"God is love. Love is God's being, nature, and character. God acts with faithful love in all the he does (Psalm 145:17; or, perhaps toward all that he has made). Everything in the universe calls forth God's love and is the object of it. There is nothing in the whole created universe that God does not love, with one single exception.
Only one thing in the universe arouses God's anger, and that is--evil. Why? Because the very essence of evil is to resist, reject, and refuse the love of God. Evil is in essence rebellion against God's love. Evil seeks to frustrate all the good purposes that God's love seeks to achieve for his creation, and that makes God angry. What sort of God would he be if he were not angry with everything that tries to wreck his good creation?
It is precisely because God loves the world so much that he is angry against all who defy the goodness of what God wants for his world. If God didn't love the world, he wouldn't be angry with evil. If God were not angry with evil, he could not really claim to love the world. Anger is the totally justified reflex of love when it is betrayed and frustrated. Would you want to be loved by a God who was not angry against evil?
Miroslav Volf is a Christian theologian from Croatia. He says that he used to hold to the fashionable view that dismissed the wrath of God, that the idea of an angry God was somehow incompatible with the love of God. But then war came to his country. Terrible atrocities were done. Then he thought--if God is not angry at such injustice and cruelty, then he is not a God worth worshiping. Only if God is angry against such evil is he worth loving, or being loved by us.
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 ever 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 world in the former Yugoslavia, the
region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 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 past 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 grandfatherly 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.
A few years ago my wife and I sat round our table with a woman in great distress. Her husband was behaving in inexplicably hurtful ways and it was throwing their marriage into a turmoil of contradictory messages. She was visibly and expressly angry indeed with him for his unconscionable behavior. But then she cried through her tears, 'But I do love him so much. I just want him back.'
That's it, isn't it? That's totally understandable and justified. Love and anger go together when love comes up against wickedness. If she had not loved him so much, she would not have been so angry with him for what he was doing. If she had not been angry at all at his behaviour, it would have meant she did not really love him but was indifferent. Her anger and love were simultaneous emotions within the same breast, toward the same person. Why, then, do we say they are contradictory in God?...
...The wonderful paradox, which lies beyond our understanding, is that the cross was simultaneously the outpouring of God's anger and the outpouring of God's love. For in his love for us, God was absorbing, in Christ, his anger against sin. For that reason, two of the lines in Stuart Townend's wonderful hymn 'In Christ Alone' could be modified to a greater biblical fullness of meaning. Townend wrote,
...till on that cross as Jesus died
the wrath of God was satisfied.
It would be equally biblical and truthful and probably better to sing,
...till on that cross as Jesus died
God's wrath and love were satisfied. "
- Christopher J. H. Wright
from: http://www.amazon.com/God-Dont-Understand-Reflections-Questions/dp/0310275466/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362261494&sr=1-1&keywords=the+god+i+don%27t+understand
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