Is God angry with us, even furious to the point of threatening to kill us, until we accept his Son, at which point he begins loving us?

One thing is clear, those who read and believe the Bible must do something with the wrath of God which is said to rest on those who have not yet believed in the Son of God (John 3:36).

Then we need to do something with the Son of God, himself, who urges the religious leaders of his day not to think that he is going to condemn them to his Father, but rather to realize that the one who is condemning them is the Moses in whom they are trusting (John 5:45).

Jesus says that after telling them not to think that it is the Father who is going to judge them, but rather the Son to whom the Father has entrusted all judgment (John 5:22).

Some will say that this reflects the circular reasoning and self-contradictory nature of the Bible. Others might interject that this is, once again, the problem of trying to reconcile the angry God of the Old Testament with the loving God of the New Testament. But if that’s our frame of mind, could it be that it is our view of God’s wrath that deserves a second look?

It is the God of the Old Testament who tells the prophet Hosea to marry an unfaithful woman and then to go out and lovingly buy her back for himself after she has sold herself into the bondage of her lovers.  And it is the New Testament (rather than the OT) that describes God to followers of Jesus, not only as the ultimate example of eternal, immeasurable love (1John 4:16), but also as a consuming fire (Heb 12:29).

Is the Bible making us crazy? Or is  the only answer to think of God as having a divided personality and character, one side of which is angry at sinners all of the time—whether in Christ or out—while the other side caused him to love sinners all of the time—whether in Christ or out?

Or is there a sense in which God’s anger and wrath is motivated by his jealous interest in us—which causes him to hate with a consuming passion anything that brings harm to ourselves or others?

Seems to me that we see in the God of the Old Testament what we see in Jesus– who enraged religious leaders by being a friend of sinners. At the heart of his story we see the affections of an eternal God who loves us before and after we turn to him… while never wanting us to forget that he remains intensely against anything that would turn our hearts away from him— causing ruin to ourselves and others…

Isn’t this the Jesus who intervened to show us how much God loves us by bearing in his own body the reality of the evil passion…and self-deceptive anger that caused us to unwittingly call for the death of the God who loves us– rather than to give up the kind of self-defeating, war mongering, self-affirming, moral obsession that we sometimes mistake as our honor and calling?

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