Christianity for People Who Aren't Christians, Part 1Намуна

God of Wrath or God of Justice? 

When you read the Bible and find instances of seemingly harsh punishment, the call for sacrifices and even the mass slaughter of entire nations—which, I might add, you do find—do we still have a good and loving God on our hands? Or do we have a terribly evil Being to be rejected, and certainly not to be believed in?

Let’s look at just one of the concerns about the God of the Bible, arguably the one most discussed: the slaughter of the Canaanites. The context is critical. God led the people of Israel out of slavery and out of Egypt. He was not only forming them into a new people, a new nation, but taking them to a new land that would become known as the Promised Land. But it wasn’t just given to them. They had to take it, possess it, and, at times, conquer it.

This was more than just an invasion or conquest. This was God’s planned punishment of the people of Canaan for their ways, long in the making and in the coming. Yes, God was displacing them from the land to give it to the people of Israel. The Canaanites were marked by the worst possible aspects of slavery, religious prostitution, and sexual cults which God tolerated for more than four hundred years. Why? Because no matter what you’ve heard, judgment is always his last resort.

This brings up an unavoidable point: it’s the idea of God’s wrath. We are bothered to imagine that God is a God who is angry with evil and at war with evil. We think if God expresses anger, we have a bad or immoral God on our hands. But why does an angry God bother us so much? 

I once read some penetrating words from Yale theologian, Miroslav Volf. He was born in Croatia and lived through the nightmare years of ethnic strife in the former Yugoslavia. He once thought that wrath and anger were beneath God, but he said he came to realize that his view of God had been too low. His own people had been murdered, displaced, brutalized beyond imagination: “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.”

Is it hard for you to reconcile that a God who loves is also a God of judgment and wrath? Why?