How do you explain God’s wrath in the Bible?
Not too long ago I watched a video on social media talking about God’s wrath in the Bible. It pointed out lots of times in the Scriptural texts when God explicitly commands the Children of Israel to kill their enemies.
God’s wrath in the Bible
Here’s an example. This Moses talking to the Children of Israel:
But as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as the Lord your God has commanded, so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against the Lord your God. Deuteronomy 20:16-18 New Revised Standard Version
That’s pretty explicit. Here’s another example.
Samuel said to Saul, ‘The Lord sent me to anoint you king over his people Israel; now therefore listen to the words of the Lord. Thus says the Lord of hosts, “I will punish the Amalekites for what they did in opposing the Israelites when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”’ 1 Samuel 15:1-3 NRSV
When Saul did not kill every living thing according to what Samuel told him God told him to, God was displeased.
The word of the Lord came to Samuel: ‘I regret that I made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me, and has not carried out my commands.’ 1 Samuel 15:10, 11 NRSV
Changing views over time
Growing up, when I read these stories, and there are lots more like them, I just saw them from the perspective of the Children of Israel being the Chosen Ones of God. The fact they defeated their enemies in battle was just proof that God was on their side.
When I got serious about my faith in high school and made a commitment to follow Jesus and be as much like him as I could, I began to see these stories of God’s wrath in the Bible more as metaphors for how God defeats evil and didn’t focus on the implications of them being historical events.
But over many years I’ve had to ask myself: What is going on in these passages? Did God really tell the Israelites to kill all those people? That’s what a lot of people believe. How can the God described in these stories in the Old Testament be reconciled with what Jesus teaches us about God in the New Testament?
It’s not an easy question to answer. There are some easy answers depending on your view of Scripture and the nature of God. You may think it’s easy: That’s exactly what God said to do and that’s what happened.
Or there may be something deeper going on.
What is God’s wrath in the Bible?
You really have to start with who God is. What is God’s true nature? Does God change over the centuries and become less about killing evil people and more focused on redeeming them?
How you see God will determine how you deal with what is described as God’s wrath in the Bible.
I know some people who believe that God actually said word for word exactly what is printed in these Bible verses I just quoted commanding Israel to kill its enemies. God wanted all those people annihilated because they worshiped other gods and He didn’t want His people to be influenced by them.
These folks explain that God was teaching the Jews not to let any idolatry exist in their land. But since they didn’t kill everyone, idolatry was not wiped out and this caused Israel to sin later on.
But I wonder, given how quickly the Israelites fell into idol worship in their history too many times to count, what would have happened if they had actually eradicated all those enemies. Would they have never sinned or practiced idolatry over the next 1,000 years? I doubt it.
I wasn’t there
So, did God actually tell these Old Testament leaders and prophets to kill all their enemies? I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I don’t know what God actually said or what they heard.
But I do believe God was talking to them and they wrote down what they heard, or thought they heard .
Now you’re probably wondering: Hey James, wait a minute. What do you mean? That God didn’t actually say to kill their enemies but that’s what they thought He said?
Okay, here again, let me say, I wasn’t there. I don’t know what was said, but it seems pretty clear that’s what was written down was what the people thought God said.
If you take these passages at face value and on their own, the simple conclusion is that God told Israel to kill all its enemies.
But when you look at these passages in the context of everything the Bible reveals about God’s nature as a whole you may come to a very different conclusion.
How I see God’s wrath in the Bible
I’m going to share how I have been able to come to terms with these stories about God’s wrath in the Bible. I’m not claiming to have the perfect answer and if you disagree with me, that’s perfectly fine. I would love to hear your thoughts.
The Bible is not a dogmatic, legalistic document that can only be taken literally. When you only take the Bible literally, you lose a lot of its meaning. The Bible is a vibrant revelation that continues to emit light and speak to us today.
If you don’t look beneath the surface of these Bible stories, you miss much of its deeper meaning.
Were all those prophets and leaders in the Old Testament completely perfect? Did they have a perfect understanding of God’s nature?
How could they? They were human. Did their culture and personal perspectives influence the way they saw things? Of course. Did it influence how they heard what God said to them? It could be.
Looking at God’s wrath in the Bible through the lens of Christ
Is there anyone in the Bible who did understand God completely and live in perfect harmony with God?
Well of course, you know the answer. It was Jesus.
The thing that’s helped me the most in coming to terms with the way God’s wrath in the Bible is talked about is to look at these passages through the lens of Christ, through the lens of what Jesus taught us about God.
Jesus was the pure, undiluted, uncompromised, untainted representative of the Father.
Jesus presented a crystal clear vision of God’s true nature. He showed us, and continues to show us, who God is and what God is like.
That doesn’t mean we always see what Jesus shows us, even when it’s right under our noses. This was true for his disciples as well.
Philip said to him, ‘Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.’
Jesus said to him, ‘Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, “Show us the Father”? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? John 14:8-10 NRSV
Jesus was explaining to Philip, and to us, that he had given his disciples a clear picture of who God is by the way he, Jesus, had acted and spoken.
Jesus heard and saw God
Earlier in his ministry Jesus had made this clear.
Jesus gave them this answer: “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. John 5:19 NIV
For I did not speak on my own, but the Father who sent me commanded me to say all that I have spoken. I know that his command leads to eternal life. So whatever I say is just what the Father has told me to say. John 12:49, 50 NIV
Jesus was a transparency for God. He showed forth God’s true nature by doing and saying only what he heard and saw God do and say.
The only way to really see or know who God is, is to look at how Jesus lived, what he said and did, especially how he talked about God, his heavenly Father.
Dealing with your enemies
So, on the topic of how to deal with enemies, we’ve talked about what people in the Old Testament believed God wanted them to do. But what does Jesus say about how to treat your enemies?
It’s one of the hardest of his commandments to obey.
‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax-collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. Matthew 5:43-48 NRSV
Jesus turns the teaching of the Old Testament to hate, destroy, and kill our enemies upside down and commands us instead to love our enemies.
Does God’s wrath in the Bible change to love?
Did God’s law and will change over the centuries that now we should love our enemies instead of kill them? That would be a pretty hard position to defend.
The prophet Malachi reports what he heard God say,
For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, have not perished. Ever since the days of your ancestors you have turned aside from my statutes and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you, says the Lord of hosts. Malachi 3:6, 7 NRSV
Malachi discerned to some degree the unchanging nature of God. God didn’t change. He didn’t go anywhere. It was the Israelites who went back and forth between obedience and disobedience to God.
God does not change
So let’s start with this idea that God does not change from the time of the Patriarchs to the time of Jesus. What changed was the way people perceived God. Jesus brought much m ore light to the table.
The only way to really understand what’s often described as God’s wrath in the Bible, is to look at each story through the lens of what Jesus reveals about God’s nature.
When you look through a clear, clean lens, you see clearly. When you look through a dirty, shaded, or warped lens, it distorts the image you see.
When you look through the lens of the social attitudes prevalent in many parts of the Old Testament which considered killing your enemies the way to victory, and at the same time are hearing messages from God about overcoming evil influences, it could be possible that you would hear God’s voice, but it would be filtered through your own preconceptions and belief systems.
What does that mean? Here’s a metaphor that illustrates what I’m talking about.
Looking through a wall of glass bricks distorts what you see
Once, I was in an office building that had a wall of glass bricks in the reception room. As I was waiting for my appointment, someone walked behind the glass bricks and I couldn’t even tell it was a person. All I saw was a flash of red, from the red jacket they were wearing. It was a poor representation of the person on the other side of the glass brick wall.
When we have limited or incorrect conceptions of who and what God is, and then God speaks to us, we’re going to perceive what God is saying through the distorted lens of our own limited concept of Him and not see or hear exactly what God is doing or saying.
I did an entire episode focused on this metaphor, Episode 197: Quit Looking at God Through a Wall of Glass Bricks.
I can only speak from what I’m seeing right now. However correct or incorrect it maybe, I’m not the final judge. I’m just sharing how things appear to me.
Hearing God’s voice through our own filters
When I look at everything the Bible says about God, especially how Jesus reveals God’s nature, it seems to me that the people who heard God tell them to kill all their enemies, definitely heard God talking to them. They knew God did not want them to be influenced by the evil around them.
But whatever God actually said was distorted to some degree, because they heard God’s voice through the filter of their own minds and preconceptions. They didn’t hear the voice of God as clearly as Jesus would have. Just as I couldn’t see the person in the red jacket clearly behind the wall of glass bricks.
This is why we need to look through the lens of Christ to hear and see God clearly. You and I, along with all those folks in the Bible, do not see or hear God clearly when we look and listen through the lens and filter of our own limited, material view of things.
Unless you’re looking through the lens of Christ, you cannot see the complete and accurate nature of God.
Christ gives us clear vision
Without Christ you cannot see God clearly.
John points this out in his gospel.
The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. John 1:17 NRSV
Without Christ, something is missing.
Now you may be thinking: Hey James, it sounds like you’re saying Jesus just wants us to love our enemies and everything will be fine. Does that mean we should just love evil people and let them get away with all the bad stuff they do?
Jesus came to destroy evil
Of course not. Jesus didn’t come just to talk about love and let evil run rampant on the earth. His purpose was to destroy evil.
The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil. 1 John 3:8 NRSV
One of the things the Bible reveals about Jesus is
You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness; Hebrew 1:9 NRSV
It doesn’t say Jesus hated sinners. He was merciful to sinners. He loved them. But he hated the evil influences of the carnal mind that lured them into sin.
Different views of God’s wrath in the Bible
So let’s come back to how to deal with the way God’s wrath in the Bible is talked about.
I’ve shared how I look at these passages and what makes sense to me.
But you may think it’s important to take the Bible 100% literally as God’s actual words. If that’s the case, then you will interpret these stories very differently. And you may be right. Maybe God actually told Moses, Joshua, Samuel and others to kill all the enemy populations.
If that’s the way you see the Bible and God, then that will all make sense to you. And you will have to find some way to reconcile the way God acts in the Old Testament to how Jesus reveals God’s nature in the New Testament.
I’ve heard some pretty elaborate explanations of why God wanted all those people killed, but it usually sounds like someone trying to justify their already-set beliefs instead of really getting to the heart of who Jesus reveals God to be.
As I mentioned earlier, Jesus said and did everything he heard and saw the Father say and do and that God showed him everything He did. Can Moses, Joshua, Samuel, and the others make that same claim? I don’t think so.
Jesus didn’t kill his enemies because God did not
Since Jesus didn’t kill his enemies or recommend that his followers kill their enemies, it means Jesus did not see his heavenly Father kill or desire to kill any of His enemies.
And we come back to what God said to Malachi: I change not.
I will stand on the unchanging nature of God as Love itself, which John’s first epistle makes clear.
God is love. 1 John 4:8 NIV
There is an attitude today with some people, and this attitude has been around for thousands of years, that God condones and encourages genocide against the enemy. And some of the stories of the Israelites killing their enemies are used to justify this position today.
Jesus redefines who the enemy is
But Jesus gives a whole new view about what it means to destroy the enemy. He even redefines who the real enemy is.
To those who hold the traditional view that your enemy is a person or persons, Jesus says we need to love those people, forgive them, and bless them.
In effect, he’s saying these people are not really your enemies.
In his parable of the tares and the wheat, referring to the one who planted the tares, or weeds, Jesus defines who the real enemy is.
and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; Matthew 13:39 NRSV
Wait a minute. If we’re supposed to love our enemies, does that mean we’re supposed to love the devil? Of course not. It means we need to see who the actual enemy is, Satan, not a person, nor a group of people, not a nation of people who are different from or disagree with you.
We need to destroy whatever influence, small or great, Satan has in our lives. Then we can see clearly to help others get rid of the evil influences in their lives.
What does God’s wrath in the Bible represent?
So let’s come back to God’s wrath in the Bible and what it represents. Every place the Bible talks about God’s wrath, the ultimate message is that God is displeased with evil and evil practices and that He will destroy them.
The Bible Speaks to You Podcast is about learning how to think, pray, and love like Jesus. So the question really becomes: How did Jesus deal with evil? How did he destroy evil, or the “works of the devil,” as 1 John refers to it?
Jesus worked very effectively on an individual level with people. He met them where they were, healed whatever disease or problem they had, cast out whatever evil spirits, or you could say, whatever evil influences were in them.
For example, Jesus didn’t command thunderbolts from heaven to kill Zacchaeus, a tax collector who had cheated lots of people. Instead, Jesus treated him with love and it transformed him. Jesus’s approach to destroying evil was often to show love to the sinner and nurture the transformation of character.
To those who weren’t willing to admit they had problems, like the Pharisees, he was much more direct and called out their sins, but still in the spirit of love, in an effort to have them realize their sins and change their ways.
You can follow Jesus’s example
This is a good place for us to start, helping people on an individual level bringing “the wrath of God,” so to speak, the power and the love of God, to destroy evil, to people we interact with. And actually, the best place to start is with yourself. You can invoke the supremacy of God’s power to cast out any influences in yourself as well. In fact, Jesus recommends we start with ourselves.
first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye. Matthew 7:5 NRSV
Jesus also defeated evil on a collective scale through his crucifixion and resurrection. It isn’t for you and me to do the work Jesus did on the cross and in the resurrection. But there may be times when your efforts to bring the omnipotence of God to bear on the destruction of evil influences in a collective setting and you’re not just helping one person at a time.
We need to imbibe the spirit of Jesus in destroying the works of the devil, in loving our enemies, loving righteousness and hating unrighteousness, and ministering to those in need.
The wrath of God in the Bible means that God’s power, God’s goodness, and God’s love destroy evil. The more you live God’s goodness and love in your own life, the more you will bear witness to the destruction of evil in your life. And the more you’ll be able to help others as well.
When you’re reading stories about God’s wrath in the Bible, I encourage you to look at them through the lens of what Jesus taught us about the nature of God. The more clearly you see God, the more clearly you will hear His voice and the more effective your prayers will be.
_____________
James Early, the Jesus Mindset Coach, is a Bible teacher, speaker, and church mentor. He conducts Bible workshops online and in person. His focus is on getting back to the original Christianity of Jesus by learning to think, pray, and love like Jesus. Contact him here.
Make a donation to support the show
Listen and leave a review on
_____________
Bible References
Deuteronomy 20:16-18 New Revised Standard Version
16 But as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive.
17 You shall annihilate them—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as the Lord your God has commanded,
18 so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against the Lord your God.
1 Samuel 15:1-3 NRSV
1 Samuel said to Saul, ‘The Lord sent me to anoint you king over his people Israel; now therefore listen to the words of the Lord.
2 Thus says the Lord of hosts, “I will punish the Amalekites for what they did in opposing the Israelites when they came up out of Egypt.
3 Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”’
1 Samuel 15:10, 11 NRSV
10 The word of the Lord came to Samuel:
11 ‘I regret that I made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me, and has not carried out my commands.’
John 14:8-10 NRSV
8 Philip said to him, ‘Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.’
9 Jesus said to him, ‘Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, “Show us the Father”?
10 Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?
John 5:19 NIV
19 Jesus gave them this answer: “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.
John 12:49, 50 NIV
49 For I did not speak on my own, but the Father who sent me commanded me to say all that I have spoken.
50 I know that his command leads to eternal life. So whatever I say is just what the Father has told me to say.
Matthew 5:43-48 NRSV
43 ‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.”
44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,
45 so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.
46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax-collectors do the same?
47 And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?
48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Malachi 3:6, 7 NRSV
6 For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, have not perished.
7 Ever since the days of your ancestors you have turned aside from my statutes and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you, says the Lord of hosts.
John 1:17 NRSV
17 The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
1 John 3:8 NRSV
8 The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil.
Hebrew 1:9 NRSV
9 You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness;
1 John 4:8 NIV
8 God is love.
Matthew 13:39 NRSV
39 and the enemy who sowed them is the devil;
Matthew 7:5 NRSV
5 first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.
