Celebrating the Wrath of God

The only answer to the question of suffering is God. He knows very well about the world’s awful wrongs and its inexpressible pain. In the end, it’s God’s character and his commitment to us that brings us assurance if assurance is to be had.

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Another woman I know had spent more than thirty years in Asia as a missionary and was vacationing in America for a couple of weeks when she leaned over to pat a dog. The animal lunged at her, caught her by the mouth, and ripped away her whole bottom lip.

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First Kings tells us that God’s purposed judgement on Ahab was carried out like this, "But someone drew his bow at random and hit the king of Israel between the sections of his armor" (22:34). Fancy that! A soldier, holding the horses, anxious to get a shot in, grabs his bow and shoots an arrow in the direction of the enemy "at random," and Ahab is judged. As he’s driven away, someone might have been heard to mutter, "Now there’s bad luck for you."

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Linda has Huntington’s chorea. I first noticed her in an assembly in South Dakota. How could I have missed her when I saw her arms flying up and down, in and out and across in ever direction. Her body was a ceaseless stream of involuntary jerks. I spoke to her afterward while she fed herself with surprisingly more success than I thought possible. She said...

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"Well, he said slowly, "if that’s true, you don’t think a little bit of death is going to harm two people like us, do you?"

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And who wants a life of one marital brawl after another? Who wants a life that’s nothing but one more hypodermic needle, one more battery of tests, one more night of pain, one more year of loneliness, one more year of moral wrestling and losing, one more year of self-loathing and fear, one more year in a job that crushes the soul and deadens the heart, one more year in a pigsty trying to make ends meet, one more decade of pointlessness? Who could want it? Why not end it all? Because...

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Patrick Drumsheugh read to his dying friend, the Scots doctor, "And the publican standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes to heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner." The old doctor said, "That micht hae been written for me, Patrick, or ony ither auld sinner that hes feenished his life, an’ hes naething tae say for himsel."

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Sometimes we react to forgiveness as if God were a friend paying for our lunch. "How kind of you," we say and we mean it. But we aren’t dumbfounded by it, and that itself is astonishing.

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A young Israelite turns from the Red Sea and faces the brooding and threatening wilderness. "Look at this," he calls to his friends, and they join him in a long pale-faced silence. But then in a moment of splendor, remembering that God had rescued them from a long and bitter bondage, one young woman begins to sing, "God is our refuge and strength...Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea." Taking their cue from her...

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When Giuseppe Garibaldi dared his already weary "Red Shirts" to unify Italy via hunger and cold and wounds and death, he asked them, "How do you like it?" They stood silently for a moment and then threw up their arms crying, "We are the men! We are the men!"

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