The attributes of God

The Wrath of God

An attribute of God · Romans 1:18

The wrath of God is his settled, holy opposition to all evil. It is not a loss of temper but the just response of perfect love and holiness to what destroys and defiles. The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness, Scripture says honestly. Yet this very attribute is held together with his mercy, and at the cross the wrath our sin deserved fell upon Christ in our place, so that we might be spared.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;Romans 1:18 (KJV)

What the wrath of God means

We must speak of this carefully and honestly. God's wrath is not petulance, cruelty, or a fit of rage. It has none of the sinful qualities of human anger, which is often selfish, out of control, and unjust. God's wrath is the pure and steady reaction of his holiness against sin, the necessary flip side of his love. Precisely because he loves what is good and loves his creatures, he is set against the evil that ruins them. A God who felt nothing toward cruelty, abuse, and injustice would not be good; he would be indifferent.

Wrath, then, is not an attribute alongside love that competes with it, but love's own opposition to all that harms the beloved. It is holy love saying no to evil. Scripture calls it the wrath of the Lamb, joining the two words we would think opposite, because the same Christ who is gentle toward sinners is fierce toward the sin that destroys them. God's anger is slow, measured, and just; he is slow to anger and of great mercy, and does not willingly afflict. But he is not neutral about evil, and we should not want him to be.

How the Bible reveals it

Scripture does not hide God's wrath, and neither should we. The flood, Sodom, the plagues on Egypt, the exile of Israel, all reveal a God who does not let evil run forever unchecked. Paul writes that the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. The prophets warned that a day of the Lord was coming, a reckoning for oppression, idolatry, and bloodshed.

Strikingly, it is Jesus who speaks most often and most soberly of judgment, warning of a wrath to come and pleading with people to flee it. He does so not to frighten for its own sake but as a physician names a fatal disease, in love, so that we will seek the cure. And the New Testament reveals that this wrath, real as it is, is not God's final word or his deepest desire. He has no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn and live. His wrath is his strange work; his mercy is his delight.

Common misunderstandings

Many picture God's wrath as an angry deity lashing out, the very opposite of love. But this misreads it. God's wrath is not the failure of his love; it is love's refusal to make peace with evil. The two are held together in one holy character. The cross is where we see them most clearly not as rivals but as one: there wrath and mercy meet, and love bears the judgment itself.

Others swing the other way and deny God's wrath entirely, imagining a God who is only ever affirming and never opposed to anything. But a God incapable of wrath against genocide, abuse, and cruelty would be a moral nullity, not a loving Father. To remove his wrath is to remove his goodness. And some live in terror of it, forgetting that the whole point of the gospel is that the wrath we deserved has already fallen on Christ for all who trust him. Rightly understood, the doctrine of wrath does not drive the believer to despair but to the cross, and there to peace.

How wrath is held with mercy and fulfilled at the cross

Here is the very center of the good news. Our sin is real and God's wrath against it is just; if nothing were done, we would rightly face it. But God, being rich in mercy, did not leave us to that end. He set forth his own Son as the propitiation, the place where his righteous wrath against sin was borne and exhausted. On the cross Jesus drank the cup of judgment to the dregs, and cried out in the darkness the desolation our sins deserved, so that we might never face it.

So wrath and mercy are not two Gods but one, meeting at Calvary. God did not set his justice aside to be merciful, nor his mercy aside to be just; he satisfied his wrath in himself, in the person of his Son, and so is both just and the justifier of the one who believes. This is why there is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. The storm has already broken over his head; for those who shelter in him, only mercy remains. The wrath of God, honestly faced, drives us straight to the arms of the Savior who bore it.

How the wrath of God is seen and answered in Jesus Christ

It is in Jesus that we understand God's wrath rightly, for he both warned of it and absorbed it. He could blaze against hypocrisy and injustice, driving out those who made his Father's house a den of thieves, for he shares the Father's holy hatred of evil. Yet he wept over the very city that would reject him, longing to gather it as a hen gathers her chicks. Wrath and tears met in him.

And at the last he took the wrath upon himself. He who knew no sin was made sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. The judgment we could not survive, he bore, and rose again, so that death and wrath are behind him and behind all who are his. Being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. To flee to Christ is to pass from under the wrath of God into his everlasting love, and to find that the God we feared is the God who gave himself to save us.

A note offered humbly and for all Christians: God is one, simple, and undivided in his being, and these attributes are not parts of him but the one God seen from many sides. His holiness is loving, his love is holy, his justice is merciful, and his mercy is just. He is also greater than all our words, and no page can contain him. What we can say, we say only because he has graciously revealed it, above all in Jesus Christ, who is the image of the invisible God.

Related: The Justice of God · The Mercy of God · Who is Jesus? · All the attributes of God