It sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s true. God’s wrath is compassionate, and His activity in judgement is motivated by His tender mercy. Even the seven last plagues are poured out of “golden bowls,” symbolizing the holy love in which they find their source.

But I must confess, I have lost my share of peace over this issue. I have flinched through stories like the conquest of Jericho where “men, women and children” were to be utterly destroyed.1 I have shaken my head and asked, “Can this really be you, God?” I have heard a few intriguing theories that claim that Satan’s rage or man’s guilt is the wrath God speaks of as His own. I have tried to believe these philosophies, but I couldn’t and be honest with the Word. The Bible is clear that there is a wrath of God, which is stored up in heaven and finally comes from God upon the rejectors of His love.

This is a hard thing for me to admit because the idea that God actually punishes people has fallen out of style. Due to the almost irresistible force of humanism some sectors of Christiandom have begun to adopt a very eastern concept of God which tends to equate love with pleasantness. The Adventist church has a special temptation in this area because years of legalism have created a backlash which makes a phlegmatic God look very attractive. A passivist at heart, I have been drawn to the same characterizations of God, but those characterizations conflicted with numerous passages of scripture. Finally the conflict came to a head and I realized I would have to choose between my docile picture of God and faith in the naked Word.

God didn’t leave me without a door of escape, though. That door was Jesus Himself, specifically His cross, which finally made sense out of the punitive side of God’s character, revealing it as sourcing from His love. I saw in the cross the fact that God bore His own punishment as Jesus “chose to bear the wrath of God.” 2 I saw that in so doing He both upheld the integrity of His law and gave Himself to save us. How could I accuse God of failing to love those He finally cut off when He “spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all.”?3 How could I fault God for destroying those whom He first died to save?

I saw that to give short shrift to the reality of the wrath of God was to compromise the cross. Like working from a macro, to edit one was to edit the other. All the fulness of God’s hate for sin was hurled against His Son who became sin for us. To minimize God’s wrath was to shrink His hatred of sin proportionately.

Still, the wrath passages of the Bible were too similar to my envisions of earthly despots, genocide and mass torture for my comfort. My experience with man’s wrath—from the neighborhood bully to the footage of the Holocaust I saw in Sophomore Social Studies class—revealed it as purely evil. All the wrath I had ever witnessed sprang from a swamp of hate rather than a fountain of love. Reading about God’s wrath caused my bitterest memories to assert themselves and project upon God their own hateful motives.

Rather than run away from what threatened my concept of a loving God, though, I decided to embrace the naked word and ask God to expand my conceptions. I found that, although God’s wrath was similar enough to man’s wrath to be called the same thing, it was as different in motive as God was different in nature. A bit of delving beneath the surface of God’s wrath revealed these important distinctions:

1. God’s wrath is sensitive. We detach from the pain of those we punish. The very phenomenon of human rage is such that we become consumed with our own emotional universe, and thus shut off the springs of empathy. Not so with God, who “does not afflict willingly or grieve the sons of men,”4 for He “takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked.”5 God’s heart is hyper-sensitive to even the pain that His judgements cause. Think of David grieving the death of his rebellious son Absalom.6 The connectiveness of human paternal love is only a shadow of that which comes forth from “Our Father.” God will retain His connection, and therefore retain His empathic anguish, until the last lost heart ceases to beat.

2. God’s wrath is impartial. We are told that “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.”7 Notice that the wrath is against ungodliness and unrighteousness, not people. Although there are many references to God pouring out His wrath upon individuals, this is never God’s first choice. He wishes to destroy sin without destroying sinners. He never designed that sinners should be in that lake of fire which was “prepared for the devil and his angels.”8 God would have even spared Satan and his hosts if there had been any hope of salvation for them! Only when a being, human or angelic, is inextricably bound to sin by their own choice does God destroy them.

3. God’s wrath is according to fixed laws. When human beings take revenge for injustice, we add to the problem of injustice. This is because we are not principled in our wrath. The best of human judges fall short of perfect objectivity. God’s wrath, however, is perfectly just and in compliance with a law that never changes. While the law of God does demand that sin be punished, the punishment is perfectly suited to the crime. This is depicted in the levitical law, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”9 We have often viewed this expression as harsh and heartless, but in fact this law was a provision of mercy in that it prevented unlimited, lawless vengeance!10 Likewise in the final judgement, there will be vengeance of a nature that is determined by the crime itself and not a random decree. In fact, the books of heaven where sins are recorded are in precise accord with the mind’s own record of wrongs committed. Prior to the final punishment, God will bring these hidden, or unconscious, things to mind.11 Then every lost soul will know that God’s judgements are fair and right and His litigations without bias. “Every knee shall bow. . .and every tongue shall confess.”12

4. God’s wrath is protective. A friend explained to me why she believed that God would punish evil. She said that as a young girl, her father knew that she was being abused by a relative, but did nothing to protect her. The result was that she lost respect for her father. In just such a way, we would lose respect for a God who didn’t protect His children from harm. While this world is full of injustice, God bids us over and over in His Word to look forward to a time when those who exploit the innocent will face the consequences of their deeds.13 Some feel that God’s condemnation of sin and sinners makes Him look cruel. They should realize that God’s lavish mercy has made Him seem indifferent to those who are victims of wrongdoing. But He is neither cruel to sinners nor indifferent to sin; He is simply faced with the dilemma of extending mercy while maintaining justice. In the end, His justice will be seen to be intertwined with mercy, for He could not be entirely merciful and allow sin and sinners to live forever. Thus His wrath is that of a protective Father who cannot allow His children to be forever ravaged by the enemy.

5. God’s wrath is motivated by love. “God executes justice upon the wicked, for the good of the universe, and even for the good of those upon whom His judgements are visited.”14 In this simple statement we see that the entire objective of God in the final judgement is the good of His creatures. Out of love to the universe He purges out those who are conveyors of deception and sin. Out of love to the wicked he spares them the agony of living in the presence of a holy God. The lost would hate heaven! They would be miserable there, for God’s very presence would be to them a consuming fire.15 Even if God could shortchange His justice and save the rebellious, He wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be kind of Him, because heaven wouldn’t be heaven for them. They, by their forfeiture of the gift of Life, have made life itself a burden, for “all they that hate me love death.”16 God in the truest sense gives each and every soul that which they have chosen. If He gave them anything else, they would only live to hate Him for it.

In many ways it seems like a pleasant option to assume that God is too passive to punish wrong, but in the end this kind of “love”--a love which excuses sin rather than requiring retribution for it—will be seen to be mere sentimentalism, a cheap counterfeit for the holy, self-giving love of God.

Yet while we embrace the reality of God’s wrath, we need to avoid projecting our own human depravity onto it. We are by nature children of wrath, and we love violence. Let us not confuse people with the false picture of a God whose vengeance belches forth out of a heart filled with bitterness and acrimony. Many a conversation about God’s retributive justice has degenerated into a table-pounding tirade that “God does too kill!” Making God seem bloodthirsty in this way will only serve to lead sensitive souls to regard the New Age idea of a passive God as a welcome refuge.

How do we obtain and keep this balance? Simply by viewing the touchy subject of God’s wrath in the light that streams from the cross. Witnessing the self-abandoning love of God, our hearts learn to trust His goodness. When we read of the pouring out of God’s wrath in the final judgement, we remember that He first poured out His love on Calvary. His wrath goes nowhere that His love hasn’t gone first, and destroys no one whom He didn’t first die to save.

1 Joshua 6:21

2 The Review and Herald, vol. 2, page 246

3 Romans 8:32

1 Revelation 14: 9 and 10 KJV

2 See Luke 22:50 and 51; Matt. 26:51-54; Jn. 18:10 and 11; and Is. 34:5

3 See Luke 9:51-56; Ps. 11:6

4 Lamentations 3:33, NASB

5 Ezekiel 33:11, NASB

6 2 Sam. 18:33

7 Romans 1:18, NASB

8 Matthew 25:41, KJV

9 Ex. 21: 22-25

10 See Gen. 4: 23 and 24

11 See 1 Corinthians 4:5 and The Great Controversy, page 666, paragraph 2.

12 Romans 14:11, KJV. See also Phil. 2: 10 and 11, and Is. 45:23-25

13 The imprecatory passages of the Bible are too numerous to list, but a good example is Psalm 10, in which David prays, “Break the arm of the wicked and the evildoer. . . to vindicate the orphan the oppressed,” vs. 15 and 18, NASB

14 The Great Controversy, pages 541 and 542.

15 Ibid., page 543.

16 Proverbs 8:36, KJV.

Scripture quoted from the New American Standard Bible unless otherwise indicated.