Flowers for Blood and the Wrath of God

An outraged friend, which for me is the best kind, sent me a link to a video of a father and son, in France, placing flowers at the concert hall that was attacked in Paris over the weekend. The video is no longer available, but the transcript quotes the father as saying to the son that we will “match the mean people’s guns with flowers and candles.” Under the video are the words ‘tres preciuex’, or, ‘how precious’. Mmhhhhmmm. Precious is the word I would have chosen, actually, but not in the sense intended.

So, follow me down a meandering path, for a moment, and see if we don’t arrive somewhere useful by the end. I have written, in these esteemed pages, over the last many weeks, that God is very angry. He is an angry God–angry with humanity, angry with sin, angry with rebellion. This isn’t something I feel to be true, it’s something that I can understand easily by reading the bible. God created a beautiful creation, and that creation rejected him, filling its hands with violence and blood all the time.

Some people, whose comments I did not put up, found this basic concept difficult to understand. I could never believe in a God like that, they said, you’re a stupid idiot for believing something so stupid. You don’t know anything about anything. I was tempted to put these comments up because I thought they would make me look good. But sense prevailed, and my stated desire of acting in charity towards those who would like to be my enemy won the day. I didn’t put them up. See how good I am? Confessing my sins in such a way that I still come out not that bad? Anyway, I’m one of the good ones, or at least not one of the really bad ones, and God saved me because of the spark of good that he saw inside my heart…..that’s just a little joke.

For many many years now, the western Christian has been lied to about God’s anger. Anger isn’t very nice, and so the church leaned hard on the message of God’s mercy and love, on the individual’s personal relationship with Jesus, on the feelings of the heart, rather than on the content of the Christian Faith, on the judgment of God, and the just wrath of the creator of the world. We wanted people to be saved, so we tried really hard never to speak of anyone perishing. The result of this is an entire generation of supposed Christians who think they are basically good people. Systems are evil. Other people are evil. Money is evil. But I, me, my actual self, I am not evil.

It’s hard not for me to just spew all kinds of sarcastic angst all over this sentiment when I hear it. Because that’s what it is, it’s blind sentimentality, it’s not true.

Each individual person is terribly evil. Not a single human on earth is innocent. The only innocent person was Jesus, and he is in heaven now, so there aren’t any innocent people here any more. Humanity as a whole, and each individual, is terribly wicked all the time. And God is angry.

And, before I take a turn on my winding path, let me just point out that it is good that this is so. You may not think that you want God to be angry, you may feel afraid of anger, but you actually depend, personally, on God’s righteous, judging anger. Your sense of moral good, of some things being bad and other things being good, depends on someone, out there, bigger than you, being able to right wrongs and judge wickedness. When you hear of something unfair, the natural and good response is indignant outrage. The trouble is, no human is prepared to put himself, or herself, into the place of the one who has acted unfairly and unjustly.

And, we have tumbled into such moral decline, that, not being able to face the evil in ourselves, we cannot face the evil in the other. So, Paris is blown up and there are dead bodies all over the ground, and a nice man says to his child, let’s just lay out more flowers. This is a general, nebulous evil, right here, and if we are nice enough, this unidentifiable evil will stop being evil and become good, like us.

Um, no. That’s a precious thought, and, unfortunately, utterly worthless. The evil that we’re facing isn’t some nebulous, unidentifiable, evil-ish system. It is a great big group of actual evil people doing particular and real acts of violence. And the real acts of violence and hatred are really acts that make God angry.

But don’t worry, I’m equal opportunity. I was trying to wrap my head around why I’m not able to get all weepy about the refugees. I look at the pictures and my heart doesn’t flutter and I don’t feel like weeping or sending anything in the mail or taking any of them into my home. I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t moved. But at two o’clock in the morning it came to me in a blinding flash.

The people who are lecturing me about my attitude about refugees, and really, here, I’m just talking about the president, are the same people who think it’s ok for babies to be slaughtered before they are born. See, I’m really angry about the number of babies that have been killed in America over the last forty years. Sometimes, when I think about it, I just feel waves of rage wash over me. Helpless rage because there are evil systems and cultural realities that mitigate against me doing very much. I can’t stop it. I am so so so angry that the original motivation of Margaret Sanger was the elimination of African Americans, other minorities, and the weak. This enrages me, but it does not enrage my president.

Guess what, though, it does enrage God. Just like my own sin enrages him. I am not a lovely, sinless, fluttering butterfly snowflake unicorn of goodness. I sin. I am evil. I rebel against the one who made me, just like the terrorists, just like my president, just like the refugees, just like Margaret Sanger. All Have Sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

And the Christian must say this. We must talk about God’s anger. Do you honestly think that little boy, in Paris, who sized up events rightly, concluding that something terrible had happened and that they, he, is being pushed out of his own home by the violence and hatred of others, is going to buy the dumb idea that if you just lay enough flowers in the street and bow low enough before the one who hates you, you’ll survive and not be killed and that equals winning? He seems a clever boy. I wouldn’t be surprised if he looks at all the flowers and all the pools of blood and figures out that someone is lying.

If you don’t talk about God’s just and righteous anger against sin, you won’t be able to understand the gospel. And if you don’t ever understand the gospel, you’ll only experience God’s wrath forever and that will be fair, because without his intervention to deal with your sin, you will go on hating him. God doesn’t look at you, or me, or the terrorist, or the refugee, and try to find some spark of goodness upon which he can build an affection for himself. He looks at the sinner and sees it for what it is–total, ugly rebellion. And then, because he is both perfectly just and perfectly merciful, he has mercy on some. He absorbs his own wrath into himself on the cross. He takes your ugly death dealing wickedness and dies instead of you.

And this is why it is good and right that not all would be saved. His death destroyed death, but some go on perishing forever. Some he lets reject him for the long stretched out days of eternity, to declare and manifest the fairness, the rightness of his being angry against sin. If you find that you have been saved, that God rescued you and made you love him, you don’t puff out your chest and crow over your good fortune. You were just the same. You rejected God. You should perish. But he grabbed you, he rescued you, he saved you, to glorify himself and make a bride for his Son. You can only bow down in gratitude at such an incredible and undeserved mercy.

More also, if you have been shown mercy, you can give mercy. If you have been forgiven, you can forgive, not in groveling fear, not laying down flowers and hoping the terrorists will be distracted by the sparkly colors. You, when the terrorist is getting ready to cut off your head, can say, “I also am a sinner, like you. But Jesus died in my place. If you repent of your sins, you can be saved by him forever. On the basis of his forgiveness, I forgive you.” To the refugee, if you have been shown mercy, you can say, “I was lost and perishing, but God rescued me. On the basis of his work, I will help you.” To the abortion worker you can say, “I have sinned, like you, and offended God, like you, but he forgave me, and he can forgive you, if you repent.” It’s the same for everyone–the very high, the very low, the terrorist, the one fleeing terror, the president, the baby slayer, everyone. Each must repent, must turn around, must be forgiven and receive mercy.

And, it may be, that in time, some might need to stand up to protect the weak, the broken, the sinner. Not with flowers, but with weapons, the weapons of war. If someone wants to shoot you, even though you may deserve to be shot, you should defend yourself and those around you. For this also is the gospel. That Jesus came to deal with his great enemy, to battle Satan and death, and to win the girl. The one who stands up to fight on behalf of others, and lays down his life, is a right picture of Jesus who didn’t stand by, waving a candle and a flower, while we slaughtered each other and Satan. His light, his blood, spilled on the ground, poured out for you, will overcome his own wrath.