Is It Loving to Talk About God’s Wrath?

Currently we’re three weeks into a sermon series on the Minor Prophets. Week by week we’re taking a birds-eye view of one of these twelve books of Scripture. Although each book is different, they all share a common refrain: God is a holy God with righteous wrath against sin.  

But is that loving to talk about? What about grace, love, and mercy? Wouldn’t it be better to talk about the goodness and gentleness of God instead of focusing on His wrath? Is it even loving to talk about God’s wrath?  

Parents, imagine that you’ve adopted a toddler from a third-world country. As you introduce him to various items in your home, you come across your kitchen stove. Would it be loving to teach your wide-eyed, impressionable toddler that the red-hot eye on the stove is good?  

Now in a sense, you’d be right. That stovetop makes water boil to cook spaghetti noodles. It turns slimy eggs into a tasty yellow breakfast. It turns hard, inedible kernels into fluffy white popcorn. The stove is good. Of course, all of that is true. But it’s an incomplete truth. A stove is good, but it’s also dangerous. If the stove is misused, it can become deadly.  

The same is true with God. Yes, He is a God of love, mercy, gentleness, and grace. But He is also holy, righteous, and He judges with perfect judgment. If you approach this holy God with unforgiven sin, He is dangerous.  

So yes, let’s talk about God’s unending love and boundless grace. But let’s remind sinners that unless they approach Him with their sin covered by the blood of Jesus, He is a dangerous God.  

As God Himself said to Moses in Exodus 34:6-7, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation.”