Uncomfortable comfort

Then I saw another sign in heaven, great and amazing, seven angels with seven plagues, which are the last, for with them the wrath of God is finished. 

Revelation 15:1

Seven plagues…with them the wrath of God is finished.  Such are the words of the vision of St. John as a comfort to Christians in the first century.  Plagues and wrath as comfort.  Perhaps I’m not tracking with him on this.  The comfort, of course, is that the wrath of God is ended.  But 20 centuries later, I can hardly get to the comfort of such words because I am, perhaps, offended by the very notion of God having wrath.  What is meant as comfort is uncomfortable because it assumes a God of wrath – and something that deserves wrath.

Let’s consider first the ramifications of a wrathless God.  I wonder what it is that makes you outraged.  What abuse, exploitation or disregard of animal, person or planet gets you exercised?  What is it that inspires in you a rant at the injustice or shortsightedness of it all?  Injustice is the key word here.  We are moved to anger by what we perceive to be unjust. 

Sometimes my sense of injustice is personal at offenses, real or imagined, against me.  But when I have the grace to see beyond myself to a broader context, there are things that leave me speechless at injustices and atrocities both against individuals and groups as a whole.  As a counselor I have heard many things that are legitimate atrocities committed against individuals.  And I feel angry because it is wicked and unjust.

Since God is personal – and by that I do not mean that he is my personal God, like my personal trainer or personal chef, I mean he embodies, quite literally in Jesus, the qualities of personhood.  Since God is personal he acts as a Person and so has a sense of justice – better said, he is the source of justice.  He is also outraged at injustice.  Anger at injustice is godly wrath.

A wrathless God is a God either without any sense of justice, or perhaps worse yet, a God who does not love enough to actually care.  Wrath, ultimately, is a product of a heart that loves and is disturbed by abuse to the objects of that love.  Wrathless is either also loveless or justice-less or both.  And that is no God at all.

And on the topic of deserving wrath, we are also uncomfortable.  Two things here.  In one sense we are too individualistic to appreciate what first-century Christians took for granted, and on another level we are not individualistic enough.

Our sense of wrath at injustice and, indeed, the very existence of atrocities committed by men and women on both a small and large scale, is the clue to us that as a race or a species, we do things deserving of wrath.  I may not have personally participated in the Holocaust or the slaughter of Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda or the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.  But I am a member of the same family who did.  These things alone tell me that there is a problem, rather a wickedness in the family that is deserving of wrath.  Obvious to me if I look and obvious to first-century Chrsitians.  When I think about wrath I am all too often thinking about myself and whether I am deserving of it – alternating between fearing it may be true and being unable to imagine it could be.  Too individualistic.

In the recent Russell Crowe film, Noah, a film I have not seen but have heard is a profound disappointment to those expecting a faithful biblical account, Noah is, again I’m told, deeply convinced of the wickedness of the human race.  He sees the cruelty and the atrocities of men and women and understands that there is a problem.  He understands the wrath of God.  Sadly, he succumbs to despair in this – or so I am told.  Russell Crowe’s Noah understands that there is a problem with the family as a whole. 

But we are also not individualistic enough.  It is my desire and my practice to put myself in a category different from the “bad guys”.  That is not to say that there are not real bad guys whose monstrous action dwarf the evil that I commit.  Theologically I understand that “there but for the grace of God…”  But in practice I am unconvinced.  I need to come back to the point that I am a member of the family with the problem.  That would be me.  And in that I need to take the wrath of God seriously.

So back to the uncomfortable comfort of Revelation 15:1.  The comfort in the end of God’s wrath and God’s plagues, indeed the comfort of the existence of hell, is that God will place an eternal limit on evil and will no longer have cause for wrath.  That with these plagues his wrath is ended means that we who ultimately long for justice despite our corporate and individual wickedness, will be satisfied.  God’s wrath is ended because the fullness of his kingdom will have come.  I am comforted.