Beautiful Tension: Love and Wrath
How is it that God can be both loving and wrathful? Are not these two qualities mutually exclusive? Is it possible that in order to be loving one must also have wrath? Can a loving God ignore injustice, thereby shrugging off the attribute of wrath? Or is it possible to have an angry wrathful God who also have the ability to forgive thereby expressing inexplicable love?
On this issue Tim Keller (along with C.S. Lewis) is helpful. I am quoting at length Keller from his book King’s Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus. 1
Keller writes:
[[Here you may say, “I don’t like the idea of the wrath of God. I want a God of love.”
The problem is that if you want a loving God, you have to have an angry God. Please think about it. Loving people can get angry, not in spite of their love but because of it. In fact, the more closely and deeply you love people in your life, the angrier you can get. Have you noticed that? When you see people who are harmed or abused, you get mad. If you see people abusing themselves, you get mad at them, out of love. Your senses of love and justice are activated together, not in opposition to each other. If you see people destroying themselves or destroying other people and you don’t get mad, it’s because you don’t care. You’re too absorbed in yourself, too cynical, too hard. The more loving you are, the more ferociously angry you will be at whatever harms your beloved. And the greater the harm, the more resolute your opposition will be.
When we think of God’s wrath, we usually think of God’s justice, and that is right. Those who care about justice get angry when they see justice being trampled upon, and we should expect a perfectly just God to do the same. But we don’t ponder how much his anger is also a function of his love and goodness. The Bible tells us that God loves everything he has made. That’s one of the reasons he’s angry at what’s going on in his creation; he is angry at anything or anyone that is destroying the people and the world he loves. His capacity for love is so much greater than ours—-and the cumulative extent of evil in the world is so vast—that the word wrath doesn’t really do justice to how God rightly feels when he looks at the world. So it makes no sense to say, “I don’t want a wrathful God, I want a loving God.” If God is loving and good, he must get angry at evil—angry enough to do something about it.
Consider this also: If you don’t believe in a God of wrath, you have no idea of your value. Here’s what I mean. A god without wrath has no need to go to the cross and suffer incredible agony and die in order to save you. Picture on the left a god who pays nothing in order to love you, and picture on the right the God of the Bible, who, because he’s angry at evil, must go to the cross, absorb the debt, pay the ransom, and suffer immense torment. How do you know how much the “free love” god loves you or how valuable are you to him? Well, his love is just a concept. You don’t know at all. This god pays no price in order to love you. How valuable are you to the God of the Bible? Valuable enough that he would go to these depths for you.
A correspondence between C.S. Lewis and a man named Malcolm has been collected in a book called Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. In one letter Malcolm said that he was uncomfortable with the idea that God gets angry. He found it more helpful to think of God’s power and justice like a live electrical wire. He said, “The live wire doesn’t feel angry with us, but if we blunder against it we get a shock.” Lewis replied: “My dear Malcolm: What do you suppose you have gained by substituting the image of a live wire for that of angered majesty? You have shut us up all in despair, for the angry can forgive, but electricity can’t….Turn God’s wrath into mere enlightened disapproval and you turn his love into mere humanitarianism. The ‘consuming fire’ and the ‘perfect beauty’ both vanish. We have, instead, a judicious headmistress or a conscientious magistrate. It comes of being high-minded….Liberalizing and civilizing analogies can only lead us astray.” 2 Your conception of God’s love—-and of your value in his sight—-will only be as big as your understanding of his wrath. ]]
We must be able to take the God of the Bible seriously without picking and choosing or schlepping off the realities that do not initially sit well with us. Can God handle your doubt and questions? Absolutely. In fact I encourage everyone of faith to doubt and question in order to have your faith take a deeper root. Faith worth having will stand the test of fire (both doubting and suffering). But there is a difference between doubting and recreating. The historic rule of thumb has been faith seeking understanding, and not understanding seeking faith. This is a good guide for areas of belief, doctrine, or Scripture that are hard to understand, reconcile, or even believe.
Does the idea of wrath initially place a bad taste in our mouth? Of course it does. Why? Because humanity wants to do what it pleases without question and without consequence. Sure the idea of a wrathful God is unpopular, but God is not running for president of our high school student council, the president of the United States. He is not running for any office. He is God, He is King and He is reconciling a people, not campaigning. The reality of a God who is simultaneously loving and wrathful should make us run to the cross, not run away. The reality of a God who is both able to forgive and demand justice should give us cause to reflect and ask do I want God’s forgiveness or God’s justice.
The message of the Gospel is that you are much, much more deserving of God’s justice than you dare to believe and on the other hand, much, much more loved and provided for than you could ever imagine. God owes you nothing, yet he extends grace and mercy for those who will accept his incredible offer.
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- Timothy Keller, King’s Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus (New York: Dutton, 2011), 176-78.
- C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1963), 96-97
