Is God Angry?
A close encounter with Christianity is an encounter with a God who is capable of anger. Whether we are reading about Moses pleading with a furious Yahweh who wants to wipe out the complaining Israelites and start all over in the book of Exodus (Exodus 32:10-11) or God’s general wrath towards stubborn and unrepentant people (Romans 2:5). The anger of God is not an uncommon theme in Christian theology, either, from Fire and Brimstone Baptist preachers to the famous sermon from the Great Awakening, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” by Jonathan Edwards. But it’s also not a distant theme in most of our lives as we continue to sin despite being made new in Christ. When we sin it can be difficult to see the infinite grace of Jesus’s death on the cross being offered to us. Instead, the angry face of God can loom menacingly over us even as we turn to His Word for comfort and the promise of forgiveness. Over time, we stop seeing anger as something God experiences in response to sin an...