The Fury of God
We Cannot Truly Understand God’s Love Until We Fully Understand His Fury
by
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Introduction
I. Why Engage this Topic?
Reason #1: We Cannot Truly Understand God's love, Until We Fully Understand His Fury.
The first, and most important, reason to engage the topic of God's anger is that His anger helps to magnify our understanding of His love. Perhaps one of the best ways to illustrate how God’s fury helps to magnify our understanding of God’s love is to simply hand the task over to the greatest communicator of Scriptural truth in the history of the world: Jesus.
“And Jesus answering said to him, "Simon, I have something to say to you." And he answered, ‘Say it, Teacher.’ ‘A certain moneylender had two debtors. One owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they could not pay, he cancelled the debt of both. Now which of them will love him more?’ Simon answered, ‘The one, I suppose, for whom he cancelled the larger debt.’ And he said to him, ‘You have judged rightly.’" (Luke 7:40-43)
Jesus taught that there is a direct relationship between the amount of debt forgiven and the amount of appreciation a person has for the one who forgave the debt. The Gospel is preached today as if mankind has a small sin. There is little, if any, appreciation for the sacrifice of Jesus Christ because there is little understanding of how much our sin angers God. When we fail to understand the degree of fury God has for our sin then we also fail to appreciate being saved from the judgment that results from His intense anger.
The more we understand what makes God angry, the more we will appreciate the fact that He sent His Son to die in our place. It is one thing to think of a loving, happy God sending His Son to help us out of our plight but it's another thing to consider a God who is angry with us and still sends His Son to die on our behalf. Simply put, we cannot truly understand God's love, until we fully understand His fury.
Reason #2: Society's Overemphasis on the Love of God at the Expense of the Wrath of God.
If you take a moment to turn on your computer and start browsing for Christian books online, you'll find a myriad of book titles. Likewise, if you go to any major book selling website and type in “Love of God”, you'll come up with thousands of search results. In fact, I just did this and I came up with 6,858 search results at ChristianBook.com. Now, if you type in “Anger of God”, then you'll get a few hundred search results at best. I did this as well and came up with 310 search results. That's not all. If you start looking at the books that are suggested, they aren't even books about the anger of God; but, rather, they are books about how to be delivered from anger or how to properly deal with anger as a Christian.
It was this simple fact that first drew me to this subject. The fact that there seems to be so little emphasis on the fury of God in the mainstream of Christianity bothers me immensely because the Scriptures emphasize God’s anger so much. Further, there seems to be an overwhelming amount of books, sermons, articles, and blog posts on the love of God which suggests to me that the Christian mainstream isn’t just missing the Scripture’s emphasis on God’s fury, but appears to be suppressing it intentionally. If they can see the Scripture’s emphasis on the love of God, how can they possibly miss the Scripture’s emphasis on God’s anger, wrath, and judgment? Due to this overemphasis on the love of God, at the expense of the wrath of God, there seems to now be an agreement between the secular view of God, the liberal view of God, and the Christian mainstream view of God, that He is loving and He's never angry.
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About the Book
Is God loving? The Bible says that God is love; however, it also portrays a God that floods the earth, takes the lives of the firstborn in Egypt, and lashes out time and again in His fury. How can a God of love be synonymous with the God of fury displayed in the Old Testament?
Are we fools? “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction” (Pro 1:7).
Twice in the Proverbs we’re told that the beginning of knowledge and wisdom is the fear of the Lord. Is it possible that we have become altogether ignorant simply because we’ve tossed out the Bible’s basic teaching on God’s fury? The Fury of God penetrates the paradox and shows that we cannot truly understand God’s love until we fully understand His fury.
If believers today are truly abiding in God’s Word, they will come face-to-face with the fury of God, and its truth will bring satisfaction to their souls. God’s people must know the truth. They longingly desire it. The truth is that our God is a consuming fire. He is a jealous God. He is a holy God. He is an unchanging God. He is a triune God. Our God is a God of fury. It is that God, the God of the Scriptures, whom I hope to resurrect in the hearts and minds of His people with this book.
About the Author
Pastor Jeremy J. Lundmark has served as the senior pastor at Community Baptist Church, Apalachin New York, since 2009. He has earned his BRE from Davis College in Johnson City, New York, and is presently pursuing his MMin at Baptist Bible Seminary in Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania.