Friday, April 25, 2014

The Truth About the Wrath of God


Nobody likes the thought of God's wrath; people get really angry about it. That should give you a clue as to what God's wrath really is.

The wrath of God is that great gaping chasm between you and Him, and how you really feel about it deep within your unconscious. It is you standing on the lip of that bottomless pit, and some joker coming up behind you, pushing you and holding you back saying, "Saved you!" with a gormless grin on his face. And that joker is you. Remember this seven-word mantra: You are being lied to, by yourself.

It is the feeling of having someone's hand clamped over your nose and mouth. It is you believing you deserve to be thrown into the abyss, forever falling, always wanting it to end, but it never does. It is guilt and punishment and pain. It is wishing someone else could be thrown into the pit, that they suffer, and that they know it. It is wishing God himself be thrown in. And, when we feel like this we turn to other things to fill the yawning maw, or we collapse in on ourselves like a manic depressive black hole.

The wrath of God is not God's wrath, it is man's. Man has plenty enough anger to go around. Plenty enough anger to keep this world in a state of perpetual terror. God's wrath is me; it is you; it is him, her and six billion other people.

"Comfort, comfort my people," says your God (Isaiah 40:1)

Without presuming that God could never get angry, of this we can be certain: God has never drowned a world of mankind; he has never killed a nation's first-born; he has never had the ground open up and swallow down hundreds of men and women; he has never slaughtered whole families, or been complicit in genocide, or had fire rain down from heaven. God is love, not fear. The fear is all our own.

God wants to offer comfort. He wants every valley to be raised up, every hill to be made low. In other words, in Jesus' words, he wants mountains to be moved. He wants the abyss to be filled. The book of Revelation has the great dragon being dumped into the abyss, and a lid being slammed shut on him. Satan is our own chaos, the lies we tell ourselves, the slander, our opposition to God. Deal with that, sort that out and our pathway to God is made smooth. The word "comfort" can otherwise be translated, "Repent!" And, believe me, repentance doesn't mean what you think it means.

So, what are you angry about? What is your IQ - your irritability quotient? What sparks you off? What are you frustrated about, scared about, ashamed of? Get to the bottom of that and you can be one person closer to ridding the world of "God's Wrath". And if you say, "I'm not angry about anything," then you need to go back to the seven-word mantra. Have it printed on a mug, on a t-shirt, on a poster.

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