We know about the love of God but why don't preacher teach about the wrath of God? It is another side to our Loving God. I am talking about the wrath of God. The God in the Old Testament. The one that did not tolerate sin in the least. What about that God! no materialist here.
God’s wrath comes about because God’s holiness and love have been violated by the sinfulness of man. Human beings who live their lives apart from God are really hateful in away. This means people living this way are actually the enemies of God. Since mankind assaults everything good and pure that God is and stands for, he cannot but be in opposition to man’s way. This holy and loving opposition to sinfulness in every form is called “God’s wrath.” God is sinless is perfect Holy Being by nature. If He did not oppose sinfulness in man, He would not be God. If He was not wrathful and warring against sin, God would then, in effect, be saying that sinfulness is not evil and can be tolerated. That would be a lie, because sinfulness is evil. But God cannot lie and be untrue to His essential Being, which is Holy and Loving. God's action flow out of His love for man, which is the essence of His being. God expresses His love in that He continues to hold up His creatures freedom to choose for or against Him even while they sin against Him and hate His way. God has supremely expressed this love by sending His Son, Jesus Christ to pay the penalty of sin and to end sinfulness. Human beings who are “in Christ” (Romans 8:9-11) are saved from wrath through Jesus’ redemptive work and in the indwelling Holy Spirit, who transforms us. They are now at peace with and reconciled to God. This reconciliation involves a turning to God and a turning away from everything that is an idol in human life and the world (1 John 2:15-17) Salvation is God’s rescue program in Christ –“who rescues us from the coming wrath” (1 Thessalonians 1:9-10). To repeat, human beings by nature are God’s enemies and this animosity causes a necessary and spontaneous countermeasure from a holy and loving God – his wrath. But from the beginning, God has purposed out of his love to end the human-caused wrath through sin by the saving work of Christ. It is through God’s love that we are reconciled to him in his own saving work in the death and life.
When we read the New Testament statement that God so loved the world that he sent his Son – and that whoever believes in him will not perish (John 3:16) – we are to understand from this very act that God is “wrathful” against sin. But in his war against sinfulness, God does not condemn sinful man, but saves him from it for reconciliation and eternal life. God’s “wrath” is not intended to “condemn the world,” but to condemn and destroy the power of sin in all its forms so that humans may have an eternal relationship of love with him.
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