Over the past few weeks, I have really been meditating and thinking on some of God’s most uncomfortable and unpleasant attributes. As a Christian, I believe in the authority of the Bible as an accurate source to tell us what God is like. My faith is rooted in Christ, his life, death and resurrection and what He says is true about humanity and about God. But as anyone who has spent a lot of time reading the Bible knows, there are a lot of things that God does or says that are really against the grain. For me, some of the hardest things for my mind to wrap around is the reality of God’s judgement and Wrath on sin. God loves everyone, right? So why does he send people to Hell? Why does he order people’s deaths or strike them dead right where they stand? What does it even mean when Jesus says, For God so loved the World?
The truth is that there is no beating around the bush on these questions. You can’t honestly read the Bible and not start to ask these questions.
And to top it off, this isn’t some sort of Old Testament issue that we can write off as a poor understanding of God and his character. We can’t say to ourselves, now we have Jesus who loves his enemies and never speaks about judgement. Jesus spoke more about Hell than anyone else in the whole Bible. In fact, Jesus says that all law-breakers will be gathered and thrown into a fiery furnace in a place where there is going to be weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 13:41-42).He also says that this fire will be unquenchable and last forever (Matthew 25:41). To top it off, He says that no one can come to the Father and receive eternal life, except through Him (John 14:6). So Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, our example of true Love, pronounces a coming time of condemnation and judgement, characterized by weeping, gnashing of teeth and an everlasting fiery furnace. And he says anyone who doesn’t follow him is going to spend eternity there. This is a dilemma. On the one hand, we have verses like John 3:16 which says God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son that whoever believes in Him would have everlasting life, but on the other hand, those who don’t have are going to spend eternity burning in a place called Hell. Where is the love in that? This is where my mind has been for the past couple of weeks and it really is a head question to wrestle with.
However, as certain things have begun to unfold in the political arena of the world, God has begun to give me a lot of clarity and understanding about His justice and His wrath as a manifestation of His love. Yes… God’s Wrath is actually an extension of His love in the context of a fallen, sinful world. To understand this more deeply, I think it’s helpful to illustrate with the help of a very popular children’s movie that I am sure most people reading have watched. The movie I want to refer to is Disney’s Lion King. For those of you who haven’t watched it, the movie is about a King who rules the animal kingdom on the plains of the African Savannah and His jealous, embittered brother who staged a plot to assassinate both the king and his Son, heir to the throne, in order to inherit the throne for himself. He ends up succeeding in his plan, with one small problem; namely, the son survives the assassination attempt. The Son whose name is Simba goes on living his life far away from the kingdom that once belonged to His father and meanwhile Scar, the king’s brother takes the throne for himself. He and his band of hyenas lay waste to the beautiful kingdom that Mufasa built. They enslave the population and kill and eat everything. There is nothing but a barren, desolate wasteland. The story continues with Simba realizing who He is and the identity He had along as the rightful king and he goes and challenges Scar. After an epic battle, Scar ends up losing and falls off a cliff into a fiery death. Simba becomes the new kingdom and restores the kingdom to what it once was. He chases off the hyenas that destroyed it and the kingdom lives happily ever on.
This story is an excellent picture of the necessity for the Wrath of God. You see, just like in the Lion King, Scar committed treason and established his own kingdom in place of Mufasa’s, so we too have committed treason against God and established our own kingdom in place of God’s. We usurped God’s authority over our lives and we do what is right in our own eyes. And just like Scar’s kingdom left the Pride looking desolate and barren, so our kingdom has left this earth in utter chaos. There is oppression, bondage, deceit, racism, hatred, wickedness, murder and a host of other evil and destructive forces all over our world. We have polluted God’s creation and rebelled against the true King. Many of us can understand the anger and indignation towards a treasonous act against our imperfect country because they recognize it as a threat to the ideals of our nation. However, few people have that same indignation or anger when treason of the highest sort is committed against a God whose laws and ideals are perfect.
No one felt sorry for Scar at the end of the Lion King. No one thought to themselves, why did Scar have to die and fall into a fiery death? Why? Because we all knew that was what he deserved. Some of you would reply, but isn’t Hell a bit of an overreaction from God? Does spending eternity burning in flames sound proportional to the treasonous acts one could possibly commit here on earth?
To which I would respond, when does the murderer get to choose which sentence he thinks is fair? When does the guilty party get to decide what is just or deserved? You see, we are all guilty of grievous sin before a Holy good God. We cannot accurately see how heinous our own sin is, so how can we accurately judge the penalty our sin deserves?
This is what makes the cross so great. Because God saw our sin for what it truly is. He saw that he could not simply let it go, but that a penalty had to be paid. So he sent Jesus to pay that penalty for us. He made a way for us to belong to His kingdom again. Jesus’ primary message to the people of his day was Repent and believe the good news that the kingdom of God is at hand. You see Simba has returned. The kingdom of Scar does not need to be your kingdom any longer. You can repent, change your mind and crown Jesus as the king of your heart and be made a part of His kingdom once again. You can be restored and the negative effects of the kingdom of Scar can be restored, if you would just humble yourself and make Jesus your king.
