Terminology Tuesday: Wrath

WRATH. The permanent attitude of the holy and just God when confronted by sin and evil is designated his ‘wrath’. It is inadequate to regard this term merely as a description of ‘the inevitable process of cause and effect in a moral universe’ or as another way of speaking of the results of sin. It is rather a personal quality, without which God would cease to be fully righteous and his love would degenerate into sentimentality. His wrath, however, even though like his love it has to be described in human language, is not wayward, fitful or spasmodic, as human anger always is. It is as permanent and as consistent an element in his nature as is his love. This is well brought out in the treatise of Lactantius, De ira Dei.

The injustice and impiety of men, for which they have no excuse, must be followed by manifestations of the divine wrath in the lives both of individuals and of nations (see Rom. 1:18–32); and the OT contains numerous illustrations of this, such as the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the downfall of Nineveh (see Dt. 29:23; Na. 1:2–6). But until the final ‘day of wrath’, which is anticipated throughout the Bible and portrayed very vividly in Rev., God’s wrath is always tempered with mercy, particularly in his dealings with his chosen people (see, e.g., Ho. 11:8ff.). For a sinner, however, to ‘trade’ upon this mercy is to store up wrath for himself ‘on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed’ (Rom. 2:5). Paul was convinced that one of the main reasons why Israel failed to arrest the process of moral decline lay in their wrong reaction to the forbearance of God, who so often refrained from punishing them to the extent they deserved. They were presuming upon ‘the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience’, and failed to see that it was intended to lead them to repentance (Rom. 2:4).
In their unredeemed state men’s rebellion against God is, in fact, so persistent that they are inevitably the objects of his wrath (Eph. 2:3), and ‘vessels of wrath made for destruction’ (Rom. 9:22). Nor does the Mosaic law rescue them from this position, for, as the apostle states in Rom. 4:15, ‘the law brings wrath’. Because it requires perfect obedience to its commands, the penalties exacted for disobedience render the offender more subject to the divine wrath. It is, to be sure, only by the merciful provision for sinners made in the gospel that they can cease to be the objects of this wrath and become the recipients of this grace. The love of God for sinners expressed in the life and death of Jesus is the dominant theme of the NT, and this love is shown not least because Jesus experienced on man’s behalf and in his stead the misery, the afflictions, the punishment and the death which are the lot of sinners subject to God’s wrath.
Consequently, Jesus can be described as ‘the deliverer from the wrath to come’ (see 1 Thes. 1:10); and Paul can write: ‘Since, therefore, we are now justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God’ (Rom. 5:9). On the other hand, the wrath of God remains upon all who, seeking to thwart God’s redemptive purpose, are disobedient to God’s Son, through whom alone such justification is rendered possible.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. R. V. G. Tasker, The Biblical Doctrine of the Wrath of God, 1951; G. H. C. Macgregor, ‘The Concept of the Wrath of God in the New Testament’, NTS 7, 1960–1, pp. 101ff.; H.-C. Hahn, NIDNTT 1, pp. 105–113.

Tasker, R. V. G. (1996). Wrath. In D. R. W. Wood, I. H. Marshall, A. R. Millard, J. I. Packer, & D. J. Wiseman (Eds.), New Bible dictionary (3rd ed., pp. 1250–1251). Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.