Once there was,
and once there was not,
an artist.
He was good — very good. He painted beautiful scenes and portraits.
He had some wit and whimsy about him: Always, whether at the center or somewhere hidden, his paintings included the faces of those he loved. His wife and children. Or his dog. His neighbors. Or his house. Even himself. The people and things that gave him delight found their way onto the walls of those who bought his paintings.
He poured himself into his work. I don’t mean that he worked hard to make a living, though he did. I mean that his art expressed the very best of his own heart — all he saw as good, and true, and beautiful; his hopes and his aspirations; his joys and his sorrows and longings.
It was almost as hard to give the paintings into the hands of their buyers as it was to paint them in the first place.
But sell the paintings he did. He sent his work out into the world, and it supported his growing family.
Then one day an invitation came: a commission from someone very very wealthy.
This was the opportunity to create a masterwork.
This was the opportunity to take care of his family.
The house would be paid off. The children’s education would be provided for. There would be no worries for a long time to come.
Days, and weeks, and months of loving labor. The great painting was complete. Those with eyes to see could find everyone and everything the artist loved on that canvas. Those who saw it could never quite say why or how, but they swore the whole thing looked like him.
But the night before the painting was to be delivered, while he and his family slept, someone broke into his studio.
Who knows what the vandal was thinking? What could motivate such actions?
Each hidden face of a loved one was destroyed — some painted over, some scraped off. A jar of turpentine was poured onto the surface, and scrubbed hard to increase the damage. And the large central figure, the subject of the commission, was cut out with a knife and burned on the studio floor.
How did the artist feel when he came in that morning?
If there is any topic in classic Christian vocabulary that gets ordinary people’s knickers in a knot it is God’s “wrath.” Many rule out the idea that God could have wrath, as if such a feeling would be unworthy of a loving God.
But consider God the Artist.
Consider God who created the unutterable beauty of this world and called it good — only to find human beings destroying whole species of birds and animals, pouring poisons into waterways, creating weapons of mass destruction.
Consider God who created humanity as his own self-portrait, bearing his own image and likeness — only to find we would rather live apart from him than in loving intimacy with him; that we disregard the plans he had for us to thrive and flourish; that instead of loving our fellow creatures we harm each other and ourselves.
We tend to assume that if God is wrathful it is about our breaches of particular rules: do this, don’t do that.
The real issue is that God’s good work and God’s intentions for life have been thwarted and turned to rubbish — and quite naturally his heart cries out with anguish, and even rage.
If you prefer to think of God as removed from such human emotions, consider this as the true expression of both love and justice.
You get angry too, in the midst of grief and loss.
Some time ago in the comments to this blog I was asked about God’s wrath. It was on one of my posts on the Heidelberg Catechism, the much-loved and widely used Reformed summary of biblical Christianity.
Here, for the record, is what I think of as the key section of the Catechism on the topic. The previous questions have been on human sin, our damaged nature that leads us into misery by bad choices. Then comes Question 10. (By the way, after this the Catechism has much more to say about God’s gracious solution to the problem.)
10 Q. Does God permit such disobedience and rebellion to go unpunished?
A. Certainly not.
God is terribly angry with the sin we are born with
as well as the sins we personally commit.
As a just judge, God will punish them both now and in eternity, having declared:
“Cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the things written in the book of the law.”
The post is getting rather long, so let me just note that God is not said to be angry at us, but at sin. It is the destruction of his beautiful creation, and choices that lead to further destruction, that grieves God.
Of course God is angry at such a twisting, such a misuse of what was intended to show God’s beauty and wisdom.
Of course God, who is not just an artist, but the ruler and judge, would take action against the sin that wreaks such havoc.
Of course you wouldn’t want to live in a universe where God did not plan to take action to set things right.
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I would love to hear from you in the comments: What helps you make sense of God’s “wrath”? Or what makes God’s “wrath” so hard to fathom?
What has helped to make (some) sense of Divine Wrath to me has been the experience of losing people I love to Alzheimer’s and related dementias. I HATE dementia. I hate it for stealing away people I love without their permission or their cooperation. I hate it for putting up walls between me and those I love, so that they cannot understand me and I cannot reach or understand them. I hate what it does, not only to the sufferer but to all who love that person. We never stop loving them, but we rage against the condition that keeps them from us. The Wrath of God, as you (and the Catechism) wisely remind us, is not at us but at sin. “We war not against flesh and blood…” the apostle reminds us, and neither does our God. Or so it begins to seem to me…
Thank you Dave. Beautifully stated.
I’m sorry for your losses.
Thanks so much, Gary — wonderful analogy. “God is Love,” people say, “so how can God get angry?” The “love” they have in mind with this comment is not truly the love of God, nor even the love common to human experience, but Hallmark love. Your analogy is an effective antidote to that response, and reminds us that wrath is, indeed, a righteous and faithful aspect of love – especially that aspect of love that we know as grace.
Thank you Brint! Great to hear from you.
We do slip easily into thinking that if God is love he must always be nice. This leads to an inability to make sense of a great deal of the Bible, of course.
It seems to me like a failure to reflect on our own experience in loving relationships as well. Of course we aren’t the measure of God, but at least we can learn that deep anger does not mean lack, or negation, nor elimination of love.
Gary, wonderful timing!
In our Sunday School (Anglican church), we just finished LD 4 last week where we wrestled with this very question — how should we understand God’s justice/wrath against sin and also his mercy? How do they relate? I don’t have any kind of complete answer, but do think these questions find clarification in the death of Jesus. Without trying to eliminate the hard questions, we yet see “righteousness and peace kiss” (as the psalmist has us sing) at the cross.. In other words, it should drive us to worship. In our case, of course, we followed in the next hour with Holy Communion. So we talked about what this discussion brings to our own perspective when we take the host and drink the wine. “What do you see when you look into the chalice?”
And this question of satisfying divine anger comes up again in LD 5 when thinking through what kind of Savior we must have. I’d love to use your illustration, if I may, on Sunday. I think it clarifies what do, and more importantly, perhaps, what we do not mean about God’s wrath. Well done! — David
Thank you so much, David!
You are welcome to use the parable, though I would be most grateful if you let them know you saw it here on my blog. They would be very welcome to stop by too.
By the way, where are you? Several countries in the visitors stats today and Anglican could be anywhere.
Hi Gary, It was most helpful to me many years ago that the obverse side of the coin of God’s wrath is God’s mercy. That I cannot grasp the wrath without holding onto God’s mercy.
Dave’s experience with dementia speaks well to this.
I also like the wisdom you demonstrate that for God to be indifferent or passive in the face of sin is NOT loving.
Thanks Keith! Looking at the flip side of God’s wrath and finding it is mercy is great.
During Lent at a community service I heard a sermon from a neighboring pastor about God’s wrath being like a mother’s love. I understood it to mean when a mom’s child is in danger she would destroy (or feel like destroying) whatever was harming her child. She would go to great lengths to protect her child or free her child because of her love.
This was the first time I thought about God’s wrath not as meanness but as an expression of love. This has made me think a lot. Thank you for giving me more to think about.
Thanks Mabel! Great comparison. Hope you’ll join the comments again soon. (If you are the Mabel I think you are, say hello to your family for me.)
This analogy is quite helpful. It helps me understand how God’s anger is rooted in God’s love — and that anger can serve the cause of love.
I wonder in what ways our difficulties with God’s wrath have something to do with our culture’s tendency to denigrate anger in general Very few of us have been brought up with examples of how to constructively express anger in ways that build relationships — leaving many of us uncertain about what to do with angry feelings.’
This post is a timely one for me — I”ve spent some of my summer in CPE studying “The Angry Christian: A Theology for Care and Counseling” by Andrew D. Lester. Lester is more interested in how we human beings deal (or more often fail) to deal with anger than in divine anger. But it may be that we need to consider our own attitudes towards human anger in order to think more clearly about God’s anger.
A very helpful post on a difficult issue — thank you!
Thanks, Gary — sorry for the delay in replying. I hope CPE is going well.
I think the expression of anger on the human plane is very culturally determined. Long ago a book on ethnicity and family therapy pointed to the ways some cultures are happy with volatile and voluble emotional expression, while others typically hide all emotional extremes.
But it seems like much of our culture frowns on anger in particular as a “bad” emotion. We condemn it in those around it an in ourselves, so I suppose we can’t imagine Someone in the divine realm being tainted by it.
This topic has always been sort of a theological conundrum (and its corollaries) for me as I’m sure it is for many others. The wrath of God directed at human sin and brokenness always seems to be redirected back, at least in some way, to the issue of theodicy. And then I tend to think of the often-used phrase, as Harold Kushner put it: “when bad things happen to good people.” I wonder why God’s wrath isn’t openly spent on the intentional perpetrators of the brokenness in His creation … or at least why his sovereignty isn’t used in a more preventative way. But then I must remind myself: 1) I too am a sinner, and prefer not to be an object of his wrath, and 2) God already has in place the answer to this sad predicament that we find ourselves in. And that of course is found at the Cross and God’s redemptive plan for us.
Still, I wonder why God’s wrath isn’t more purposefully directed at the natural brokenness of our existence … the cancer, Alzheimer’s, developmental disorders, heart disease, and the disasters of nature that all too often take too many lives before their time for no apparent reason. The Cross is still there for those instances too, but still, it makes one wonder. I suppose Rev. 21:4 can be an answer.
Good to hear from you, Phil. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, and I’m sorry for my delay in replying.
This particular Q/A of the catechism is about God’s response to human sin — the particular destructive choices we make individually and as a species — so it doesn’t really touch on the theodicy questions you raise. Maybe that will come up another time!
Neat parable, I’m reminded of the footsteps in the sand. When we feel we are being punished , hurting for what is happening in our lives (sick loved ones, loss of job, disagreements with family, etc), we feel we are walking along on the sand, but as we all know from that story, we are truly not alone. God’s wrath is against sin, and I feel God is always with us, even in the midst of our worst times.