wrath AND mercy

In our both-and series, this will be the most challenging pair to reconcile and perhaps the most important to our practical spiritual lives in Christ. One of the most important both-ands of the Christian faith is the wrath AND mercy of God.

If there is a pairing that can cause confusion or provide stunning clarity regarding how to interpret certain Biblical ideas and themes, and also how to interpret God’s providence in our lives, it is this pairing. So friends, my big admonition here is this: please embrace a God that has both the characteristic of wrath and mercy in his divine attributes! If you do not, if you will not, you will not have a true picture of God. You will end up with a god of your making. If you have a god only of mercy (and love) and no wrath (and judgment), you will have a permissive, uncle of…