God is a righteous judge, a God who expresses his wrath every day. (Psalm 7:11, NIV)
What is it that you don’t understand about golf?
Recently I stood alongside a softball field after a casual church game and introduced a few elements of the golf swing to a young man who’s interested in learning to play. And since this was an athlete I was dealing with, I knew he could handle a fair bit more in the way of motion training than the average beginner.
And yet there is so much to this swing of ours: this gripped, turned club going back; this extended, squared club setting at the top; this butt-end dropped, inside-tracked move toward the ball; this descending, surging bottoming out with the ball trapped by the clubface for maximum control; this fluid extension and released, on-balance finish. Yep, that’s all you need to know. Which explains precisely why golf is so difficult to understand.
God too is so demanding—especially when we don’t want to wrestle with him, to ponder his essence, to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. So we make lazy habits in our thoughts of him, camping on the comfortable ideas and cordoning off those that freak us out. Like his wrath.
It’s hard to deal with the wrath of God. For one, it does not sit well with his critics. If you have even one vocal friend who questions your whole involvement in the kingdom of God, you’ve heard it: “God is no loving God, like you Christians all say. Your own Bible talks about his wrath. Who needs a God like that?”
As if those encounters aren’t bad enough, there are the sweating thoughts of your own bedtime meditations. What gives, God? Really, you would wipe out people with the sweep of your hand just because they weren’t wholly honest about their gifts to the church? God should do many things but he should never, we think, haunt us.
But wrestle we must with all that we read in Scripture, even the wrath of God. So let’s take a moment to do this.
Nearly all God’s people are aware that we live in the midst of a cosmic battle. The enemy rages against the ways of the Lord—and it is easy for him to enlist even men and women of God, because our flesh still houses us, and we give it authority when we should not. The enemy hates righteousness and rages against it with temptations that lead us into sin. This is OK in our theological minds. We make room for the wrath of the enemy; we allow him to openly hate God, and we by our thoughts, words, and deeds sometimes go so far as to participate in this hatred.
We are far more reluctant, however, to permit God his wrath, his anger against the sin of his people. And that’s to our shame. If the enemy hates goodness and rages against it, we should be neither outraged nor cowardly about the wrath of God. He is not raging against those he loves; he is raging against the wickedness that rules them. This is the everyday wrath of God—the dismantling of the evil that would envelop his people.
God’s wrath is no doubt fearful. It gives us reason for pause. But it is assuaged by the righteousness of his Son. Let us cling to our Savior that we might be passed over by the anger of the Lord!
—
Jeff Hopper
June 7, 2012
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