At\a time of global turmoil and with threats of nuclear war, apocalyptic language is making a comeback. Along with references to the “wrath” of God. But just what is meant by that biblically? It’s important to reach some enlarged understanding here.
Widespread and long established notions of divine “wrath” can trouble believers for their seemingly arbitrary and excessive nature like the slaughter of the many Israelites who succumbed to the worship of the Golden Calf during Moses’ long absence on Sinai. The problem doesn’t necessarily go away if one thinks of God’s actions as culture-bound to elicit sufficient attention and authority; nor if one insists, correctly enough, that anciently whole families could die for the transgression of a single member. It doesn’t even help that what some call history in this area others suggest is only part or wholly morality tale. Wrath talk can function like a spiritual wound. Desire for a culture and history transcendent “good” God persists.
Any misunderstanding here matters. It affects the whole spiritual outlook of the collective. It’s not simply that atheists like Richard Dawkins breezily declare the Lord the most repulsive figure in literature, It is problematic that through Replacement Theology Christians may dissociate from the Old Testament legacy with its covenantal and prophetic theology in a way that can support a kind of quietly superior anti-Semitism. Amid the confusion it becomes ever more vital today to understand God and his “wrath” and as representing something more than early Hebrew assimilation of images of the mountain and storm god, Baal.
But to arrive at any kind of wider understanding here, arguably one should set aside a type of western thinking common since especially the Enlightenment but even earlier. According to this God is – implicitly at least – supreme Mind or Reason enthroned, a point towards which one may hope to ascend, step by step, asking questions, working things out as one goes, or, as per some reflections of a popular saint like Padre Pio, by simply avoiding specific attitudes like Pride, Envy and Greed in order to escape hell. All this comes close to pursuing a path less of faith than of knowledge, something as good as forbidden for authentic salvation as Eden’s Tree of Knowledge to ongoing God-conscious living.
NOT IN ANY WESTERN WAY
God is not a mind to work out, know or describe in the normal way. As the prophet Isaiah has it, ” My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways says the Lord” (Is 55:8). God is a Spirit according to Jesus (Joh 4:24) and he can be consuming fire according to the Epistle to Hebrews (Heb 10:37). The beginning of contact and revelation to Moses is through a burning bush. It is important to note this particular fire does not consume the bush, itself something suggestive for all those claims from mostly the Eastern churches that the same light that illuminates the redeemed burns the damned. Why? Because everyone and every thing exists through God the Creator who is eternal spiritual fire and who, as Lord of Life, may consume but will not and cannot outright kill recalcitrant souls, but rather as it were, quarantine them.
God is in and through All (Col 1: 16-18) and perfect as such. God’s “holiness” is his unique, vast and sinless Otherness. But I suggest the All and the Otherness function more like a super-inclusive Unconscious than the conscious, abstract geometric perfections of Reason..And within God there is simply a knowing, total and innocent, implicitly akin to that of the naked Adamic couple in Eden whose communication with God is unrestricted and immediate until doubting and thinking narrowly upset relation. As in the vision of Ezekiel (Ezek 1), naturally unconfined, God, surrounded by fire and brightness, moves and sees in all directions and is knowingly everywhere.
But following the Fall into the distancing of rationalizing things up to and including deity, presently not all space is equally safe or appropriate territory for God and humans, Significantly, as in Exod 33:5 God declines to dwell with even his chosen people because they are “stiff necked” and his presence would only destroy them.
In short, God is good and essential to everything and everyone, but currently also hard and potentially dangerous to know! Effectively there are only two ways to know him to any safe degree: either through 1) some kind of mediation represented by such as Moses, David and especially Jesus (who claimed divine sonship and radically enlarged contact potential) combined with protective practices or attitudes they advocate or, 2), like Moses and the prophets to become more like deity oneself. Some mystics like Dame Julian of Norwich would maintain when the believer approaches God it is his mediating Son he sees. Be that as it may, the total perfection of God is arguably a limit, the only real limit to the divine.
One could picture God and the divine nature a bit like a plant that automatically recoils when touched,,, or like a lion (and Jesus is “the Lion of Judah”) that almost automatically pounces and attacks when approached whether by friend or foe.
Even while followers are encouraged to knock and ask (Matt 7:7) and while they may learn something of the Creator from creation, (Rom 1:19) there seems to be little question that the greater spiritual drama, or quest, belongs less to souls seeking God than God seeking alienated “fallen” humanity despite the limitations of the divine nature itself to do this. This quest risks hurting what divinity would prefer to heal if it approaches its object too near and often. Within the “cloud” of divine power that Moses negotiates, there is not so much the contradiction of will and explicit declarations some perceive, as a certain ongoing tension between wrath and mercy, impulse and plan And it’s a real tension too sensitive and complex to be explained away with suggestions of influences from Baal cult.
PERFECTION
God is Echod, One but a composite, not an absolute One (like the God of Islam). Keeping to the idea that God is perfect but like a vast encompassing Unconscious, it is possible to see more archetypal elements involved in any tensions. It is beyond present scope, but touched on in various articles of mine, would maintain it is possible to represent directions within the divine mind through symbolism of the outer spiritual planets that exist beyond the visible and more human ones. These three will align with the voices/trends of, creative/destructive Pluto, organizing and future seeing Uranus, and the more visionary and maternal Neptune more inclined to forgive, inspire and include.
Much could be said on all this,but amid the interactions of this natural Trinity. practically biblical divine “wrath” is to be seen as of two kinds and operative in two places and ways, namely wrath through presence and wrath through absence.
As Maker and Sustainer of the world, God naturally recoils from and/or automatically opposes any evil beyond a certain level of manifestation (which within time and given freewill is permitted some scope).As Judge and Ultimate Perfection, “wrath” is however more from absence and withdrawal than actions. Hell, which is necessary existence through divine fire without benefit of the other life-sustaining elements, is also called “destruction”:(Phil 3:19) as though it was something active, not a stasis And the Tribulation period of apocalyptic vision is uniquely hellish because at least some degree of world-upholding presence (through the Restrainer or Holy Spirit) has been withdrawn (2 Thess 2.6) allowing greater scope to the evil, which presently rules the world and obscures God.
From all this and to conclude these observations, God’s “wrath” is not to be read like Zeus throwing thunderbolts or Baal losing his temper or Shiva dancing the death of worlds. The terrible destructions of apocalypse don’t mean that God is, as the late poet Kathleen Raine (daughter of a Methodist minister) had it, the God of Revelation is a demon god.
What Revelation with its judgements portrays is not necessarily even effects fully planned or directly willed. It can be something more inevitable and automatic for divine character and its forrce may recoil upon who and what occasioned it as in Isaiah’s”Woe to Assyria, rod of my anger” (Is 10.5). It may also in some respects function as a mercy to the extent the extremes of disaster and suffering may urge those otherwise spiritually indifferent towards God and any mind change (the literal meaning of repentance). In which case there is something in the pattern of the harsh wisdom of Hebrews 12:6 that declares “For whom the Lord loves he chastens”. Where perfection cannot tolerate evil nor through blessings awaken evil to its true nature, love may only proceed through punishment.
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