[Tuesday's Devotional] - Averting the anger of God

Does God get angry?  We might hear a lot about God's love in our churches these days, but we don't hear so much about his anger.  While the Bible does have quite a lot to say about God's anger, we must not get divine and human anger mixed up.

We are often angry when our pride is hurt.  Human anger can be unpredictable, selfish and sinful.  But God's anger is quite different.  His wrath does not explode like human anger; it is controlled, steady but unrelenting.  And his anger is always directed against the same thing: against evil.

As sinful people our sins ought to be the object of his righteous anger, but the Bible makes it clear that on the cross, it was Jesus who was the focus:

This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.  [1 John 4: 10]

The technical term for 'atoning sacrifice' is propitiation.  There is the sense of Christ appeasing or pacifying God's anger.

Our sins made us the target for the wrath of God; but Jesus, by bearing our sins, received the full force of that anger.  We see this in the cry of dereliction from the cross:  My God, my God why have you forsaken me?  The agony of the crucifixion was not merely in the physical pain that Jesus suffered (awful as it was), but in loneliness he endured as even the Father turned away from him.

Till on that cross as Jesus died,
The wrath of God was satisfied -
For every sin on Him was laid;
Here in the death of Christ I live.

Lord Jesus, thank you that although we deserved to be on the receiving end of the Father's wrath, you stepped in and died for our sins.

David Long