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
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