Pastoral Resident Ryan Gawrych continues our Advent series, returning to Exodus 34:5-9, but focusing on the surprising good news of God's anger.
Well, some of you may be familiar with the name Christopher Hitchens. If you are, you've probably seen him on YouTube debating certain religious philosophers. If you're not, christopher Hitchens was a British journalist who moved over to America early in his career and he became most well known as a columnist for the Atlantic. He was really just a prolific writer, a brilliant thinker, just had a magnificent mind, but he was also the most influential atheist of the 20th and 21st century, and one of the last books Hitchens wrote just before he died in 2011 from complications with esophageal cancer.
Ryan:It was called God is not Great. God is not Great, and in that book he says this. He says the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, is one long nightmare in which a cranky God thrones over a chosen people that he incites to genocide. The New Testament may be even worse, since the allegedly so mild mannered Jesus preaches the condemnation and the punishments of hell. For Hitchens, God is angry, and that's not okay For many of us.
Ryan:An angry God is not okay either, if we're honest with ourselves. If we're honest, we're suspicious of a God who would dare call himself good and angry, and there are legitimate reasons for this. Perhaps some of us have parents in here who, growing up, handled their anger in a bad way or wrongly, and we learn to appease that anger and please them. And so now we map that onto God. And so if we're not doing everything right, we're just waiting for God to get angry. We're waiting to experience his wrath in our lives. Maybe you're so familiar with your own anger, your own lashing out, your own irritability, that you can't really even think up what good anger would look like. Anger is nothing but damaging for you. Or maybe you're experiencing intense suffering right now, maybe a cancer diagnosis, maybe maybe your son's not talking to you at the moment, strange relationships, and the question that keeps circulating in your head is God, are you mad at me? Well, we really don't need to be suspicious when it comes to God's anger. And here's why because he's not secretive about his anger at all. God is not secretive about his anger.
Ryan:David Palacen, in his book Good and Angry, puts it this way. He says no other person in history has ever allowed his or her anger to be so carefully detailed and held up for public inspection. No book ever written tells so much about one person's anger and portrays it as essentially incoherently good, never capricious, never irritable, never selfish. The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament that consistently build upon it offer an extended, coherent case study and other things. It's a case study in the inner workings and the outworking of healthy anger. Whatever you think about God, come and take a close look at the most famous angry person in history.
Ryan:God's anger is not something that we have to be ashamed of. It's not something that we have to tiptoe around. His anger can actually be celebrated because he says his anger is good. And we know that because that's what our text tells us this morning. In Exodus 34 we get some characteristics or attributes of God named for us, but in Exodus 33, he always says I'll pass by before you, moses, and he says all my goodness will pass by you, and that includes not just his mercy and his grace, which Damien unpacked last week, but somehow also his anger, particularly his slowness to anger. So the question for us this morning isn't just is God angry? I think we have enough warrant in scripture to be able to say conclusively he is angry. The question that we have to wrestle with this morning is how can it be good that God's angry? How can it be a good thing that God is angry? So let me offer four reasons this morning why God's anger is good. And here's the first it's necessary. It's needed.
Ryan:For many of us, the idea of an angry God is deeply offensive, the idea of a God who gets to decide what is right and wrong and then, when someone or one of us violates that right or wrong, actually gets mad at it. It seems archaic, it seems medieval, it seems old or outdated and we feel like we don't really need that kind of thinking anymore. We feel like we're basically good, that deep down at the core of each of us, we're good people and perhaps the only reason we're not really living up to our full potential is because we just have certain societal things that haven't been met yet. Maybe there are. If we just had racism under better control, or inequality or drug abuse, or if we could lessen the dial or lower the dial on poverty, we'd reach our full potential. Then we could fix all the things that are wrong with us. So what we need is not an angry God, we just need better systems.
Ryan:Divine anger is outdated in our minds and we've outgrown it. We feel we're sophisticated enough to know the difference between right and wrong. You know, it's interesting in our day and age that to be angry is almost always insulting. It's almost never good. Categorically in our minds we can conceive of good and bad anger. We were to press one another, we would say, yeah, I could see how anger could be good. I also have experience of bad anger, but our own experience and expression of anger is almost always bad. And so what we end up doing is we map that onto God and we think that the idea of a God who would admit to something as petty as anger is just so off-putting.
Ryan:I have a good friend and if you've been here for any time maybe the last year and a half since I've been a resident his name's Shay. He absolutely wouldn't mind me mentioning his name. We get coffee from time to time and win a garden at a little coffee shop called Oxham. And I asked Shay this week. I said hey, shay, I'm preparing a sermon this Sunday. Would you mind answering a question for me? I said what is conjured up inside of you when you think about a God who's angry? And he said well, ryan, you know me well enough now to know that I don't really subscribe to the idea of a God who could be angry. He's a mix of Buddhists and Hindu, and so that just doesn't work for him. But what caught me was he said it's just too human. He said it's too human. Well, that might feel intuitive and it might even sound compelling, but the fact is God's anger is needed. His anger is needed.
Ryan:I recently heard of a pastor friend of mine recommend a book on a podcast that I listened to a couple months ago, and it was a book called Exclusion and Embrace by a theology professor at Yale Divinity School named Miroslav Volf. Exclusion and Embrace and Miroslav grew up in Croatia during the fight for independence in the 90s and there was a lot of bloodshed during that time. And this is what he says in this book. He says the reason people in the West don't believe in God's anger or his judgment is because we're too sheltered. He says at one point in the book it's a belief that could only come from a quiet suburb, it's a belief you come to only if you haven't lived through genocide. And then he goes on to say listen, I know that Western theologians are gonna disagree with me here or might have a hard time with this, but imagine if you were articulating your belief that we don't need an angry God in the middle of a war zone.
Ryan:The truth is, it's not just that sad things happen in this world, it's that evil exists, like real, efficient, sick evil rulers of darkness, spiritual wickedness in high places that exists. Bad things happen not just because we haven't evolved or advanced yet or because we don't have the systems in place that we need, but because there's such a thing as wrong and that needs to be addressed. And in this broken world, sadly, too many wrong things never get made right. We have corrupt leaders who evade justice and get to retain power for far too long. On a more personal level, many of us have been wronged here and profound in deep ways, and they still haven't been righted.
Ryan:We need to know that there's a good and merciful God who also gets angry, that what upsets us and goes unnoticed or unpunished, he sees and, as our text this morning says well, by no means clear the guilty. That's a good thing. God's anger is needed. Secondly, god's anger is good because it's slow, because it's patient. If the first way of thinking says God's anger is good because he will make wrong right, what we can't do is ignore that the wrong that needs to be made right is actually living inside of us. We are the guilty. We possess in us the one thing that God has a right to get mad at, and that's sin. And so, for you and I, patience, or God's anger expressed as patience, is absolutely a good thing.
Ryan:Paul says in Romans five that sin came into the world through one man and death through sin. And so death spread to all men because all have sinned. And then he goes on to say that death reigned from Adam to Moses. Death reigned from Adam to Moses, even those who sinning was not like the transgression of Adam. Sin equals death. God has every right to be upset with us. We have infiltrated and corrupted his good creation, beginning with ourselves.
Ryan:But God says that he's slow to anger and quick to mercy. He's slow to anger and quick to mercy. The reverse should be true for us. If there's one thing that anger demands, it's actually fairness. Anger sees a wrong and says that needs to be made right. Instead, god actually treats us unfairly. He doesn't give us his quickness to anger, but his quickness to mercy, and he's slow to anger. He forgives us, and yet God would be totally just if he were the opposite. That would be totally right. But he doesn't treat us that way. We get God's patience.
Ryan:I mentioned David Pauluson and his book Good and Angry when we began, and he calls God's good anger. I wanna name this because I think it's a helpful term. He calls it his merciful displeasure. That's a helpful way to think of God's anger, his merciful displeasure, at least towards those who he calls his own, those who aren't living in continued, unrepentant sin, you might say those whose hearts are not hardened. It's his merciful displeasure that we experience. That's to say, you and I justly deserve anger and condemnation.
Ryan:But mercy's purposes control how God expresses his anger. Mercy's purposes control how God expresses his anger. In other words, god's anger is an expression of his mercy. If we leave here with nothing else this morning, that's what we have to know that God's anger is an expression of his mercy. He doesn't snap. He takes his time because God's not interested in destroying you, he's interested in destroying what's destroying you. That's what he's after. He's patient.
Ryan:Another way to think of God's patient is his willingness to work with wrong over time. His willingness to work with wrong over time. I can hardly think of a more vivid example of God's willingness to work with wrong over time than Peter, the apostle Peter. You may recall, peter denied Jesus three times on the eve of his crucifixion. The third time, luke actually tells us in Luke 22 that Jesus looked at him and I wonder what was in that look? I guarantee it wasn't a look of condemnation, it was a look of complete understanding. He knew that he would do that. He told him he would do that and he did. Peter felt the weight of that look, but it was a loving look. It was a mercifully displeased look. It was a look that would change Peter. And then, in an act of marvelous patience, jesus, after his resurrection, finds Peter and he undoes all that Peter did by asking him if he loves him three times. He was reiterating that he still loved Peter, that even what he did leading up to his crucifixion couldn't change that. And so Peter pays tribute at the end of his second letter to the amazing and spectacular patients of Jesus.
Ryan:And second Peter, three, eight to 10, and he says this do not overlook this one fact beloved that with the Lord, one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise, as some count slowness, but he is patient towards you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should find repentance, that Jesus is good and angry heart towards you, that all should reach repentance. That's really God's heart. He's slow to anger because he loves you. But it's worth noting that there is a way that we can experience God's patience as and not so helpful way. We can often experience God's patience as indifference, that he doesn't care, that his slowness, anger somehow means he's indifferent. But that couldn't be further from the truth.
Ryan:Patience is a curious response. I'll admit to being wronged, but it's the right response for a God who names himself merciful and gracious. It's what we would expect. So God's anger is consistent with his mercy and his grace. It's an expression of his love. He doesn't let evil hang around for no reason. He's working. He's working to make right what is wrong, despite how fast or slow we're experiencing it.
Ryan:Third, god's anger, or as we just called his merciful displeasure, shows us that we matter to him. It's revealing. Anger makes a value judgment. Anger tells us what matters to someone. It's the right response. It's the right response. It's the right response. It matters to someone. If you wanna know what matters to someone, just pay attention to what they get angry at. On the opposite end, pay attention to what someone doesn't get angry at, because the absent of anger doesn't mean doesn't equal good. That could also be just as bad. Anger makes a judgment.
Ryan:But in our minds anger and love are opposites. If God is loving, he can't possibly be angry. And if he's angry then he's either not God at least the God we thought we were worshiping or he's not loving. That's the way it works in our minds. We keep them in two separate categories. But the opposite of love is an anger. The opposite of love is indifference. The opposite of love says I don't really care. Imagine what it would have looked like if Moses had come down from that mountain or if God had seen what Israel was doing and he just said that's fine, I'm fine with that. Ben had named or labeled that illustration or that experience on the mountain of the golden calf as Israel violating their wedding vows on their wedding night. Could you imagine if God had responded that way, within difference? That would feel wrong. That would feel more wrong than reading of God's just and good anger.
Ryan:When I was younger some of you may know this it was my life's mission to become a professional baseball player. It didn't work out, obviously, but I came close. I got to play in college for a while and that was a win for me. But anyone who's really into sports and feels like they might have a chance to make it after high school, you do more than just play in high school, and for baseball, the regular season is in the spring and in the summer you typically travel into what's called showcases or camps. You visit universities and they have camps they're putting on and you take part in that and you showcase your skills. It's an opportunity to show both your talent and your work ethic, how hard you've been working, and basically to say in your performance I deserve to be here, and so you do that in the summer. Occasionally, you'll also play travel ball alongside your regular season high school games In the spring. Well, one particular summer my brother and I were visiting this college campus that we both really wanted to go to. I'm gonna leave it unnamed because I'm still a little bitter by the way it worked out, but we were up there and it was a camp in which we got to showcase our skills.
Ryan:And in baseball you basically showcase. There's two things you can showcase your offense and your defense. And so, offensively, they pull out a cage on the field and you take BP BP stands for batting practice and you have someone throwing hopefully they're good and accurate so you look good and you get seven to 10 pitches, typically three to four rounds. So you get like 20 to 30 swings to really show what you've got and convince these guys that you're worth pursuing. Well, the scouts and coaches were behind this cage and one of them I had my eye on and I really wanted to catch his attention.
Ryan:But after my first round I had the suspicion that he wasn't really paying attention to me. Maybe he was busy, maybe he was doing something more constructive, but whatever it was, I felt like he wasn't paying attention and so I went around the cage and I told myself that when I get the video afterwards, they would give you a video of your showcase so you could take it home and send it to other scouts if you wanted to. I was gonna look and see if he was looking to me at all while I was taking BP and he wasn't. He didn't look at one swing. Now there were other coaches that were doing that, but this guy I really wanted to have watch me. He didn't look at me at all, not once, and that landed really heavy on me. What it told me was that he really didn't care. As an athlete, you spend your entire life working for those moments to get seen and noticed, and I wanted real feedback from him and I didn't get it. It might seem a little heavy to say that he didn't love me well in that moment, but at least, at the very least, you could say he was indifferent. He was indifferent.
Ryan:The fact that God gets angry at all with us is actually a sincere form of flattery. Really it's a sincere form of flattery. It means he cares about us. The fact that God gets angry at you means you're worth caring about. You're worth getting angry over. Should think about that more often. We matter to him. God knows that the best thing for us in this life is to follow him. That's why Paul says that we are illegitimate children, not sons and daughters, if we are without discipline. We matter enough to God for him to get angry. His anger is not a contradiction of his love, it's an expression of it. Fourth, in love, god's anger works to disarm the power of sin in our life.
Ryan:In anger or, excuse me, in love, god's anger works to disarm the power of sin in our life. It's transforming. It's another way of speaking to sanctification. His hatred of sin is expressed for our well-being. He is for us. In the present God deals with indwelling sinfulness and he does this by his spirit, which he pours out in love over you and I as a burning fire against evil, which is so interesting to name it that way, as a burning fire, because God's anger is often noted or described as something that burns. But when you belong to him through Jesus, the burning you experience is the burning of sanctification of his merciful displeasure, the burning that refines what needs to be refined and even cinched within you. He does not destroy you. He destroys sin and he makes you new. Instead, fast love. He remakes you not by tolerating your sin that's not what God's doing but by hating your sin in ways, hopefully over time, through the process of sanctification, that you and I actually learn to love. Now, the process isn't always pleasant, but it's good. Sanctification is good.
Ryan:Michel Foucault was a French philosopher and activist during the post-World War II period and he wrote extensively on things like discipline and order and power, and I probably never would've heard of him. I don't want to discredit him and his work maybe I would have because he's rather prolific, but I took a class in seminary on prisons and I had to read this book. And so he wrote this book called Discipline and Punish, the Birth of the Prison, and this is what he says. He says discipline makes individuals. Discipline makes individuals. It is the specific technique of power that regards individuals both as objects and instruments of its exercise, both as objects and instruments. His point is that discipline is good. For us, discipline is good. It's a kind of medicine, you could say.
Ryan:We've described that throughout centuries, philosophers and theologians have described God's discipline, or fatherly displeasure as a type of medicine. But God's discipline doesn't come at us as slaves. Another way of saying that is Jesus isn't our jailer. We have a father, and Paul tells us that we have an older brother in Jesus, and both are working in perfect harmony to nourish and perfect our faith. They're for you, even in their anger, as those privileged to the grace of sanctification. God's destructive power works within you against what is wrong with you, and in his patient anger he doesn't just transform our relationship to sin, but he even transforms our relationship to anger, which I admit can be rather sinful.
Ryan:Now that kind of anger rightly recognizes. Excuse me, let me back up for a second. There's a false kind of anger. There's a false kind of anger I mentioned earlier on and perhaps the first point that we can conceptualize of a good and bad anger. But there's a false kind of anger, and the false kind of anger we can harbor says that if I don't get angry, nothing gets done. If I don't get angry, nothing gets done. In fact, when I do get angry, good things happen, and so that's what it means for anger to be good for me. Anger becomes our solution towards progress. That kind of anger rightly recognizes that anger can be constructive in many ways, but there's a danger in it.
Ryan:We feel like we have to get angry about everything, and when we feel like we have to get angry about everything, the oppressed can come to us. We're angry about everything, the oppressed can quickly turn into the aggressors. When we feel like we have to get angry about everything, when we see God's anger, and then we take that as a model, a bad form of it, or this false anger, and say that's what I need to do, I need to get angry about everything and make everything right, the oppressors quickly become the aggressors. Read any of the prophets, major and minor prophets. That's exactly what happened to Israel. Israel was the oppressed and then they became the aggressors.
Ryan:False anger, bad anger worked out, does not lead to good things. You end up becoming like the things that you once hated. But the beauty of God's good and patient anger is that he sees everything. God sees everything. The fact that we have a good and angry God actually means that we can relax a little bit. We can trust him to handle all wrongdoing. God will make all things right. God will make all things right. So God's anger transforms us by sanctifying us, and it also disarms us. It also disarms us. So those are four reasons why God's anger or his merciful displeasure is actually good. But the fact is none of those actually address the biggest problem of God's anger, which is not so much is God angry? I would suspect that the question most of us have when we think about God's anger is is God angry with me? Is God angry with me? That's really what it comes down to. When we think about God's anger, even after all the promises that have been spoken to us and over us, we still ask ourselves is God angry with me?
Ryan:It was Robert Louis Stevenson. You may know that name. If you don't. You certainly know one of his greatest works, treasure Island.
Ryan:He was a Scottish novelist who wrote in each of us, two natures are at war. Two natures are at war. The good and the evil lives inside all of us, all our lives. The fight goes on between them and one of them must conquer. But in our own hands lies the power to choose what we most want to be we are. There is good in each one of us, but there's also evil.
Ryan:Stevenson got that right. There's good in each one of us, but there's also evil. But left to ourselves we're powerless to fix that we will ensure our own ruin. Left to ourselves, that much is true, which means we all deserve God's anger and we're all helpless in avoiding its ultimate end, which is his just judgment and his wrath. And that's why there's actually a fifth reason to rejoice about God's anger, his good anger, and that's because God's anger falls on Jesus. God's anger falls on Jesus. The anger that your sin deserves falls on Jesus, not on you. It falls on the Lamb of God, which is the whole point of the feast that Israel has said to institute just before their deliverance from Pharaoh in Egypt, the whole point of that feast, the Passover to show them that God has taken the anger we deserve upon himself and delivered us. Friends, when God considers your failings, you have to know he remembers his mercy. When God considers your failings, he remembers his mercy, and that's why his wrath, or his anger, is actually our hope. It's good.
Ryan:There's a show on Netflix that my wife and I will frequent not with any sort of regularity, just sort of as we have time, although Sierra watches it a bit more than I do. Occasionally I'll hop in on an episode. I'm also gonna leave that unnamed because I don't want any judgment passed on us here. But in this particular episode, a fire is encroaching around this town and their people and their businesses, and it's threatening the town and if it's left untamed, this town is quickly gonna be consumed by this fire. And so when something like this happens, when there are these vast brush fires, firefighters come to the scene and they create what's called a backfire, and a backfire is set intentionally in order to stop the progress of approaching fire. It's an intentional fire set to stop the progress of an approaching fire, and in this particular episode it worked and the town was safe. And the reason that works is because fire can't burn the same thing twice. Fire cannot burn the same thing twice.
Ryan:Friends, the fire of God's anger has already landed on Jesus. We can take refuge there. Let's pray Father, we thank you for all your goodness. All your goodness, which includes not just your mercy and your grace, but also your just anger, your merciful displeasure. Show us this Advent season, as we celebrate the arrival of our Savior, that your wrath and your anger is truly our hope. Remind us that you are patient with us. We ask these things in your name, amen.