13. The God Who Is Very Angry
13
The God Who Is Very Angry
As solemn as the subject of this chapter is, for anybody who has followed the Bible’s storyline this far it should not be too surprising. Any residual ideas of God as a slightly sleepy grandfather figure and nothing more simply will not stand up to the way that the Bible portrays God’s righteousness, his sense of the most profound offense when his creatures wish to distance themselves from him. When you stop to think through what the Bible says about judgment, there is quite a lot there from Genesis 3 on: the judgment of the flood, the sacrificial system with all those dead animals, the cycles of decay under the judges in Israel when the nation sank down again and again and faced various kinds of judgment, the judgment that fell on the kings of Israel when they were increasingly perverse and corrupt, and on and on all the way through. Then there is Jesus himself with blistering language in Matthew 23 condemning some of the sins in his day, and Jesus again saying more about hell than any other person in the Bible. So none of this should surprise us if we have followed the Bible’s storyline at all.
In our culture it is hard to think about this topic because anger is often connected in the public mind with intolerance, narrow-mindedness, and bigotry. The category of righteous anger is not for us near the top of our scale of virtues.
In this chapter we will focus on one particular passage from the last book of the Bible and then reflect a little on the place of God’s anger in the Bible as a whole.
Revelation 14:6–20
One of the most frightening passages in the Bible is found in Revelation 14. We have come to the last book of the Bible. There are many passages to which we could turn to explore the theme of God’s wrath, but we shall focus on Revelation 14:6–20.
This section is divided into two: the heralds (three angels) and the harvest (two metaphors about harvest), and both sections talk about judgment in frankly horrendous terms. The literary genre of this last book of the Bible is often called apocalyptic literature. It is full of symbolism and figures that one does not find in other kinds of writing. We cannot here unpack how all the symbolism in this book “works,” but the main thrusts of this chapter are easy enough to understand.
6Then I saw another angel flying in midair, and he had the eternal gospel to proclaim to those who live on the earth—to every nation, tribe, language and people. 7He said in a loud voice, “Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come. Worship him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea and the springs of water.”
8A second angel followed and said, “‘Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great,’ which made all the nations drink the maddening wine of her adulteries.”
9A third angel followed them and said in a loud voice: “If anyone worships the beast and its image and receives its mark on their forehead or on their hand, 10they, too, will drink of the wine of God’s fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath. They will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. 11And the smoke of their torment will rise for ever and ever. There will be no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and its image, or for anyone who receives the mark of its name.” 12This calls for patient endurance on the part of the people of God who keep his commands and remain faithful to Jesus.
13Then I heard a voice from heaven say, “Write: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.”
“Yes,” says the Spirit, “they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them.”
14I looked, and there before me was a white cloud, and seated on the cloud was one like a son of man with a crown of gold on his head and a sharp sickle in his hand. 15Then another angel came out of the temple and called in a loud voice to him who was sitting on the cloud, “Take your sickle and reap, because the time to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is ripe.” 16So he who was seated on the cloud swung his sickle over the earth, and the earth was harvested.
17Another angel came out of the temple in heaven, and he too had a sharp sickle. 18Still another angel, who had charge of the fire, came from the altar and called in a loud voice to him who had the sharp sickle, “Take your sharp sickle and gather the clusters of grapes from the earth’s vine, because its grapes are ripe.” 19The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great winepress of God’s wrath. 20They were trampled in the winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses’ bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia.
Revelation 14:6–20
As I have already indicated, the passage neatly divides into two parts.
The Heralds (Rev. 14:6–13)
Angels are often found in apocalyptic literature. In this case, the proclamations they bring are interrelated and progressive.
In verse 6 the first angel summons all humankind to fear God and worship him. “I saw another angel flying in midair”—that is, mid-heaven, to be seen and heard by all. Now he issues a proclamation “to those who live on the earth.” His proclamation is not for the angelic hordes of heaven but for people living on the earth. “He had the eternal gospel to proclaim to those who live on the earth.” That is what he was there for: to proclaim “the eternal gospel.” To whom? The author stipulates “to those who live on the earth”—and in case the sweep of that designation escapes us, he adds, “to every nation, tribe, language and people.” But what is this “eternal gospel” he is proclaiming? There are two views:
(1) One group says that the “eternal gospel” in verse 6 is given its content in verse 7. So the eternal gospel is what this angel says in verse 7: “Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come. Worship him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea and the springs of water.” In this case it sounds like the eternal gospel is some kind of generic idea like “you might not have heard of Jesus and might not have known the truth, but sort of worship the God who has manifested himself in nature and you will be all right.” As popular as this interpretation is, it does not make much sense, for two reasons:
(a) By the time this book was written, about AD 90, the word “gospel” already enjoys fixed meaning. That “gospel” is the great news of what God has done in Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection on behalf of his desperately needy image-bearers.
(b) Earlier on in this book, in two spectacular chapters, Revelation 4–5, the author John has a vision that shows us what the gospel really is, what it looks like. It is spectacular. I wish I had time to expound those two chapters to you. Revelation 4 is to Revelation 5 what a setting is to a drama. In highly apocalyptic imagery, God is presented in the setting as transcendent, so spectacularly glorious that even the highest order of angels cover their faces before him and cry, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!” (4:8). There we are told that he is the God of creation, and the entire created order lives and moves and has its being entirely because of him. That is Revelation 4.
Then in Revelation 5, a drama begins. In the right hand of this God, we are told, is a scroll sealed with seven seals, and this scroll turns out to be the book that contains all of God’s purposes for judgment and blessing for the entire universe. As the drama is set up in this vision, an angel proclaims to the whole universe, “Who is worthy to break the seals and open the scroll?” (Rev. 5:2). But that means one must be worthy to approach this God and take the scroll from the right hand of God himself, and serve as God’s agent to break the seals. In the symbolism of the day the breaking of the seals meant bringing to pass everything that was written down in the scroll. What angel could approach this God and be God’s agent for bringing to pass all of God’s purposes? No one is found who is worthy: no angelic being, no human being, no one in the abodes of the dead, no one. After all, he is the God who is described in such transcendent terms in the previous chapter. If even the highest order of angels dare not look on him, who is going to come along and say, “Here, I’ll do that; no problem”?
So John, in his vision, weeps. He weeps not because he is a busybody who is frustrated because he is not allowed to see into the future. He weeps because in the symbolism of the vision, unless somebody does come along with the qualifications to approach this God, take the scroll, and break the seals, God’s purposes for judgment and blessing will not come to pass. That is, history becomes meaningless. There is no final accounting. There is no righteousness. The sufferings of the church are useless. So John weeps.
Then one of the interpreting figures taps him on the shoulder and says, in effect, “Stop your crying, John. Look! The lion of the tribe of Judah has triumphed so as to open the scroll!” “So I looked,” John says, “and I saw a lamb.” A lion has been introduced, but what he sees is a lamb. We are not to think of two animals parked side by side. This is apocalyptic literature, and one of the characteristics of apocalyptic literature is that mixed metaphors are very common: the lion is the lamb. The lion of the tribe of Judah means “the one who comes from the royal tribe.” The tribe of Judah is the tribe of David, the tribe from whom the king comes, the tribe of the Messiah, the promised one. The lion comes from the tribe of Judah. He is a royal figure. He has “triumphed,” suggesting that he has prevailed after a struggle. Yet the lion is a lamb—a slaughtered lamb, a sacrificial lamb. How is it that this lion-lamb can approach the transcendent God so boldly? The answer is that he himself does not approach God from the outside, as it were, but he himself emerges from the center of the throne (see Rev. 5:6). He is one with God himself. We have returned by another route to the complexity of the one God. As he manifests himself as the lion-lamb, all around the throne countless millions break out in a new song as they address this Christ-figure, this lion-lamb, and sing,
You are worthy to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
because you were slain,
and with your blood you purchased for God
members of every tribe and language and people and nation.
Revelation 5:9, emphasis added
In other words, the gospel is the same gospel as you find in Paul. It is what God has ordained through his Son, this lion-lamb, to pay the price of sin, to take on the effects of the curse, to release his people, to gather and transform men and women from every tongue and tribe and people and nation. This is the good news.
(2) So in Revelation 14:6–7, the connection between these two verses has got to be seen the other way. It is not that verse 7 gives us the content of the gospel. The content of the gospel is defined by Jesus on the cross and has already been laid out for us in Revelation 4–5. The connection between Revelation 14:6 and 14:7 is a little different. It runs like this: “Granted that the gospel is here, granted that it is being proclaimed to everyone, granted that this is the sole means by which God’s purposes for salvation and judgment come to pass, then fear God and give him glory because the hour of his judgment has come. Worship him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea, and the springs of water.”
In other words, verse 7 does not give us the content of the “gospel” mentioned in verse 6, but the motive to respond to the gospel, since the end is so close. People everywhere are called to respond in worship to their Creator, since “the hour of his judgment has come.”
The second angel announces the impending downfall of paganism. This angel follows and says, “‘Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great,’ which made all the nations drink the maddening wine of her adulteries” (14:8). The historic city of Babylon, of course, was the capital of the Babylonian Empire and was located in the Tigris and Euphrates river system. At one point it was the capital of the regional superpower that destroyed the southern part of the land of Israel, that is, the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. It destroyed the temple in 587 BC. By the time the book of Revelation was written, however, it was nothing but ruins and a small fishing village. Nevertheless, in the Bible Babylon becomes a kind of symbol for paganism that runs amuck and is finally destroyed. The book of Daniel reports that at one juncture the Babylonian emperor boasted, “Is not this the great Babylon I have built as the royal residence, by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty?” (Dan. 4:30). Small wonder that “Babylon” became synonymous with the spirit of godlessness that in every age lives in those who worship themselves, their successes, and their possessions—anything but the Creator. Society set free from God is its own worst enemy. So although by New Testament times the ancient city of Babylon had long since been destroyed, the name of Babylon was still useful to refer to the city of Rome, which at that time was the capital city of the regional superpower and center of fresh rounds of pagan arrogance.
That is what is being picked up by the cry of the second angel: “Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great”: that is, this is an announcement of the impending destruction of every culture, not least Rome itself, that arrogantly sets itself up against God. Pagan Rome “made all the nations drink the maddening wine of her adulteries.” In biblical language these “adulteries” are not primarily sexual; rather, adultery becomes a figure of speech rejecting God. As in ordinary adultery a spouse betrays a spouse, so in spiritual adultery people betray the God who is there and chase after idols. The massive pagan voice of Rome has made the nations drunk with the maddening wine of her adulteries.
The third angel vividly portrays the torments awaiting those who worship the beast (see 14:9–11). The reference to the beast is from the previous two chapters. Revelation 12:9 pictures the devil himself, referred to as “that ancient serpent,” which again calls to mind Genesis 3. That old serpent then calls forth two “beasts” as his functionaries. The first beast is particularly strong and powerful, while the second beast is deceptive and sometimes called a false prophet. And in John’s vision the devil, the first beast, and the second beast function together as a kind of aped trinity, pretending to be God, trying to act like Father, Son, and Spirit, but only evil, only destructive, never able to be God. The beast, then, wants everybody to be stamped by his image and come under his sway and control. That is part of the language of the previous chapter.
So this third angel says in a loud voice:
9If anyone worships the beast [that is, Satan’s own emissary] and its image and receives its mark on their forehead or on their hand, 10they, too, will drink of the wine of God’s fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath. They will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. 11And the smoke of their torment will rise for ever and ever. There will be no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and its image, or for anyone who receives the mark of its name.
Revelation 14:9–11
God’s wrath poured out in full strength? What does that mean? The image is drawn from wine-drinking practices in the ancient world. When you produce wine, it comes out about 30 proof, that is, about 15 percent alcohol. It can go up or down a bit, but it is not a distilled product where you can control the amount of alcohol. It is a fermented process, so it depends on the sugar content, the temperature, the kind of berry, and so on, but commonly wine is about 30 proof. In the ancient world, however, it was very common to “cut” the wine with water, somewhere between one part in ten (one part of wine to ten parts of water) and one part in three. Most table wines that people drank in the ancient world were cut. This image is a way of saying that in the past, God’s wrath has been diluted. It is as if the text were saying, “This is now the wine of God’s wrath poured out full strength. Any manifestation of God’s wrath that you have seen so far—the exile, for example, plagues in the Old Testament, disease, war—any of these things that you have seen as horrible manifestations of God’s wrath, they were the diluted form. Now God’s wrath is poured out full strength.”
Various images are used to get the point across: “burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb” (14:10) does not mean that the angels and the Lamb are sitting there laughing and saying, “I told you so.” It means that there is enough awareness in these people of the angels and the Lamb to whom they no longer can have access, that that is part of their torment. There is no way out. “And the smoke of their torment will rise for ever and ever” (14:11).
The Harvest (Rev. 14:14–20)
Here the arrival of God’s judgment is depicted in two agricultural portraits.
1. THE GRAIN HARVEST (REV. 14:14–16)
The point of these three verses is very simple: a set time is coming when the harvest will take place, and there is no escaping it. The “one like a son of man” is Christ himself with “a sharp sickle in his hand,” and the angel that comes out of the temple (i.e., from his heavenly Father) says, “‘Take your sickle and reap, because the time to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is ripe.’ So he who was seated on the cloud swung his sickle over the earth, and the earth was harvested” (Rev. 14:15–16).
In other words, life does not go on and on endlessly. This is not Hinduism where there are cycles of existence. History in the Bible is teleological—that is, it is heading somewhere, to a telos, a goal, an end. It begins somewhere, and it ends somewhere; it heads toward the end God has appointed. When the time comes and the Lord himself swings his sickle, time as we know it will be no more, and judgment will be final.
2. THE TREADING OF THE WINEPRESS (REV. 14:17–20)
This final vision emphasizes the violent thoroughness of God’s wrath when it is finally poured out. In the ancient world, vine keepers would take the grapes they gathered and put them into a great stone vat. At the bottom of the vat were little holes, and when the grapes were squashed the juice would run out through those holes and along stone channels into collecting pots. So you would put the grapes into this vat and the servant girls would kick off their sandals, pick up their skirts, jump in, and stamp down the grapes. That would make the juice flow. Then the juice would be collected, and from it would come the fermentation and the wine that marked the vineyard’s prosperity.
But now this imagery is used to portray people being thrown into the great winepress of God’s wrath, people who are being trampled underfoot so thoroughly and in such numbers that their blood flows out from the channels to a height of a horse’s bridle for a distance of almost two hundred miles.
Now I know this is imagery. The sulfur is imagery too. And elsewhere darkness and chains, no doubt, are imagery. But they are not imagery of nothing. In each case they are meant to tell us something important about the awfulness of the final judgment on those who have spurned the “eternal gospel.” Here the point of the imagery is the violent thoroughness of God’s wrath when it is finally poured out.
Biblical-Theological Reflections on God’s Wrath
What shall we make of this? A lot of Christians today want to say, “Surely it is better to think of hell as a place where there will be some temporary punishments until eventually people simply lose all consciousness: annihilation.” Others think that it is manipulative and cruel to think of hell at all: “Just talk about the love of God.” There are several things that really must be said. This is not an easy topic, but they have to be said.
1. The Person in the Bible Who Talks Most of Hell Is Jesus
Jesus is the one who introduces most of the horrendous and colorful images. He can openly say to those of his followers who are at risk of being crucified and beaten and sawn apart and all the rest: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28). He talks about dungeons and chains, outer darkness. People sometimes say, “I’d like to go to hell. All my friends will be there.” There are no friends in hell. Jesus speaks of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. So it is not surprising that he weeps over the city when people in it do not repent and believe.
So if people think that warning people of hell is manipulative, they must charge Jesus with manipulation. Yet the charge of manipulation is sensible only if the threat of hell is not real. One would never speak of manipulating people to leave a burning building by warning them of the terrible consequences of staying inside and entreating them to leave. Granted that hell is real, terrifying, and eminently to be avoided, it would be unkind and uncharitable of me not to warn you, in exactly the same way that it would have been unkind and uncharitable of Jesus not to warn the people of his day.
The only thing that many Americans know of the New England Puritan Jonathan Edwards is that he preached a sermon titled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Many high school students have read it as part of their American literature or American history courses. The main point of the sermon is, in Edwards’s words, “There is nothing that keeps wicked men, at any moment, out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God.”[1]Not a little of Edwards’s language is graphic. Countless generations of students have read the sermon and dismissed it as barbaric or worse.[2]Yet it is not as if preaching about hell constituted the exclusive core of Edwards’s ministry: he preached and wrote on a broad array of themes, and his book expounding 1 Corinthians 13, known as the love chapter, is a rich pleasure to read even today. In this Edwards follows Jesus, who also preached on a broad array of themes yet devoted some space to warning against the terrible danger of going to hell. Even in the degree of graphic detail, Edwards does not differ greatly from Jesus. If Edwards is barbaric, so also is Jesus; if Jesus is to be thanked for telling the truth and bringing needed warning, so also must Edwards be thanked.
2. There Are Some Small Hints That This Place of Suffering Goes On
Did you notice the line in Revelation 14:11? “The smoke of their torment will rise for ever and ever.” This does not sound like a place where suffering comes to an end. Or again, a few chapters on:
9But fire came down from heaven and devoured them. 10And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.
Revelation 20:9–10
It is an illusory comfort to suppose that those who end up here will eventually be annihilated.
3. Those in Hell Can No Longer Repent
Hell is not going to be filled with people who say, “All right, all right, you win. I’m so sorry. I repent. I really would like another chance. I would like to trust Jesus. I would like to go to heaven.”
I cannot prove this, but I think that there are enough biblical hints to hold that it is true. The last chapter of the Bible says, “Let those who do wrong continue to do wrong; let those who are vile continue to be vile; let those who do right continue to do right; and let those who are holy continue to be holy” (Rev. 22:11). That is, you move into the new heaven and the new earth—or you move into hell itself—and you remain in principle what you are already. If as a Christian you are already seen as righteous in Christ, if you have already been increasingly conformed to the likeness of Christ, you move into a new heaven and a new earth, and righteousness becomes yours without footnotes or exceptions or tendencies to fall away or the influences of the old nature. “Let those who do right continue to do right.” Righteousness is consummated. Or you move into hell, and you do not suddenly turn over a new leaf and become spotless: “Let those who do wrong continue to do wrong; let those who are vile continue to be vile.” Evil is consummated.
Hell is full of people who do not want to be there but who still do not want to bend the knee. For all eternity they still hate God. They still despise the cross. They still nurture sin; they still hate others in this endless cycle of self-chosen sin, iniquity, thanklessness, idolatry, and their consequences. The prospect is horrendous. This ongoing sin is so much a part of their stamp and makeup that if they were suddenly transported to heaven, they would hate it. In exactly the same way as we saw in John 3 in the passage on God’s love, when the light comes, people love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil. That is the horrible awfulness of it: ongoing punishment and still—God help us—no repentance. Not ever. That’s why the Bible tells us to “flee from the coming wrath” (Matt. 3:7).
Biblically faithful Christianity does not present itself as a nice religious structure that makes happier parents and well-ordered children and good taxpaying citizens. It may produce better parents and taxpaying citizens, but the issues at stake in biblical Christianity have to do with eternity: heaven and hell, matters of the utmost significance, your relationship to your Maker, what God has provided in Christ, what the cross is about, the resurrection. At the end of the day, what hell measures is how much Christ paid for those who escape hell. The measure of his torment (in ways I do not pretend to begin to understand) as the God-man is the measure of torment that we deserve and he bore. And if you see that and believe it, you will find it difficult to contemplate the cross for very long without tears.
4. Any Christian Who Teaches on These Things without Tears Is Betraying Jesus
Christian faith and thought are not helped by angry preachers whose tone almost suggests that they take a kind of vicious glee from the tragic end of others. For a start, we Christians will be the first to acknowledge, as Paul understands in Ephesians 2, that we are all by nature children of wrath—starting with us who have become Christians. If we have come to experience the forgiveness of sins and reconciliation with the living God, it is only because of the grace of the gospel. We are never more than poor beggars telling others where there is bread; we are never more than condemned prisoners who have found pardon and who want others to enjoy the same.
Concluding Prayer
Open our eyes, Lord God, so that we can see the eternal significance of the glorious gospel of Christ. Help us to see that the terrors found in this world, the threats and torments displayed often enough across the history of the world, are nothing compared to the wrath of the Lamb. We face a choice: either we will live our lives frightened of people and what they think, people who at most can do a little damage to us in this world, or we will live our lives in submissive fear of him who can destroy body and soul in hell—and justly so. O Lord God, help us to turn to our only escape, to him who bore our sin with its guilt and penalty in his own body on the tree that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. Help us to sing with that old converted slave trader, John Newton,
I saw One hanging on a tree
In agony and blood;
He fixed His loving eyes on me,
As near His cross I stood.
My conscience felt and owned the guilt
And plunged me in despair;
I saw my sins His blood had spilt
And helped to nail Him there.
A second look He gave, which said,
“I freely all forgive:
This blood is for thy ransom paid,
I die that thou may’st live.”
Thus, while His death my sin displays
In all its blackest hue,
Such is the mystery of grace,
It seals my pardon, too.
O can it be, upon a tree,
The Savior died for me?
My soul is thrilled, my heart is filled,
To think He died for me!
Lord God, be merciful to me, a sinner. For Jesus’ sake, Amen.