Good and Angry by David Powlison

Author:David Powlison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-07-21T00:00:00+00:00

These Realities Nourish Our Hearts

Our Father knows us. Each of these four aspects of God’s anger is constrained by mercy to comfort a different aspect of our human struggle.

When your heart becomes fearful, and you wonder how God could ever love you, remember. Jesus took your sins upon himself. The innocent was slain in place of the guilty. When God considers your failings, he remembers his mercy.

When you feel discouraged and weak, that you have no strength to fight all that is proud, unruly, and forgetful inside you, remember. The Holy Spirit hates evil, loves good, and he will not quit working on the inside. He will complete the good work he began in you.

When you feel overwhelmed by all the heartache, unfairness, disappointment, callousness, and betrayal that you experience, remember. The Lord will destroy every cause of pain, stumbling, and tears. Because God loves those he has befriended, he will defend them from every enemy: death, sin, Satan, and unfriendly people.

When you are tempted to pack it in and give up, plunging back into the darkness, remember. The Lord is a holy fire, and he disciplines those he loves that we might share his holiness. “The righteous falls seven times and rises again” (Proverbs 24:16). He will not let you go fatally astray.

God’s wrath is your hope. God’s wrath is my hope. We don’t often hear that, but it appears everywhere in the Bible. Wrath is our hope because love masters anger. God’s loving anger resolves the entire problem of evil in a way that brings him inexpressible glory and brings us inexpressible blessing. The God who is love justly condemns evil, severs the power of remnant evil, brings relief from suffering, and protects us from ourselves.

Even though God’s wrath is the hope of his children and the despair of his enemies, it is also true that those enemies who turn and believe the staggering message of how wrath is converted into grace through Jesus Christ are changed into friends. The truth is that you can’t understand God’s love if you don’t understand his anger. This is the message of the book of Psalms, that royal road into the heart of redeemed humankind, with its otherwise inexplicable interweaving of joy and sorrow, hope and anguish, confidence and fear, contentment and anger. “Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways! . . . To Him be the glory forever. Amen” (Romans 11:33, 36 nasb).

It is this God that we were created to be like. We are made in his image. That’s why we have the capacity for moral judgment. We are made to be aroused to anger and to constructive action in the presence of moral evil. That’s what God is like.

But we have fallen into sin. That’s why our anger gets so messed up, so twisted, perverted, and misused. We play at being God and try to run the world, punishing evildoers on our own terms.

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