Is God Angry? How to Think Biblically About Crisis and Judgment
I'm not connecting that not yet to the pandemic or the countries that were affected first or the lives that were lost. Is God angry when he looks across this world at all of the humans he has created and blessed with an eternal soul…
Begin with what is true
I'm not connecting that not yet to the pandemic or the countries that were affected first or the lives that were lost. Is God angry when he looks across this world at all of the humans he has created and blessed with an eternal soul and he examines the common and increasing behavior of people made in his image?
I'm not saying he's angry with everyone, nor even all the time, but consider this there are eight billion people right now on planet Earth, and only two billion, one quarter of us consider ourselves to be Christians.
See God more clearly
If you are a child of God, if you have been washed in the blood of the Lamb, if you are in fellowship with Jesus, God is not punishing you. This is not some discipline against you for the sins of your past, those have been taken away.
I'm not convinced, and maybe you can debate with me in another forum on this, that God punishes forgiven people.
Let faith shape the response
And then, as you moved through the Old Testament, you could read from Jeremiah or Haggai or any number of prophets in between, and you would find that a nation of Israel had turned away from God. They had replaced him with idolatry and served themselves and ignored him, and so he sent nations, like the Assyrians and the Babylonians, to punish, to kill, to enslave people who were his, but who had increasingly rejected him.
Not everyone in that nation had done so, and God went about protecting some people, like Jeremiah, and certainly the faithful in Israel during those periods of time, they were tested.
Live it today
If my neighbor comes to me and says, Hey Chris, I know you're a preacher and Christian, what do you think's going on with all of this? There are a lot of things I don't know, but I know that the only right outcome in any of this is for us to open the book, read it, and obey the God who made us all, who is certainly disappointed in the way that the world is living, and that our only chance at healing, at peace, and to live with true hope is to obey God and serve his son.
If anyone comes to you angry, mad at God, mad at the way things are, just ask them Have you tried obeying the gospel?
Take the idea with you.
- 01Where does the central idea of “Is God Angry? How to Think Biblically About Crisis and Judgment” show up most clearly in my life right now?
- 02What does this episode call me to believe, stop, start, or handle differently?
- 03What is one specific action I can take today instead of merely agreeing with the idea?
Listen to the original episode
This article was adapted from Is God Angry?. Continue with the podcast for the original teaching in Kris’s voice.
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