Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf (Yale University) wrote in Free of Charge:

I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? 

God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them.

My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry.

Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them?

Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.

Tim Keller quotes Volf in one of his sermons–I confess that I cannot find the quote or the sermon, if anyone knows either please help me out–where Volf says something like, “The only way for people to believe in a wrathless God is to close their eyes to the unjust suffering that people inflict on one another. Of course God gets angry. Otherwise, evil wouldn’t truly be evil.”

(The quote is really so much better than my memory of it; my apologies. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.)

And again according to Keller, he says something like: “It is only the view of those who are ‘safe’ in the suburbs, faculty lounges, and places of comfort who find the idea of God’s wrath offensive. But the people who are suffering and oppressed need a God who will stand up against evil, and that requires wrath.”

So: we NEED God’s wrath, even if it frightens or offends us. (The problem isn’t God, it’s us.)

Maybe my problem comes when I measure God’s wrath in terms of human wrath, MY wrath.

I know that MY wrath frightens me, and so I avoid it and suppress it. So in regard to God’s wrath, I do the very human thing of “creating God in my image”, thinking that God’s wrath is like my human wrath. And so, finding MY wrath frightening, I avoid and suppress the thought of a wrathful God.

But God’s wrath isn’t like my wrath. I’m selfish, frequently thoughtless, sometimes just plain stupid. Often I get things wrong by misjudging situations and misunderstanding peoples’ actions and motives. I make all kinds of wrong assumptions. My mind is a buffet of cognitive distortions. That’s why my wrath can’t be trusted.

God’s wrath isn’t like that. He’s NOT stupid or thoughtless, he is the opposite. His knowledge is perfect and he IS love.

So:

• God’s wrath is based on his perfect knowledge of people’s actions and intentions.
• His wrath must be in keeping with the center of his character. Love is not just something God does, it’s what he IS. He IS love. And because he IS love, his wrath is the impetus for his redeeming acts.

God allows us, even his people, to do horrible things. But he takes even those horrible things and weaves them into his redemptive plan, working all things together for our good.

Even for those who are not his people, and even in the worst cases, God is still working to redeem, calling perpetrators of even the worst injustice to repentance and restoration and healing. His wrath is part of that redemptive work, his characteristic intent is to redeem rather than to reject.

Volf again:

“The only way to avoid the question of God’s just wrath is to close one’s eyes to the world as it is—to the horrendous evil, the awful suffering, the great injustices. Not only do I not have a problem with the idea of God’s wrath, I need it. … The notion of a God without wrath who does not penalize evil is the notion of an impotent God, of a God who is not truly love.”