God's Wrath

Nahum 1:2-6
The Lord is a jealous and avenging God;
the Lord is avenging and wrathful;
the Lord takes vengeance on his adversaries
and keeps wrath for his enemies.
The Lord is slow to anger and great in power,
and the Lord will by no means clear the guilty.
His way is in whirlwind and storm,
and the clouds are the dust of his feet.
He rebukes the sea and makes it dry;
he dries up all the rivers;
Bashan and Carmel wither;
the bloom of Lebanon withers.
The mountains quake before him;
the hills melt;
the earth heaves before him,
the world and all who dwell in it.
Who can stand before his indignation?
Who can endure the heat of his anger?
His wrath is poured out like fire,
and the rocks are broken into pieces by him.
The Holy Bible : English standard version.

Most people don’t want to acknowledge, think about, or believe that God is a God of wrath. A preacher bringing up this subject is categorized as one of those “hell-fire-brimstone” preachers from days of old.

Well, here I am bringing it up. First of all, I am not one of those old timey “hell-fire-brimstone” preachers. I am too young to fit into that category. I do believe, preach and advocate the grace and mercy of God. I do not always try to “scare” people to faith.(although there is a need for more reverence of the Lord God, I’ll save that for another blog).

But, I do believe the Bible. God has revealed Himself to us through His Word. And time and again we see the mention of His wrath. From beginning to end God is a God of Wrath just as He is a God of Grace. To ignore this truth is to make a god of our imagination, who is no god but a false idol.

So, how do we understand God’s Wrath? How can we make sense out of this truth? J.I. Packer has a great chapter in his classic book Knowing God. I am going to reproduce a couple of paragraphs that I think are excellent.


The root cause of our unhappiness seems to be a disquieting suspicion that ideas of wrath are in one way or another unworthy of God.

To some, for instance, wrath suggests a loss of self-control, an outburst of seeing red which is partly if not wholly irrational. To others it suggests the rage of conscious impotence, or wounded pride or plain bad temper. Surely, it is said, it would be wrong to ascribe to God such attitudes as these?

God’s wrath in the Bible is never capricious, self-indulgent, irritable, morally ignoble thing that human anger so often is. It is instead, a right and necessary reaction to objective moral evil. God is only angry when anger is called for. Even among humans, there is such a thing as righteous indignation, though it is, perhaps, rarely found. But all God’s indignation is righteous. Would a God who took as much pleasure in evil as he did in good be a good God? Would a God who did not react adversely to evil in his world be morally perfect? Surely not. But it is precisely this adverse reaction to evil, which is a necessary part of moral perfection, that is what the Bible has in view when it speaks of God’s wrath.

Then to others the thought of God’s wrath suggests cruelty….Does this follow? Two biblical considerations show that it does not.

In the first place, God’s wrath in the Bible is always judicial-that is, it is the wrath of the Judge, administering justice. Cruelty is always immoral, but the explicit presupposition of all that we find in the Bible on the torments of those who experience the fullness of God’s wrath is that each receives precisely what he deserves.

My note: the mistake most people make when trying to understand God’s wrath is they overestimate their own goodness and underestimate their own badness. We are not good, we have sinned and offended the holiness of God Almighty that brings on us exactly what we deserve for such sin—His punishment and wrath.

Romans 2:5-6 says that God will give to each person according to what he has done.

In the second place, God’s wrath in the Bible is something which people choose for themselves. Before hell is an experience inflicted by God, it is a state for which a person himself opts by retreating from the light which God shines in his heart to lead him to Himself.

From Knowing God by J.I. Packer pages 150-156.

Next post: Being delivered from God’s Wrath; propitiation