How do you feel when you hear the day’s news—when you hear about brutal killings, or people running roughshod over the environment, or people being cheated and exploited? You likely feel anger, a sense of moral outrage!

Given the fact that human beings are continually doing rotten things, it is not surprising that the prophets of the Bible speak often about God’s wrath—or God’s anger in the face of human behavior.

But the wrath of God is only rightly understood when we remember that the primary Biblical image for God—particularly as it comes to clear focus in Jesus—is that God is our heavenly parent. When parents make a “wrathful response” to their children’s misbehavior—with a stern voice, a call for correction, perhaps a timeout or loss of privileges—they are in fact acting in love, seeking to bring about a needed change in their children, so that their children will live rightly. Likewise God’s wrath is the response of God’s love to human wrongdoing, with the aim that human beings will change their ways and get on the right track in life.

But what if we ignore such calls for correction? The prophets foresaw very negative consequences coming because human beings persist in sin. They began to speak of the “day of the Lord”—the day when God’s judgment would finally fall on human sin.

It all comes to a head in the cross of Jesus Christ. God’s judgment does fall—but rather than condemnation coming upon us, Christ takes the judgment for our sin upon himself, so that we can be forgiven and set right with God! The cross moves us finally to truly answer the call of the prophets—to “return to the Lord your God, for God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.” [Joel 2:12–13]

So in the face of human wrongdoing:

The prophets warn us about the consequences of ignoring God and persisting in sin
God acts through Jesus Christ, not to condemn us but to redeem us
As we put our faith in Christ, we are embraced by God’s mercy and can experience the Spirit of God at work within us, to renew us in God’s love

Sunday’s Scripture Readings:
Amos 5:18, 20
Joel 2:1–2; 12–13
Nahum 1:2–8
Zephaniah 1:14–18
Zephaniah 3:14–18
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About the Author

Dr. David A. Palmer has been the senior pastor at the United Methodist Church of Kent since 1995. He has a B.A. from Wittenberg University, a Master of Divinity from Duke University, and a Doctor of Ministry from Princeton Theological Seminary. A native of Wooster, Ohio, he has served three other churches in east Ohio before coming to Kent. He and his wife, Mavis, have three children.