God's Anger, Our Hope

There is great hope in God's anger. There is great hope. And if you don't have an angry God, honestly, if you don't believe in an angry God, and I realize this may sound really offensive to some of you, but if you don't have an angry God, look, you don't have hope. You live in a world of crushing injustice and wrong and wickedness, and you become bitter. You want to take revenge or you want to hide. You yourself will not be able to have clean anger in that. Only people who know God gets angry and God will make things right can really have clean anger toward the world of what we see.

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I want to look at Isaiah 57:14-21 and then Isaiah 64 verses one through six. I had a lot of things I wanted to preach on in this section and I just want to do two this morning. So we're going to read this aloud together. I'm reading from the CSB version. So this is not the Pew Bible, but it's up on the screen behind me if you'll join your voices with mine.

He said, "Build it up, build it up. Prepare the way. Remove every obstacle from my people's way." For the high and exalted one who lives forever, whose name is holy says this: "I live in a high and holy place and with the oppressed and lowly of spirit to revive the spirit of the lowly and revive the heart of the oppressed. For I will not always accuse you and will not always be angry, for then the spirit would grow weak before me, even the breath which I have made. Because of his sinful greed, I was angry. So I struck him. I was angry and hid, but he went on turning back to the desires of his heart. I have seen his ways but I will heal him. I will lead him and restore comfort to him and his mourners, creating words of praise. The Lord said, 'Peace, peace to the one who is far or near, and I will heal him.' But the wicked are like a storm-tossed sea which cannot be still and its water churns up mire and muck. There is no peace for the wicked," says my God. — Isaiah 57:14-21

Then over in Isaiah 64: "If only you would tear the heavens open and come down so that the mountains would quake at your presence, just as fire kindles brushwood and fire boils water, to make your name known to your enemies so that the nations would tremble at your presence. When you did awesome works that we did not expect, you came down and the mountains quaked at your presence. From ancient times, no one has heard, no one has seen, no eye has seen any god except you who walks on behalf of the one who waits for him. You welcome the one who joyfully does what is right. They remember you in your ways, but we have sinned and you were angry. How can we be saved if we remain in our sins? All of us have become like something unclean, and all our righteous acts are like a polluted garment. All of us wither like a leaf, and our iniquities carry us away like the wind." — Isaiah 64:1-6

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

God's Anger

You know, maybe one of the most controversial or difficult subjects for lots of people is God's anger, God's wrath. It makes people really nervous when we talk about this. Maybe it's because we picture anger as always destructive—you got incredible Hulk imagery in your head: "Don't make me angry, you wouldn't like me if I'm angry," Bruce Banner said. Maybe you think of anger as a base human emotion, something primitive, something beneath God, not appropriate. Or maybe you think of it as a relic, God's anger as a relic of yesteryear.

A number of you may have had to read the sermon by Jonathan Edwards, the early Puritan pastor who ended up starting a seminary in this country—"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Anybody have to? Yeah, I did too. So I mean, very vivid picture of God's destructive anger. And we read about that and it brings to mind a lot of discomfort, and these passages speak so much to God's anger. How do we think about God's anger?

A friend recommended a writer earlier this year, Doctor Robert Masters, who's done an extensive amount of writing on emotional intelligence. And he says this, and I think it's really helpful: there's no such thing as negative emotions. When we think about anger, he distinguishes between clean anger and unclean anger. So we see a lot of unclean anger—anger that ends up in aggression, that's vindictive, that's vengeful. But there's a type of anger, a moral fire, that doesn't turn into aggression, doesn't attack, it doesn't blame or shame or harm. That's clean anger.

And I think that's really helpful when we think this morning in these passages about God's anger. God is the origin and the epitome of clean anger.

God gets angry and what I hope to show you in these passages from Isaiah 57 and 64 is that God's anger is actually a gift to his people. It's not primitive. It's not leftover from a bygone era, and if you don't have a God who is angry, you actually can't have hope. You can't have humility. You're not going to be a person who really understands the depth of God's love for you.

Isaiah's writing to a people who likewise needed to know that God got angry. He's writing to two separate groups of people in two parts of this big book in the Old Testament. Chapters one through 39 are written to the Northern Kingdom of Israel, the 10 tribes in the North that called themselves Israel after there was that split—that civil war kind of split after Solomon. So those 10 tribes abandoned worship of God at the temple, abandoned God, and as a result, God allowed their enemies, the Assyrians, to come and wipe them out. The whole first part of the book is really negative. If you try to read Isaiah, it's really hard to read. Chapters one to 39 are all about, "Woah, woah, God is about to bring destruction at the hand of your enemies." The people were scratching their heads: "How can God be this angry?"

The last half of the book—the part we're looking at this time going up to Easter—chapters 40 through 66 are written to the Southern Kingdom, Judah. Jerusalem was in Judah. The southern two tribes that remained with the Lord for many years, but slowly also began, as God says, "You honor me with your lips, but your heart's far from me. You give me lip service, but it's not really real." And God allows their enemies, the Babylonians, to come in and take the people into captivity. These are people in captivity now looking at these last chapters, chapters 40 through 66, and saying, "What has happened to us?" And again, they need help there—words of comfort, words of hope. But what's fascinating is words about God's anger even here. This tells us that maybe we miss something often about God's anger: that there's a goodness to it.

The Good News of God's Anger

So today, I have a couple points I want to walk us through: the good news of God's anger, the bad news of God's anger, and the servant in God's anger. This is a really simple sermon, y'all.

What is the good news of God's anger? You know what the good news of God's anger is? That God gets angry. That's good news. It's good news to know that we have a God who gets angry. There's a deliberate, firm stance where God is set against all that destroys and harms people. There is a justice coming in the world. God is going to set everything right.

We read this in the passage here:

There is no rest for the wicked. There's no peace for the wicked. — Isaiah 57:21

And God is saying, "I have moral categories and they are absolute. There is right and wrong. I hate what is evil and I am going to do something about it." There's an accounting day that's coming. There is a judgment, and nothing that's wrong in this world will be scoffed at or ignored. God is not gonna shrug at the violence and injustice done.

And this is good news. Because don't your stomachs turn? Aren't you upset? I mean, some people have given up reading the news because we can't handle it. We know there's wrong. We know there's wickedness. We're very aware of injustice, and some of us are just so tired. We're tired of feeling like there's nothing we can do about any of this. And it's good news that there is a God who gets angry at what is wrong. Amen?

Is anybody here with me this morning? Did y'all just go to sleep after spring break? Come on. Isn't it good news that God gets angry about this? Yes. Don't we need this? Don't our hearts cry out for it? I mean, you may not admit the kind of movies you watch, but the ticket sales for vengeance movies are really high because we're like, "Somebody do something. Make it right."

There's a verse at the end of Romans 16, and it's a really sweet verse:

The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. — Romans 16:20

It sounds very peaceable, but what we miss often times is that there is no peace without God's anger. And God's saying, "I'm gonna set things right."

I read another Southern pastor who had a redneck translation of that verse. You ready? His version is, "I will run Satan down with my monster pickup. He will be roadkill. The buzzards will pick over his carcass, and I will laugh my head off forever."

There is great hope in God's anger. And if you don't have an angry God—honestly, if you don't believe in an angry God, and I realize this may sound really offensive to some of you, but if you don't have an angry God, you don't have hope.

You live in a world of crushing injustice and wrong and wickedness, and you become bitter. You want to take revenge or you want to hide. You yourself will not be able to have clean anger in that. Only people who know God gets angry and God will make things right can really have clean anger toward the world of what we see.

The Bad News of God's Anger

Second point, the bad news of God's anger. If you've been around a church long enough, you know there's good news of God's anger, so what's the bad news? The people of Judah in exile in Babylon, they're praying the first part of chapter 64.

Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would shake, we've seen you do great stuff in the past, would you come down and do awesome works again and cause everything to be put right? — Isaiah 64:1

They're praying this stuff. There's something about knowing God's anger that rightfully—this is a good use of this—causes us to pray: God, would you come and make things right?

But here's the one thing they did not recognize as they're praying this: of course, if God is going to be angry at sin and wrong, then I'm on the wrong side of that equation too, and so are you. God is rightfully angry with us in our wrongdoing.

We've inherited a personification of justice that looks like a woman with a blindfold. Have you seen this before? A statue or a picture of a woman with a blindfold holding those old kind of scales that go up and down. You put weights on one side, you put something on the other side and it balances. It's a picture of justice.

But see, this is what's pictured for us in this passage. If we are a people who understand God's anger, then we know that we are put on those scales as well.

In the Bible, something that's holy is described with the Hebrew word kavob, which means weighty, heavy. Something that's really holy is substantial, and something that has no substance to it is light. So what does it say here about us?

All of our righteous deeds are like filthy rags and we're like a leaf that shrivels up. — Isaiah 64:6

What does a shriveled up leaf weigh? Put it on the scale—does the scale even move? It weighs nothing. No substance to it. This is what we're like.

What this means is that God always looks under the surface. He doesn't just see what we do but why we do it. The motivations, the reasons, what prompts us. What's odd about humans is that often the motivations for doing good things are the same motivations for doing bad things. They're exactly the same.

For example, we love for people to be pleased with us. Anybody else love for people to like you? Yeah. Everybody. You're a human being if you want people to like you, right? But one of the main motivations for sinning is wanting people to like us. It's one of the reasons we fudge the truth, we tell little lies, make sure the boss sees that we're doing a little bit more than we actually have done. Those all come from wanting to be approved of and wanting to be liked.

But the motivations to do good things are the same as the motivations often to do bad things—wanting other people to approve of you. It can lead you to volunteer for the PTA at your kid's school or giving money to charities in order to look good, just as much as it leads to telling lies. It's true of so many of our behaviors.

God looks beneath the surface. He sees the heart, and there are so many ways that we function in this world, what motivates us, that come from the same root. There's a root of pride that can lead us to be very generous and also very selfish. It's exactly the same.

The human heart is so good at masking and hiding righteous behaviors, but they can come from a bitter root—a lack of trust of God, unbelief, fear, arrogance, self-righteousness. This is why Isaiah says your righteousness, your goodness even, is like filthy rags. What do you do with filthy rags after you've done cleaning under the car where you've changed the oil? You don't put them in the washing machine, you put them in the trash can. They're not good for anything. They're trash at this point.

This is why Isaiah says we wither like a leaf. There's no substance to us. You take our goodness and you put it on the scale of God's righteousness and it weighs nothing. The scale doesn't move. It doesn't weigh anything.

You may think I'm being too narrow, too negative—negative sermon from a bald guy this morning—too exacting, right?

But the reality is not only do we not fulfill God's law, we're not righteous in his life, we can't even fulfill our own rules. So I shared this a couple months ago. I bought in hardcore the Lance Armstrong story. I did. I bought the book. In May 2000, Lance Armstrong, the pro cyclist, published a book with a ghostwriter called It's Not About the Bike. And it's his story, an incredible story about overcoming testicular cancer. He had all these rounds of surgeries, four cycles of chemotherapy. Final treatment was December 1996, during which he was declared cancer free. Then in 1997 he became the second American ever to win the Tour de France and went on to win seven times. It's just incredible, and I was like, oh yeah, this is amazing, right? I bought in on all this. In the book, he describes all this overcoming of the cancer. In fact, he describes one night he got brain lesions that were left over from the testicular cancer. He had to have surgery for that. He's laying in the hospital bed and he makes a deal with the universe and he says this:

The night before brain surgery I thought about death and I said I want to live a true life. I want to be judged on living a true life.

1996. How'd that work out for Lance Armstrong? Anybody know the rest of the story? Not so great. Not so great. All seven of his Tour de France medals were stripped from him for one of the most elaborate cheating incidents in sports history. An amazing hoax. He went to great lengths to defame other people. Did Lance live up to his own statement, "I want to be judged on living a true life"? No. While he was in the middle of writing that, he was already blood doping.

I put that out there because we're people. As much as we say, "I don't want to be judged on God's standard," do we even meet our own standard? None of us can even meet our own standard. If you think about all the ways that you say should and ought about other people, the ways you judge and evaluate other people, we don't even live up to our own standards for ourselves, much less God's standard.

By contrast, Sufjan Stevens wrote a terrific song about a horrible person years ago called "John Wayne Gacy Jr." John Wayne Gacy Jr. was a serial killer in Chicago in the nineteen seventies who terrorized the city. All these young men disappeared. Eventually they found 33 bodies under the floorboards of his house. I encourage you not to look up this story. It is a horrific story. Stevens takes this story. In 1980, he was convicted and executed by lethal injection by the state of Illinois.

But Sufjan Stevens is a believer, and he understood Isaiah 64:6, and he writes this about John Wayne Gacy Jr.:

In my best effort behavior, I'm really just like him. Look beneath the floorboards for the secrets I have hid. I'm the same. Underneath everything.

See, Sufjan knows what Isaiah knows, that my goodness is the same as my badness.

The Difference Between a Christian and a Religious Person

Hold on to that thought for a moment. I want you to see why this matters so much. There are plenty of religious people who read Isaiah 64 verses one through three and they're like, "Yeah. God come down and punish those bad people. Come down and make everything quake and punish the baddies out there. I know that you're about justice. Come and do it." And yes, that's an appropriate use of understanding God's anger. But they don't keep reading or don't understand this part.

The difference between a Christian and a religious person is that Christians pray Isaiah 64 one through three—"come down and deal with the bad ones"—and Isaiah 64:6—"I'm one of them." Christians, real Christians repent not only of our evil deeds, but even of our righteousness. Because we know that our goodness, our supposed goodness, doesn't weigh anything on the scale, and it's actually preventing me from really laying hold of what God has for me.

A real Christian isn't someone who repents just of their sin, but repents of their righteousness. We know that God doesn't look just at the outside like other people do, like we do with one another, but he looks on the inside. We know that:

My righteousness, your righteousness is like filthy rags.

This is how I know when I meet somebody from the South. I'm like, are you a Christian or not? This is one of the ways I really know. It is because if they understand the gospel or not. Because tons of people claim religion, even Christianity, who are self-righteous, smug, arrogant, looking down on other people. Can I get a witness? But they don't really understand God's moral judgment.

They don't understand God's righteousness unless you have a God of anger, unless you have a God who looks beneath the surface. You will also walk around with your nose up and look down at everybody else in gradations of moral righteousness. At least I'm not like him. At least I'm not like her. At least I'm better than them. May not say it out loud because we're southerners. We're nice, but we think it. Think it all the time. Us and them. You will have very little true humility. You really will think yourself better than others. You'll have very little grace for other people. You'll carry yourself around church and around town like, wish everybody was like me.

God saved this church from self-righteous people. You know, our church is not gonna be destroyed by some government edict. Nobody's gonna come and take away your freedom. Nobody's gonna come and take me out. All the things we really think are gonna destroy a church. You know what's gonna destroy a church? It would destroy everything we built here. Self-righteousness. That's what will destroy a church. We forget John Wayne Gacy junior under the floorboards. I'm just like him. That's the bad news: God's anger. The servant in God's anger.

How Can We Be Saved?

And that's why, in Isaiah 57, Isaiah asked this question. Like, God says all these words about comfort and I'm with the contrite and lowly and, you know, Isaiah's like, God, I know about your anger. How can we be saved? That's what he asks in that passage. If this is all true, if you are a God who is righteous in all these ways, how can we be saved? I know I am not righteous. How does this add up?

This is what he says in verse 15:

For the high and exalted one who lives forever whose name is holy, says this, I live in a high and holy place and with the oppressed and lowly of spirit to revive the spirit of the lowly and revive the heart of the oppressed. — Isaiah 57:15

And he goes on to say he's not gonna be angry forever. He will heal. Now that is an incredible promise in your Bible. But Isaiah had no idea how that was gonna happen.

I remember being in seminary, which is the school where they train pastors. I remember going through Old Testament classes, and they're like, there are two competing strains in the Old Testament. And if you try to resolve them in the Old Testament, you have to do so with a pair of scissors. There are two strains. There are all these books that emphasize God's incredible love for his people. The book of Exodus is like this. The Psalms are like this. Kings is like this. All the story about David. Hosea is like this. And then there are these other books that we don't like so much. Deuteronomy, blessings for obedience, curses for disobedience. Chronicles, here's why I sent you into exile and punish you. Proverbs, this is how God is. You better be wise. Be warned. And then all the prophets. And these two strains have tension throughout your Bible. God's unbelievable standard, God's unconditional love, and it's never resolved in your whole Bible, in your Old Testament.

The only way you can resolve it is with a pair of scissors or a cross. You either cut out God's justice, his standard, or you cut out God's love. You can cut out those parts of your Bible, or the only place this is resolved is at the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Suffering Servant

The suffering servant—the one who upheld all of God's righteous acts, God's righteous standard in his life, perfectly obedient, did everything that was required by God according to God's standard, not just his own, God's standard—holy. And the embodiment of God's unconditional love for sinners.

As one theologian puts it, the wisdom of God—this is the only way this gets resolved. The wisdom of God devised a way for the love of God to deliver sinners from the wrath of God while not compromising the righteousness of God. The cross is the means by which God propitiates his wrath that's justly due for our sins, which we all deserve.

And I know that's incredibly offensive, and there are people who are like, hey, I don't really believe that happened. I believe this was created in a Reformation time, and we could talk about that. That's actually a historical fallacy and a lot of historical prejudice around that. But this is the thing you need to know. This is throughout your Bible. This is the point that this is all coming to converge on. The cross of the Lord Jesus Christ where God's wrath and God's love come together, and we need both.

Let me lighten the mood here. Okay. So there was once this obscure TV show called The Office. Maybe some of you have heard about it. In season five, there's an episode called The Golden Ticket.

Now, the story is about a fictional paper company, Dunder Mifflin. The manager, the branch manager, is Michael, and he dresses up one day as Willy Wonka and comes up with this marketing scheme. He's going to put golden tickets into five sheets of paper in random paper shipments that are going out. He says they'll get 10% off their entire order, and he says it will be a day for them that is full of whimsy and excitement and full of fantasy. He's very excited about this.

Well, what happens is all of those golden tickets go to the same customer. So suddenly a customer has 50% off their entire order, and this is threatening to put the entire business underwater. The CEO, David, calls him up and says, "I'm coming to your branch right now." So Michael panics and he goes to his second in command, Dwight, and convinces him, "I want you to take the fall for me." Dwight is like, "I've got to work this, right?" So he takes the fall, he takes the blame.

But when the CEO shows up, he's like, "I just got off my phone and the company that got all the tickets have now said our exclusive business is going to Dunder Mifflin paper. Dwight, you're a genius!" And everybody cheers except for Michael, who's in the corner fuming. He's so mad, and finally he fesses up to the boss, "This was my idea." And of course David is scratching his head, like, "Wait, you made your employee take the fall for your own bad action?" And he says this: "Well, David, I'll be honest with you. I want the credit without any of the blame."

And I'm like, that'll preach. I know, even as a pastor, you don't watch anything the same way. You're always like, "That'll work right there." This is what is given to us at the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. All of the credit for his righteousness, all of his goodness is yours permanently, forever. And none of the blame. He has taken the blame for us. This is why blood was spilt at Calvary. This is why someone died. There was a wrath that had to be satisfied for human sin in order that he could take all the blame and you could get all the credit.

Two Applications

There's an old pastor who used to go to churches like this as a guest preacher, and he did this exercise. He made everybody stand up, and he said, "We're going to play a game today. We're going to play 'Who's as righteous as...'"

So he'd say, "Everybody stand up. Okay, sit down if I want you to remain standing if you think you are as righteous as your pastor." And about a fourth of the people would sit down, like, "Yeah, I'm not as righteous as my pastor."

So alright, so let's keep going. He says, "Okay. There's a well-known evangelist at the time, Billy Graham, who preached all over the country, lots of people came to faith. How many of you—I want you to remain standing if you think you're as righteous as Billy Graham." Well, half the group sits down.

"Okay. One more. Mother Teresa, a nun who served in Calcutta among the poorest of the poor. If you think you're as righteous as Mother Teresa, remain standing." And then kind of most everybody else sat down.

And then he's like, "Okay. Last question. You can remain standing if you think you're as righteous as Jesus." And everybody except for one guy sat down, and he points at the guy and says, "That's the only person in here who understands the gospel. Because that is what's really true. You are as righteous as Jesus Christ. All the credit, none of the blame."

I know that this sermon may not sit real well with some of you. You're like, "Still I am not convinced. I don't want an angry God. I've had an angry dad. I've had an angry boss. I've had an angry spouse. I've been through unclean anger, and it's hard for me to stomach a God who is angry." But I've got to press this: If you don't have an angry God, you don't really understand how much your God has loved you.

If it doesn't cost your God anything to love you, if it hasn't cost him at great expense to love you and call you to his own, then that idea of God's love is just a word. But one of the things that Christians know when we look at the scales and when we look at the cross is: I deserve every bit of that, and yet he loves me this much. All the credit, none of the blame.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, let's pray together.

Father, thank you for your word. There's nothing like your word, Lord. This is a hard one for us to believe—that you're this angry, and you're angry with us in our sin, and that the cross really is the resolution of your anger for sinners. Lord, we thank you that this is true beyond our ability to even understand it.

Lord, we pray, Father, we've won the golden ticket. We pray, Father, you'd help us to believe it. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.

Let's respond to God's word in song together.