Why I love an angry God

What God do you serve? A sentimental, soft-hearted gentleman or a powerful, sometimes wrathful dictator? Ed Dickerson.

The memories still shock. White-winged birds of death impaling the glass towers, detonating in fiery flowers. The sky raining ashes, then bodies, followed by cataracts of steel, glass and concrete, as the slain towers staggered to earth. Eventually, only emptiness remained—the space in the skyline, the vacant place at the table, the clothes without a wearer. In shock, we ask, why?
Astonishingly, some US Christians credited the same cause as some Middle Eastern Muslims: punishment of an angry God! Such notions aren’t recent vintage. Whether Quetzalcoatl of the Aztecs, Kali of the Thugs or Molech of the Canaanites, angry, bloodthirsty gods have been the norm in history. Ancient peoples struggled constantly to appease their angry deities.

It is perhaps because of this that it’s become fashionable to blame belief in God for all violence, citing all the wars fought in the name of religion. The horrible suicides/murders at Jonestown, Guiana, in 1978, and the continual threats and violence in the name of Allah testify that these ideas live today.
Many react to all this by rejecting the existence of God. Others profess belief in a more pleasant deity who never gets angry. While at first such concepts seem reassuring, ultimately they’re as frightening as the bloodthirsty deities they were designed to displace.

atheism

No matter how large the body count you attribute to abusive religions, the 20th century demonstrated atheism’s unparalleled lethality. The great atheist ideologies, fascism and communism, systematically exterminated more human beings in one short century than all those killed in the name of religion in all the preceding millennia. In less than 10 decades, millions died! Stalin intentionally starved and worked to death 30 million of his own people, before the war with also godless German Fascists, that exacted another 20 million Soviet dead. Not to mention the millions of Commonwealth, US and assorted European dead! Everywhere godless systems have ruled, people of all ages and gender have died in droves.

The evils done in the name of God shrink before the atrocities committed in the name of godlessness. Even at its worst, the Spanish Inquisition didn’t approach, either in sheer cruelty or numbers, the horror of the Holocaust, the purges in Stalinist Russia or the killing fields of Cambodia—three atheistic systems.
The 20th century demonstrated that passionless, methodical killing machines, like the Nazi death camps or Soviet gulags, are worse than any angry god.
A false god at least offered a false hope, a hope that not only sustained the believer but also restrained him—there were things they must avoid to achieve salvation. No God means no hope and no restraint—a deadly mix.

a toothless tiger

Fleeing the rapacious gods of the ancients, and finding the absence of God unendurable, many take refuge in a sort of “toothless” God. C S Lewis once described this “god” as a sort of elderly gentleman who “liked to see the young people having a good time.”
This indulgent God likes to dispense blessings, but never corrects or chastens His children. Above all, He never gets angry with them, no matter how feckless their behaviour. Although this God may appeal at first, it cannot endure trial.
So long as things go relatively well for us, we like a god who demands little, winks at our “small” indiscretions, who never corrects, and generally stays out of the way.
But when disasters strike, sweeping away thousands, when evil men visit pain and destruction on the innocent, when children starve and suffer terrible disease, this passive, indulgent God mocks our suffering and pain.

A soul crying out for justice doesn’t want a neutral response. Nor do we want to hear platitudes about love. Rather, we want action against perpetrators; we want our toothless god to grow fangs. We don’t want an indifferent god, or a moronically pleasant god. When we see the innocent suffer from evil, we feel outrage. We can’t be comforted by a God who cares less than we do.

a God of our making

The reason we fear and reject an angry God is that we know Him too little and ourselves too well. We know that, moved to anger, we retaliate. We see what harm our anger brings, and know that it pales compared to the destructive potential of an almighty, angry deity. Also, we know that sometimes we do evil, and fear the power of an angry God will be turned on us.
Therein is our mistake. We keep trying to make God in our image. However, His ways are infinitely above ours (see Isaiah 55:8, 9). When angered, we strike out to visit greater retribution and pain on the perpetrator. God, in contrast, although angered by the depredations of sin, reached out in grace to eliminate the evil and end the suffering by taking it into His infinite Self. Our anger seeks to end the evil by obliterating the doer. God sent Jesus, His only Son, to eradicate the evil deeds by redeeming the doers.

give me thunder!

Oh, yes, I love my angry God—because it is His love for me that makes Him angry at sin. Give me none of your mechanical, unfeeling gods, almighty automatons absent of passion. Don’t offer me your toothless God whose tepid smile betrays a lukewarm love. Forget the bloodthirsty, human-cartoon gods of the ancients. Give me a God of infinite love, stirred to infinite anger by evil—a God fully, truly emotional.

In such a God we see passionate feeling; astringent anger untainted by spite, soaring joy unclouded by envy, purging sorrow free of sour self-pity, and healing compassion unsullied by condescension. To glimpse the divine passion is to witness, if only for an instant, what it means to be fully alive.
So learn to hear God’s passion as a full-throated call to life. Tremble before His divine anger: “Therefore I will make the heavens tremble; and the earth will shake from its place at the wrath of the Lord Almighty, in the day of his burning anger” (Isaiah 13:13). Groan with God’s sorrow for a wayward child: “‘How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? . . .’ My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused” (Hosea 11:8). Exult in his joy: “He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing” (Zephaniah 3:17).
These and other Old Testament passages expose the fashionable false contrast of “the angry God of the Old Testament” with a pasteurised portrait of the peaceable Jesus of the New Testament. We now can see, in the words of William Barclay, “God is and was and ever shall be always like Jesus.”*
Jesus came to show us the Father so that we might live life to the full. Drink deeply at the spring of God’s passion, the fountain of life. Get to know the passionate, sometimes angry, Father and Son and experience life to the full.