The Wrath of God

God is perfectly righteous, never compromising His justice. He acts always and only in line with His own righteousness, for His character is the measure of right and wrong. Consequently, as we have seen, He does not compromise His own righteousness in declaring sinners righteous in His heavenly courtroom. This is because when we trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, whose name is “The Lord is our righteousness,” His perfect law-keeping is credited to our account, and God judges whether to grant us eternal life based on what Jesus has done and not on what we have done (Jer. 23:5–6; 2 Cor. 5:21).

Today we are going to think about the righteousness and justice of God from a different perspective, asking this question: What happens to those who are not declared righteous in God’s heavenly court but are declared unrighteous? They receive the wrath of God (Rom. 1:18–2:11). That leads us to consider the relationship of the Lord’s wrath to His other attributes.

Importantly, the divine attributes describe what is essential to God’s character, what would be true of Him even if He never created the world and sin never existed. Because of this, wrath, properly speaking, is not an attribute of God. Yet that does not make it less important or any less real than the other things that are true of our Creator. Divine wrath, instead, is the necessary consequence of our perfect, eternally righteous and just Lord’s coming into contact with sin and unrighteousness. Because God is just, He pours out His wrath on sinners whose sins have not been covered by the blood of Christ (Rom. 5:9).

Petrus van Mastricht, one of the Reformed scholastic theologians, writes that “wrath is in God nothing but his avenging justice, or his inclination to strike those who have struck him by their sins.” Thus, divine wrath is really God’s disposition and actions toward unredeemed sinners that necessarily and inevitably flow from His evaluating them by His perfectly righteous standard. Divine wrath, therefore, is something that all human beings should fear until they have received God’s salvation. All people, in fact, do fear God’s wrath, as seen in the varied attempts that people make through false religions to appease the Creator. Such efforts are vain, for the only way to escape the wrath of the Lord is through trust in Jesus Christ alone (John 3:16; 14:6).