Lesson 5: “The Wrath of Divine Love”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine
Problems with this lesson:
- The lesson defines God’s wrath as the expression of divine love instead of as His response to persistent unbelief.
- The lesson explains God’s withdrawal from Israel as the consequence of their decisions, not as the fulfillment of His covenant terms.
- Adventism’s wrong definitions of sin and righteousness neutralize the seriousness of God’s wrath.
Adventism has always taught that God’s “wrath” is His eventually granting people their own choices to live apart from Him. No one, I was taught, goes to the second death unless he or she chooses to go. God is such a gentleman, Adventists often say in effect, that He does not force Himself on them. People are free to serve Him or not. He is long-suffering and patient, compassionate, forgiving over and over again, but some people just would not be happy in heaven with God for eternity, so they choose to go into the Lae of Fire and be annihilated instead.
Thus God’s wrath, from their perspective, is almost a passive, accidental outcome of His love and protection for the innocent victims of the perpetually rebellious. In protecting the suffering victims, sometimes God destroys the oppressors and perpetrators. Thus God’s wrath is in a sense the inverse reality of His love.
Incredibly, God is denatured by the Adventist worldview into a superhuman being with the power to overcome evil, yet He is so kind and good that His destruction of evil is actually the result of His protection of victims.
This view of God completely rejects the biblical revelation that every single human ever born—with the exception of the Lord Jesus—is dead in sin, and unless he believes in the Lord Jesus, the wrath of God remains ON each person. Each of us in born as a child of wrath, deserving of death.
In reality, God’s wrath is not merely the overflow of His protective impulses as He dismisses evil people from the innocent. God’s wrath is His settled disposition toward rebellious unbelief. He destroys the rebellious; He does not merely wait until they destroy themselves.
Evil Doesn’t Provoke God to Passion
Saturday’s lesson launches the week with a reactive God who responds to the injustices of His evil creatures. It turns God’s sovereign wrath into an emotional reaction against bullies and evil beings. Here is the last paragraph of Saturday’s lesson:
God’s anger is always His righteous and loving response against evil and injustice. Divine wrath is righteous indignation motivated by perfect goodness and love, and it seeks the flourishing of all creation. God’s wrath is simply the appropriate response of love to evil and injustice. Accordingly, evil provokes God to passion in favor of the victims of evil and against its perpetrators. Divine wrath, then, is another expression of divine love.
Right from the start, the lesson portrays God as reactive. The author actually says that “evil provokes God to passion…”
Nothing could be further from the biblical revelation of who God is! God is not somehow involved in human life and provoked, as we are, by the selfish cruelty of evil men and women and demons. God is sovereign OVER all creatures, including the demons, and He is not reacting to them.
God has the demons on a leash; they cannot move anywhere He does not permit them to move—and humans are the same. God does not permit anyone to sin successfully forever or to do the damage they would naturally do if left to their own devices. We know from the story of Babel alone, found in Genesis 11, that God judged the evil post-deluvian generations when they refused to fill the earth and subdue it as He commanded Noah after the flood. God confounded the languages of the Babel tower-builders:
And Yahweh said, “Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they have begun to do. So now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them.”—Genesis 11:6 LSB
God was completely in control. He stopped their evil plans because He knew they would be able to do whatever they purposed to do unless He intervened. He confounded their languages to stop them—and to preserve human life, protecting them from themselves. And He did all this so soon after His sovereign destruction of the world by a flood!
Adventism teaches that God is not responsible for the “bad things” that happen, yet God is sovereign over all humanity and the angelic realms. He is sovereign over all creation. Even the legion of demons that Jesus cast out of the Gerasene demoniac (Luke 8:26–39) did not have the permission to go where they wanted. They had to implore Jesus to permit them to enter the herd of swine—and they entered the pigs only when Jesus gave them permission!
No, God does not allow evil to play out according to its own desires in order to let it demonstrate how evil it really is. Rather evil is constrained by our sovereign God, and His wrath is already resting on all who have not believed (John 3:18, 36). His wrath is not the inevitable overflow of limits and discipline against those who hurt the “innocent”. Furthermore, there truly are no humans who are innocent!
And here is where Adventism reveals its unbiblical view of the nature of man.
Our Decisions Don’t Determine God’s Punishment
The lesson’s author continues this train of thought by building the point that sometimes God withdraws from His people because of their decisions, but if and when they call on Him, he delivers them faithfully and compassionately, over and over again.
The picture is that God is allowing people to freely practice whatever debased evil they wish to practice. His responses to them are based on their own decisions: they choose to leave Him, and He withdraws. They suffer oppression and cry to Him—and God is there. There is no sense of God’s being in charge of the dynamics between Him and His people; rather the people are steering this ship.
Here is what Monday’s lesson says:
The God of the Bible loves justice and hates evil. Sin and evil, therefore, provoke Him to passion, a passion expressed on behalf of those oppressed and abused, and even in cases in which one’s evil affects primarily oneself. God hates evil because evil always hurts His creatures, even if self-inflicted. In the biblical narratives, God is repeatedly provoked to anger by what biblical scholars refer to as the cycle of rebellion. This cycle goes as follows:
The people rebel against God and do evil, sometimes even horrendous atrocities, such as child sacrifice and other abominations in His sight.
God withdraws according to the people’s decisions.
The people are oppressed by foreign nations.
The people cry to God for deliverance.
God graciously delivers the people.
The people rebel against God again, often more egregiously than before.
In the face of this cycle of egregious evil and infidelity, however, God repeatedly meets human unfaithfulness, but with unending faithfulness, long-suffering forbearance, amazing grace, and deep compassion.
First, notice again that this quote says that God is proved to passion by sin and evil. This assumption makes God no better than a super human affected by powers beyond Him. He, like we, can be hurt, angered, or impassioned by powers outside Himself.
No! God is outside of creation. He is the sovereign Creator, and evil is merely a tiny subset of creation. Satan is God’s monkey, not a cosmic power in competition with God. He is contained and limited by His own Creator, and evil does not provoke God to passion. Furthermore, God is not moved to do things He wouldn’t otherwise think to do when He sees suffering.
God is not surprised by anything that occurs within creation because He is sovereign OVER it.
Second, the author refers to a phenomenon illustrated clearly in the book of Judges. After Israel went into the land but before they had fully conquered all the nations in Canaan, and long before there was a monarchy, the Israelites went through what are sometimes called the “Seven Cycles of Sin”. The author introduces this cycle by stating, “God withdraws according to the people’s decisions.”
From the first step of the cycle, the author attributes the people with the power and authority to make God “move”. From there the author says the people are oppressed by foreign nations, but they cry out to God for deliverance, and He graciously delivers them. Then they people rebel again—even more egregiously.
The way these cycles of sin are represented here make God the responder and the people the agents in charge. Compare the way the lesson describes this with this passage from GotQuestions.org:
Israel would fall into sin. God would send another nation to judge them. Israel would repent and call upon the Lord. The Lord would raise up a judge to deliver them. They would serve the Lord for a while and then fall back into sin again. And the cycle would continue.
Notice that God is never described here as RESPONDING to Israel’s decisions. His withdrawal was not the consequence of their decisions. Rather, Israel simply would “fall into sin”. Notice further that the lesson never mentions “repentance”. Yet the Bible clearly describes the people calling on God in repentance. They didn’t merely call on Him only to have Him graciously show up and deliver them.
Further, God’s deliverance of them always involved raising up an Israelite to act as their judge. God established a man who would act as their leader who rallied the men to defeat the enemy.
The biblical cycles of sin included the prominent rebellion of Israel, but they also included repentance and a return to God and the raising up of a man who trusted God and did His will in leading Israel to victory.
The lesson’s author completely overlooks the fact that the people did not facilitate God’s withdrawal. In fact, this repetitive cycle of sin perfectly reflected the terms of the covenant God established with Israel.
He promised that if they honored Him and kept His covenant, He would bless them. If they did not keep His covenant, He would bring curses and invasions upon them.
God’s “withdrawal” from the people was not His response to their decisions. It was His faithfulness to His own covenant promises. God was doing exactly what He told Israel He would do. He not Israel, was in charge of His discipline of the nation. Deuteronomy 28: 15, 16 says this:
“But it will be, if you do not listen to the voice of Yahweh your God, to keep [and] to do all His commandments and His statutes with which I am commanding you today, that all these curses will come upon you and overtake you:
“So all these curses shall come on you and pursue you and overtake you until you are destroyed, because you would not listen to the voice of Yahweh your God to keep His commandments and His statutes which He commanded you.”—Deuteronomy 28:15, 16 LSB
God did not leave because of people’s “decisions”; He sent afflictions exactly as He promised He would. God, not Israel, was the acting agent in the afflictions that came upon Israel.
Furthermore, these cycles of sin were unique for Israel. God had a covenant with them, and He kept His terms of the covenant exactly as He promised.
God did not behave this way with the unbelieving gentiles in Canaan with whom He did not have a covenant. Even further, in the New Testament, God has a new people: the church. God does not have a conditional covenant with the church which states that He will “withdraw” and send curses if we disobey. Rather, the Lord Jesus has fulfilled in Himself all the terms of that covenant God made with Israel, and when we trust Him, we are placed in Christ. We are no longer in the domain of darkness but are transferred to the kingdom of the Beloved Son.
The terms of “blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience” that defined the covenant with Israel was entirely fulfilled in the person of Christ. Now, when we are in Him, all the benefits of His having taken the death penalty for our sin and of breaking that curse of death in His resurrection—those blessings now belong to us.
When we are in Christ, there are no more covenant terms of judgment. The judgment has all fallen on Christ! We are in Him, seated at the Father’s right hand.
In the new covenant, there are no cycles of sin which God is keeping with people. Rather He calls on everyone to believe. Those who do not believe are already condemned; those who believe pass out of death into life.
God’s wrath can only be understood by looking at Jesus on the cross—yet the lesson never mentions the cross.
Here is what the Bible says about God’s wrath and the difference it makes to believe:
“He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.”—John 3:18 LSB
“He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.”—John 3:36 LSB
The lesson’s idea that God’s “wrath” is the overflow of His protection of the innocent and the result of man’s decisions to pull away is simply unbiblical. It makes God the servant of man, the facilitator of human decisions. It makes the relationship between God and man exactly upside down and backwards.
No Understanding of Nature of Man
Finally, Adventism’s unbiblical view of the nature of man is the underlying foundation that supports this insipid view of God’s “wrath” as being the reaction to evil.
The Bible tells us that God’s wrath currently rests on all people who do not believe. Even more explicitly, here is Romans 1:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.—Romans 1:18, 19
The fact is that because of Adam’s legacy, every human born is born spiritually dead:
And you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all also formerly conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.—Ephesians 2:1–3 LSB
God’s wrath rests on everyone who does not believe. When we see that the Lord Jesus came and fulfilled the covenant God made with Israel in every detail, when we see that He became the promised Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world and that He broke death by rising from death—we are made spiritually alive and are no longer under God’s wrath.
God’s wrath is indivisibly connected to all of His attributes; His love includes His justice, mercy, wrath, compassion, mercy, and grace. Yet it is not our capricious decisions that determine whether He expresses His wrath or not. His eternal promises and our spiritual life or death are what determine the expression of God’s wrath.
He is sovereign. He will destroy evil in His time exactly as He describes in Revelation. His wrath is real and is not determined by any reaction on his part.
It is the reaction of His holiness to the spiritual death of unbelief. God cannot excuse our unbelief, and it is not mere “decisions” that determine whether His wrath spills over onto evil.
Furthermore, God’s compassion for the suffering is not the inverse of His wrath. His wrath is His fixed response to the rebellion of persistent unbelief.
Because Adventism refuses to teach that humanity is by nature dead in sin and under the wrath of God, they twist the nature of man and the nature of God. They force God and man into an egalitarian relationship of reciprocity instead of man being subject to the Creator’s total sovereign authority.
God’s wrath is real, and it will ultimately destroy evil.
Finally, Thursday’s lesson says,
While God eventually brings judgment against injustice and evil, Christ has made a way for all who believe in Him. Indeed, it is “Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come” (1 Thess. 1:10, NKJV; compare with Rom. 5:8, 9). And this is according to God’s plan: “For God did not appoint us to wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thess. 5:9, NKJV). Divine wrath is not nullified, but those who have faith in Jesus will be delivered from such wrath because of Christ.
In what way has Christ’s atonement upheld justice while also delivering us from wrath?
They finally say that Christ is the “way out” of experiencing God’s wrath, but the cross and the gospel are never mentioned. Instead, this last paragraph is followed by an indirect reference to “Christ’s atonement”. What does that mean?
Jesus’ blood is not discussed; His death, burial, and resurrection are never mentioned. Rather His “atonement” upholding justice is a point of conversation. Within an Adventist framework this reference can only point to the investigative judgment where Jesus is supposedly applying His blood in an ongoing atonement to every confessed sin of the obedience Sabbath-keepers who are perfecting their adherence to the law!
Within Adventism, these references are understood—and Jesus’ complete, once-for-all atonement on the cross is not in view. Within the Adventist worldview, Jesus’ atonement was NOT completed at the cross. There is no call to repentance to trust in Jesus’ substitution for us to His complete payment for sin—because they do not believe that to be true!
I appeal to any Adventist or former Adventist who may still not understand their own sinful nature or God’s sovereign power: get a notebook, and begin copying the book of Hebrews. Discover who Jesus really is and how He is greater than the law in every detail. Learn how and why He became a man, and ask Him to be your Savior. Come to Him in repentance and ask Him to forgive your sins.Ask Him to show you the truth about your own nature and about His completed atonement, and believe.
Believe that He carried your sins in His body on the cross and that He took God’s wrath in Himself as He hung between heaven and earth. See Him rise from death and receive His resurrection life transferring you out of the domain of darkness into the kings of the beloved Son.
Believe in Jesus today, and you will know what it means to be delivered from God’s wrath—His settled disposition against unbelief and rebellion.
Believe in Jesus today—and pass today into eternal life with Jesus. †
This weekly feature is dedicated to Adventists who are looking for biblical insights into the topics discussed in the Sabbath School lesson quarterly. We post articles which address each lesson as presented in the Sabbath School Bible Study Guide, including biblical commentary on them. We hope you find this material helpful and that you will come to know Jesus and His revelation of Himself in His word in profound biblical ways.
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