[God said to Moses]I’ve been watching the Israelites, and I’ve seen how stubborn and rebellious they are. So don’t try to stop me! I am going to wipe them out, and no one on earth will remember they ever lived. Then I will let your descendants become an even bigger and more powerful nation than Israel. [Moses said] Fire was raging on the mountaintop as I went back down, carrying the two stones with the commandments on them. I saw how quickly you [Israel] had sinned and disobeyed the LORD your God. There you were, worshiping the metal idol you had made in the shape of a calf. So I threw down the two stones and smashed them before your very eyes. I bowed down at the place of worship and prayed to the LORD, without eating or drinking for forty days and nights. You had committed a terrible sin by making that idol, and the LORD hated what you had done. He was angry enough to destroy all of you and Aaron as well. So I prayed for you and Aaron as I had done before, and this time the LORD answered my prayers. It was a sin for you to make that idol, so I threw it into the fire to melt it down. Then I took the lump of gold, ground it into powder, and threw the powder into the stream flowing down the mountain.
–Deuteronomy 9.13-21 (CEV)

If you do not take sin and the wrath of God seriously, chances are you will never take Lent seriously, let alone the Christian faith. In the west, at least, we have been conditioned to believe the lie of human self-improvement propagated by Enlightenment thinking. In buying the Enlightenment’s now debunked view of human progress, we have elevated ourselves to an unrealistic and unhealthy position before God and forgotten how grievous sin is to our Holy God. Neither is a good thing since both make us blind to the terrible reality of God’s wrath toward us without an adequate solution to turn it away.

Passages like today’s make us terribly uncomfortable, don’t they? They offend our modern senses. We don’t like to think that God sees our sin as ongoing rebellion against him. The thought of an angry God makes us uncomfortable, in part, because we have seen our own anger and it is generally an ugly, ugly thing. We’d rather think of God as being loving and merciful, which of course he is. But God is also perfect, just, and holy. And because he is holy he cannot tolerate sin in his presence and is implacably opposed to it in any form. The holy and the profane simply cannot coexist. However, before we are too critical about this notion, consider this. If you want to live forever in God’s New Creation where there is no death, suffering, or imperfection, you have to rid it of every trace of sin because sin perforce leads to death.

We see this illustrated in today’s story. God has chosen and called out his people Israel to be agents of his redeeming love for God’s broken and hurting world. In this particular context, God is continuing to make manifest his call to his people by bringing them out of their slavery in Egypt and leading them to his promised land where they can get to work on his behalf. But despite God’s mighty deeds and acts, Israel decides that she needs other gods beside God. In making idols, Israel has violated the Prime Directive, so to speak. How can she love God with her whole being if she is worshiping idols? Likewise, how can we?

And lest we think that we are beyond idolatry, think again. Sure, we’ve gotten much more sophisticated in making our idols. We typically don’t build golden calves anymore but we have our idols nevertheless. Money, sex, power, fame, prestige, popularity, and materialism are among those idols we commonly worship today and they take our focus away from loving and worshiping the one true God. That, in turn, arouses God’s anger against us. But why? Is God just a cosmic bully who is out of sorts and cannot take a joke? Is he just some prig who cannot stand to see anybody having a little fun?

No. God’s anger is aroused when we rebel against him because God created us to have a relationship with him, a relationship not of equals but between Creator and his creatures where we love and enjoy him. And because he loves us and wants us to live, when we rebel against him, it arouses God’s wrath against us and puts us in mortal (and eternal) danger.

But this latter notion turns us off. Many of us just cannot accept the notion of a wrathful God. Yet if we think about it for a moment it makes sense. There are not many of us who don’t understand how a rebellious child can incur the wrath of his parents. When parents really love their kids, they want the best for them and when the child continuously rebels against her parents and does whatever she pleases, even if it means bringing her harm, this will typically make the parents angry.

Of course, we have to be careful and not take this analogy too far because God’s wrath is holy and not imperfect as sinful human anger and wrath usually are. But the point remains valid nevertheless. Rebelliousness on the part of the beloved can incur the wrath of the lover, especially when the rebelliousness is destructive and aimed at the lover. If we understand this dynamic in the context of parents and their rebellious children (which is really what sin is in the biblical sense), then why are we incredulous when considering the wrath of God? Do we think that God really does not love us or are we really elevating ourselves to a position of being equal with God? Either way, we are asking for trouble. Denying God’s wrath does not make it any less real.

However, if by God’s grace we are able to develop a healthy theology of God’s wrath, we are now in a position to take Lent seriously because we begin to see the terrible and hopeless plight of the human condition. We understand that without radical help, we are lost and without hope. But of course we do have hope because we believe we have received radical help, and no less from God himself! We have seen the cross of Jesus and we believe that in Jesus’ death, God himself has borne the brunt of his own wrath, satisfying it completely.

All this should stop and make us think about what Lent is all about and why we must observe it. When we have an adequate concept of sin and understand how grievous it is to God–and if we really love him–then we will have real sorrow for all that we have done to demonstrate our rebelliousness toward God. Just like we behave toward our loved ones, at least when we are at our best, we want to behave in ways that are pleasing to God, precisely because we do love him, and are grieved when we do things that we know will both sadden and anger him. And so we try to stop doing those things that we know are displeasing in his sight. In traditional terms, this is called “repentance.”

But you cannot repent if you do not really believe you have done anything wrong in the first place.

I am not talking here about following a bunch of arbitrary rules. Instead, I am talking about keeping the Big Picture in mind of loving God first and demonstrating our love for him by loving others as we do ourselves. Why is the latter important? Because every other human, like us, is made in God’s image and when we act badly toward others, we are therefore acting badly toward God. When we act selfishly and maliciously toward others, we are essentially saying that God’s Image in others really isn’t important enough to be loved and respected at all times. So real repentance, aided by the grace of God’s Holy Spirit living in us, will always involve a reorientation away from our self-centeredness and toward God and others so that we can demonstrate our love for God, in part, by fulfilling the two Great Commandments. This is also why self-denial is emphasized during Lent because it helps us break our self-centeredness.

In sum, reflecting on the wrath of God is never a pleasant thing to do but it is necessary if we are to ever develop a healthy and realistic attitude about the plight of the human condition. Without the radical and healing intervention of Jesus, we humans are destined to live in rebellion and alienation from God forever, and this must incur God’s wrath against us because as we have seen, God cannot tolerate any form of evil or sin.

But neither is it healthy for us to focus exclusively on the wrath of God and the hopelessness of the human condition without also focusing on what God has done about our plight. God wants us to live forever with him. He created us to love and enjoy him forever and he has acted decisively in history on our behalf to end our alienation and exile from him. And here is where it gets really interesting. The more realistic we are about the reality of God’s wrath and his continuing antipathy toward our sin, the more wondrous the cross of Christ becomes because we realize how really hopeless is our plight without the wondrous love and grace of God made manifest in the cross of Jesus. Simply put, when we see sin for what it is and does to us, we are also able to see the cross for what it is and what it has done for us.

All this is worthy of our reflection during this season of Lent. All of this will help us develop a healthy understanding of who we are and who God is, and it will inevitably lead us to engage in a real season of Lent. We will fall to our knees in thanksgiving and awe for the wondrous and costly love of God made manifest in Jesus. We will truly understand the gift we have been given, and this will motivate us to do the things we need to do to deny ourselves, take up our cross each day, and follow Jesus.

This season, may God bless you with the grace of really understanding the wondrous love made manifest in the cross of Jesus Christ.