God's Love and God's Wrath: A Compatible View
Many think it is easy for God to forgive. I recall meeting a young and
articulate French West African when I was studying in Germany more than twenty
years ago. We were both working diligently to improve our German, but once a
week or so we had had enough, so we went out for a meal together and retreated
to French, a language we both knew well. In the course of those meals we got to
know each other. I learned that his wife was in London, training to be a
medical doctor. He himself was an engineer who needed fluency in German in
order to pursue doctoral studies in engineering in Germany.
I soon discovered that once or twice a week he disappeared into the
red-light district of town. Obviously he went to pay his money and have his
woman. Eventually I got to know him well enough that I asked him what he would
do if he discovered that his wife was doing something similar in London.
"Oh," he said, "I'd kill her."
"That's a bit of a double standard, isn't it?" I asked.
"You don't understand. Where I come from in Africa, the husband has
the right to sleep with many women, but if a wife is unfaithful to her husband
she must be killed."
"But you told me that you were raised in a mission school You know
that the God of the Bible does not have double standards like that ."
He gave me a bright smile, and replied, "Ah, le bon Dieu, il doit
nous pardonner; c'est son métier [Ah, God is good, He's bound to forgive us;
that's His job]."
It is a common view, is it not? I do not know if my African friend knew
that the same words are ascribed to Catherine the Great; he may have been
consciously quoting her, for he was well read. But even when people do not put
things quite so bluntly, the idea is popular, not least because some
ill-defined notions of the love of God run abroad in the land. But they have
been sadly sent imentalized and horribly stripped of all the complementary
things the Bible has to say.
This address reflects on a few of these other things, with the aim of
thinking more precisely and faithfully about the love of God.
The
Love of God and the Wrath of God
The Bible speaks of the wrath of God in high-intensity language.
"The LORD Almighty is mustering an army for war. . . . Wail, for the day
of the LORD is near; it will come like destruction from the Almighty. . . . See,
the day of the LORD is coming—a cruel day, with wrath and fierce anger—to make
the land desolate and destroy the sinners within it" (Isa. 13:4, 6, 9). Even
allowing for the unusual nature of language in the apocalyptic genre,
Revelation 14 includes some of the most violent expressions of God's wrath
found in all literature.
Wrath, like love, includes emotion as a necessary component. Here again,
if impassibility is defined in terms of the complete absence of all
"passions," not only will you fly in the face of biblical evidence,
but you will tumble into fresh errors that touch the very holiness of God. The
reason is that in itself, wrath, unlike love, is not one of the intrinsic
perfections of God. Rather, it is a function of God's holiness against sin.
Where there is no sin, there is no wrath, but there will always be love in God.
Where God in His holiness confronts His image-bearers in their rebellion, there
must be wrath. Otherwise God is not the jealous God He claims to be, and His
holiness is impugned. The price of diluting God's wrath is diminishing God's
holiness.
While the wrath of God is a function of God's holiness against sin, it
nevertheless has a powerful affective element. To distance God too greatly from
wrath on the ground of a misconceived form of impassibility soon casts shadows
back onto His holiness. Alternatively this so-called "wrath,"
depersonalized and de-emotionalized, is redefined as an anthropopathism that is
actually talking about the impartial and inevitable effects of sin in a person
or culture. That was the view of C. H. Dodd in the 1930s. The entailment, then
as now, is that the significance of the Cross changes. If God is not really
angry, it is difficult to see the need for propitiation.
Further, to retreat to the distinction between the immanent Trinity and
the economic Trinity in this case would be disastrous. That tactic argues that
God as He is in Himself (the immanent Trinity) is immune from wrath, while God
as He interacts with rebels (the economic Trinity) displays His wrath. But this
leaves us in the dubious position of ascribing to God as He is in Himself less
concern for maintaining His holiness than God as He interacts with the created
and fallen order. Conceptually this is a substantial distance from the picture
of God in Scripture; analytically it is slightly bizarre.
How, then, do God's love and His wrath relate to each other? One
evangelical cliché has it that God hates the sin but loves the sinner. There is
a small element of t rut h in these words: God has nothing but hate for the
sin, but this cannot be said with respect to how God sees the sinner.
Nevertheless the cliché is false on the face of it, and should be abandoned.
Fourteen times in the first fifty psalms alone, the psalmists state that God
hates the sinner, that His wrath is on the liar, and so forth. In the Bible the
wrath of God rests on both the sin (Rom. 1:18-23) and the sinner (1:24-32; 2:5;
John 3:36).
Our problem in part is that in human experience wrath and love normally
abide in mutually exclusive compartments. Love drives wrath out, or wrath
drives love out. We come closest to bringing them together, perhaps, in our
responses to a wayward act by one of our children, but normally we do not think
that a wrathful person is loving.
But this is not the way it is with God. God's wrath is not an implacable
blind rage. However emotional it may be, it is an entirely reasonable and
willed response to offenses against His holiness. At the same time His love
wells up amidst His perfections and is not generated by the loveliness of the
loved. Thus there is nothing intrinsically impossible about wrath and love
being directed toward the same individual or people at once. God in His
perfections must be wrathful against His rebel image-bearers, for they have
offended Him; God in His perfections must be loving toward His rebel
image-bearers, for He is that kind of God.
Two other misconceptions circulate widely even in circles of
confessional Christianity. The first is that in the Old Testament God's wrath
is more strikingly transparent than His love, while in the New Testament,
though doubtless a residue of wrath remains, a gentleness takes over and
softens the darker period: God's love is now richer than His wrath. After all,
Jesus taught His disciples to love their enemies and turn the other cheek
(Matt. 5:39, 41).
Nothing could be further from the truth than this reading of the
relationship between the Testaments. One suspects that the reason this formula
has any credibility at all is that the manifestation of God's wrath in the Old
Testament is primarily in temporal categories: famine, plague, siege, war,
slaughter. In the here and now those images have a greater impact than what the
New Testament says, with its focus on wrath in the afterlife. Jesus, after all,
is the One who in the New Testament speaks most frequently and most colorfully
about hell, this Jesus of the other cheek. The apostolic writings offer little
support for the view that a kinder, gentler God surfaces in the New Testament
at this stage in redemptive history.
The reality is that the Old Testament displays the grace and love of God
in experience and types, and these realities become all the clearer in the New
Testament . Similarly, the Old Testament displays the righteous wrath of God in
experience and types, and these realities become all the clearer in the New
Testament. In other words both God's love and God's wrath are ratcheted up in
the move from the Old Testament to the New. These themes barrel along through
redemptive history, unresolved, until they come to a resounding climax in the
Cross. Do you wish to see God's love? Look at the Cross. Do you wish to see
God's wrath? Look at the Cross.
Hymn writers have sometimes captured this best. In Wales, Christians
sing a nineteenth-century hymn by William Rees:
Here is love, vast as the ocean,
Lovingkindness as the flood,
When the Prince of life, our ransom,
Shed for us His precious blood.
Who His love will not remember?
Who can cease to sing His praise?
He can never be forgotten
Throughout heaven's eternal days.
On the Mount of Crucifixion
Fountains opened deep and wide;
Through the floodgates of God's mercy
Flowed a vast and gracious tide.
Grace and love, like mighty rivers,
Poured incessant from above,
And heaven's peace and perfect justice
Kissed a guilty world in love.
Lovingkindness as the flood,
When the Prince of life, our ransom,
Shed for us His precious blood.
Who His love will not remember?
Who can cease to sing His praise?
He can never be forgotten
Throughout heaven's eternal days.
On the Mount of Crucifixion
Fountains opened deep and wide;
Through the floodgates of God's mercy
Flowed a vast and gracious tide.
Grace and love, like mighty rivers,
Poured incessant from above,
And heaven's peace and perfect justice
Kissed a guilty world in love.
A second common misconception pictures God as implacably opposed to us
and full of wrath but somehow mollified by Jesus, who loves us. Again, there is
some wonderful truth here. The Epistle to the Hebrews certainly lends some
support to this way of thinking, especially in its portrayal of Jesus as the
High Priest, who continuously makes intercession to God for us (Heb. 7:25). All
this is modeled on the Levitical worship established at Sinai. Or more
precisely the system established at Sinai was meant to be, according to
Hebrews, the shadow of the ultimate reality. Jesus is the Advocate who speaks
to the Father in the believers' defense (1 John 2:1).
But other strands of New Testament theology must be brought to bear on
this subject. God loved the world so much that He gave His Son (John 3:16).
This does not mean that God was reluctant while His Son won Him over; rather,
God Himself willingly sent His Son. Even though Jesus as the believers' great
High Priest intercedes for us and pleads His own blood on our behalf, this is
not an independent action the Father somehow did not know about, or reluctantly
approved, being eventually won over by the independently originating sacrifice
of His Son. Rather, Father and Son are one in this project of redemption. The
Son Himself came into the world by the express command of the Father.
Thus propitiation does not mean the Son, full of love, offered Himself
and thereby placated (i.e., rendered propitious) the Father, who was full of
wrath. The picture is more complex. The Father, full of righteous wrath against
sin and sinners, nevertheless loved us so much that He sent His Son. Perfectly
mirroring His Father's words and deeds, the Son stood over against us in wrath
(displayed vividly when sinners will call for rocks to fall and hide them
"from the wrath of the Lamb," Rev. 6:16), and yet He was obedient to
His Father's commission, offering Himself on the cross. He did this out of love
both for His Father, whom He obeys, and for us, whom He redeems. Thus God is
necessarily both the subject and the object of propitiation. He provides the
propitiating sacrifice (He is the subject), and He Himself is propitiated (He
is the object). That is the glory of the Cross.
All this is implicit in Romans 3:21-26, a great atonement passage. After
devoting two and a half chapters to showing how the entire human race is cursed
and is rightly under the wrath of God because of its sin (1:18-3:20), the
apostle Paul demonstrates how Christ's death was God's wise plan "to
demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who
justifies those who have faith in Jesus" (3:26). God presented Jesus as a
propitiation in His blood, received through faith (3:25).
The
Love of God and the Intent of the Atonement
How does the love of God shed light on the purpose of the Atonement,
another area related to the sovereignty of God?
The label "limited Atonement" is singularly unfortunate for
two reasons. First, it is a defensive, restrictive, expression: Here is
Atonement, and then someone wants to limit it. The notion of limiting something
as glorious as the Atonement is intrinsically offensive. Second, even when
inspected more coolly, "limited Atonement" is objectively misleading.
Every view of the Atonement "limits" it in some way, except for the
view of the unqualified universalist. For example Arminians limit the Atonement
by regarding it as merely potential for everyone. Calvinists regard the
Atonement as definite and effective, that is, those for whom Christ died will
certainly be saved, but they limit this effectiveness to the elect. Amyraldians
limit the Atonement in much the same way as Arminians, even though the
undergirding structures are different. It may be less prejudicial therefore to
distinguish general Atonement and definite Atonement, rather than unlimited
Atonement and limited Atonement. Arminians (and Amyraldians, who may be lumped
together for the sake of this discussion) hold that the Atonement is general,
that is, sufficient for all, available to all, on condition of faith.
Calvinists hold that the Atonement is definite, that is, intended by God to be
effective for the elect.
At least part of the argument in favor of definite Atonement runs as
follows. Let us grant, for the sake of argument, the truth of election. That
is one point where this discussion intersects with what was stated about God's
sovereignty and electing love in the third lecture in this series. Election
granted, the question may be framed in this way: When God sent His Son to die,
did He think of the effect of the Cross with respect to His elect differently
from the way He thought of the effect of the Cross with respect to all others?
If one answers negatively, it is difficult to see that one is really holding to
a doctrine of election at all; if one answers positively, then one has veered
toward some notion of definite Atonement. The definiteness of the Atonement
turns rather more on God's intent in Christ's work on the cross than on the
mere extent of its significance.
Those who defend definite Atonement cite several verses for support.
Jesus will save His people (not everyone) from their sins (Matt. 1:21). Christ
gave Himself "for us," that is, for the people of the New Covenant
"to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that
are his very own, eager to do what is good" (Titus 2:14). Moreover, in His
death Christ did not merely make adequate provision for the elect; He actually
achieved the desired result (Rom. 5:6-10; Eph. 2:15-16). The Son of Man came to
give His life a ransom "for many" (Matt. 20:28; Mark 10:45; cf. Isa.
53:10-12). Christ "loved the church and gave himself up for her"
(Eph. 5:25).
Others, however, respond that there are simply too many texts on the
other side of the issue. "God so loved the world that He gave His one and
only Son" (John 3:16). Clever exegetical devices that make "the
world" a label referring to the elect ar e not very convincing. Christ
Jesus is the propitiation "for our sins, and not only for ours but also
for the sins of the whole world" (1 John 2:2). The arguments marshaled on
both sides are of course more numerous and more sophisticated than indicated in
this thumbnail sketch. But recall for a moment the outline given in the first
address on the various ways the Bible speaks about the love of God: (1) God's
intra-Trinitarian love, (2) God's love displayed in His providential care, (3)
God's yearning, warning and invitation to all human beings as He invites and
commands them to repent and believe, (4) God's special love toward the elect, and
(5) God's conditional love toward His covenant people as He speaks in the
language of discipline. If any one of these is absolutized, a false system is
generated that squeezes out other important things the Bible says, thus
distorting one's vision of God.
In this case, if we adopt the fourth of these ways of talking about
God's love (viz., God's peculiar and effective love toward the elect) and
insist that this is the only way the Bible speaks of the love of God, then
definite Atonement is exonerated. But this is at the cost of other verses that
do not easily fit into this mold, and it is at the expense of being unable to
say that there is any sense in which God displays a loving, yearning, salvific
stance toward the whole world. Further, there could then be no sense in which
the Atonement is sufficient for all without exception. Alternatively, if we put
all our theological eggs into the third basket and think of God's love
exclusively in terms of open invitation to all human beings, we have excluded
not only definite Atonement as a theological construct but also a string of
passages which, when read most naturally, mean that Jesus Christ did die, in
some special way, for His own people, and that God, with perfect knowledge of
the elect, saw Christ's death with respect to the elect differently from the
way He saw Christ's death with respect to everyone else.
Surely it is best not to introduce disjunctions where God Himself has
not introduced them If one holds that the Atonement is sufficient for all and
effective for the elect, then both sets of texts and concerns are accommodated
A verse such as 1 John 2:2 states something about the potential breadth of the
Atonement The proto-Gnostic opponents John was facing thought of themselves as
an elite group who enjoyed an inside track with God because of the special
insights they had received. But when Jesus Christ died, John rejoins, it
was not for the sake of, say, the Jews only, or now of some group, Gnostic or
otherwise, that sets itself up as the elite of the elect. Far from it, John
says: It was not for our sins only, but also for the sins of the whole world.
The context then understands this to mean something like "potentially for
all without distinction" rather than "effectively for all without
exception"— for the latter would mean that all without exception must
surely be saved, and John did not teach that that would take place. This is in
line, then, with passages that speak of God's love in the third sense listed
above. But it is difficult to see why that should rule out the fourth sense in
other passages.
In recent years I have tried to read both primary and secondary sources
on the doctrine of the Atonement from Calvin on. One of my most forceful
impressions is that the categories of the debate gradually shift with time so
as to force disjunction where a slightly different bit of question-framing
would allow synthesis. Correcting this, I suggest, is one of the useful things
we may accomplish from an adequate study of the love of God presented in
Scripture. For God is a person. Surely it is not surprising that the love that
characterizes Him as a person is manifest in a variety of ways toward other
persons. But it is always love. Both Arminians and Calvinists should rightly
affirm that Christ died for all, in the sense that Christ 's death was
sufficient for all and that Scripture portrays God as inviting, commanding, and
desiring the salvation of all, out of love (in the third sense developed in the
first lecture). Further, all Christians ought also to confess that in a
slightly different sense Christ Jesus, in the intent of God, died effectively
for the elect alone, in line with the way the Bible speaks of God's special
selecting love for the elect (in the fourth sense developed in the first
lecture).
Pastorally, there are many important implications. I mention only one.
This approach, I contend, must surely come as a relief to young preachers in
the Reformed tradition who hunger to preach the gospel effectively but who do
not know how far they can go in saying to unbelievers things like "God
loves you." When I have preached or lectured in Reformed circles, I have
often been asked the question, "Do you feel free to tell unbelievers that
God loves them?" Historically, Reformed theology at its best has never
been slow in evangelism, as seen, for instance, in George Whitefield or
virtually all the main lights in the Southern Baptist Convention until the end
of the last century. Obviously I have no hesitation in answering this question
from Reformed preachers affirmatively: of course, I tell the unconverted God
loves them.
Not for a moment am I suggesting that when one preaches evangelistically
one ought to retreat to passages of the third type (above), holding back on the
fourth type until after a person is converted. There is something sleazy about
that sort of approach. Certainly it is possible to preach evangelistically when
dealing with a passage that explicitly teaches election. Charles Spurgeon did
this sort of thing regularly. But I am saying that, provided there is an honest
commitment to preaching the whole counsel of God, preachers in the Reformed
tradition should not hesitate for an instant to declare the love of God for a
lost world, for lost individuals. The Bible's ways of speaking about the love
of God are comprehensive enough not only to permit this, but to mandate it.
The
Love of God for the World
One of the striking formal dissonances in the Johannine corpus is the
clash between the Gospel's assertion of the love of God for the world (John
3:16) and the first epistle's prohibition of love for the world (1 John
2:15-17). In brief, God loves the world, and Christians had better not. The
impression is rather strong that if people love the world, they remain under
God's wrath: the love of the Father is not in them. The dissonance, of course,
is merely formal. There is a ready explanation. But this formal dissonance
reminds us yet again that the ways the Bible speaks of something are diverse
and contextually controlled.
God's love for the world is commendable because it manifests itself in
awesome self-sacrifice; our love for the world is repulsive when it lusts for
evil participation. God's love for the world is praiseworthy because it brings
the transforming gospel to it; our love for the world is ugly because we seek
to be conformed to the world. God's love for the world issues in certain
individuals being called out from the world and into the fellowship of Christ's
followers; our love for the world is sickening where we wish to be absorbed
into the world.
So "do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves
the world, the love of the Father [whether this love is understood in the
subjective or the objective sense] is not in him" (1 John 2:15). But
clearly believers are to love the world in the sense that we are to go into
every part of it and bring the glorious gospel to every creature. In this sense
we imitate in small ways the wholly praiseworthy love of God for the world.
The
Love of God and the People of God
I conclude with three reflections.
First, the love of God for His people is sometimes likened to the love
of a parent for the child (e.g., Heb. 12:4-11; cf. Prov. 14:26). The Lord
disciplines those He loves (the fifth category of God's love). These lectures
have addressed that category less than the other four. But believers must never
forget to keep themselves in the love of God (Jude 21), remembering that He is
loving and merciful to those who love Him and who keep His commandments (Exod.
20:6). In this way we imitate Jesus. As Jesus obeys His heavenly Father and
remains in His love, so we are to obey Jesus and to remain in His love (John
15:9-11).
Second, the love of God is not merely to be analyzed, understood, and
adopted into wholistic categories of integrated theological thought. It is to
be received, absorbed, felt. Paul's prayer in Ephesians 3:14-21 connects such
Christian experience of the love of God with Christian maturity, with being
"filled to the measure of all the fullness of God" (v. 19). Clearly
no one can be a mature Christian who does not walk in this path.
Third, Christians should never underestimate the power of the love of
God to break down and transform the most amazingly hard individuals. One of the
most powerful recent affirmations of this truth in a context far removed from
our church buildings is the worldwide showings of the musical version of Victor
Hugo's magnificent novel Les Misérables. Sentenced to a nineteen-year
term of hard labor for stealing bread, Jean Valjean becomes hard and bitter. No
one can break him; everyone fears him. Released from prison, Valjean finds it
difficult to survive, as innkeepers will not welcome him and work is scarce.
Then a kind bishop welcomes him into his home. But Valjean betrays the trust.
During the night he creeps off into the darkness, stealing some of the family
silver.
Valjean is brought back next morning to the bishop's door by three
policemen. They had arrested him and found the stolen silver on him. A word
from the bishop and the wretch would be incarcerated for life. But the bishop
instantly exclaims, "So here you are! I'm delighted to see you. Had you
forgotten that I gave you the candlesticks as well? They're silver like the
rest, and worth a good two hundred francs. Did you forget to take them?"
Jean Valjean is released, and he is transformed. When the gendarmes
withdraw, the bishop insists on giving the candlesticks to his speechless,
mortified, thankful guest. "Do not forget, do not ever forget, that you
have promised me to use the money to make yourself an honest man, "
admonishes the bishop. And meanwhile Javert, the detective who is constantly
pursuing Valjean and who is consumed by justice but who knows nothing of forgiveness
or compassion, crumbles when his black-and-white categories of mere justice
fail to cope with grace that goes against every instinct for revenge. Valjean
is transformed; Javert jumps off a bridge and drowns in the Seine.
Of course this is Christian love, that is, the love of God, mediated in
this case through a bishop. This is how it should be, for God's love so
transforms us, that we mediate it to others, who are thereby transformed. We
love because He first loved us; we forgive because we stand forgiven.
One of the faces of love I have virtually ignored in this series is our
love. My focus has been on the love of God and the various ways the Bible
speaks of that love. Yet sooner or later one cannot adequately grasp the love
of God in Scripture without reflecting on the ways in which God's love elicits
our love. The five categories developed in the first lecture also relate to
believers' love.
(1) God's intra-Trinitarian love ensures the plan of redemption. The
Father so loves the Son that He has decreed that all will honor the Son even as
they honor the Father, and to that end He "shows" the Son things,
gives Him tasks, including the supreme task of the Cross. And the Son so loves
the Father that out of obedience He went to the cross on our behalf, the Just
for the unjust. The entire plan of redemption that has turned our hearts toward
God is a function, in the first place, of this intra-Trinitarian love of God.
(2) God's providential love protects us, feeds us, clothes us, and
forbears to destroy us when mere justice could rightly write us off. The Lord
Jesus insists that the evidences of God's providential love call us to faith
and God-centered kingdom priorities (Matt. 6:25-34).
(3) God's yearning, inviting, commanding love, supremely displayed in the
Cross, "compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and
therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer
live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again" (2
Cor. 5:14-15). With Paul, we are debtors; we owe others the gospel.
(4) God's effective, electing love toward us enables us to see the sheer
glory and power of Christ's vicarious death on our behalf, by which we are
reconciled to God. We grasp that God has not drawn us with the savage lust of a
rapist, but with the compelling wooing of a lover. Out of sheer love, God has
effectively secured the salvation of His people. We love, because He first
loved us.
(5) God continues to love us, not only with the immutable love that
ensures we are more than conquerors through Christ who loved us (Rom. 8:37),
but also with love like that of a father for his children, telling them to
remain in His love (Jude 21). Thus we are disciplined in love that we might be
loving and obedient children of the living God.
All this has transformed us, so that we in turn perceive the sheer
Tightness of the first commandment: to love God with all of one's heart, soul,
mind, and strength (Deut. 6:5; Matt. 22:37; Mark 12:30; Luke 10:27). As that is
the first and greatest commandment, so the first and greatest sin is not to
love God with one's heart, soul, mind, and strength. For this, there is no
remedy except what God Himself has provided—in love.
D. A. Carson is research professor of New Testament at Trinity
Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. He is a founding member and
currently president of The Gospel Coalition.
Comments
Post a Comment