The grace of wrath

James, a missionary, returned home from a trip to equatorial Africa. During his last days there, he developed an ailment in his lower left leg. The condition began in his big toe, but he thought, “No big deal.” By the time he got home and visited a clinic in Atlanta, it had spread halfway up his calf. He had a fever and was in great pain.

The doctor examined him and determined that James had developed gangrene—a condition that, if left untreated, would be fatal. The only sure cure was to remove the entire left leg. The doctor decided that the remedy was too severe for a good man like James, so he avoided it, prescribed some antibiotics and didn’t tell James the proper diagnoses, sending him home while hoping for a miracle.

Now most of us would consider the doctor incompetent, having poor judgment, and unloving toward James. The doctor wouldn’t amputate for the patient’s good because it violated his sensitivities. He wouldn’t deal with a fatal disease ruthlessly because he felt it would hurt the patient.

This story is fictitious, but it makes an important point about how deadly diseases need to be dealt with appropriately. Like gangrene, sin and evil are deadly diseases that bring ruin to a person, a church, a city, a nation. If left untreated, the “patient” comes to destruction. Just as a gracious doctor severs a leg for the good of the entire body, a gracious God, acting in His wrath, severs sin and evil (Romans 1:18). Doing what is best for the whole body is the loving, gracious response and a necessary and good part of God’s grace. We can call it, taking a cue from John Steinbeck, “the grace of wrath.”

We live in a culture where the presiding mantra, both in church and society, is, “God is love.” We revere that, we misinterpret that, we twist it until it means nothing like what the Bible intends. Yes, God is love, but God is also hate. God hates sin and evil. The late Presbyterian pastor Donald Grey Barnhouse wrote in his commentary on Romans, “If you say that God is love without realizing that God is hate of sin, you have no gospel at all because you do not have God. The people who teach that God is love without teaching God is also the hate of sin, have, in reality, another god who is Satan with a mask on.”

Our nation hears the word “wrath” and thinks of anger, retribution, revenge, hot-blooded immediate reactions—man’s wrath. But that is not God’s wrath. God’s wrath is a settled, patient, long-suffering, holy response to evil and sin. It took generations for God to respond in wrath to Israel’s apostasy. It is not sentimental, not emotionally triggered, but an all-knowing response to a deadly disease, which if left unattended, will terminate the patient.

So when we think of God’s wrath, let’s see it as it really is: a good and necessary part of the character of a loving and grace-filled Creator, a trait to be treasured and respected.