Understanding God's Love vs. God's Wrath

My sister recently commented that of all the questions she'd want to ask God is first and foremost, "How do you balance the whole wrath and fury thing with love and compassion?"

Here is my response.

That question used to bother me a ton (it sometimes still does). How do we reconcile ideas about God's wrath with those about God's love? I think the key is in realizing that wrath isn't the opposite of love. It's the opposite of mercy and is the consequence of justice (just as mercy is the consequence of compassion). Showing mercy to one is denying justice to another; and yet both justice and mercy are attributes of love.

Understood this way, we see that wrath isn't an expression of God's anger at being hurt (just as we often confuse "love" with an emotional response, we do the same for "wrath"). It is an expression of his justice in consequence of our abusing not only God, but also creation and each other. Wrath is as much a part of God's love as is compassion. If there was no wrath, no justice, then how could a rape victim cry out to God in their anguish? How could a homeless man, repeatedly beaten down by the world, turn to God for any kind of hope? Who could an abused child turn to?

Hypothetically, if God had just decided to forget our past sins and skip the Incarnation, death, and resurrection; the blood of the innocent would still cry out from the ground and our cycles of injustice, oppression, violence and death would spiral ever deeper until humanity wiped out all life (including itself). So God took the wrathful death which we deserved as a consequence of justice (itself being a characteristic of God's love for the innocent and downtrodden) on himself in Christ and conquered it in the resurrection.

A perfect example of this is the story of Noah's Ark, which is as much a warning for the future as it is a story about the past. In that story, the ark could be said to be Christ carrying the world through the waters of death into new life (think of baptism) and a new covenental relationship between God, humanity and the rest of creation. If there were no ark, no flood, and no new covenant; then humanity would have perpetuated the pre-flood cycles of violence to the point that it would have wiped out all of creation, with no remnant left to be saved.

It becomes less a question of balance, and more one of fulfillment. How could God's love toward a selfish, death-dealing, abusive humanity be realized to its fullest extent? Only in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus...

#God #love #wrath #justice #compassion