God Has a Name

by John Mark Comer

Put another way, what you think about God will shape your destiny in life.

I came to realize something about God that I’ll never forget: that’s just what God is like—compassionate and gracious. He goes around blessing all sorts of people who don’t deserve it.

Listen: every time you see them, every time they annoy you or upset you or make you mad, it’s an opportunity to be like God, to show mercy.

You’re right. It’s not how it’s supposed to be. It’s not God’s will. There’s no secret plan behind all the injustice in the world. It’s evil, plain and simple. “Gods” and human beings are at war with Yahweh. Yes, Yahweh has a plan to work all this mess into good, but he still feels the pain of war. Remember he’s a person, not an idea.

has feelings. And he feels anger over evil in the world.

Here’s my favorite definition of God’s wrath: “his steady, unrelenting, unremitting, uncompromising antagonism to evil in all its forms and manifestations.”9

Our anger is almost always from a wounded ego—somebody hurt us or made us feel stupid or took advantage of us or didn’t do what we wanted. It’s inherently selfish, even narcissistic.

God’s anger isn’t like that; the punishment fits the crime. There’s a justice we just can’t match.

So here’s the ground we’ve covered so far: God does get angry, but it’s unusual. His baseline is “compassionate and gracious, slow to anger.”

To clarify, that’s a quote of Exodus 34v6–7.

It turns out that sin is its own punishment, and obedience its own reward.

This is the kind of anger we see in Yahweh. Anger that is patient, just, and unselfish—that comes out of a place of love. Anger that comes from a Father who cares about his kids.

A lot of people—in particular, Americans—misinterpret God’s faithfulness to mean some kind of promise to give us life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So when tragedy strikes or the economy goes south or the child tests positive or we don’t find a spouse by thirty, we think God is unfaithful.

Our hope isn’t that nothing bad will ever happen to us. Or that everything that does happen to us is “the will of God.” Our hope is that no matter what happens to us, Jesus is back from the dead, and anything is possible.

Like Abraham and Sarah, these whispers often come years before they turn into Isaacs. And they often seem unlikely, if not impossible. The waiting can push your faith to the limit. There will be many days when it seems like everything in your present contradicts God’s promise over your future.