No Soft Touch — A LifeWords Devotion

Romans 1:18

But God’s angry displeasure erupts as acts of human mistrust and wrongdoing and lying accumulate, as people try to put a shroud over truth.(THE MESSAGE)

It seems some people long for a cuddly teddy bear type deity, one who is all sweetness and light, one who indulgently gives a wink and a nod to our own and others’ failures. If that is our fixed desire, the God of the Bible is not the one we look for.

The God who shows himself to us in the life and work of Jesus, is no soft touch. He cannot put up with evil doing, he will not tolerate injustice, he will fairly judge anything or anyone who dehumanises his precious human creation.

So, when we hear of God’s wrath, it is not as if our God is a bad-tempered tyrant who wants to throw us in some fiery pit. God’s wrath or anger is directed to all that might threaten and harm his loved world. A God without such anger would be a God who would not be trusted to act in a loving and just way towards us and would not be trusted to put wrong things right.

This God who gets rightly angry at evil and injustice is the one who not only promises to one day abolish all that, but who has offered us mercy and forgiveness for our own part in what is wrong with his world.

We must not go to the extreme of seeing God as having a short fuse, or as one just itching to hurl thunderbolts at us. But nor do we see him as some morally neutral being who doesn’t care about right and wrong.

Best to look to Jesus, who was uncompromising in his opposition to evil and injustice, and yet who invited those who participated in it to change their ways and receive his mercy. Neither a hard-faced tyrant or a soft touch sentimentalist.