Love and Wrath

Exodus 34: 6."The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, 'The Lord, The Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfullness'". Isaiah 5:25. "Therefore the anger of the Lord was kindled against his people, and he stretched out his had against them and struck them, and the mountains quaked; and their corpses were as refuse in the midst of the streets. For all his anger has not turned away, and his hand is stretched out still." Before i start out i would like to mention that both of these texts were in the midst of events happening in the Old Testament. I am using them today not as a part of the stories that they are in, but more so as examples to point out, the love and wrath of God.


To put it simply, the love and wrath of God go together, you can't have one without the other. If you take away the wrath of God then you have watered down christianity, and if you take away the love of God i don't think may people would want to be christians. it is more common to have the idea that God is all love and He couldn't possibly have wrath as an attribute. If that were the case, it would look like this: God is ok with sin, and feels no need to rebuke sin, and ultimately that God is no God at all. Why? because God can't be ok with sin. If we think this, then we have a distorted view of God...righteousness can't have any dealings with unrighteousness. It isn't possible for a Holy and Righteous God to have any part with sin. So now heres a dilema...


We are by nature sinners and deserving of Gods wrath! oh my goodness what are we going to do? Nothing. There is nothing we can do to save ourselves. So the story gets a little depressing at this point because we can' t do anything to make God change His mind about our sinful state and we certainly can't will Him to take away His wrath. But He can do something. He can satisfy His Wrath, by giving us his Son as a sacrifice, thus by giving us this sacrifice we are introduced to God's Love. Romans 8:3 "By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit." So Christ, who knew no sin, became sin for us, so that we might be saved. Jesus satisfied the wrath of God by taking on man's sin. and Gods love is shown by giving us Christ as our covering.


and hence the love and wrath of God.