God's Justice & Wrath - Conclusions

Based on our previous study on God’s justice, wrath, and hell, this is how I would categorize all of God’s judgements and how I would imagine the afterlife to look like.

When all people die, their bodies stay on the earth while their souls go to Hades, the intermediate state. This place is also called Shoel. However, believers and unbelievers will not go to the same place in Hades. When people die, it is possible that everyone will go into a soul sleep where they maintain consciousness but in a way that they don’t remember anything while asleep; or, it could be like a dream state until they are reunited with their bodies. If there is no soul sleep, then they will be conscious but only existing as an immaterial spirit. For this reason, there is no physical pain in Hades. For the unbeliever though, there will be mental anguish because of the regrets that they have and the anticipation of the judgement that will be awaiting them at the end of the age. After death, there will be no more opportunity for repentance, even as Judas and Esau found no place for repentance. Though, I suppose it is possible for God to show mercy and take pity on some and that God might listen to our prayers to show them mercy. But, that cannot by any means be guaranteed. There would also not be any reason that our merits or deeds should win anything for them because their judgement is between them and God alone. According to their own deeds they shall answer God. As the Word says, “the soul who sins will die,” and “even though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job were in its midst, by their own righteousness they could only deliver themselves” (Ezek 14:14; 18:4). If there was anything meritorious we could give them, it would be our love and compassion alone in our prayers for them. But this would not be merit at all but grace—grace to move the heart of God to show mercy upon them. And so, if they ever are saved, it will be by grace and grace alone. I say these things for the Catholics and Orthodox, even though I am not convinced.

For the believer, their souls shall be instantly purged from all remaining evil and shall be conformed to the image of Christ. There will be no long-drawn-out process of any merit they have to attain, or to have contrition or prayers to complete their purgation. Their struggle with sin shall cease and they will enter the rest and joy of their master. The place they will reside is the intermediate state. For the believer, this could be called Hades, Paradise, Abraham’s bosom, or heaven. I believe that the experience will be full but not the fullest measure because without the material body, there will be a lack of experience.

All souls who have died will wait in Hades until the second coming of Christ to the earth and the final judgement. If soul sleep is true, then it will be as the very same day that people died that they will wake up to face God, even though perhaps thousands of years have passed. If there is no soul sleep, then we cannot say with certainty how quick or slow time will pass before the end of the age. But, it will be long enough for people to remember the things they did on earth. Whether or not there will be demons to torment the unbelievers, we do not know. Some say that for the unbelievers, they will experience agony from the presence of God which is symbolically as fire to them and tormenting. Not that God is the one tormenting them, but their experience is that of torment because there is much darkness within them and when that darkness becomes exposed to the light, it is painful to the soul.

When Jesus comes to establish His one-thousand-year reign upon the renewed earth, the bodies of the righteous will rise from their graves and be re-united to their souls and they shall dwell upon the earth and reign with Christ and live forevermore. The unbelievers will still wait until that time is complete and until the day of the Great White Throne Judgement. When that day comes, they will be reunited to their earthly bodies and face God to give an account of all the deeds they have done. This is their trial day where God will hear them out and they will be informed of their eternal sentence. When faced with the purity of God’s goodness and informed of all their evil deeds, they will bow before the King of kings and acknowledge their just sentence that they are worthy of. The Prince of Peace will have the final say in all matters of judgement but will judge in unison with His Father. Though the Father and the Son are not greater or lesser than each other and have all the divine attributes, they will both represent the two sides of the scale of justice. The Father in His infinite knowledge and wisdom will be one side and the Son in His experiential knowledge and personal affliction on earth will be the other side. The Father will judge in the holiness of His love and will execute that love upon the wicked which will consume them like fire. This will happen by merely hearing the words that come out of His mouth and they shall die by them. The Prince of Peace will judge by sucking out the peace from their souls since they were found not worthy of peace. All will die by these things and will cease to be forever. Both their body and souls will be destroyed. This is the lake of fire and it is called fire because God’s presence is fire and fire is purifying to the righteous but for the unrighteous, it consumes them and destroys them. Like gold that is melted, the gold remains but the dross is taken away. So shall it be with the wicked and the righteous. The lake of fire is also called a lake because that’s where rivers flow into. This means that being a lake, it is the final judgement. It’s where the road ends.

Reviewing the terms that we have used for God’s retributive, governmental, and consequential justice and wrath, here is where I would place them:

There is moderate support for the view that the penalty of death at the Fall of mankind was consequential justice. It was certainly governmental to an extent as well. Retributive justice could also be argued. As for God’s relation with Israel, I see it as mostly governmental to purify a people for His own possession so that they would make His name known throughout the earth, along with His loving care for them. God’s direct action of retribution is also at play as He rains down fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah, strikes plagues on Egypt, and punishes people and individuals for their irreverence and arrogance (e.g. Nadab, Abahu, Uzzah, King Uzziah). We could argue for consequential wrath for Uzzah and King Nebuchadnezzar but certainly cannot eliminate retribution from these events. It was also governmental in the sense that God was upholding His moral order. When we reach the New Testament, we read that Jesus did not come into the world to condemn the world but to save it. This implies that consequential justice is at play because all people have an account with death itself and they are all due to die because that is what sin has produced for them. However, at the same time, the New Testament speaks of God’s vengeance, retribution, and Jesus coming back again to judge the living and the dead. Therefore, people will be directly punished for their crimes against God and against one another. The natural disasters that shall come upon the earth will at first be the birth pangs of the earth itself, getting ready to birth the sons and daughters of God to usher in the physical reign of God on earth for the thousand-year reign of Christ. We could call those birth pangs consequential or natural. Then shall come the cleansing upon all the earth, which is governmental. The retributive wrath of God does not begin until at the sixth seal in Revelation six. This will be sometime after the midpoint of the tribulation when the bowls of wrath are poured out upon the earth from heaven. This is the repayment for the sins of those who are rebellious to God. This is also a time where believers will not endure God’s wrath since they are not appointed to wrath but to salvation. Since they are forgiven, their penalty is dealt with and God’s wrath does not abide on them. Then comes the Great White Throne Judgement at the end of the age. All three types of wrath will happen there. Then after this, there is the lake of fire which is the second death. This is consequential wrath which will consume God’s adversaries until they are no more. It is the absence of God forever which is the absence of all life. At that time, all things will be completed and God’s wrath will be finished.

The reason it is important to understand all of these types of wrath is because in it, we see God’s heart and God’s methods. It is important to have a right and balanced view of God because our God is not like other gods. He is not wrathful just because we made Him upset. His wrath is both perfectly just and purposeful according to His good nature.

In His governmental wrath, He upholds the good of the universe for His creatures and purifies them to reduce the overall suffering of the world and to bring people into the light of His goodness and salvation. Though the afflictions that come from this wrath are painful, it is to yield the fruits of peace and righteousness on the earth for the happiness of God and His creatures. Behind this wrath is the motive of God’s love. If we see only God’s retribution and not these other purposes, then our view of God will be of a God who is a stern and stoic judge who punishes simply because He has to because that’s who He is and rendering penalties seems to be the end goal without any other reason besides the fact that He was offended and repulsed by our sins. This leads to an imbalanced view and imbalanced reading of Scripture so that you may find it difficult to know, love, believe, and relate to this God who is so holy and transcendent. But since the motive behind God’s wrath is His love, we can rejoice and take comfort in God and the laws He has given to us for our good and we can grow deeper in love with this God as we read the Old Testament because God is overwhelmingly for us and against our own self-destruction.

For God’s consequential wrath, it is important to believe because with this type of wrath people are left to their own devices and that is why they suffer. God does not delight in their suffering or increase their suffering but rather, they suffer because it is the way that they have chosen for themselves. The impetus of their own suffering is upon them and their own free-will choice. In this way, God does not actively torment people in a literal lake of fire hell for eternity. God maintains His good nature and is not petty or overbearing in His wrath. The torture then, does not come from God, but from our own self-destruction. The natural consequence of our own actions can be a sufficient means for justice to be rendered since the penalty and affliction is intrinsic to the sin itself and further punishments directly rendered from God may not be necessary at that point.

However, it is also important to believe in God’s retribution as well, for God is actively involved in the entire universe and He is the one in control. The Bible says that He is a just Judge and will judge all the earth. There is also a unity between God’s justice and mercy in which God and all His heavenly angels and glorified creatures are in agreement with. It is not as though God is in disagreement with His own judgements and pinning away in some corner wishing He didn’t have to punish people. As A.W. Tozer says, “All the attributes of God concur in a man’s death sentence … You’ll never find in heaven a group of holy beings finding fault with the way God conducts His foreign policy. God Almighty is conducting His world, and every moral creature says, ‘True and righteous are thy judgements…. Justice and judgement are the habitation of they throne’ (Rev 16:7; Ps 89:14). When God sends a man to die, mercy and pity and compassion and wisdom and power concur—everything that’s intelligent in God concurs in the sentence” (The Radical Cross, 15-16). None of God’s moral creatures in heaven are complaining or crying about God’s judgements. God’s justice is a thing to be praised and celebrated, not a thing to mourn. This is God’s retributive justice that we should be in agreement with as well and should agree with the Word of God that only through Jesus can people be saved because although God is love, love is not God. The only way to God is through Jesus Christ and His love and grace but for those who do not want Jesus, they cannot be saved through a religion of love. What many people don’t understand these days is that the One true God is a Jealous God and because of this, in His jealous love, He will not stand for competition or those who are arrogant, thinking their own good works of love can save them or that other gods can save them. If we neglect God’s retributive justice and wrath, we will be led astray into such errors as these which leads to the heresy of Universalism and creating a graven image in our minds to worship love as God rather than God as love.

In the next lesson, we will move on from the three types of God’s wrath and we will focus on God’s anger and hatred and how to properly understand this according to Scripture.