Not God Enough by J.D. Greear

Author:J.D. Greear
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2018-01-12T05:00:00+00:00

GOD’S WRATH IS REAL

If you take your Bible seriously at all, there’s no denying the existence of God’s wrath. The Old and New Testaments are filled with more than six hundred references to it. In the Psalms, David tells us that God is “angry with the wicked every day” (Ps 7:11 NLT).

This is another place many assume a big “gap” between the Old and New Testaments. God got a lot nicer in the New Testament. He grew up a little and came back to earth as God 2.0., Jesus-the-meek-and-mild.

Growing up, that’s how I saw Jesus. I learned the gospel through “flannelgraph Jesus.” We had cutout figures for almost every moment of his life: Jesus with sheep on his shoulders, bread in his hands, or two fingers lifted in blessing. We didn’t have a “raining-down-judgment” Jesus, however. Nor can I recall a “flared-nostrils-and-a-bullwhip-in-his-hand” Jesus (Matt 21:12–17).

The wrath of God, however, was one of Jesus’s primary teaching themes. He said, “Whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on them” (John 3:36). In Why I Am Not a Christian, skeptic Bertrand Russell admitted that the primary reason he couldn’t believe Jesus was because he believed in hell and taught about it “in one verse after another . . . again and again.” Russell called Christ’s belief in the wrath of God “the one serious defect in Christ’s moral character.”2

The Pharisees didn’t hate Jesus because of his effusive talk about God as the missing piece in their lives. They killed him because he told them that God’s wrath was coming upon them (Matt 23:13–36).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.