God’s holiness and wrath
God’s holiness and wrath
We have considered the seriousness of sin as rebellion against God, the continuing responsibility of men and women for their actions, and their consequent guilt in God’s sight and liability to punishment. But can we think of God as ‘punishing’ or ‘judging’ evil? Yes, we can and must. Indeed the essential background to the cross is not only the sin, responsibility and guilt of human beings but the just reaction of God to these things, in other words his holiness and wrath.
That God is holy is foundational to biblical religion. So is the corollary that sin is incompatible with his holiness. His eyes are ‘too pure to look on evil’ and he ‘cannot tolerate wrong’. Therefore our sins effectively separate us from him, so that his face is hidden from us and he refuses to listen to our prayers.19 In consequence, it was clearly understood by the biblical authors that no human being could ever set eyes on God and survive the experience. They might perhaps be permitted to see his ‘back’ but not his ‘face’, the sunshine but not the sun.20 And all those who were granted even a glimpse of his glory were unable to endure the sight. Moses ‘hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God’. When Isaiah had his vision of Yahweh enthroned and exalted, he was overwhelmed by the sense of his uncleanness. When God revealed himself personally to Job, Job’s reaction was to ‘despise’ himself and to ‘repent in dust and ashes’. Ezekiel saw only ‘the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD’, in burning fire and brilliant light, but it was enough to make him fall prostrate to the ground. At a similar vision Daniel also collapsed and fainted, with his face to the ground. As for those who were confronted by the Lord Jesus Christ, even during his earthly life when his glory was veiled, they felt a profound discomfort. For example, he provoked in Peter a sense of his sinfulness and of his unfitness to be in his presence. And when John saw his ascended magnificence, he ‘fell at his feet as though dead’.21
Closely related to God’s holiness is his wrath, which is in fact his holy reaction to evil. We certainly cannot dismiss it by saying that the God of wrath belongs to the Old Testament, while the God of the New Testament is love. For God’s love is clearly seen in the Old Testament, as is also his wrath in the New. R. V. G. Tasker correctly wrote: ‘It is an axiom of the Bible that there is no incompatibility between these two attributes of the divine nature; and for the most part the great Christian theologians and preachers of the past have endeavoured to be loyal to both sides of the divine self-disclosure.’22 Yet the concept of an angry God continues to raise problems in Christian minds. How can an emotion, they ask, which Jesus equated with murder, and which Paul declared to be one of the ‘acts of the sinful nature’ of which we must rid ourselves, possibly be attributed to the all-holy God?23
One attempted explanation is associated particularly with the name of C. H. Dodd, and with his commentary on The Epistle of Paul to the Romans. He pointed out that, although alongside references to God’s love Paul also writes that he ‘loved’ us, yet alongside references to God’s anger he never writes that he ‘is angry’ with us. In addition to this absence of the verb to ‘be angry’, the noun orgē (anger or wrath) is constantly used by Paul ‘in a curiously impersonal way’ (p.21). He refers to ‘wrath’ or ‘the wrath’ without specifying whose wrath it is, and thus almost absolutizes it. For example, he writes of ‘the day of God’s wrath’, of how ‘law brings wrath’, and of how wrath ‘has come upon’ disbelieving Jews, while believers will be rescued from ‘the coming wrath’ through Jesus Christ.24 Dodd’s deduction from this evidence was that Paul retained the concept of wrath ‘not to describe the attitude of God to man, but to describe an inevitable process of cause and effect in a moral universe’ (p.23).
Professor A. T. Hanson has elaborated C. H. Dodd’s thesis in his comprehensive biblical survey The Wrath of the Lamb. Drawing attention to ‘a marked tendency’ among post-exilic biblical authors ‘to speak of the divine wrath in a very impersonal manner’, he defines it as ‘the inevitable process of sin working itself out in history’ (pp.21 and 37). Coming to the New Testament, he writes: ‘there can be little doubt that for Paul the impersonal character of the wrath was important; it relieved him of the necessity of attributing wrath directly to God, it transformed the wrath from an attribute of God into the name for a process, which sinners bring upon themselves.’ For wrath is ‘wholly impersonal’ and ‘does not describe an attitude of God but a condition of men’ (pp.69 and 110).
That expression ‘relieved him of the necessity’ is revealing. It suggests that Paul was uncomfortable with the notion of God’s personal wrath, looked round for an escape from having to believe and teach it, and was ‘relieved’ of his burden by discovering that wrath was not a divine emotion, attribute or attitude, but an impersonal historical process affecting sinners. In this Professor Hanson seems to be projecting on to Paul his own dilemma, for he is candid enough to confess that he has just such an a priori problem himself. Towards the end of his discussion he writes: ‘If we once allow ourselves to be led into thinking that a reference to the wrath of God in the New Testament means that God is conceived of as angry..., we cannot avoid maintaining that in some sense the Son endured the wrath of the Father, we cannot help thinking in forensic terms, with all the strain and violence to our God-given sense of moral justice that such a theory involves’ (pp.193–194). He seems to be saying that it is in order to overcome these ‘appalling difficulties’ that he has reinterpreted the wrath of God. To say that Christ bore ‘wrath’ on the cross, he maintains, means that he ‘endured the consequences of men’s sins’, not their penalty (p.194).
We must watch our presuppositions, therefore. It is perilous to begin with any a priori, even with a ‘God-given sense of moral justice’ which then shapes our understanding of the cross. It is wiser and safer to begin inductively with a God-given doctrine of the cross, which then shapes our understanding of moral justice. I hope later to demonstrate that it is possible to hold a biblical and Christian concept of ‘wrath’ and ‘propitiation’ which, far from contradicting moral justice, both expresses and safeguards it.
The attempts by C. H. Dodd, A. T. Hanson and others to reconstruct ‘wrath’ as an impersonal process must be declared at least ‘not proven’. To be sure, sometimes the word is used without explicit reference to God, and with or without the definite article, but the full phrase ‘the wrath of God’ is used as well, apparently without embarrassment, by both Paul and John. Without doubt also, Paul taught that God’s wrath is being revealed in the present both through the moral deterioration of pagan society and through the state’s administration of justice.25 These processes are not identified with God’s wrath, however, but declared to be manifestations of it. The truth that God’s wrath (i.e. his antagonism to evil) is active through social and legal processes does not necessitate the conclusion that it is itself a purely impersonal continuum of cause and effect. Perhaps the reason for Paul’s adoption of impersonal expressions is not to affirm that God is never angry, but to emphasize that his anger is void of any tinge of personal malice. After all Paul sometimes refers to charis (grace) without referring to God. He can write, for example, of grace ‘increasing’ and of grace ‘reigning’ (Rom. 5:20–21). Yet we do not on that account depersonalize grace and convert it into an influence or process. On the contrary, grace is the most personal of all words; grace is God himself acting graciously towards us. And just as charis stands for the gracious personal activity of God himself, so orgē stands for his equally personal hostility to evil.
How, then, shall we define anger? Writing particularly of righteous human anger, James Denney called it ‘the instinctive resentment or reaction of the soul against anything which it regards as wrong or injurious’ and ‘the vehement repulsion of that which hurts’.26 Similarly, God’s wrath in the words of Leon Morris is his ‘personal divine revulsion to evil’ and his ‘personal vigorous opposition’ to it.27 To speak thus of God’s anger is a legitimate anthropomorphism, provided that we recognize it as no more than a rough and ready parallel, since God’s anger is absolutely pure, and uncontaminated by those elements which render human anger sinful. Human anger is usually arbitrary and uninhibited; divine anger is always principled and controlled. Our anger tends to be a spasmodic outburst, aroused by pique and seeking revenge; God’s is a continuous, settled antagonism, aroused only by evil, and expressed in its condemnation. God is entirely free from personal animosity or vindictiveness; indeed, he is sustained simultaneously with undiminished love for the offender. Charles Cranfield’s summary is that God’s orgē is ‘no nightmare of an indiscriminate, uncontrolled, irrational fury, but the wrath of the holy and merciful God called forth by, and directed against, men’s asebeia (ungodliness) and adikia (unrighteousness)’.28
What is common to the biblical concepts of the holiness and the wrath of God is the truth that they cannot coexist with sin. God’s holiness exposes sin; his wrath opposes it. So sin cannot approach God, and God cannot tolerate sin. Several vivid metaphors are used in Scripture to illustrate this stubborn fact.
The first is height. Frequently in the Bible the God of creation and covenant is called ‘the Most High God’, and is personally addressed in several Psalms as ‘Yahweh Most High’.29 His lofty exaltation expresses both his sovereignty over the nations, the earth and ‘all gods’,30 and also his inaccessibility to sinners. True, his throne is called ‘the throne of grace’ and is encircled by the rainbow of his covenant promise. Nevertheless, it is ‘high and exalted’ and he himself is ‘the high and lofty One’, who does not live in man-made temples, since heaven is his throne and the earth his footstool; so sinners should not presume.31 True again, he condescends to the contrite and lowly, who find security in his shadow. But proud sinners he knows only ‘from afar’, and he cannot stand the high and haughty looks of the arrogant.32
The ‘high’ exaltation of God is not literal, of course, and was never meant to be taken literally. The hue and cry about abandoning a God ‘up there’ was largely superfluous. The biblical writers used height as a symbol of transcendence, just as we do. It is more expressive than depth. ‘The Ground of Being’ may speak of ultimate reality to some people, but ‘the high and lofty One’ conveys God’s otherness more explicitly. When thinking of the great and living God, it is better to look up than down, and outside than inside ourselves.
The second picture is that of distance. God is not only ‘high above’ us, but ‘far away’ from us also. We dare not approach too close. Indeed, many are the biblical injunctions to keep our distance. ‘Do not come any closer,’ God said to Moses out of the burning bush. So it was that the arrangements for Israel’s worship expressed the complementary truths of his nearness to them because of his covenant and his separation from them because of his holiness. Even as he came down to them at Mount Sinai to reveal himself to them, he told Moses to put limits for the people around the base of the mountain and to urge them not to come near. Similarly, when God gave instructions for the building of the Tabernacle (and later the Temple), he both promised to live among his people and yet warned them to erect a curtain before the inner sanctuary as a permanent sign that he was out of reach to sinners. Nobody was permitted to penetrate the veil, on pain of death, except the high priest, and then only once a year on the Day of Atonement, and then only if he took with him the blood of sacrifice.33 And when the Israelites were about to cross the Jordan into the promised land, they were given this precise command: ‘Keep a distance of about a thousand yards between you and the ark; do not go near it’ (Josh. 3:4). It is against the background of this plain teaching about God’s holiness and about the perils of presumption that the story of Uzzah’s death must be understood. When the oxen carrying the ark stumbled, he reached out and took hold of it. But ‘the LORD’s anger burned against Uzzah because of his irreverent act’,34 and he died. Commentators tend to protest at this ‘primitive’ Old Testament understanding of God’s wrath as ‘fundamentally an irrational and in the last resort inexplicable thing which broke out with enigmatic, mysterious and primal force’ and which bordered closely on ‘caprice’.35 But no, there is nothing inexplicable about God’s wrath: its explanation is always the presence of evil in some form or other. Sinners cannot approach the all-holy God with impunity. On the last day, those who have not found refuge and cleansing in Christ will hear those most terrible of all words: ‘Depart from me.’36
The third and fourth pictures of the holy God’s unapproachability to sinners are those of light and fire: ‘God is light’, and ‘our God is a consuming fire’. Both discourage, indeed inhibit, too close an approach. Bright light is blinding; our eyes cannot endure its brilliance, and in the heat of the fire everything shrivels up and is destroyed. So God ‘lives in unapproachable light’; ‘no-one has seen or can see’ him. And those who deliberately reject the truth have ‘only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God....It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.’37
The fifth metaphor is the most dramatic of all. It indicates that the holy God’s rejection of evil is as decisive as the human body’s rejection of poison by vomiting. Vomiting is probably the body’s most violent of all reactions. The immoral and idolatrous practices of the Canaanites were so disgusting, it is written, that ‘the land vomited out its inhabitants’, and the Israelites were warned that if they committed the same offences, the land would vomit them out as well. Moreover what is said to be the land’s repudiation of evil was in reality the Lord’s. For in the same context he is represented as declaring that he ‘abhorred’ the Canaanites because of their evil doings. The identical Hebrew word is used of him in relation to the stubborn disobedience of Israel in the wilderness: ‘For forty years I was angry with (literally ‘loathed’) that generation.’ Here too the verb probably alludes to nauseating food, as it does in the statement, ‘we detest this miserable food!’ Our delicate upbringing may find this earthy metaphor distinctly embarrassing. Yet it continues in the New Testament. When Jesus threatens to ‘spit’ the lukewarm Laodicean church people out of his mouth, the Greek verb literally means to ‘vomit’ (emeō). The picture may be shocking, but its meaning is clear. God cannot tolerate or ‘digest’ sin and hypocrisy. They cause him not distaste merely, but disgust. They are so repulsive to him that he must rid himself of them. He must spit or vomit them out.38
All five metaphors illustrate the utter incompatibility of divine holiness and human sin. Height and distance, light, fire and vomiting all say that God cannot be in the presence of sin, and that if it approaches him too closely it is repudiated or consumed.
Yet these notions are foreign to modern man. The kind of God who appeals to most people today would be easygoing in his tolerance of our offences. He would be gentle, kind, accommodating, and would have no violent reactions. Unhappily, even in the church we seem to have lost the vision of the majesty of God. There is much shallowness and levity among us. Prophets and psalmists would probably say of us that ‘there is no fear of God before their eyes’. In public worship our habit is to slouch or squat; we do not kneel nowadays, let alone prostrate ourselves in humility before God. It is more characteristic of us to clap our hands with joy than to blush with shame or tears. We saunter up to God to claim his patronage and friendship; it does not occur to us that he might send us away. We need to hear again the apostle Peter’s sobering words: ‘Since you call on a Father who judges each man’s work impartially, live your lives...in reverent fear.’39 In other words, if we dare to call our Judge our Father, we must beware of presuming on him. It must even be said that our evangelical emphasis on the atonement is dangerous if we come to it too quickly. We learn to appreciate the access to God which Christ has won for us only after we have first seen God’s inaccessibility to sinners. We can cry ‘Hallelujah’ with authenticity only after we have first cried ‘Woe is me, for I am lost’. In Dale’s words, ‘it is partly because sin does not provoke our own wrath, that we do not believe that sin provokes the wrath of God’.40
We must, therefore, hold fast to the biblical revelation of the living God who hates evil, is disgusted and angered by it, and refuses ever to come to terms with it. In consequence, we may be sure that, when he searched in his mercy for some way to forgive, cleanse and accept evil-doers, it was not along the road of moral compromise. It had to be a way which was expressive equally of his love and of his wrath. As Brunner put it, ‘where the idea of the wrath of God is ignored, there also will there be no understanding of the central conception of the Gospel: the uniqueness of the revelation in the Mediator’.41 Similarly, ‘only he who knows the greatness of wrath will be mastered by the greatness of mercy’.42
All inadequate doctrines of the atonement are due to inadequate doctrines of God and man. If we bring God down to our level and raise ourselves to his, then of course we see no need for a radical salvation, let alone for a radical atonement to secure it. When, on the other hand, we have glimpsed the blinding glory of the holiness of God, and have been so convicted of our sin by the Holy Spirit that we tremble before God and acknowledge what we are, namely ‘hell-deserving sinners’, then and only then does the necessity of the cross appear so obvious that we are astonished we never saw it before.
The essential background to the cross, therefore, is a balanced understanding of the gravity of sin and the majesty of God. If we diminish either, we thereby diminish the cross. If we reinterpret sin as a lapse instead of a rebellion, and God as indulgent instead of indignant, then naturally the cross appears superfluous. But to dethrone God and enthrone ourselves not only dispenses with the cross; it also degrades both God and man. A biblical view of God and ourselves, however, that is, of our sin and of God’s wrath, honours both. It honours human beings by affirming them as responsible for their own actions. It honours God by affirming him as having moral character.
So we come back to where we began this chapter, namely that forgiveness is for God the profoundest of problems. As Bishop B. F. Westcott expressed it, ‘nothing superficially seems simpler than forgiveness’, whereas ‘nothing if we look deeply is more mysterious or more difficult’.43 Sin and wrath stand in the way. God must not only respect us as the responsible beings we are, but he must also respect himself as the holy God he is. Before the holy God can forgive us, some kind of ‘satisfaction’ is necessary. That is the subject of our next chapter.