Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

by Brian Zahnd

Dr. Baxter Kruger refers to this inner tension as the windshield wiper of the soul that vacillates between two visions of God. The first is powerful and transcendent, a God of glory or might, sitting on a distant throne wrapped in unapproachable light. While this transcendent imagination of God might inspire awe and fear, it does not generate relational embrace or ease. But there is a second, qualitatively divergent vision of God that also attracts us. It doesn’t begin with the mind trying to grasp the immensity and grandeur of God, but the heart that yearns for beauty and the wonder of being well loved. This is the God of my deepest longings, the One whom I can taste in the rhythms of music and creativity, catch glimpses of in my encounters with love, and feel embraced in the holy encounter with an

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” It’s a Puritan classic. An American greatest hit. A revered revivalist text. I had my own handmade copy. I assembled photocopies of this 250-year-old sermon into a homemade booklet. This was back when cutting and pasting were done with scissors and glue. I carefully collated and stapled the twenty pages. My favorite passages were highlighted in bright pink. I provided it with a blue card-stock cover. The title was handwritten with a heavy black marker: “Sinners in the Hands of an ANGRY GOD.” Yes, I wrote ANGRY GOD in all caps. Thirty years later I still have this artifact from my angry-God days. It serves as a reference point to give perspective on my long spiritual journey away from an angry, violent, retributive God toward the God who is revealed by Jesus as our loving Father.

revealed God as he is. Sometimes the Bible is like a Rorschach test: our interpretation of the text reveals more about ourselves than about God. However else we address the problem of proof-texting an angry God, we must always remember that any depiction of God, from whatever source, is subordinate to the revelation of God seen in Jesus. If the mystery of God is a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, the picture on the cover of the box is the face of Jesus! Jesus is the face of God, the icon of God, the Word of God, the divine Logos made flesh.*14 This is a recurring theme among the New Testament writers. What the Bible does infallibly is point us to Jesus. The Bible itself is not a perfect picture of God, but it does point us to the One who is. This is what orthodox Christianity has always said. We

make the Old Testament univocal. The Old Testament is a chorus of voices, and they’re not always in perfect harmony. The Old Testament is often a theological debate with both sides making their case. Proverbs and Job have differing stories to tell. Proverbs says if you fear God and do what is right, good things will happen to you. And there’s truth in that. But Job says that’s not always the whole story by telling his tragic tale showing how bad things can happen to good people. Then there’s this question: Does God require animal sacrifice? The priests and Levites say yes, and that’s what we find in the Torah. But eventually the psalmists and prophets begin to challenge this. David says, “Sacrifice and offering you do not desire….Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required.”*15 In this psalm David brashly contradicts the Torah’s unambiguous laws requiring animal sacrifice! Later Hosea claims that God doesn’t want sacrifice but mercy.*16 Eventually Jesus will weigh in and affirm the position of Hosea.*17 Does that mean that the Torah is wrong about animal sacrifice? That would be to put too fine a point on it. Rather, the Old Testament is a journey of discovery. The Bible doesn’t stand above the story it tells, but is fully enmeshed in it. The Bible itself is on the quest to discover the Word of God. What we find in the Old Testament is a progression of revelation. The Old Testament begins with a primitive assumption that God requires ritual sacrifice but eventual...

who settles the dispute. One of the main challenges in talking about God is the problem of metaphor. We cannot talk about God without using metaphor; it’s the only option we have when speaking of the supremely transcendent. But to literalize a metaphor is to create an idol and formulate an error. For example, God is not a man, not a rock, not a tower, not a fortress, not a hen, not a husband, not a mother, not a warrior, not a charioteer, not a farmer, not a king…even though the Bible uses all these metaphors to talk about God. We can use these metaphors, but we can’t literalize them. The only way to deal with this problem is to create a multitude of metaphors and occasionally retire some that have outlived their usefulness. The wrath of God is a biblical metaphor we use to describe the very real consequences we suffer from trying to go through life against the grain of

love. Canadian theologian Brad Jersak says, “The wrath of God is understood as divine consent to our own self-destructive defiance.”*19 When we sin against the two great commandments—to love God with all our heart and to love our neighbor as ourselves—we suffer the inevitable consequences of acting against love. We can call this the wrath of God if we like; the Bible does, but that doesn’t mean that God literally loses his temper. God no more literally loses his temper than he literally sleeps, even though the Bible says, “The Lord awoke as from sleep.”*20 Literalizing a divine metaphor always leads to error. We easily acknowledge that God is not literally a rock and not literally a hen, but we have tended to literalize the metaphor of divine anger. Yet even in the Old Testament there are hints of how we can better understand the wrath of God. One of those hints is found in Psalm 7.

God is a righteous judge, and a God who has indignation every day. If one does not repent, God will whet his sword; he has bent and strung his bow; he has prepared his deadly weapons, making his arrows fiery shafts.*21 These three verses, laden with metaphor, make it sound as if God directly visits retribution upon sinners with personal indignation. But the next three verses give us a different perspective. See how they conceive evil, and are pregnant with mischief, and bring forth lies. They make a pit, digging it out,

and fall into the hole that they have made. Their mischief returns upon their own heads, and on their own heads their violence descends.*22 These verses reveal that what we may call the whetted sword of God’s vengeance is, on a deeper level, the reciprocal consequences of seeking to harm others. These sinners fall into their own diabolical traps and their violence boomerangs back onto their own heads. But here I need to make something very clear: that God’s wrath is a biblical metaphor does not make the consequences of sin any less real or painful. The revelation that God’s

What I want you to know is that God’s attitude, God’s spirit, toward you is one of unwavering fatherly-motherly love. You have nothing to fear from God. God is not mad at you. God has never been mad at you. God is never going to be mad at you. And what about the fear of God? The fear of God is the wisdom of not acting against love. We fear

When the prodigal son fell fearfully into the hands of his father, forgiveness, healing, and restoration began. Just because the prodigal son felt fear as he fell into his father’s hands doesn’t mean he had anything to fear from his father. In his father’s hands was the only safe place to be. It was in the far country that the prodigal son was in danger, not in his father’s hands. When we fall into the hands of the living God, we are sinners in the hands of a loving God.

from Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son. After the younger son left his father’s house, the consequences of his sin eventually caught up with him in the far country, and the boy ended up living with the pigs. Call this the wrath of God if you like. But never think that the father was mad at his son. He was not. Never think that the father looked upon his son as a loathsome spider. He did not. The father had nothing but love in his heart for his profligate son. As long as the son remained in the far country, the “wrath of God” abided upon him. But when he turned toward home and sought mercy, he was saved from “wrath” and found himself a sinner in the hands of a loving God.

The monster god has faded away, and today I preach the beauty of God revealed in the face of Christ. But that doesn’t mean there are no monsters. The monsters of war, violence, greed, exploitation, oppression, racism, genocide, and every other form of antihuman abuse continue to inflict our species with unimaginable suffering. If we try to manipulate these monsters for our own self-interest, they eventually turn on us and destroy us. We can call this the wrath of God. But the hands of God are not actually hurling thunderbolts from heaven like Zeus of the Greek pantheon. The hands of God have been stretched out in love where they were nailed to a tree. The nail-pierced hands of God now reach out to every doubter and every sufferer, revealing the wounds of love. The hands of God are not hands of wrath but

Closing the Book on Vengeance Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son” Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on” God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”

God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but The next time you see me comin’ you better run” Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?” God says, “Out on Highway 61” —Bob Dylan, “Highway 61 Revisited”

Let’s play a little game. I’ll ask a few questions and you answer them. Okay? First question: Did God tell Abraham to kill his son? You say yes? But hastily add that God didn’t actually require Abraham to go through with it—it was just a test of faith. All right. Next question: Did God command Joshua, King Saul, and the Israelites to kill children as part of the ethnic cleansing of Canaan? Is that a hesitant yes I hear, like walking in untied shoes? My next question is simple and straightforward: Does God change? I sense your confident answer of no to this question. And you are quite correct. A cornerstone of Christian theology has always been that God is immutable—that is, God doesn’t mutate from one kind of being into another kind of being. The immutability of

God is the solid ground upon which our faith stands. Next question (brace yourself): Since God doesn’t change, and since you have already acknowledged that in times past God has sanctioned the killing of children as part of a genocidal program of conquest, is it then possible that God would require you to kill children? You say you don’t like this game? I understand. I don’t really like it either. But bear with me a little more; we’re almost done. Last question: If God told you to kill children, would you do so? I know, I know! Calm down. Of course, you answer without hesitation that under no circumstances would you participate in the genocidal slaughter of children. (At least I hope that’s how you answer!) Yet in answering with an unequivocal no to the question of whether you would kill

children, are you claiming a moral superiority to the God depicted in parts of the Old Testament? After all, the Bible says God commanded the Israelites to exterminate the inhabitants of the land during their conquest of Canaan, including children…right? Yet (hopefully) you find the very suggestion of participating in genocide morally repugnant. So what’s going on here? Is genocide something God used to command but now God has reformed his ways? We already agreed that God doesn’t change, God doesn’t mutate. So if God used to sanction genocide, and God doesn’t change…well, you see the problem. You’ve been painted into a corner. So where ...

We can question the immutability of God. Maybe God does change over time. 3. We can question how we read Scripture. Could it be that we need to learn to read the Bible in a different way? For some there seems to be a fourth possibility: to simply ignore the whole thing, to pretend there is no problem. But this is impossible for honest, thoughtful readers of the Bible. I regularly speak with serious readers of the Bible—usually young people—who are deeply troubled with the problem of the divine sanction of genocide in the Old Testament. They just can’t recon...

John the Baptist was sent by God, but John was not God. John bore witness to the Word, but John was not the Word. John was inspired by God, but John was not God incarnate. This is how we should understand the relationship between the Bible and the revelation of God in Christ. The Bible is sent by God and inspired by God, but the Bible is not God. The Holy Trinity is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—not Father, Son, and Holy Bible. John the Baptist and the Bible play similar roles in relation to the eternal Logos who is Christ. We might say it this way: “There was a book sent from God, whose name was the Bible. It came as a witness to the light, so that all might believe through it.” The Bible testifies through John the Baptist, “[Jesus is] he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ ”*2 This is not a low view of Scripture but a high view of Christ.

So if we don’t want a monstrous God who occasionally commands genocide, and if we don’t want a malleable God who is slowly mutating away from a violent past, how do we view the Old Testament? Something like this: The Old Testament is the inspired telling of the story of Israel coming to know their God. It’s a process. God doesn’t evolve, but Israel’s understanding of God obviously does. If the revelation of God is perfectly depicted in the Pentateuch, why follow the story line of Scripture into the Prophets, Gospels, and Epistles? It seems obvious that we should accept that as Israel was in the process of receiving the revelation of Yahweh, some unavoidable assumptions were made. One of the assumptions was that Yahweh shared the violent attributes of other deities worshiped in the ancient Near East. These assumptions were inevitable, but they were wrong. For example, the Torah assumed that Yahweh, like all the other gods,

required ritual blood sacrifice, but eventually the psalmists and prophets take the sacred text beyond this earlier assumption. Even a casual reader of the Bible notices that between the alleged divine endorsement of genocide in the conquest of Canaan and Jesus’s call for love of enemies in his Sermon on the Mount, something has clearly changed! What has changed is not God but the degree to which humanity has attained an understanding of the true nature of God. The Bible is not the perfect revelation of God; Jesus is. Jesus is the only perfect theology. Perfect theology is not a system of theology; perfect theology is a person. Perfect theology is not found in abstract thought; perfect theology is found in the Incar...

The Old Testament tells the story of Israel coming to know the living God, but the story doesn’t stop until we arrive at Jesus! It isn’t Joshua the son of Nun who gives us the full revelation of God but Yeshua of Nazareth. It’s not the warrior-poet David who gives us the full revelation of God but the greater Son of David, Jesus Christ. We understand Joshua and David as men of their time, but we understand Jesus Christ as “the exact imprint of God’s very being.”*3 Once we realize that Jesus is the perfect icon of the living God, we are forever prohibited from using the Old Testament to justify the use of violence. Using Scripture as a divine license for the implementation of violence is a dangerous practice that must be abandoned by we who...