Why an Angry God is the Best News That You Could Ever Hear

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.  I can be a dangerous person to invite to a dinner party.  Why?   I love to talk about the two things everyone says you shouldn’t, religion and politics. 

Take politics.  Now, I was kind-of excited about the Super Bowl.   I enjoyed watching the game.   Still, if you had asked me a few weeks ago, what was happening in the playoffs, I wouldn’t have had a clue.  But if you had asked me about the Iowa Caucus or the New Hampshire Primary, forget about it.  I would have talked your ear off.   I love political play-off season.   Can Bernie, the Vermont Socialist, defeat Hillary?   Will Trump defy the odds and be the nominee?  And if not, Trump, who?  Will it be Cruz, Rubio, Bush, Kasich?  Who knows?   It’s exciting, at least, to me.

Even if you haven’t been following the political play-offs, one thing is becoming clear.  Folks are carrying a lot of anger to the polls this year.  They’re not all upset about the same things, but whatever it is, they’re really, really angry about it.   Strangely enough, that may actually be good news. 

But whatever you think about anger in politics, it’s definitely good news when it comes to God. Thank goodness, God is angry.   That’s some of the best news you could ever hear.  Why?   In the words, we’re about to read, God shows us.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.

Romans 3:21-31

As strange as it sounds, hearing that God is angry is great news.   Why?   Because: without God’s anger you can’t have God’s love.  But before we see how anger and love go together, let’s ask.  What made God so angry to begin with?

One word, a somewhat strange word here, gives us the answer.  All through this passage, Paul is declaring this incredible news.  God has now brought about a right relationship with us (that’s what righteousness means), a right relationship that had never ever happened before.  But how did God do this? Here is where it gets weird.  Paul tells us.  God redeemed us.   Do you get what this means?   Paul is telling us that God bought us back.    

That’s what the word redeem means.   It means a purchase.  In the Bible, it goes back to rules and regulations in Leviticus related to indebtedness.   In ancient times, you couldn’t declare bankruptcy.    If you got into serious debt, your creditors didn’t just take your land.  They took you.   You literally became their slave until you or your descendants worked off the debt.   But the legal code in Leviticus gave an out.   One of your kinsman could redeem you.  They could buy you back.  It wasn’t easy.  They had to pay the debt in full.  And it had to be voluntary.  They had to do it out of love not obligation.  And basically, Paul is saying that’s how God brought about the right relationship.  God bought us back.  In Jesus, God became our kinsman redeemer.  

But then who owned us?  Who enslaved us?   Basically, Paul tells us we usually have many masters.   First of all, our own guilt and shame own us.   People don’t like to hear these two words.  But let’s be honest, don’t we all feel them?    Don’t you sense, no matter how good you are, that somehow it’s not enough?    Don’t you feel the gap between the person you want to be and the person you really are?   And doesn’t that bother you?   That’s why so many folks become workaholics or get captured by anxiety and stress?   That’s why everyone works so hard at impression management?  You know, those moments when you act like everything is fine, when it isn’t at all.  Everyone knows.  This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.     

And this guilt, this sense of inadequacy carries power.  It drives people to find relief in all the wrong places.   So they get obsessed with excelling at work or with how much money they have or don’t have.   They try to find relief in relationships or popularity.  “He loves me so I must be ok”  “They think I’m fine so I must be.”   Or maybe they look to a substance or even religion to get relief.   In the end, we human beings don’t simply have one master, we likely have many.  

And let’s be real about what a slave master does.    Slave masters have no boundaries.  They can do 

anything to the people they own, and they do   And what owns us does exactly that.   Against their power, we have no boundaries.   And under their power, we do awful things not simply to ourselves but to those around us.   Our slavery wounds us.  It wounds everything.                  

And this slavery and the way it wounds us and others, that makes God angry.   And God has to do something to satisfy that anger.   In fact, that’s literally what Paul tells us God does.   When he says that God put Jesus forward as a sacrifice of atonement, he uses a word, hilasterion.  And that word doesn’t simply mean a sacrifice.  It means a sacrifice specifically done to satisfy the wrath of God.  

And that can sound scary, but is it?   Think about it.   If you’re angry, it means you care.  Whenever I’ve talked to marriage counselors, they say.   If a couple comes in angry, it’s a sign of hope.  It means they care.  But if they come in with no emotions whatsoever, that counselor knows.  That couple likely has no hope.  

In our politics, whatever people are angry about at least it means that they care.  They want this nation to be better, their lives to be better, and they believe their elected officials can help make it so.   And that is far better than having citizens who don’t care at all.  

You see.  The strongest enemy of love is not anger. It’s indifference.   In reality, anger is often love’s greatest ally.   Where does the word anger come from?  It comes from a Norse word forgrief, a sense of loss. Think about it.   It makes sense.  We feel the energy of anger when we sense loss, when we feel the gap between things as they are and the way things should be.   And that energy drives us to act.   It’s what is behind our work with Bold Justice which we’ll celebrate next week.   When we see people and families tormented by mental illness, and no one offering the help they desperately need, we care.  When we hear that some vulnerable senior has to lie in their own waste for days in a fly by night nursing home, we feel anger. Why? We care.  

And God cares.  God loves.  And because God loves, God gets angry.  God sees the losses that our slavery brings about, how it devastates us, and how it devastates everything.  But God doesn’t simply see the loss, he feels it.  Our slavery devastates God, how we brutalize ourselves and one another, and how we look to everywhere else but God for comfort and deliverance.  God feels that pain in ways we could not imagine.    

But still, why does the anger lead to a sacrifice?   Why does God have to bleed, have to pay.     Well, let’s think about it.   If you want to deal with a wrong done to you, you have two choices.  You can deliver payback.   You hurt me.  Well, buddy, I’m going to hurt you right back.   And in the moment, it might even feel good.   But in the end, it’s devastating.    You become a harder, more brutal person.   But more than that, you generate a cycle of retribution that can continue for generations.   Vengeance only leads to more vengeance and more vengeance, a world consumed by bitterness and violence.   Payback doesn’t overcome evil, it just creates more evil.     Or you can make a different choice, you can forgive.  But if you forgive, someone still pays.  You pay.  You bear the loss.  You carry the weight of the wrong.  But only forgiveness offers a way out.   Only forgiveness gives an opportunity for change, for the wrong-doer to see the light.   Only forgiveness protects your heart from bitterness and evil.  Only forgiveness stops evil from winning.

Think about it with your kids.  At some point, children always hurt their parents, and I’m not talking accidentally hurt.   Every kid at some point will say something to their parents that they know will hurt.   It may be the simple, “I hate you!”  And even if as a parent, you know it’s a temper tantrum, it still hurts.   But what do you do?  Do you deliver pay-back?  Do you go, “Well, I hate you too!”    Is that the right answer?  No, I don’t think so.  You take the hit.  In fact, the more graciously you take the hit, the more powerful the opportunity for change becomes.   If you respond, “I’m sorry you feel that way, but I love you very much.”   That has power.  But make no mistake, it still costs you.    

When a wrong is done to us, we only have two options. They suffer or we suffer.   You can’t wish away wrong.  Somebody has to pay, us or them.   Now if you know that’s how it works in an individual life, how can it be any different for God?  God can no more wish away our wrongs than we can.    Somebody has to pay.  And when we look at Jesus bleeding on the cross, we see who did.    We see God taking the hit for us. 

But still, it’s so bloody.  And here’s the reason.   Because what God did on the cross isn’t a nice fairy tale.  It’s real.   It happened.   The creator of the universe entered into this messy and messed up world, and he bled for you.   But his blood only touches the surface of the sacrifice he made.  

God knew.  The only way to bring us home was to become a slave like us, to put himself utterly at evil’s mercy.   And in that cross, in Jesus, God did that.  God entered into the heart of evil.  And God said. Here take me.   Let these people go.   God became the ransom that set you free.   He took the brokenness that was yours so that you can be healed.  He absorbed the ugliness of your guilt, your shame, so that he might restore your beauty.   He turned away from love and life, so that he might love you forever.   He became utterly alone and abandoned so you would never be abandoned ever.    

And his anger led him there.   His anger led him to act, to absorb the pain, to take the loss, to become the ransom that brought you home.    You don’t want a God, who acts as if wrong can be papered over, swept under the rug.   That’s a God who doesn’t care.  It’s like a parent who thinks it’s no big deal if their kids are dodging cars on Hollywood Boulevard.  Who wants a parent like that.   No you want a parent who will run into traffic to save you, and be angry as they do it.  Why?  That’s a parent who cares, who loves his kids.  And that’s the One who bled for you, a God who infinitely cares for you.  And it was his love-driven anger that rescued you, that led him to redeem you with his very blood.

So when guilt and shame rise up in your life, remember.  They don’t own you.  The debt has been paid.  You are free.   And when you’re tempted to look to anything else but God for comfort or security, remember.  None of that will ever fill the deepest longing of your hearts.   Only the One who created you, who died for you, who gave up everything to bring you home will do that.  What can wash away your sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.