What kind of wrath is it? Well, it is the wrath of God, it is divine wrath and that is a very important beginning. It is divine wrath. It isn’t like anything else that we know in this world. It isn’t like your wrath or my wrath; it isn’t like when we get angry. It isn’t like when we get mad. We get angry and we get mad when we are offended. And, frankly, we have pride in the way. Our passion, our anger and our wrath is not like this, this is the wrath of God. And like every other attribute of God it is as perfect as His holy person. His wrath is righteous wrath. It is the right kind of wrath, it is holy wrath. The passion that we call anger in this world, the thing that we call wrath in this human world is always reflective of the evil heart of man. But we must not impose that on God.
One writer said, “We cannot think with full consistency of God in terms of the highest human ideals of personality and yet attribute to Him the rational passion of anger.” In other words, this writer was saying ‑ God could never be angry because we know anger is a bad thing. But he is simply trying to say that God’s like us, and He’s not. Don’t push our concept of anger on God. God is angry in a holy way, ‘in a perfect way. God’s anger is not some capricious, irrational rage.
In fact, let me go a step further. And you’re getting a lesson in theology proper here about the nature of God. God could not be God and be holy and be holy good if He didn’t react to evil. Do you understand that? He has to. He can’t be God. You cannot be holy and tolerate unholiness. It can’t be done. That’s why Habakkuk the prophet said: “Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil and cannot look upon iniquity.” God can’t tolerate it. And I’ll tell you something, the more Godlike you become; the more angry you will get at certain things.
Even in this warped world of men, indignation against wickedness is essential of human goodness. We expect people to get mad about certain injustice. For God is infinitely beyond that because even when we get mad about the right things it’s usually polluted by our sinfulness.
A classic illustration was Jesus in John 2 cleansing the temple, made a whip and just started whipping people all out of the temple. I mean, that’s a very dramatic scene. Do you want to know something? That was His first public act in Jerusalem. That is not the way you start a crusade. You don’t go into the religious places, take a whip and start flagellating everybody and overturning tables and crying about their sin, you’ll never get a crowd that way. You’ve got to send the advance committee, make it sound like harps and flowers. Jesus was furious because God was being dishonored. There was dishonesty there, there was cheating and lying and extortion and desecration.
So, don’t look at the low, irrational, selfish anger of men and then push that off on God. The wrath of God is always perfect, always. The wrath of men is always somehow compromised by the presence of sin.
- John MacArthur Jr
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