Ahhh…. The age old question. The question I bet all of you are dying to know. The question that almost shattered my faith in college and the question that completely changed how I viewed the world. Shortly before leaving for the race, I experienced a period of intense… I would argue debilitating doubt in the existence of God on account of different discussions I had with atheists about apparent contradictions in the Bible, specifically with regard to the moral nature of God. The arguments were mainly directed at alleged differences between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New. On the surface, without in depth analysis, it appears that the God of the Old Testament is an angry wrathful God who is all about judgement and the God the New Testament is a nice, gentle God who is all about Love and Grace. One would go on to say that these two truths are mutually exclusive and thus conclude the Bible itself is one big contradiction. I think the church in America does a good job of speaking about the “New Testament” God, but fails to even consider the “Old Testament” God as relevant to our current culture. To be clear, I do not mean to suggest that this “divide” between the Old Testament God and the New Testament God actually exists, but I use the terms “Old Testament” and “New Testament” God to represent two ways of thinking of God that taken to their extreme are mutually exclusive and imply that the Christian Bible is a contradiction.
However, what I really want to talk about is how the entire narrative of the Bible Old Testament and New is really a cohesive storyline about one God with two paradoxical attributes that seem to contradict each other, but in reality work together in perfect harmony, such that one attribute cannot even exist in any meaningful sense without the other. I am talking about the Wrath of God and the grace of God. For many people, the Wrath of God is such an ugly term and has been abused and used as a weapon to cause people shame and disgrace, in order to make you try to be better. For others reading through the Bible, it has been a moral stumbling block, an irreconcilable truth with the doctrine of Grace and even Love. How could a loving God condemn people to eternal punishment in Hell? How could a loving God command people to kill? And an almost endless string of questions relating to actions God performed, that in our culture in the West are morally questionable at best, and morally reprehensible at worst.
I am going to try to take the rest of this blog post to sum up why the reality of God’s Wrath is good and why God’s grace would not be his grace in the absence of his Wrath. To begin with, Humanity’s greatest problem is not that God is morally reprehensible or evil, however, humanity’s chief problem is that God is good. This is a problem because humanity is not good. The Bible’s testimony from the opening page to the final page in revelation is against humanity. We, as humans were born radically depraved with hearts that are desperately wicked. The problem with this is that if God is good, he can’t simply forgive you. Proverbs says that the one who justifies the wicked and the one who acquits the guilty are both alike to the Lord. They are an abomination. You see, if God is good, he hates evil. The Bible not only says that God hates evil but it also says that he hates evil doers and his anger is raised up against all workers of iniquity. The bad news is that this includes every single one of us. The Bible says that God hates every single one of us. Here is where the apparent contradiction comes into play. How can God love and hate every single one of us at the same time?
To best answer this, I think it best to think of specific examples. If you love children, then it follows that you cannot be emotionally neutral about child molesters. You must hate them. If you love the Jewish people then you must hate the Nazis. The entire concept of Love makes it impossible to be emotionally neutral about the object of your Love. This is best illustrated in movies where injustice plays a big part in the movie. I always think of the movie Taken. In this movie, a mans daughter is kidnapped by sex traffickers who intended to sell his daughter in sex slavery. In the movie, the father, played by Liam Neeson chases down every last one of the sex traffickers and kills them and I as a viewer in the audience was just filled with a satisfaction and delight that the evil men portrayed in the movie were brought to justice. Innately, we all can relate to anger at evil in the world.
This is why the question about whether or not God falls into this category of evil as we view it is such an important question. In God’s story he is the protagonist. He is the Liam Neeson of the story. We are the antagonist of his story. God created the world good. He saw all of his creation and concluded on the seventh day that it was very good. Then, we, as independent moral agents brought evil into the world in our rebellion. It was us who messed up his perfect world and it was through our sin and rebellion that his creation was tainted with corruption. So when we read about God killing people in the Old Testament or the concept of Hell, we must realize that this is the just punishment for rebellion against God. God warned Adam and Eve that if they took from the tree and rebelled that death would be the consequence. The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life.
Without understanding the Wrath of God, we can never understand his grace. We constantly hear preaching about the grace of God, but if there is no Wrath, if God was never angry at us, to begin with, we nullify the need for the cross. The question is not “Is God a morally reprehensible monster?” The question is Are you? Until you acknowledge that you are the one that is messed up, that it is your heart that is hopelessly wicked, you can have no hope for a cure or remedy. Jesus said it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but it is the sick? As long as you maintain your innocence before a Holy and Just God you can never receive the healing, restoration and saving grace God offers. The fact that any of us are alive right now, even after all the wicked heinous things that we have done as well as all the evil thoughts and intentions of our hearts is a tribute to God’s grace in our lives. He is beckoning you to repent and turn to him. Every breathe we breathe is another breathe that we did not deserve to breathe.
So what is the conclusion then? Is the God of the Old Testament the same God as the New? The answer is yes. Upon further analysis of the most difficult passages I have found in the Old Testament, I have been able to find the two sides of the same coin of God’s love and upon inspection of the New I can see not only his grace, but I still see his wrath and indignation against evil.
The topic I discussed briefly in this blog, is going to be the topic of a book that I am currently in the process of researching and writing in which I will discuss in greater depth as well as some more specific questions and passages regarding the morality of God. As someone who struggled greatly with understanding who God is, and understanding his Love even when it seems like he does unloving things, I hope to bring clarity to a lot of the questions that tripped me up and made my faith waiver. If you have any questions related to the goodness, morality or character of God, feel free to leave them in the comments and perhaps I could consider trying to cover them as I write this book.
