 It was Tozer who said ’the most important thing about a person is what they think of when they think of God.’ As Christians we are people who need a correct perception of who God is; one that is truthful to His character and one that ensures a correct theology, the nature of God.
It is so easy to take the parts of God’s character and confuse them. To do so though is a mistake. Not only are we missing out on experiencing Him in an authentic way, limiting God, but we are guilty too of not searching after the ways of God.
In Isaiah 58 the prophet speaks God’s voice: ‘For day after day they seek me out; they seem eager to know my ways, as if they were a nation that does what is right and has not forsaken the commands of its God. They ask me for just decisions and seem eager for God to come near them.’ God approves of us drawing close to Him and learning His ways. If we fail to do so we run the risk of becoming a distorted ‘little Christ.’ God has put His spirit inside us, literally his ‘spermos’ to transform us into his likeness. If we major on one aspect of God we will be transformed lop-sided.
In Exodus 34 the Lord speaks to Moses about his character: ‘The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children to the third and fourth generation.’
How can God be both unfailing in love and punisher of rebellion? We may find that difficult to comprehend but God’s love is the overwhelming drive that drives both these features of God’s character.
In the passage, Moses has gone back up the mountain to ask God to forgive the people. They have turned away from God and made idols to take the Lord’s place. Moses pleads with God: ‘Although this is a stiff-necked people, forgive our wickedness and our sin, and take us as your inheritance.’
Moses stands in the gap between God and people & because of his actions God chooses to forgive. The whole of the bible is a series of stories that point to God’s answer to sin and rebellion - Jesus. When Moses is involved in this small part of the story, he is in fact pointing to a bigger truth. Understanding the passage with a Christiological key allows us to see God speaking into that moment (the people are spared even though they have sinned because of Moses' intervention) and into the future when Christ would activate this unfailing love - and take this sin and rebellion as punishment on Himself, for all – not just the Jewish people.
Even though God chooses to remove his judgement from Israel, the people of the Old Testament have a real problem still. Isaiah 64 says: ‘even our righteous acts are like filthy rags, we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.’
If even our righteous acts are not good enough for God then how can he say he is forgiving the sin? The answer is that even as God speaks He is looking forward to a time when someone will bridge the gap once and for all. God’s salvation and answer for sin works outside of time, and is activated by Jesus’ death for all.
Quite often we see God’s wrath and his love as two different things, but Christ is the one that allows us to live in the tension of justice and forgiveness. We must never try to solve the seeming inbalance, to do so is to put God into a box that makes a mockery of the words of Isaiah 55: ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.’
Even in this tension, many of us can take on board the concepts of God being graceful, though when it comes to God being an angry/jealous/vengeful god we can often either ignore this aspect of God, majoring on the forgiveness, or assume that god is angry at us and only tolerating us because of Christ.
In the first case we are marginalising God again. It is not our right to decide who or what god is. It is our duty, through grace, to search and find God's character. When there is a conflict in our conceptions and His self-conceptions, we must humble ourselves and ask to understand.
In the second, we face living with a wrong conception of God again - one that will steal the life away from us that Christ came to give us - life to the full. God is not angry at you.
 We can take incredible comfort from the fact that God is angered by sin. So many of us have been sinned against; there is the problem of generational sin; the enemy has come to rob and destroy; abuse exists very close by and international structures marginalise and keep people enslaved. Thera are so many examples. Many people say they can’t believe in an angry god. I would suggest that a God who isn’t angered by such things is’nt a God who is worth believing in, in the first place.
Part of our journey in being made more fullsome 'little christs' is in being changed to feel this anger for ourselves. If we don’t acnowlege God’s anger at sin we will never be moved by compassion, and we will never seek to spread the kingdom agenda that seeks to right some of those wrongs.
Coming back to the Old Testament, even amongst God’s threat of punishing sin to the third or fourth generation is the promise (in the ten commandments) of maintaining his love for thousands of generations. We can only understand his wrath when we understand his love. And, I believe, we can only understand the relationship between the two in this ratio.
Is God still angry? He is angry and his anger has been fully and totally vented. God does not merely tolerate us because of Christ; quite the opposite - he sent Christ to restore what had once been - the price (freely) paid by Christ was so incredibly high because the reward, in God's eyes, was so great. While we were yet in sin, Christ died for us. Romans 5 says: ‘While we were in sin, utterly helpless, Christ came at just the right time and died for us.’ God’s act of redemption happened as a response to our plight. We are inherently good beings that God loves, that have been made less by the effects of a fallen world.
God is no longer angry at mankind. He is no longer angry at anybody that Jesus died on the cross for. And Jesus died for everyone. It is God’s answer to that previous problem of clearing sin fully. Jesus died once and for all for the forgiveness of all sin. That is sin in the past, sin in the present, and sin in the future.
In Second Corinthians 5, Paul says that ‘Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all’ Jesus died for all people, every single person that you know, including yourself. Jesus is never going to the cross again - he had all sin placed on Him, and that was enough for God. In this act of propitiation, God’s wrath was completely extinguished, leaving only his love.
Understanding that God’s wrath was completely spent at the cross, by placing the punishement on Jesus is so important. Some of the things we can do when we think someone is angry with us include withdrawing from their presence. It is clear that Jesus died to restore a relationship with God. The two don’t tie-up, and we must be careful that the enemy does not use percieved anger to separate us from our Father.
Another thing we can tend to do is doubt what the other person is telling you. Even if they say nice thing about you it is easy to dismiss them. As God transforms us into people with an accurate self-conception (one which is based on what God says about us) we must take Him at his word – that His anger has been fully spent on His son.
God is not angry at any of us, any more. But he is incredibly angered by sin and its effect of us because of his great love for us - we must not cling to it, but put our faith in Jesus. It is at the cross that we are separated from it.
Despite all that has been done to us, and all that we have done, the final chapters of scripture reveals a beautiful picture of a restored heaven and renewed earth. We can, again, take great comfort from this. God understands the wages of sin and the effects of living in a very screwed up world. He understood so well that he considered it a privilidge to send Christ to a cross to make things right again.
In Revelation, at the end of all time, John says ‘God will wipe away every tear from their (our) eyes’. The early church lived with this sense of godly hope that made them into endurers. A question for us as a church, is whether we need to capture some of this again.
| 