Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne. (Ps 89:14)
The Lord within her is righteous; he does no wrong. Morning by morning he dispenses his justice. (Zeph 3:5)
See, the day of the Lord is coming — a cruel day, with wrath and fierce anger. (Is 13:9)
The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great winepress of God’s wrath. (Rev 14:19)
O God Most High, righteousness and justice are the foundation of Your throne. How could I ever stand in Your presence on the basis of my own righteousness? I have none. On my own, I stand condemned, and I know it is right. Your wrath and justice are good and right, and I praise You that even in Your mercy, You remain just. Always.
The dictionary defines justice as “the principle of moral rightness; equity.” It is a moral word and a rather broad moral word. Sometimes we think of justice as merely the proper punishment of evil and reward of good. That concept is indeed justice, but it is only one example. The mechanic who will stick to his quote even though he will now lose money is being just; the woman who will not move in on another woman’s man is being just; the student who will not copy an exam is being just. Justice is doing, thinking and loving what is right. The Old Testament Hebrew and New Testament Greek words bear this same sense. Justice is righteousness. When the Bible says that God is just, it is saying that He is morally right in everything He does. God is good, and God cares intensely about right behavior and attitudes. Right and wrong matter to God. If they do not, then God is not good.
Most people today have little difficulty with what I have said so far. They know (or at least think it ought to be) that God is just and good and, thus, cares about right and wrong. But if God is just, the more common and narrow application of justice is also true of Him. He must have equity. He must be no “respecter of persons.” He must show partiality to no one. He must treat sin as sin deserves to be treated, regardless of where He finds it. Now if we begin to see reality, this application of justice should make us squirm, for we both know things we have done that we would rather God not know about.
This application of justice entails judgment. Moral rightness requires that one make distinctions between right and wrong, and a just judge must punish evil. We would have to shut our eyes through all of Scripture to try to ignore the truth of God’s judgment on sin. It is on almost every page we turn. God does not gloss over sin. He condemns it and punishes it severely. The fact that He does so flows from His justice. If God merely looked past our sins, He would be corrupt. Unfortunately, too many people think that God is corrupt. Such thinking is itself sin and needs to be called so. The idea that God will simply gloss over our sins is morally reprehensible. God’s judgment against our sin is necessary if God is to be God.
This judgment is just, and it is inextricably tied to the character of God. When God administers justice against sin, that justice is an expression of His wrath. God does not merely punish sin; He is angry at it. God’s character is never neutral toward sin. He hates it, and He hates it precisely because He is just. The justice of God and the wrath of God are woven together.
Now the wrath of God is an anger, but it is not the petty anger which you and I often have. The wrath of God is a righteous, passionate hatred of evil, and it flows from His justice. God so vehemently hates evil because He so passionately loves what is right. The more we love, the more we hate the desecration of what we love. Anger at evil is something we understand. People are angry when children walk into schools and shoot children, or when a terrorist blows up a plane and kills hundreds of innocent lives, or when a large corporation uses its power to exploit helpless people, or when a politician intentionally lies to cover up wrongdoing. Anger in these situations is not a bad thing; it shows that there is a place in our hearts for what is right. If a person were calloused when confronted with such problems, we would quickly wonder about his heart. Doesn’t he care? The wrath of God is like this sort of anger. It is the heart of God responding to the desecration of something precious. It is the natural expression of His character toward sin. It is the essential manifestation of infinite moral goodness. It is how pure goodness behaves when confronted with sin. God would not be God if He had no wrath toward sin.
The judgment and wrath of God are not particularly popular ideas today. We would rather talk about God’s love and forgiveness. We are more comfortable with those concepts. Yet the God of the Bible is as much a God of judgment and wrath as He is of love and forgiveness, and we ignore His judgment to our peril. If we are not careful, we will turn God into nothing more than Santa Claus. But remember. God does not exist to indulge our desires.
Some do not like the idea of God’s wrath because they do not consider their sin to be particularly bad. They can understand wrath against child molesters and rapists, but most people do not do such things. They are just average folks who love their children and work hard to pay the bills. Isn’t God a little bigger than to get in a tiffy all about their piddling faults? Doesn’t He have bigger sins to worry about than their lusting at magazine pictures or impatience with Mrs. Johnson? Surely God is not so petty as all that. Wrath against such trifles is beneath the dignity of God. Or so they imply.
I certainly agree that God ought not get upset over nothing, but the fact of the matter is that the view God has of our sins and the view we have do not agree. When you look at Scripture you find Jesus equating lust with adultery and unjust anger with murder (Mt 5:21-8), not because their external consequences are the same but because the heart that produces the one is the same heart that produces the other. God’s anger at sin is directed at the nature of the heart. This is why Paul can say that greed is idolatry (Eph 5:5; Col 3:5). When we finagle the discussion in the car to get the family to go to the restaurant we want, we are revealing a selfish heart that God fully sees. God sees past the specific expression straight into the ugly source itself. We may not see our finagling as such a big deal (if we are even aware of it). We are adept at taking corrupt hearts and motives, dressing them up in wedding clothes and then seeing how pretty the tuxedo is. But God sees through all the dressing we put on. He sees straight to the heart. And He sees the heart from the perspective of absolute holiness. He has wrath because if the righteous standards of God were applied to our hearts, we would look to Him as child molesters look to us.
The Christian faith says that people flatter themselves, and one of the requirements God puts on a person who would become a disciple of Jesus is that he stop such flattery and admit that he has a damnable heart. Those who see their sinful hearts have no difficulty with the concept of a just wrath against them. They know they deserve it. Those who complain about the wrath of God are blind to their own heart. They have no clue about how serious sin is. We would do well to spend time contemplating the justice and wrath of God, for if our God will not pour out His justice and wrath on our sin, then we have a god who is less than God. And we have no need for Christ.
