Let’s just talk about God’s wrath for a moment. We don’t often talk about it much do we? At church or small groups, it can be a bit of an ignored subject. It’s not nice to think about God’s wrath. And it’s so easy, the small number of times when we do think about it, to picture a mean, cruel God. And that doesn’t seem to match up with the loving, merciful God we know. So we don’t think about it much. But, we can’t go through our Christian lives avoiding these hard subjects. Or in our bible reading, we can’t only read the bits that make us comfortable and all warm and fuzzy inside. Yes, God is loving and merciful but He is also the judge of the universe, and there is a coming wrath. We have to confront ourselves with these difficult parts of Christianity, these difficult parts of the bible.
John 3:36 - He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.
Romans 1:18 - “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness.”
Romans 2:5 - “But because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed.”
These are some of the parts of the bible and Christianity that our flesh just recoils away from... what do you do when you come across something in the bible that you don’t like, something that seems wrong to you? Let me tell you what we shouldn’t do, first. We shouldn’t skip past, we shouldn’t get offended, we shouldn’t lose our faith because we lack understanding on a certain aspect.
But that requires humility. Being humble enough to be ok not knowing, not understanding something. Once we can start from a place of humility and then I’d recommend taking a moment to pray, ask the Holy Spirit to bring understanding. And then He’s just going to download all information and understanding on the subject directly into your brain. That was a joke, unfortunately that’s not how it works. What we really need to do is wrestle with it. Think about it. Look closer. Learn all that we can about it in the Word of God. Ask someone older and wiser in the faith about it. Look at different teachings on it. And if we do all that but you still don’t have understanding, then it might be something we need to trust God on. Trust that God is good and that understanding will come in time. God might need to open our eyes to certain things in our own lives before the true understanding will come, or maybe understanding won’t come until we are with The Lord in heaven. There are things I’m pretty sure I won’t get the answer to until I get to heaven. And I’m ok with that. Could you be ok with that?
But, there is still a lot that we can understand, this side of heaven, if we just actually take the time to try and understand it. So in saying that, let’s talk about the wrath of God. How can we reconcile the loving God we know and who is often preached about, and the wrathful God in scripture? Listen for more...
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