What is God’s Wrath and Judgment?

At Woodland Hills, we really do believe God is love—the kind of self-sacrificial love that Jesus demonstrated by giving his life for us on Calvary. No fine print. No exception clauses.

How, then, can we understand the scriptures about God’s wrath and judgment?

First, it’s important to know that there are two kinds of judgment. We usually think of judicial judgment: a courtroom scene where a judge hands down a sentence from his bench. But there is another judgment called organic or intrinsic judgment, and this kind simply means that there is already built-in punishment as a natural consequence to some of our choices. For example, if an alcoholic suffers liver disease as a result of alcohol abuse, it is a natural consequence of his or her behavior, not the result of a court sentence.

The Bible describes God’s judgments through both legal metaphors and organic consequences. But the reality of natural consequences is a more fundamental reality than the Law.  This is because, if law is good, it protects people from the natural consequences of their own stupid or sinful behavior or the stupid and sinful behavior of others. For example, speed limits protect us because more people die in car crashes when people drive faster than is safe.

The dominant view of God’s judgment in Scripture is organic or intrinsic judgment. God is not a vindictive judge presiding over a courtroom; his judgment comes through natural consequences. God told Adam that if he ate from the forbidden tree he would “surely die.” God did not say,  “I will kill you.” Death was the natural result of Adam and Eve’s actions just as sunburn is the natural result of spending a day at the beach without sunscreen. The judgment Adam and Eve experienced was a matter of God allowing them to succeed in the choice they made to push him away.

This is the principle of “you reap what you sow.” Paul points out in the New Testament that the wages of sin is death. The passage doesn’t suggest that God intervenes to judicially impose a death sentence on sinners. He allows us to make our own choices and then we experience the natural result which is death. As the saying goes, “You are free to choose, but you are not free to choose the consequences.”

Imagine a ticking time bomb scene in an action movie. Brow dripping with sweat, the hero rushes to cut the bomb off from its power source by snipping the right wire—is it the black one or the red one? Once that wire is cut, the bomb is dead. Our “power source” comes from God, whom the Psalmist calls “the fountain of life.”  Because God is the source of life, if we “cut the wire” between ourselves and God by pushing him away, we lose our connection to him as the originator, sustainer and protector of life, and without his life in us, we are dead.

Separation from God is death, so God’s “wrath” is simply abandonment to the death-consequence of sin when we choose to go our own way. It is a relational reality, not a judicial punishment. Paul states this explicitly in Romans 1:24-28 which describe “the wrath of God” as  giving people over to their sinful desires.

The Old Testament speaks of “the cup” of God’s wrath, and that cup is abandonment. On the cross, Jesus became our sin, and so drank the cup of God’s wrath. While the Father did not turn his face away, Jesus experienced abandonment by God because he was experiencing the death-consequences of the sin of the world which he bore because of our covenant-breaking. As Jesus stood in our place, the Father never lifted a finger against his Son: he merely allowed evil to run its course.

This “wrath” is an expression of God’s love. Wise parents love their children in this same way.  For example, instead of forcing six-year-old Johnny to wear a coat, a parent might say, “Wow, the TV said it’s 50 degrees outside, so I’m going to put on my coat. Do you think you should put on a coat?”  If Johnny says, “No, I like my sweatshirt better,” the parent would say, “Are you sure?” And if Johnny persists, the parent then lets the cold do the teaching. Hopefully Johnny learns to pick warmth over fashion the next time. When we push God away, and experience abandonment as the natural result, hopefully we will learn to return to our life source in him.

One last consideration to keep in mind in the Old Testament depictions of God’s wrath is that the children of Israel were culturally conditioned to assume that ascribing violence to God was the highest form of praise. Because God never forces change to the way people think, God had to stoop to accommodate this assumption, and so we have violent depictions of God in the Old Testament.  Due to God’s patient influence over centuries, God’s people came to gradually understand that God is always on the side of peace and opposed to violence, which is what we discover in Christ.

In summary, God’s judgment is primarily seen in the natural consequences of our decisions when we remove ourselves from him. God’s wrath is abandonment to those consequences as a result of our life source being cut off from him.