Remember the Context of the Plagues.
“Then the seventh angel poured out his bowl upon the air, and a loud voice came out of the temple from the throne, saying, “It is done.” And there were flashes of lightning and sounds and peals of thunder; and there was a great earthquake, such as there had not been since mankind came to be upon the earth, so great an earthquake was it, and so mighty. The great city was split into three parts, and the cities of the nation’s fell. Babylon the great was remembered in the sight of God, to give her the cup of the wine of His fierce wrath. – Revelation 16:17-19. (NASB)
Though God’s compassion is often celebrated, many find the idea of His wrath disturbing. If God is love, they think He should never express wrath. That notion, however, is false. His wrath arises directly from His love. Love and justice are intimately intertwined. The “wages of sin” is death, and this was demonstrated in both testaments.
The God of the Bible loves justice and hates evil. Sin and evil, therefore, provoke Him to passion, a passion expressed on behalf of those oppressed and abused, and even in cases in which one’s evil affects primarily oneself. God hates evil because evil always hurts His creatures, even if self-inflicted.
Some claim that the Old Testament God is a God of wrath and that the New Testament God is a God of love. But there is only one God, and He is revealed as the same in both Testaments. God, who is love, does become angry at evil—but precisely because He is love. Jesus Himself expressed profound anger against evil, and the New Testament teaches numerous times about the righteous and appropriate wrath of God.
God’s anger is always His righteous and loving response against evil and injustice.
Divine wrath is righteous indignation motivated by perfect goodness and love, and it seeks the flourishing of all creation. God’s wrath is simply the appropriate response of love to evil and injustice. Accordingly, evil provokes God to passion in favour of the victims of evil and against its perpetrators. Divine wrath, then, is another expression of divine love.
According to the Bible, love and justice are intertwined. Divine anger is the proper response of love against evil because evil always hurts someone whom God loves. There is no instance in Scripture where God is arbitrarily or unfairly wrathful or angry.
Asaph the musician and poet, who wrote 12 of the psalms, said this in Ps 78:38 (NLT), (he was recounting Israel’s multiple rebellions in the wilderness wanderings to the promised land,) “Yet he was merciful and forgave their sins and did not destroy them all. Many times, he held back his anger and did not unleash his fury!”
God’s anger against evil, which will finally culminate in the eradication of all evil once and for all, stems from His love for all and from His desire for the final good of the universe, which itself has a stake in the whole question of sin and rebellion and evil.
But a raging God doesn’t always sit well with people today. But one thing we have to keep in mind is that Revelation was written primarily to people who were suffering as they heard the book read. In a time of ease language like today’s text can seem inappropriate, but in desperate times the thought of a mighty avenger can seem almost sweet to the abused and the downtrodden.
But more than this, God uses this kind of language as a motivator in some circumstances. God knows that we often want to do the right thing, but we need some sort of motivation to pull it off. The sense of negative consequences can go a long way toward changing our behaviour.
Here’s an old motivation story but a goodie: It seems that a number of the girls at a school thought it was great fun to coat their lips with lipstick and then plant a big kiss on the mirror in the girl’s bathroom. The appearance of all the lip marks seemed too hilarious for words. This, however, increased the cleaner’s workload greatly as the oil-based substance was quite difficult to remove.
So, the principal made it a rule. No kissing of mirrors in the girl’s bathroom was allowed. Did this motivate the practice to stop? Of course not! Now there was not only the fun of smudging the mirror, but there was also the thrill of breaking a rule! So, the marks increased. A fine didn’t work either.
He finally came up with an idea. He cleared the girl’s bathroom one day and called in ten of the most talkative girls for a demonstration. He would show them how hard it was to clean the mirror of all the lip smudges. With the girls looking on, he called on the cleaner to clean the mirror in front of them. The cleaner dipped a sponge in the toilet and began to wipe the mirror! Needless to say, within two or three days the kissing of mirrors had stopped in that school!