God's Wrath vs Human Wrath
On Death, Live, Retribution, and Love
The Difference Between Human Wrath and God's Wrath:
1. God is love so
2. God doesn't need to punish sin/sinners in order to forgive it/them
3. God's enemy is death, not you and me
4. Sin accumulates and brings forth death so
5. God opposes sin and its operation in you and me and God does this without making us the enemy
6. It's the dis-ease, the infestation, the pollution that's the problem, not us
7. So God- who is life- takes death in himself in Jesus: as us, with us, because of us, ahead of us.
8. Jesus takes on 'the wrath' then in two distinct ways: a- human wrath opposing God and b- God's wrath opposing death
9. Human wrath ≠ God's wrath. Human wrath opposes life; God's wrath is God's love opposing the forces of death (injustice, sin, corruption).
10. Human wrath is retributive and punitive; God's wrath is corrective and healing. It's the difference between using a sword or a scalpel: both will 'end cancer' in a patient, but one will sacrifice the patient to end the cancer, the other will save the patient and deal with the cancer.
11. When we conflate human wrath and God's wrath, we project onto God the way sin and death works. God's opposition to wrong is where his anger and love meet (tim mackie phrase there)
12. Anger isn't opposed to love; we see in Jesus how anger is an expression of love, moving out and against to rescue and purify and oppose and save.
God is love and in him there is no sin and death at all.
We must learn how love opposes wrong so we can live in love even when there's wrong; and there's a lot of wrongs going around and lots of opportunity to live in love right there.
Excellent explanation, Matt! Thanks for this. I don’t not believe in PSA because I do not like it, but because I believe it’s incongruent with God, who is love, and whose justice is restorative not retributive.
Good morning Matt and thank you for the post. The last paragraph speaks directly to my own heart.