God's Consequential Wrath

In the previous articles, we covered God’s retributive and governmental justice. Now, we will turn our attention to God’s consequential justice. Previously, we did briefly mention God’s consequential justice in Romans 1 and Nebuchadnezzar could be an example of this as well when his arrogance made him insane and he lived like a wild animal and ate grass. Throughout most of my life, I’ve read the Old Testament through the lens of God always exacting a penalty for sins as a crime against Him and His honor. But is that always the case? We have established that this isn’t always the case because there are other reasons God deals out punishments for sins and it is out of love and for the ultimate good of all of His creatures. Sometimes, God is even indirectly involved with those punishments through using the free-will of other people and nations to bring order and purity in the world. But how indirect can His punishments be? The Easter Orthodox Church essentially believes in what I have termed, consequential justice. And they seem to believe this to the exclusion of God’s retributive justice. At least, I never hear them talk about retribution. Their idea of God is that in Him there is all love and life and God has this in perfection. For this reason, to sin against God is to depart from that love and life so that the result is death and disintegration of the entire being of the person. The further one goes away from God, the greater the disintegration. It’s like devolving into something base or becoming or resembling something more like the wildness and foolishness of some animals. God’s law is like God saying, “look both ways before you cross the street.” His laws are warnings and the punishments are not that He is going to give you a beating if you fail to do what He says, but the punishments are the natural consequence of failing to heed His voice. If you fail to look both ways before crossing the street, then you might get hit by a car and become seriously injured or die. It’s not that God did this to you but it is the natural way in how things work. Or, you might say that it’s like God warning you to put on sunblock before you go out to the beach in the Florida summer sun and if you don’t, you could get seriously sunburned because you have exposed your body to the elements. Or, if you were an astronaut stepping out into space without a space-suit, you would die. These are natural and metaphysical consequences of the universe but God, who is all wise, knows how the cosmos operates. He knows all the natural and spiritual laws by which the world is governed, and so He gives us laws for our good and for our protection. God also sees every possible future and outcome and so He creates laws to have us avoid all those bad outcomes. There is a justice built into the world that we live in so that if we fail to obey God’s law, we will experience bad consequences. This could be natural consequences derived from bad choices, the natural world, the devil’s power, depriving ourselves of the goodness of God, or getting too close to God’s goodness in our impurity and darkness of our hearts. All of these things, I will term, consequential justice.

I cannot say that this is the official position of the Orthodox church because they’re not really systematic theologians so it’s not so simple to find categorical doctrines on their beliefs that explain things thoroughly. But from what I’ve read and listened to, this seems to generally be what they believe. The key passage for them is about the Fall of mankind in Genesis 3 where God says that the day they eat of the fruit they would surely die. The key word is death and what the definition of death is. To them, it’s not God saying, “I will punish you,” or “I will kill you,” because He never says that; but rather, “this is what will happen if you do this.” God’s law here was a warning of the natural consequences that would happen to Adam and Eve if they disobeyed that law. When Adam and Eve ate of the fruit, their sin produced death in them. This death was a disintegration from the life of God and this disintegration was the corruption of their nature—both physically and spiritually.

Sin isn’t a material substance that dwells in us. Sin is a choice—a choice to depart from the life of God. That choice and the more we choose it, leads to the fragmentation of our humanity and a breaking apart from the image of God that we were created in. Sin destroys us because sin is death. Sin is the opposite of God’s life. God is light but sin is darkness; but only life is found in the light. Plants were made to live by the sun but apart from the sun, they die. That’s what happens when we depart from God. Some plants, however, are not fit for the intensity of the sun’s rays and they are best kept in the shade to receive only little light. In a similar way, the darkness that is within us according to how sin has corrupted our nature, will be to our own death if we get too close to God’s holiness because our own nature is weak and not capable of handling the intensity of God’s presence. The solution then is to be cleansed and get rid of our corruption so that we can approach God’s presence. David writes, “Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord? And who may stand in His holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not lifted up his soul to falsehood and has not sworn deceitfully” (Ps 24:3-4). In a similar way, Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Mt 5:8). So then Jesus came to die on the cross for us to bring about the purity of His blood to cleanse our “conscience from dead works to serve the living God” (Heb 9:14), and to have “our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water” (Heb 10:22). Jesus came to purify us so that we don’t have to live in our corruption anymore but so that we can live in His life. It is God’s love that purifies our hearts as we choose Jesus over this world. However, I didn’t mean to turn this lesson into a gospel message, so let’s go back to Genesis 3.

How else can we defend the penalty that Adam and Eve received was of natural consequence? Well, if we look at the curses that ensue afterwards, we see that God doesn’t say, “I curse you,” but rather, to the serpent He says, “Cursed are you…” and to the man He says, “Cursed is the ground because of you,” as if He is informing them of the consequences that will result from their actions. And when Cain killed Abel, God said, “Now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from you hand” (Gen 4:11). The wording seems to indicate that it is not God who cursed him but the ground, the ground was the origin of the curse. And why was it the origin of the curse? Because the blood that Cain had spilled in killing his brother seeped into the ground and defiled the ground. Sin corrupts things in the sphere of our influence. Cain cursed the ground through his sin and the ground brought forth a curse for him. It’s sort of this natural law of reaping what you sow.

Another way we could look at this is that Cain subjugated himself to the devil’s power which was the curse. In John 8:44 Jesus speaks of the devil being a murderer from the beginning. Who did he murder? Well, since he brought death to mankind through his lies, in that way he murdered humanity. Hebrews 2:14 says that the devil holds the power of death in which he keeps humanity under his power. But Jesus came to free us of that power. From this perspective, it would seem then that the devil has a role to play in this curse. He is the one who steals, kills, and destroys. So then, when we choose to sin, we subject ourselves to the sphere of Satan’s influence for him to wreak havoc in our lives. Curses then, are the result of us moving away from the life of God and moving towards the dysregulation of that life by the claim or legal right that the devil has over us because of our sin.

We could say that the devil caused the death of Adam and Eve rather than death being God’s retribution. But then we would have to explain why God deliberated to send them out of the garden to never again eat of the tree of life so that they could live forever. I mentioned before that this was God’s mercy upon them so that they would not live forever in sin. Because of that, we don’t necessarily have to see this as God’s retribution. Someone has said it like this:
“God’s loving hand was forced by Adam and Eve to close access to the garden. It was a consequence of love, and even a punishment, yes, but intrinsic to the sin, not extrinsic to it and arbitrarily added on. After all, God said, ‘You will die,’ not, ‘I will kill you’” (Anástasis Center).

Then we come to the verse that seems like a direct punishment. In Genesis 3:16 God says to the woman, “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth, in pain you will bring forth children; yet your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” God says, “I will,” seeming to indicate that this is something God is directly doing by handing out this punishment. Yet if we go to the previous verse to think the same way, it might be problematic. God says, “And I will put enmity between you and the woman…” Is this a punishment too? Can the God of peace cause enmity? Or, is God simply saying that this will be the consequential result of sin having entered into the world, that there would now be a war between good and evil? It seems that this is more likely the case and that God is not the one who caused this war. So then, it might make more sense to see the penalty that Eve received for pain in childbearing was something that was the natural result of sin. That is, her sin produced death and that death brought an added pain in childbearing as a dysfunction from the natural created order. In this way, God is informing her of the consequence. So then, why does God say, “I will”? As we explained in the previous article, God sometimes uses the phrase “I will” even when God Himself isn’t the one doing it like in Ezekiel 30:24-25 where God says that He will war against Jerusalem yet it is Babylon who is sovereignly used by God to do the warring. Ultimately, we know that God is sovereign over the entire universe and that the universe is governed by certain rules that He Himself is over.

In this way, the penalty for sin for Adam, Eve, and Cain, was something that God naturally allowed from sin, the devil, and a curse to bring about the just punishment. As Romans 1 says, “God gave them over…” and they received “in their own persons the due penalty of their error” (v. 26-27). This was God’s consequential wrath because God released them from His hand of grace since they decided to depart from Him. However, this wasn’t Him abandoning them. There is a sense in which we could say that God doesn’t need to punish those who have done the punishment for Him by punishing themselves. Like a good father who tells his son or daughter to wear protection while skating but they fail to listen and end up getting scrapped up and bruised. The father doesn’t need to punish them for disobeying since their pain of getting hurt was a punishment unto itself. There was an intrinsic penalty to their disobedience. Ultimately, sin is death, which is a falling away from God’s grace. God engineered and manufactured us to operate in obedience to Him and to be His image bearers and so we should not be surprised that if we disobey God and live contrary to our design that we should break down and break apart; for we were intended to live in Him because He is life. He is our source of strength.

What about the book of Revelation? Can we see God’s consequential wrath there? It’s possible that natural disasters, earthquakes, and stars falling from the sky are God’s consequential wrath. We know that God upholds all things by the power of His word so what happens when He stops upholding things? Things will start to disintegrate and break apart. The order of the universe will turn to chaos. Right now, the rotation and alignment of the planets are perfect. If the earth were any further away from the sun we would freeze and if we are any closer, we will burn up. The sun could have some crazy solar flares or other things happen to it so that the sun goes dark and the elements of the earth burn up. The first five seals in Revelation 6, I believe is the wrath of mankind; so, you could say that God allows these events in history to unfold and in that way, it’s God’s consequential wrath. But I just call it the wrath of man. That chapter can also be correlated with Matthew 24 which describe the birth pangs of the earth which seem to be of natural consequence. In Revelation 9 God allows demons to torment the earth. In Revelation 16 the bowls of wrath are poured out and the sun scorches people with intense heat. Whatever kind of wrath it is though, people will know it is from God because they will blaspheme God’s name because of it. And then, speaking of the man of lawlessness or the antichrist, 2 Thessalonians 2:6-7 says, “And you know what restrains him now, so that in his time he will be revealed. 7 For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains will do so until he is taken out of the way.” The restrainer could be the Holy Spirit, the church, or Michael the Archangel. But regardless of which one it is, when the restrainer is taken away, all hell will break loose upon the earth. This is when the antichrist will be revealed, the abomination of desolation will occur, and the tribulation at its midpoint will turn into the Great Tribulation. Then, sometime after this Jesus will come back and the church will be raptured. I believe in what is called the Pre-Wrath Rapture. Regardless, when the church is raptured, peace will be taken from the earth because it was the church that was holding back a lot of evil and in their presence, they carried the peace of God. But without that presence, the experience of people on the earth will turn to utter terror and dread. This is another aspect of God’s consequential wrath as He takes away peace from the earth. So first, the angel Michael stops restraining the antichrist and he becomes free to do all his abominations and then later, the presence of the Holy Spirit inside believers will be taken from the earth as they meet the Lord in the air. That’s what I believe in a nutshell. And then hell, the lake of fire, is also God’s consequential wrath. I believe that the fire of hell is symbolic and then the description of hell as the second death is literal. So, literal death meaning annihilation. But why is it annihilation? Because their names weren’t written in the book of life and they will go “away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power” (2 Thess 1:9). Without the source of all life, God alone possessing immortality, they will disintegrate and cease to be. The consequence of refusing the life of God is death.

Moving on, what about when people died from encountering the presence of God like going into the temple and dying? Did they die by retribution or by consequence? If you recall, there was a time when Moses asked to see God’s glory but God only permitted Moses to see the backside of His glory because God said, “You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live!” (Ex 33:20). Moses was humbly seeking to know God more so this wasn’t a moment of pride for him but God said anyway that His glory was too much for any mere mortal to take. There is a holiness and purity to God’s glory that is so good that people can die looking directly into His presence. If you look directly at the sun, the sun is so pure and strong that it can cause you to go blind. But the radiance of God’s glory is so powerful that it can kill you. David writes, “Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord? And who may stand in His holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not lifted up his soul to falsehood and has not sworn deceitfully” (Ps 24:3-4). It is our own uncleanliness, darkness, and stain of sin that can kill us in the purity of God’s light. That’s why Moses had to have clean hands and a pure heart when he went up the mountain to meet with God and also why the Israelites were terrified of God’s voice and asked Moses for him to be their mediator (Ex 20:19; Dt 5:25). God also instructed Moses to set a boundary line around the mountain so that no one would cross it and the Lord said to Moses, “Go down, warn the people, so that they do not break through to the Lord to gaze, and many of them perish. Also let the priests who come near to the Lord consecrate themselves, or the Lord will break out against them” (Ex 19:21-22). The glory of God has an intrinsic quality to it that is so pure that whatever is not pure, it will destroy. Whatever cannot be purified will burn up but whatever can be purified, will become more pure. We see that when Moses went down the mountain, his face would shine from the glory that had radiated upon him while he was on the mountain speaking with the Lord but the Israelites were afraid to approach Moses because of the glory (Ex 34:29-35).

Later on, Aaron’s two sons, Nadab and Abihu offered strange fire to the Lord because they thought it would be such a great idea but it wasn’t because God did not command them to do that and so “fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord” (Lev 10:2). One might be able to interpret this as retribution or maybe it was an intrinsic consequence of the presence of their sin in the midst of God’s glory. As a result of this incident, God told Moses to tell Aaron that he can’t just flippantly walk into the holy place of God’s presence anytime he wants or else he will die (Lev 16:1-2). Which tells us, part of having clean hands and a pure heart is about obeying God’s commands and approaching God in humility. It’s the arrogant heart that doesn’t show reverence to God. It is the arrogant that will be consumed in God’s presence because God is a humble God and His love is absolutely pure. That is why arrogance is so detestable to God and so opposite of who He is that His pure light burns it away. I think this may be one of the reasons why the priests had the ritual of washing their hands all the time. It wasn’t about the ritual. It was about the heart. The ritual was there as a reminder for where the heart should be, to come into the Lord’s presence mindful of their unholiness so that their hearts would be properly consecrated.

Many years later, Uzziah was king over Jerusalem and reigned fifty-two years. As long as he sought the Lord, God prospered him. He became very strong in battle and built mighty fortresses with advanced military capabilities and because of all of this, his fame had spread far and wide. But one day, his strength made him very proud so that so that he acted corruptly. He entered the Lord’s temple to burn incense on the altar, which was prohibited for him to do because he was not a priest. God’s laws and instructions were clear, “that no layman who is not of the descendants of Aaron should come near to burn incense before the Lord; so that he will not become like Korah and his company” who died and were consumed by the Lord with fire (Num 16:40). But in king Uzziah’s arrogance, he paid no attention to that and when the priests told him that he shouldn’t be there and should leave at once, he didn’t listen. Instead, the king was enraged and as soon as he became enraged with the priests, leprosy broke out on his forehead because the Lord has smitten him. And so, King Uzziah was a leper until the day of his death (2 Chron 26). Now, you could interpret that as consequence or retribution but it looks more like retribution to me. But I shared this story so that we could talk about Isaiah’s encounter with the Lord’s presence which happened the same year that Uzziah died.

Isaiah 6:1-7

In the year of King Uzziah’s death I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted, with the train of His robe filling the temple. 2 Seraphim stood above Him, each having six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. 3 And one called out to another and said,

“Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord of hosts,
The whole earth is full of His glory.”

4 And the foundations of the thresholds trembled at the voice of him who called out, while the temple was filling with smoke. 5 Then I said,

“Woe is me, for I am ruined!
Because I am a man of unclean lips,
And I live among a people of unclean lips;
For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.”

6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a burning coal in his hand, which he had taken from the altar with tongs. 7 He touched my mouth with it and said, “Behold, this has touched your lips; and your iniquity is taken away and your sin is forgiven.”

In the King James Version, verse 5 says, “Woe is me! For I am undone.” The prophet, Isaiah, was overwhelmed by the purity and grandeur of God’s glory that the very fabric of his being felt like it was coming apart and unraveled. He thought he was going to die because even though he was a man of God, he saw God’s holiness and in comparison to God, he was so impure and unholy. Even the angels had to cover their feet and faces from the overwhelming light of God’s beauty though they were morally perfect. So if you can imagine how Isaiah must have felt for the light of God to illumine his heart which showed him whatever darkness that was in him. He must have been shaking and at torment within because of the ugliness of his own heart. This is the God whose name is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in lovingkindness. His love is so pure that according to Deuteronomy 10:18, “He executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and shows His love for the alien by giving him food and clothing.” He commanded the Israelites, saying, “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. 22 You shall not afflict any widow or orphan. 23 If you afflict him at all, and if he does cry out to Me, I will surely hear his cry; 24 and My anger will be kindled, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless” (Ex 22:21-24). God cares about those who are afflicted and meets the needs of people’s suffering and He brings justice to those who are mistreated. And even though God had not chosen Ishmael as the child of promise, He had compassion on him and Hagar and gave them water to drink when they ran out and their cries were heard by God who had compassion on them (Gen 21). The God who says, “do not afflict them,” is not the same God who will afflict people for an eternity in fire. That’s not justice. That’s not God’s heart. The God who cares so much about the affliction of the oppressed and punishes those who afflict them, surely won’t turn around to torment forever the very people he tells us to not torment. Will God say to us, “I care so much about the affliction of the orphan and the widow that I’m going to torment them so much in hell, torment far worse than you ever could have afflicted them on this earth. But I’m going to punish you anyway for not treating them right”? Now, does that make any sense? Do we know this God? His love is so good and so pure and so holy; and we are not. We are nothing like Him—and He is not like us…

After Isaiah was undone by God’s holiness, an angel came from the presence of the Lord and touched a burning coal to his lips so that it cleansed him and removed the stain of his sin before God so that he was forgiven. Sometimes the purity of God’s presence kills but at other times, it heals. It often depends where your heart is at. If it is arrogant and full of wickedness, then that is enough darkness to be fatal. But if your heart is humble, the light can come in to heal and cleanse.

In summary, we have seen evidences of God’s consequential justice and wrath in:

• Romans 1 where God “gave them over…”

• Nebuchadnezzar, who became insane from his arrogance

• Genesis 3 where darkness corrupted Adam and Eve’s heart from the light of God because sin produced death in them to fragment their spiritual and natural being and prevented the light of God’s goodness from coming into their hearts

• The possibility of the curse being a natural consequence of sin or a law of the universe whereby the devil receives authority to cause his destruction

• The possibility of eschatological events of natural disasters and havoc being unleashed on the earth being from God withdrawing His power of sustaining the universe so that order turns to disorder

• God will one day withdraw His peace from this earth by withdrawing the presence of the church

• When people are cast away from the presence of the Lord to hell, they will cease to be because they are absent from the life of God

• The purity of God’s presence destroys that which is impure even as the radiance of the sun destroys and burns up that which comes too close to it

• Moses was not able to see the unveiled presence of God because it is so pure and powerful that it would kill him

• Moses approached God with clean hands and a pure heart up to the mountain and so was purified and consecrated by God’s presence so that his face and skin would shine and radiate God’s glory

• The Israelites were warned not to come near the mountain or they would die

• The events of Nadab, Abihu, and King Uzziah’s death could have been the result of God’s pure presence and/or it could have been God’s retribution and governmental justice

• The encounter Isaiah had of God’s presence was painful to him but then the coal that came from God’s presence was healing to him