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A correct view of God's nature and character draws us into His loving arms and causes us to rest in His loving kindness. Many people get confused on this issue when they read or they hear something referenced in a sermon where the Bible refers to the wrath of God. It's my view that the enemy of our souls has created a spiritual fog around the true nature and character of God, and he uses this misconception to further his ends.
The truth I'm about to share with you has the power to lift that fog and help us think and see more clearly on this issue. It has the power to set us free. Let's talk about it.
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Welcome to the Christian Healthy Lifestyle podcast, where I help you navigate natural health so you can stay out of the doctor's office, age gracefully, and live a more purpose-driven life. I'm your host, David Sandstrom. This is part four in my series on the spiritual component of health. This mini-series was inspired by Charlie Kirk's assassination, and I feel more motivated to proclaim truth, no matter how controversial that truth may sound.
If you're a regular listener to the show, you know that the foundation of health and wholeness starts with our spiritual condition. Our spirit is designed to be connected to God. When our spirit is animated by the Holy Spirit, our spiritual state is healthier and stronger. A healthy spirit will animate our minds in healthy ways, and a healthy mind will animate our brains in healthy ways, and the brain runs the body. That's true wholeness, and it's part of our divine design.
The level of connectedness with God we enjoy is largely determined by our understanding of his fundamental nature and character. Do we see God as a safe, benevolent, loving father? Or do we see him as an angry deity ready to send lightning bolts our way when we mess up? A correct view of God's nature and character draws us into his loving arms and causes us to rest in his loving kindness.
The latter view causes us to be afraid of God and it pushes us away. If we're afraid of God, we'll want to keep him at a safe distance. We shouldn't apply human standards when we form our view of who God is. God's not a traffic cop hiding behind the trees hoping to catch us speeding so he can write us a ticket. He's our loving Heavenly Father that always has our best interest in mind. Many people get confused on this issue when they read
or they hear something referenced in a sermon where the Bible refers to the wrath of God. It's my view that the enemy of our souls has created a spiritual fog around the true nature and character of God, and he uses this misconception to further his ends. A.W. Tozer said in his book, Knowledge of the Holy,
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The gravest question before the church is always God Himself. And the most pretentious fact about any man is not what he at any given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. In other words, what we believe about God will shape us as individuals, and it has far-reaching impact on our relationship with Him and how we live our lives.
So we should be very careful about forming a belief that pigeonholes us into believing things about God's character that aren't consistent with Scripture as a whole. I believe there's some fundamental truths that Christian teaching has gotten wrong, and those errors create a distorted view of God's character and his true nature. Those distortions keep us from experiencing all the connectedness we're supposed to be enjoying with Him.
One of those misconceptions is centered around what the Bible calls the wrath of God. We mistakenly believe that God's law operates like man-made law. That leads us to a slippery slope in theology that forces us to conclude, yes, God is love, but He's also just, and His justice requires Him to enforce punishment on people who break His law. You know, the wrath of God and all that. The wrath of God is clearly defined for us in Romans chapter 1.
Romans 1 18 says, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. The wrath of God is God removing his hand of protection and allowing us to experience the consequences of our poor choices. Sure, God forgives our sins, that's certain, but he doesn't spare us from the consequences of.
God gives us over to our poor choices. In Romans 1, Paul repeats himself three times for emphasis. verse 24, therefore God gave them over to the lust of their hearts to impurity. Then in verse 26, God gave them over to degrading passions. Verse 28, God gave them over to a depraved mind. When I was in college, my professors would often do a review before the midterm or the final exam.
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And when they got to something that they knew was going to be on the exam, they'd stomp their foot. And they do a little emphasis to let us know that you're probably going to see this again because this is important. Well, the Apostle Paul is doing a little foot stomping here with his repeating of that phrase, God gave them over. In the Old Testament, this concept of God allowing us to experience the consequences of our choices is called blessing and cursing. Just read Deuteronomy 28. In the New Testament, it's called sowing and reaping.
This is the law of the harvest, Galatians 6, 7, and 8. God is not mocked. Whatever a man sows, this he will also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will reap eternal life. It's the path we choose that determines our outcomes. God gets no pleasure in seeing us suffer from our rebellion. He doesn't punish us for our poor choices. It breaks his heart.
Think of it this way. If you're a parent and you told your child not to play in the street and they disobeyed your instructions and they did it anyway and they got hit by a car and you look out the window and you see your child laying on the ground bleeding with broken ribs and a collapsed lung, what would your first reaction be? Would you go out there with a paddle and spank their bottom for disobeying you? Of course not. Your love
and your concern for your child's well-being would give you a strong motivation to get them to the emergency room as quick as you could where they can get the appropriate care. God is no different. But God gives us a tremendous amount of freedom. He preserves our free will. He won't force himself on anybody, and he always respects our individual liberty. That's what true love does. It's as if God is saying to us,
I prefer you do things my way, but if you choose not to and you do things your way, I promise you're not going to like it, but you're free to choose. When we suffer from our poor choices, we're experiencing the wrath of God. It's as simple as that. Now, someone might be saying right now, what about events like the great flood and Sodom and Gomorrah? Those events were not God acting like an angry tyrant and wiping out people in a fit of rage.
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With the great flood, God was displaying great patience and mercy. It's estimated that it took Noah about a hundred years to build the ark. All the while, his neighbors were laughing at him and mocking him. It's gonna rain. There's no such thing as rain, Noah. Now think about it. God's commitment was and still is to save the human race from death, the natural consequence of sin. And the Bible says that the entire human race had become corrupt.
and their minds were consumed with nothing but evil thoughts except for one man, Noah. If God had allowed Noah to die, the human race would have been lost forever. So in order to preserve the human race and save the bloodline for the coming Messiah, God waited until the very last minute. He waited until there was only one righteous person left on planet Earth. Then and only then did he choose to
The Great Flood was an incredible act of patience and mercy. I used to think, why didn't God just allow everyone to die and then create a new Adam and Eve and start over? That would be like saying to a neighbor, my child is missing. Can you help me find them? And the neighbor responds with, why are you so upset? You can replace that kid. You can have more children. That would be ridiculous, right? God is our loving Heavenly Father, and he feels the same way about
He doesn't want to see a single person lost. That's why he went to great lengths to save the human race. The great flood was not the wrath of God. The great flood was God acting therapeutically like a surgeon cutting off a limb infected with gangrene. As drastic as cutting off a limb sounds, it saves the life of the infected person. God spared the entire human race with the great flood.
Now, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was a very similar principle. God was acting to restrain evil and limit the harm that that evil would bring. That wasn't the wrath of God. To believe that it was is to believe those events were God acting out in human fashion. You see, when we feel wronged or we feel we've been offended in some way, we tend to get angry and our sinful nature
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tells our revenge to rise up inside of us. And then we feel there must be some form of restitution here. We've got to make things even. That's not the way God reacts. In God's economy, He's not concerned about fairness or evenness. He's concerned with acting in harmony with His fundamental nature, which is love. When Jesus was with the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane and the soldiers arrived to arrest Jesus,
Peter acted in human fashion and cut off one of the soldier's ear with his sword. What was Jesus' reaction? He told Peter, put your sword away. Do you not think that I could call on my father and he would at once put at my disposal 12 legions of angels? How then will the scriptures be fulfilled? Our Roman legion in Jesus' day was about 6,000 soldiers. And then Jesus proceeded to perform a miracle and attached the soldier's ear back.
not by power, not by might, but by my spirit, says the Lord of hosts. That's Zechariah 4.6. God always acts in ways that are consistent with his fundamental nature and character, which is love. A few hours after the encounter with the soldiers in the garden, Jesus was falsely accused in a sham trial, and the people he came to save called for his execution. And then when Jesus was crucified, he was mocked.
spat upon, sucker punched with a hood over his head, given a crown of thorns, had nails driven through his hands and feet, stabbed in the side with a spear, hanging on the cross, suffocating and bleeding out, what were Jesus' words? Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing. What incredible love! God doesn't act out in anger the way we would.
There's one more point I want to make here. The King James Version of the Bible often mentions having a fear of God. That's 16th century English, and using a modern vernacular from our point of view, that can cause confusion. To have a fear of God is to behold Him in a state of awe and amazement. It's not being afraid of Him. If you've ever stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon or stood out and looked at Niagara Falls, you know what awe is.
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It's when something is awesome. To fear God is to behold His awesomeness. That experience should bring us more respect for Him. And that respect for God should create in us a desire to draw closer to Him, not run away from Him. But Dave, sometimes God does get angry. God's anger is a holy anger, and it's directed at sin, not sinners.
Think of it this way, I'm going to use an illustration. If you were attending a church service and someone in the audience heard something that they thought wasn't consistent with Scripture, and they got up, hollered at the pastor, knocked over the lectern that he was preaching from, kicked over some chairs, would that cause people to feel safe around that person? Or would you run for cover? Well, Jesus did something very similar in the temple court.
When Jesus overturned the moneychanger's tables in the temple court, he was angry. Yet the biblical account says that at that moment, the children were drawn to him and they worshipped him. In the middle of all that chaos, the children felt safe in Jesus' That's because they knew his anger was righteous anger and directed at the inappropriate behavior, not them. They felt, and rightly so,
that Jesus was defending them and protecting them, and he was. Do you see the difference between a holy anger and a human anger? God's holy anger makes the vulnerable feel safe. And by the way, as followers of Jesus Christ, we are his children. When we suffer from our poor choices, God doesn't get angry at us and inflict punishment. When our poor choices naturally cause us harm, we're experiencing the wrath of God.
It's as simple as that. We experience the wrath of God when we persist in behavior that is out of alignment with the way God designed reality to work. I hope that helps clear up some of the confusion around this phrase, the wrath of God. I hope you've got a clearer picture of who God is and it causes you to run to Him just like the children did in the temple court. Well, that's it for now. If you know somebody you think might appreciate this life-giving message,
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Would you share the show with them? I sure would appreciate that. The number one way someone discovers a podcast is a friend tells them about it. So help me spread this life-giving word. Now be sure to tune in for the next episode. I'm planning on tackling an even more controversial subject, and that is what happens to non-believers when they die. Is there a lake of fire? And how do we reconcile that with all that we've been discussing here? We'll cover that in the next episode. That's it for now.
Go out there and live abundantly. I appreciate you. I'll talk with you next time. Be blessed.
