Many of us as Christians automatically think of the gospel in terms of John 3:16—the declaration that God so loved the world that he sent his one and only son to die for our sake, for our salvation. And that, of course, is completely biblical.

At the same time, however, we may be so accustomed to hearing about God’s love that we hardly know what to do with all the descriptions of God’s anger and wrath that seem to permeate the Old Testament. It makes us squirm. We want to think of God as our perfectly loving heavenly Father—and he is. More than we know. But when we read the Old Testament, and particularly the prophets, it seems like God gets mad a lot. And it’s pretty obvious that you really, really don’t want to be on God’s bad side.

Wait: does God have a bad side?

Parents understand some of this. People know me as a pretty even-tempered person, and few if any have ever seen me get really mad. Some of my friends have actually wondered out loud what it would take to get a rise out of me. The only people who have ever seen the fullness of my anger… are my kids.  

Now don’t get me wrong. I have never abused them physically or verbally. Nor am I claiming that my anger was righteous. But I know what it means for anger to be the flip side of love and concern. I know what it means to watch children make poor decisions or act impulsively based on desire, oblivious to the consequences. I know what it means to worry about how what they do today will shape their tomorrow.

As some have said, the opposite of love is not anger or hatred—it’s indifference. As a dad, I care about what happens to my children, even though they’re grown and have children of their own. That experience helps me understand in some small way what it means for God to be angry, the God whom Jesus taught us to call Father.

Yet my anger is nothing compared to the wrath of God in Scripture. God is unspeakably holy, incomprehensibly powerful. His wrath is portrayed in the language of violence.  For example, in the previous two episodes, we’ve been examining a passage in Micah that uses the word “destroy” over and over again, as if God were angrily pounding a pulpit. And while it’s one thing for God to promise to destroy his people’s enemies, it’s another for him to say he’s going to destroy their cities.

There’s no soft-pedaling or ignoring this. It won’t do for us to think or say, “Oh, that’s just the Old Testament. Everything’s different now. It’s all about grace. It’s all about Jesus.” Well… sort of. But it’s not as if God’s nature and character somehow changed in the time between the Testaments. And while we look to the Jesus of the gospels to see the embodiment of God’s humility and grace, there’s also the Jesus who cleansed the temple, the Jesus who spoke truth to power—and the Jesus of the book of Revelation. When Jesus returns to take his final and rightful place as king, there will be judgment. There will be punishment.

We mustn’t forget that there’s a flip side to John 3:16—that justly famous verse isn’t merely about how God lovingly grants us the gift of eternal life. It’s about how, without that gift, we would perish. It’s about how grace and love rescue us from the fate we would otherwise suffer, the fate we deserve. And both the terrifying judgment and the gracious gift of salvation together are expressions of God’s righteousness and holiness.

So…what do we do with that oracle in Micah? How do we respond when God threatens to destroy, destroy, destroy, destroy? Let’s go back to the question of covenant.

As I’ve suggested in previous episodes, God is the one who initiated the relationship with Abraham. God is the one who called Abraham to be the father of a nation and promised to bless him. If you read the stories of Abraham and his descendants—Isaac, Jacob, Joseph—you’re treated to honest accounts of flawed individuals. There are glorious moments of faith to be sure, but also moments of faithlessness. There is courage but also cowardice. There is wisdom and foolishness, humility and arrogance, loyalty and betrayal, a whole complex picture of what it means to be a fallen human in a fallen world.

Through it all, God remains true to the covenant promise made to Abraham. God is faithful through the generations, faithful through the ups and downs of their stories. God is faithful in raising up Moses to free his people from Egyptian slavery. And it is on the basis of that faithfulness that he asks for their covenant faithfulness in return.

The commandments, in other words, are given in the context of a covenant relationship in which God has already shown himself to be trustworthy.

That should make a difference to how we read the oracle in Micah. Again, when God says that he will destroy the people’s horses and chariots, fortified cities, occult practices and idols, he is not simply threatening to punish them for breaking his rules. True, he has commanded the people time and again to repent and obey, and warned them of the consequences of their disobedience. True, they have repeatedly ignored such warnings and gone their own way. The time has come, therefore; God will no longer hold back the consequences.

And yet: notice how God once again takes the initiative to remove the barriers to covenant obedience. This is not, I laid down the rules; you broke them; now suffer the consequences. It’s I still want you to be in a covenant relationship with me. I’m still keeping my promise. If you can’t get rid of the things that stand between us, I will.

That’s not to say that we can turn God’s anger into something as simple as “I’m doing this for your own good.” His wrath is portrayed as terrifying, and that’s as it should be. God is no mere idol to be trifled with, a knick-knack to be displayed on a living room table as a sign of our spirituality. With a word, the God of the universe can make and unmake, create and destroy. As the Bible teaches, we are right to fear him. That is the beginning of wisdom.

And we are equally right to love him, to wonder at his covenant faithfulness, to marvel at his love for us. Sometimes, that love is severe. But it is love nonetheless.