He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in steadfast love.
Micah 7:18
It’s hard to think of any issue that causes more difficulty in the minds and hearts of so many people than the anger of God.
We tend to suppress the idea of God’s anger or deny it. You’ve likely heard someone say, “I grew up believing in an angry God, but now I believe in a loving God.”
What do you do with the passages in the Bible that speak of God’s anger? Many Christians live with an underlying feeling that God is angry with them. There is this strange contradiction of saying you don’t believe in an angry God but feeling that God is always angry with you.
If you find it difficult to believe that God really loves you, it may be that you too have this underlying feeling that God is angry with you. If that is the case, you will feel that God might at best tolerate you, but He certainly will not delight in you.
The Bible makes it clear that God is irreconcilably opposed to evil and irrepressibly filled with love. It’s hard for us to understand how these two things can both be true at the same time. Our natural tendency is to grasp hold of one and lose our grip on the other.
If you can’t see how God’s love and justice meet, you will either feel that His love is not really love, it’s just a mask over His anger, or you will feel that His anger is not really anger, it’s just a mask over His love. We desperately need to see how God’s love and justice meet.
Do you feel God is angry at you all or most of the time?
