Theopedia

Wrath of God

“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.”

— Romans 1:18

Definition

The wrath of God is his settled opposition to sin: the outworking of his holiness and justice against everything that violates his own righteous character, not a fit of temper or a loss of self-control.1 Because God himself does not change, his wrath is not a passion that flares up and subsides but a fixed disposition, as constant as his holiness, toward everything that opposes him.1 Scripture holds this wrath together with God’s love rather than against it: the same God provoked by sin is the one who provides, in Christ, the means by which that wrath is satisfied.1

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession describes God as “withal most just and terrible in his judgments, hating all sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty.”2 Barrett distinguishes two sides of divine justice: remunerative justice, which rewards obedience to God’s law out of his covenantal love, and retributive justice, which punishes its violation. Wrath is retributive justice in action.3 This is not an arbitrary severity layered onto an otherwise gentler God; Barrett states that “justice is not merely a consequence of God’s decisions or his will; it is an essential property of God himself” (Ps. 5:4), so that a God who is righteous by nature and hates sin must, of necessity, punish it.3

Biblical Basis

Paul states the doctrine directly: “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men” (Rom. 1:18), and elsewhere describes those outside Christ as, by nature, “children of wrath” (Eph. 2:3). John records Jesus’ own teaching that “whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him” (John 3:36). The prophet Nahum ties God’s wrath to his own character rather than to caprice: “The LORD is a jealous and avenging God… The LORD is slow to anger and great in power, and the LORD will by no means clear the guilty” (Nah. 1:2-3), language the confession’s own wording directly echoes. Paul grounds the gospel’s hope in exactly this wrath: believers are “justified by his blood” and so “saved by him from the wrath of God” (Rom. 5:9), and wait for God’s “Son from heaven… Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come” (1 Thess. 1:10).

Objections and Responses

If God is loving, how can he also be wrathful without one attribute contradicting the other? Bavinck answers that the objection trades on a mistaken picture of wrath as an unruly emotion: “the wrath of God is no evil passion or malice, and his righteousness is not thirst for vengeance.” Even under wrath for sin, Bavinck writes, following Calvin, God’s kindness toward what is his own does not disappear: “the Lord wills not to lose what is his in us,” so that “out of his own kindness he still finds something to love.”1 Wrath and love are not rival attributes competing for supremacy; they converge at the cross, where God’s own gift of Christ as a propitiation both satisfies his wrath against sin and expresses his love for the sinner in the very same act (Rom. 5:8-9).1

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 16, “The Exalted Lord Christ.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩

  3. Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), chap. 11, “Can God Be Both Holy and Loving? Righteousness, Goodness, and Love.” ↩ ↩2