God’s forgotten Wrath…
I don’t mean to be picky. I’m really not a fire and brimstone type of guy. I fully believe in love, grace, forgiveness, and mercy. However, I was preparing a sermon on “Anger” and one of my main ideas is that anger is not a sin but often times is the right response because God has made us in His image and when that image is attacked (let us say in another, as in a rape, beating, bullying, etc) we are required by love for that other, love for God, and a disgust of such an “unnatural” and blatant violation of the once perfect and beautiful order God had set up to be angry. Sorry, I digress. Let me return to where I was heading.
So, a major keystone of the message was that God Himself does get angry and He is just as much a God of Wrath as He is a God of Love. I was searching for something to illustrate this and headed over to WorshipHouseMedia.com in hopes of a video illustration of some kind. I literally found NONE out of all the thousands of videos they have. NONE! Not even a lame, poorly made one. I hurried over to SermonSpice.com and came to the same results. NONE. Do a search for “god love” and you’ll find hundreds of applicable videos but none applicable for “god wrath”. One (or both) of them didn’t have any search results for the keyword “wrath.”
It seems that the only “Christians” willing to talk about this side of God are the fanatics who also forget about His Love. I wonder, have we lost a part of God. Have we domesticated Him? Have we emasculated Him? Is He now some cuddly Grand Father figure who is nothing but “love” but is unable to truly protect, truly provide, truly support, truly correct, or truly lead us? I love grandfathers but those that are nothing but love and giving, I don’t follow. These are not the ones I turn to for strength, protection, correction, and aid. I don’t put my lives in their hands unless they got some muscles under that wrinkly skin and some fire in their bones.
Can you have one half of God and not the other? Is He an onion we can cut in half? Have we forgotten the other half of God, and thus forgotten the whole of God?
