©2005 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

11-13-05

The Third Side Of Anger

11/13/05 The Third Side of Anger

Two weeks ago I took a little detour from our study of Ephesians

to share with you some thoughts on anger.

At the time it was my intention to spend just one week on this topic,

but once we got into the study

I found that there was more to the topic

than I had at first anticipated.

If you have a copy of the notes in front of you

you’ve no doubt already noticed

that I’ve titled this teaching today “The Third Side Of Anger”.

Two weeks ago we looked at the first side,

our anger against God.

Last week we looked at the second side,

our anger against one another.

And now this morning

I want to share some thoughts

on God’s anger against us.

And having said that,

I need to let you know

that what we will look at during the next few minutes

will, perhaps, not be what you expect.

And I will also tell you

that I simply do not understand

much of what I hear being said by the Christian community

about the anger of God toward us.

Certainly I understand well

why, when we first begin thinking about God,

and when we seriously consider how He might respond to us,

we could easily anticipate His anger against us.

The problem, of course,

is that He knows.

He knows it all.

There is no way

for us ever to build an external image before Him.

He knows everything we’ve ever done,

everything we’ve ever considered doing.

He knows every word we’ve ever spoken,

every feeling we’ve ever felt.

He knows not just what we’ve done

but why we’ve done it.

He knows who we were trying to impress,

or who we were trying to attack,

or who we were trying to avoid,

and why.

He knows those hiding places we run to when we’re hurt,

or frightened,

or confused.

He simply knows it all.

And because He knows it all

it is not surprising that,

if we can reach some level of honesty with ourselves,

when we see ourselves standing before God

we cannot help but recognize

that He has a valid basis for anger against us

both for what we’ve done

and for what we have failed to.

There are so many reasons

why He could

and perhaps even should be angry with us.

And when it comes to the world of religion,

there is perhaps no more powerful weapon

for the manipulation and control of people

than the threat of the wrath of God poured out on them.

In preparation for our time together this morning

I came across the text of one of the best known sermons in church history -

Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God,

first preached by Jonathan Edwards on July 8, 1741.

Would you like to hear a little of what he said?

“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you were suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God's hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.

O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in hell. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you have no interest in any Mediator, and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment.

The sermon continues on,

developing that same theme for 11 pages,

and for those who heard it in its entirety,

by the time Edwards finished

it is easy to see why his words met with such tremendous response.

It was a response rooted in that knowledge within each of us

that, if our Creator chose to call us to account

for our every action,

every thought,

every impure impulse and response,

He would be in every way justified

in whatever wrath He chose to pour out on us

or any judgment He chose to bring against us.

But from a truly Christian point of view

there is a huge problem

both with what Edwards did

and with a response to God

that is rooted in our fear of His wrath poured out on us.

Much of what Edwards said is true.

We do all stand guilty before God,

and there is nothing we possess,

nothing we have ever done,

nothing we could ever do

that would justify us before our God.

And he is absolutely right

in his description

about the terrifying eternity

that awaits those who reject their Creator in this life.

But the great problem with what Edwards did,

and the great error in what he said

is in the response to us in our sin here now

that he attributes to God.

“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours...”

The truth is, what Edwards said in those lines is simply not true!

It’s tremendously effective

in generating a fear-based response to God,

and it’s undeniable

that he powerfully communicates a view of God

that has been the dominant view throughout the history of the human race,

and it is also true that the message he communicates

has deeply impacted the development of Christianity

throughout the history of our nation.

I can remember my own first responses to God

when I was about 13 years old.

I can remember my own terror of going to hell,

(and at 13 I knew there were so many good reasons why He should send me there),

and I remember pleading with God

that He would not send me there.

But the great problem with what Edwards says at this point

is that the God he presents

is simply not the God who really exists.

Now, why in the world would I say that?

I say it because of one huge factor

that Jonathan Edwards seems to have overlooked.

I say it

because our God has told us that,

if we truly want to discover who He is,

if we really want to know accurately what He’s like,

there is only one doorway

through which we can enter into a correct understanding of our Creator,

and if we miss it,

if we try to understand Him through any other avenue

we will never arrive at the truth.

And it is obvious from Edwards’ words

that he was either utterly ignorant of this doorway,

(which, given his knowledge of Scripture, is impossible for me to believe,)

or that he was deceived by Satan in his thinking,

or else that he chose to ignore the truth

because he knew it would not bring the kind of response in his listeners

that he wanted to produce.

In our studies during the past two weeks

I have referred several times

to some of what I consider to be a few of the basic truths of life.

Well, there is another truth I would like to add to that list,

and, in fact,

it is the truth I should have begun with,

the one I should have placed at the top of the list.

And here again it is not complicated,

but if we miss it,

if we fail to understand it

or try to bypass it

it will be impossible for us to ever see our God as He really is

or to respond to Him correctly.

So what is it?

Simply this, that the only doorway into an accurate knowledge about our God

is through the Person of Jesus Christ.

Listen to this!

JOH 14:6-9 Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me. If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; from now on you know Him, and have seen Him." Philip said to Him, "Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us." Jesus said to him, "Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father...”

And then,

just so that there could be no confusion,

no misunderstanding,

no room for us to mess it up,

Christ gave it to us

in a single phrase.

JOH 10:30 "I and the Father are one."

What He’s saying

is that, if we want to understand who God is,

and what He’s really like,

and how He responds to us in any given situation,

and especially if we want to understand how He responds to our sin,

we need to look at Jesus Christ.

The God that Jonathan Edwards presented

was in every way the God that most of us expect,

the God that most of us anticipate,

the God whose mental image drives us to terror.

But here is the great and wonderful thing -

when this God chose to clothe Himself in human form,

when His longing to bridge the gap

between Himself and His creation

motivated Him, for a time, to become one of us

so that we could examine Him in intimate detail,

so that we could see up close and personal how He responded to us in our sin,

what we see

looks nothing whatsoever like what we heard from Edwards.

Let me offer just one example.

I am certain that, high on Edwards’ list of sins against God,

we would find the sin of adultery.

It would certainly be among those sins

that Edwards said would cause God to look upon a person as “... ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours...”

And if we remove Jesus Christ,

our God in human form,

from our thinking,

if we create for ourselves

an image of God apart from Christ,

we would reach the same conclusions

as those reached by Edwards.

Few things have more power to destroy lives,

to destroy families,

to shatter the lives of children

than does adultery.

But then this God-man comes into our world

and all of the sudden everything is not as we think it should be.

JOH 8:2-11 Early in the morning He came again into the temple, and all the people were coming to Him; and He sat down and began to teach them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery, and having set her in the center of the court, they said to Him, "Teacher, this woman has been caught in adultery, in the very act. "Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women; what then do You say?" They were saying this, testing Him, so that they might have grounds for accusing Him. But Jesus stooped down and with His finger wrote on the ground. But when they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up, and said to them, "He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." Again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they began to go out one by one, beginning with the older ones, and He was left alone, and the woman, where she was, in the center of the court. Straightening up, Jesus said to her, "Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?" She said, "No one, Lord." And Jesus said, "I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on sin no more."

Now how could that be?

This is God in human form.

They didn’t know it at the time,

be we certainly do.

And here He is

in the presence of a woman

caught in the very act of adultery.

Where is the righteous and justified wrath

of a holy and pure Creator?

Why does He not verbally dangle this woman

over the flames of hell as Edwards did

in an attempt to drive her into repentance?

Did the sin of adultery suddenly not matter any more?

Of course it mattered.

It shattered lives then

just as it does now.

But what does this God/man do?

Rather than pouring out the wrath and condemnation this woman deserved,

He offered her His forgiveness

and allowed her to see

the one thing she could never have anticipated,

He allowed her to see His love for her.

And that discovery of Divine love

altered her life forever.

Is it any wonder that

for the first three years of His public ministry

no one knew who He was?

Is it any wonder that,

even at the very end,

just hours before His death,

His disciples were saying,

“OK, we know what you’re like, Jesus,

and we really like you,

but now tell us about God...what’s He like?”

When I was putting words into Peter’s mouth a few years ago,

allowing Him to explain why it took him so long

to gain even a tiny glimmer of who this Jesus really was,

I had him put it like this.

You don’t understand why it took me so long to recognize Jesus for who He was - God’s perfect expression of Himself here on this earth, do you? You can’t figure out why, with all his miracles, and all his power, and all his authority, it took me three years to even begin to see the truth. Well, you see, it was because . . . because he liked me, and because I liked him. I knew Messiah was coming. I knew Messiah was the hope of our nation, the hope of our world. But who could have guessed that Messiah would be my best friend? Who would have guessed that Messiah would love me and that I would love him? Who could ever have imagined that Messiah would laugh at my stupid jokes, and sit and talk with me for hours about nothing, and clearly delight in my friendship and my presence with him? Messiah was not supposed to like me, and me like him. Messiah was supposed to rule and conquer and judge and command great armies. Messiah was supposed to be absolute power. But no one had expected him to be nice, to be kind, to be gentle. Of course Messiah would care about the nation, but how could I have known he would care about me?

It’s not surprising that Peter didn’t get it for so long.

It’s not surprising that Jonathan Edwards didn’t get it.

It’s not surprising that, even when we hear our God saying so clearly,

JOH 3:16-17 "I loved the world so much, that I gave My only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. For I did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.”,

even then we simply can’t believe it’s true.

And unless we fight for the knowledge of that truth daily,

with constant, determined effort,

we will fall back into our default setting

of a God filled with wrath

rightly poured out against us who deserve it so much.

I told you when I began

that I honestly do not understand

why so many within the Christian community

who hold positions of leadership

have somehow missed that one truth

through which all other truths can be understood -

to see Christ

is to see God.

I can, however, understand all too well

why, having missed that truth,

they then resort to the presentation

of sinners in the hands of an angry God.

They do it sometimes, I think,

because it brings instant, dramatic results.

Jonathan Edwards’ words

drove many who heard him

to cry out in terror for mercy

to this wrath-filled God

who was possibly minutes away

from flinging them in disgust

into a hideous eternal damnation,

just as a 13 year old Larry

pleaded with God

to please, please, please not send him to hell.

But when the fear within me finally subsided,

and I had some tiny hope that this God just might grudgingly accept

such a little wretch as me into His family,

I certainly didn’t want anything more to do with Him.

I mean obviously

this was a God to be feared,

but not a God I would want to share my life with.

He certainly wasn’t anything like Jesus.

Several hundred years ago

Jonathan Edwards preached one sermon

carefully designed to create within his listeners

an absolute terror of the wrath of God

and he created such a fear within his listeners

that the response was instantaneous and overwhelming.

For more than 20 years I have been preaching about the true nature of the love of our God for us

and the visible results of my preaching

looks nothing like what resulted from Edwards’ preaching.

And if the true measure of truth

could be found in results

I should long ago have chosen a different message.

But I have not

and could not change for two overwhelming reasons.

The first, and the greatest, of course,

is Jesus Himself.

He is, in fact, Emanuel, GOD WITH US.

And by His own words

He came not to call us to account,

and to dangle us over the flames of hell by a string

with the hope that we would be driven to change,

He came to offer us new life through our entrance into His love.

And the second reason flows from the first.

Even though it is far more difficult

for us to hear and to believe the love of God

than it is for us to hear and believe His wrath,

only our discovery of the love of God

will accomplish within us,

and between us and God

what He seeks to accomplish.

And isn’t that a remarkable thing,

that it is easier for us to hear His wrath

than it is for us to hear His love.

It’s that way, I think,

because the implications of His loving us

are potentially so much more devastating to us

than are the implications of His being angry.

You see, if He really does love us,

than it means we’ve been wrong from the very start.

It means He is not the enemy we believed Him to be.

And even more terrifying,

it means that all those things He’s said to us

are true,

and right,

and infinitely good for us.

And even though there are far fewer

who will hear the message of His love

than those who will hear the message of His wrath,

for those who do hear

the transformation of that message in their lives

is like nothing else in human experience.

I began this morning

by telling you that I was going to preach

about God’s anger against us.

It would have been more accurate

for me to have said

that I was going to teach on God’s anger

against that thing which separates us from Him - our sin.

And to do that

there is only one place where we can go,

only one place where we can turn our eyes -

not onto the pit of hell,

real as it is,

but onto that cross that held the dying body of Jesus Christ.

ROM 5:8-9 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him.

ROM 8:1 Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Oh, it is absolutely true

that our sins deserve and demand great judgement,

great suffering,

great agony poured out by God.

But the greatest wonder in all of life

is that God chose to pour out all of that judgement,

all of that suffering,

all of that agony on Himself on the cross.

And now the debt is paid in full forever

so that all of us who come to Him

can enter into the daily rediscovery of His love.