully set themselves at odds with Him:
so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
While many are eager to ask why a loving God lets bad things happen to His children, surely we should contemplate why a holy God lets good things happen to bad people?
The answer is simply that God is merciful even to those who are not His own.
However, an important distinction must be made here: God loves believers with a particular love.
It is a family love, the love of an eternal Father for His children.
It is a love that guarantees their salvation from sin and its penalty. This special love is reserved for believers alone.
Ezekiel 33:11
Ezekiel 33:11 clearly shows that God does love even those who reject His mercy:
Say to them, As I live, declares the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, O house of Israel?
But it is a different quality of love, a different degree of love from His love for His own children.
An illustration from life would be this: I love my neighbors. I am commanded by numerous Scriptures to love them as I love myself. I also love my wife. that, too, is commanded by Scripture. But clearly my love for my wife is superior, both in excellence and in degree, to my love for my neighbor. i chose my wife; I did not choose my neighbor. I willingly brought my wife into my family to live with me for the rest of our lives. There’s no logical reason to conclude that since I do not afford the same privilege to my neighbors, my love for them is not a real and genuine love.
Likewise, God loves believers in a special way reserved only for them, but that does not make His love for the rest of humanity any less real.
God’s glory is that, even while loving them, He will bring judgement to those choose evil.
However, those who wish to embrace their sin should not take refuge in the knowledge that God is full of mercy and compassion for them:
Hebrews 10:26-27
For if we go on sinning deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful expectation of judgment, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries.
Both God’s wrath and His love work to the same ultimate end - His glory.
God is glorified in the condemnation of the wicked and He is glorified in the salvation of His people.
We must understand both His wrath and His love, in harmony with each other, in order to understand God’s true glory.
Since His glory is the design of His eternal plan, and since all that He has revealed about Himself is essential to His glory, we must not ignore any aspects of His character. We cannot focus only on His love and block out everything else.
Conclusion
Conclusion
Nevertheless, those who truly know God will testify that the deepest spiritual delights are derived from the knowledge of His love.
This is why we must maintain a carefully balanced perspective as we pursue our study of God’s love.
God’s love cannot be isolated from His wrath and visa versa.
Nor are His love and wrath in opposition to each other.
Both attributes are constant, perfect, without change.
God is not loving one moment and wrathful the next.
His wrath and His love connect, compliment, and coexist; therefore, the two never contradict.
We must not set God’s characteristics against one another as if there is some internal conflict or discrepancy in God. God is always true to Himself and true to His Word.
The Lord preserves all who love him,
but all the wicked he will destroy.
My mouth will speak the praise of the Lord,
and let all flesh bless his holy name forever and ever.
Psalm 145:20–21 (ESV)
20 The Lord preserves all who love him,
but all the wicked he will destroy.
21 My mouth will speak the praise of the Lord,
and let all flesh bless his holy name forever and ever.
PRAYER
PRAYER