Hartland Winter Convocation 2018: Preparing the Way

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Hartland Institute of Health and Education

Gillian Bethel

Loving an Angry God

And this has been a personal journey for me.

I've been an Adventist for over 40 years.

And I'm so thankful for the salvation that he has provided for me.

Excuse me, but there has always been something I put on the back burner.

It was passages like the 1 we've just read in Revelation 14.

The wine of the wrath of God poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation.

Sinners burning in the presence of the lamb and of the father and the holy angels.

And it conjured up in my mind something like, you know, ancient Rome when they burned the Christians for torches and fed the rest of them to the lions and horrible, you know, and I thought, I know, God's love, you know, that's okay, we'll just not think about this part.

But I realized recently that it's my calling to prepare the way for Christ's second coming.

And I have a message to give, and it's the third angel's message, which we just heard.

I love the part about the patience of the saints and the faith, you know, and the righteousness by faith.

But I always stumbled on the part about the wine of the wrath of God.

I don't know if you're in the same situation.

So, over the Christmas break, I started praying, Lord, I would like to love you more, I would like to know you better.

Please, will you show me more of your character?

And it seemed like everywhere I turned, I was bumping into the anger of God.

And I thought, well, you know, I really need to face up to this.

So I started praying, Lord, help me to understand your anger.

It's really helped me to love him more in the end.

So I want to take you on the path that I took and see if it helps you also, maybe if you feel the same way I did about God's anger, that it would help you to see it from another perspective.

So, really, the root of the problem I found was the way I was thinking about anger.

Excuse me, I have to clear my throat, this is terrible.

Yeah, so I was thinking of God's anger the way I think of man's anger.

My father was 1 of the most patient men I had ever met.

He always spoke quietly and calmly if there was something wrong.

And so anger, I'm almost afraid of some people's anger.

I've seen people getting out of control with anger.

There are 2 kinds of human anger that I could think of.

1 was the hot impulsive kind of anger, and maybe most of us have experienced that.

It would be like when Moses killed the Egyptian, right?

He didn't start out that morning and say, I think I'll go and kill an Egyptian today.

But things have been building up in his mind.

He'd been watching the treatment of the Hebrews by the Egyptians and he was getting more and more resentful about it.

And when he saw that 1 event there, it just was the last straw and he looked around, no 1 was looking and he did something he hadn't intended to do.

Well, you know, we haven't killed anybody, but we have sometimes said things and done things as a result of that kind of anger.

And afterwards we're like, why did I do that?

The other kind is the cold kind of calculating anger, the cold smouldering kind, that would be something like when Esau decided he was going to kill Jacob.

Jacob had taken his birthright away from him with the bowl of lentils and now he's stolen the blessing and he decided when my father dies, I'm going to kill him.

So he waited and of course Jacob had to flee and he kept that cold smouldering anger all those years until Jacob was on his way back.

And it was only by the intervention of God that he didn't kill Jacob, even after all that time.

But both kinds of anger are a build-up of resentment.

Both kinds of anger are usually revengeful, there's some selfishness in there, you know, you hurt me so I'll hurt you back.

And sometimes we look at God's anger like that.

And I found that those were the spectacles I was wearing when I considered the anger of God in the Bible.

I'm gonna actually take you to a longish passage, 2 Kings, chapter 21.

Come with me, we're going to do a lot of Bible study this morning.

I want to read to you about wicked King Manasseh.

Now, Manasseh was the son, the only son of King Hezekiah, good King Hezekiah, good King Hezekiah who did so much for Israel.

And Manasseh even co-reigned with him for 10 years.

And yet, Manasseh did so much wickedness.

If there was ever a king that was an enemy of God, it was Manasseh.

So I'm just going to read this because I want you to get the feel for how God's anger comes across in here.

2 Kings 21, and we'll start at verse 1, and I'm going to go all the way to...

All right, Manasseh was 12 years old, 2 Kings chapter 21, verse 1.

Was 12 years old when he began to reign and reigned 50 and 5 years in Jerusalem and his mother's name was Hepzibah.

And he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord after the abominations of the heathen whom the Lord cast out before the children of Israel.

For he built up again the high places which Hezekiah his father had destroyed, and he reared up altars for Baal and made a grove, as did Ahab king of Israel, and worshipped all the host of heaven and served them.

And he built altars in the house of the Lord, in the temple, of which the Lord said, in Jerusalem will I put my name.

And he built altars for all the host of heaven in the 2 courts of the house of the Lord.

And he made his son pass through the fire and observe times and used enchantments and dealt with familiar spirits and wizards.

He wrought much wickedness in the sight of the Lord to provoke him to anger.

And he set a graven image of the grove that he had made in the house of which the Lord said to David and to Solomon his son, in this house and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all tribes of Israel, will I put my name forever.

Neither will I make the feet of Israel move any more out of the land which I gave their fathers, only if they will observe to do according to all that I have commanded them, and according to all the laws that my servant Moses commanded them.

And Manasseh seduced them to do more evil than did the nations whom the Lord destroyed before the children of Israel.

And the Lord spake by his servants the prophets, saying, Because Manasseh king of Judah hath done these abominations, and hath done wickedly above all that the Amorites did which were before him, and have made Judah also to sin with his idols.

Therefore, thus saith the Lord God of Israel, behold, I am bringing such evil upon Jerusalem and Judah that whosoever heareth of it both his ears shall tingle and I will stretch over Jerusalem the line of Samaria and the plummet of the house of Ahab and I will wipe Jerusalem as a man wipeth a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down.

And I will forsake the remnant of mine inheritance and deliver them into the hand of their enemies, and they shall become a prey and a spoil to all their enemies, because they have done that which was evil in my sight and have provoked me to anger since the day their fathers came forth out of Egypt, even unto this day." Whoa.

Now, you could look at this by saying, okay, so God told Israel to do certain things and they didn't do it and they did all the things that he told them not to do and they provoked him to anger.

So he got really angry with them and he took it out on them.

But God is the God of love, That can't be right, can it?

But that was the set of eyeglasses I was wearing when I read about God's anger, and I went, oh, you know, I don't like this.

But I want us to try to separate the anger of man that we have in our minds from the anger of God.

And what finally helped me make the breakthrough on this was reading in Adam White where she talks about God's righteous anger.

And I went, ah, I like this, a different name for it, that will help me separate it, now I can think of God's righteous anger as being different.

So I went to look, and the place I started was in Exodus 34.

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Loving an Angry God

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