“Holy Hostility”

That’s what John Stott calls God’s wrath.

Lately, I’ve been surfing blogs, podcasts and websites of folks who, burned by “the institutional church”, “organized religion”, “evangelicalism” or various other expressions of Christianity in the West, have taken to calling God “Dad” and talking about His great love. I’m not against that per se. I just find that at times it’s a bit reactionary and therefore unbalanced. These folks seem to be rushing from abject terror of the Cosmic Cop into the awaiting arms of a great Celestial Softy.

I think Stott’s commentary “What is God’s Wrath?” can help to restore balance. Afterall, since “Dad” is so crazy about us, then shouldn’t we expect Him to be hostile toward whatever and whoever would harm us? (Romans 1:18-32. 1) What is the wrath of God?

If we are to preserve the balance of Scripture, our definition of God’s anger must avoid opposite extremes. On the one hand, there are those who see it as no different from sinful human anger. On the other, there are those who declare that the very notion of anger as a personal attribute or attitude of God must be abandoned.
Human anger, although there is such a thing as righteous indignation, is mostly very unrighteous. It is an irrational and uncontrollable emotion, containing much vanity, animosity, malice and the desire for revenge. It should go without saying that God’s anger is absolutely free of all such poisonous ingredients.
The desire to eliminate any notion of God’s personal anger, as being absolutely unworthy of him, is usually associated with the name C.H.Dodd, whose commentary on Romans was published in 1932. He argued that ‘Paul never uses the verb “to be angry” with God as subject’, although he is often said to love, and that the noun *orge* (anger) is used only three times in the expression ‘the anger of God’, whereas it occurs constantly as ‘wrath’ or ‘the wrath’, without reference to God, ‘in a curiously impersonal way’. Dodd’s conclusion is that Paul retains the concept ‘not to describe the attitude of God to man, but to describe an inevitable process of cause and effect in a moral universe’. A.T.Hanson elaborated this view in *The wrath of the Lamb* (1959), maintaining that God’s wrath is ‘wholly impersonal’ and is ‘the inevitable process of sin working itself out in history’.
But the argument based on the comparative absence of the expression ‘the wrath of God’ in favour of ‘wrath’ or ‘the wrath’ is weak. For Paul treats grace similarly. At the end of Romans 5 he writes both of ‘the grace of God’ (15), and about ‘the grace’ which he nevertheless personifies as both ‘increasing’ (20) and ‘reigning’ (21), and which is the most personal of all God’s attributes. If then ‘grace’ is God acting graciously, ‘wrath’ must be God reacting in revulsion against sin. It is his ‘deeply personal abhorrence’ of evil.
The wrath of God, then, is almost totally different from human anger. It does not mean that God loses his temper, flies into a rage, or is ever malicious, spiteful or vindictive. The alternative to ‘wrath’ is not ‘love’ but ‘neutrality’ in the moral conflict. And God is not neutral. On the contrary, his wrath is his holy hostility to evil, his refusal to condone it or come to terms with it, his just judgement upon it.

Everybody ought to know

V is a friend of my son.

S has known her for the last three years. In a few days, she’ll be moving back to her home country.

V came over for one last play date. All of the kids were sitting at the table having a snack. S asked her, “Do you know Jesus?” V said she didn’t. S asked who her God is. V didn’t seem to understand the question (but she may have just not wanted to answer) so to clarify S and his brother M asked, “Who do you pray to at night?”

At this point I intervened and said, “Guys, she may not pray.”

Before abandoning the inquiry all together, S commented “Everybody ought to know who their God is.”

Yes, everybody should.

God’s Particular Will

In a commentary on Ephesians, particularly chapter 5, John Stott says:

“Secondly, *wise people discern the will of God*. They are sure that, whereas willfulness is folly, wisdom is to be found in God’s will and nowhere else. *Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is* (verse 17)…Moreover, in seeking to discover it, it is essential to distinguish between his ‘general’ and his ‘particular’ will. The former is so called because it relates to the generality of his people and is the same for all of us, e.g. to make us like Christ. His particular will, however, extending to the particularities of our life, is different for each of us, e.g. what career we shall follow, whether we should marry, and if so whom. Only after this distinction has been made can we consider how we may find out *what the will of the Lord is*. His ‘general’ will is found in Scripture; the will of God for the people of God has been revealed in the Word of God. But we shall not find his ‘particular’ will in Scripture. To be sure, we shall find general principles in Scripture to guide us, but detailed decisions have to be made after careful thought and prayer and the seeking of advice from mature and experienced believers.”

Pardon my presumption, but I would add two things to Stott’s commentary at this point. First, while it is true that we will not find God’s particular will for ourselves in Scripture, we will find His particular will for others. (Consider God’s will for Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Paul.) Why bring this up? I’ve noticed that there is an assumption that many Christians have when it comes to discerning God’s particular will for their lives which is rooted in their attitude toward God’s revelation of his particular will to these and other people in Scripture. The assumption is that, just as God had a particular call on these people’s lives, He has a call on each and every individual. Note that I use the word assumption for that is what it is. The Scriptures never say that God has a particular will for each and every individual beyond being delivered from death to life. Second, I’d like to add that even after we think carefully, pray earnestly and pursue good counsel from “mature and experienced believers”; we still can not claim to have flawlessly divined God’s particular will for our individual circumstances. We can say that we have used the resources available to us and commended our decision to God who “in all things, works for the good of those who love him”.

I think many Christians are unnecessarily burdened with the task of finding God’s particular will for their lives. I’m not thinking of those folks who tramp through life confident that they’ve rightly understood various impressions, leadings and “burdens” on their hearts or faultlessly interpreted the results of “fleeces” they’ve “lain out”. I’m thinking of those who are constantly wondering if they are “in the center of God’s will” or who, due to a change in their circumstances, feel oppressed by the guilt of having “missed God’s will”. For those people, I would ask God to help them reach the point where they can rely on His revealed general will and the wisdom that He provides to make particular decisions, ultimately confident that God is at work, mysteriously, on their behalf.