What Makes God Angry? - The One Year Unlocking the Bible Devotional
What Makes God Angry?
The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness. Romans 1:18, NIV
The wrath of God is not some kind of flaring rage, and we should not think of God as losing control and lashing out in random acts of frustration. God’s wrath is his strong and settled opposition to all that is evil.
God is love—that is in his nature, and there has never been and never will be a time when he is not love. But God’s anger is different. The Bible never says “God is wrath”; in fact, God is “slow to get angry” (Psalm 103:8). The Bible story demonstrates his great patience and tolerance toward an evil world. But God’s anger can be provoked by godlessness and wickedness.
A godless person doesn’t want anything to do with God, and a wicked person refuses to obey God. But in order to sustain this response to God, a person must suppress what God has revealed about himself.
It takes energy to go on resisting God. Picture a man pressing down on a powerful spring. He has to put his whole weight on it to keep the spring compressed. If the man lets up for a moment, the spring will recoil. Those who want nothing to do with God have to work hard at avoiding him because God has revealed his divine power and his glory all around us in creation (see Romans 1:20).
The person who wants to keep God at a distance has to close his or her eyes to this revelation and keep up the pretense that all the beauty and order in the world are just products of chance. Many people choose to believe this because they find the alternative unacceptable. They’re determined not to acknowledge the glory of their Creator because they’ve already decided they will not obey him.
When people say, “We’ll pour our energy into beliefs and behaviors that keep God’s truth as far away from us as possible,” God reveals his wrath. God loves the world, and he cannot be indifferent and shrug his shoulders as his world destroys itself.
For further reading, see Psalm 103
