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Does God hurt people or get angry?

fter church one day our six-year-old daughter decided she wanted to take some inspirational booklets called Our Daily Bread and give them to people on the street as we took an afternoon walk in the city. As she offered it to a young man on the street he looked back at her and asked, Is your God a god that hurts people? Rather a deep theological question for a six-year-old. A couple I met recently took teachings of various philosophies and mixed them with Christianity to come up with a religion that they said was like Christianity but for which they had no name. They believe the Holy Spirit is the feeling of love, definitely not a person as the Bible teaches, and that the feeling we call love is actually God because God is only love (to the exclusion of any other emotion). In summary, they declared that God never expresses wrath. Are they right? These two seem to go together and are good questions for contemplation: Is God ever angry? Does he ever hurt people? The answer is simple and also complex, as it should be since we are dealing with a concept and a being beyond total human comprehension. It is amazing that we can conceive of God at all. Does a worm have any concept of what a human being is? Yet a worm is physically and biologically nearer to us than an omniscient and omnipresent creator of all things. I am the type of person who analyses, questions, and doubts. I used to have my own god taken from various religions and mixed with my own personal beliefs until I realised that I had never actually read the Bible and yet was assuming my intellect surpassed what was in those pages. Reading the Bible is an intense experience the scope & depth of its logic and reason can make your head spin, yet at the same time the language is so simple that a child can understand it. So it is with these two simple questions: simple and yet deep. The Bible seems to show that God does get angry,i yet it also says that God embodies love.ii It says that God never does anything evil,iii yet it seems to tell us that He does hurt peopleiv (although the words God and hurt do not actually appear together anywhere).

2 Defining the Question before the Answer Before I can sincerely attempt to answer a question I must first consider the question itself. Are we asking the right question? Is the question biased in any way? A classic example of a biased question goes something like this: Do you always beat your wife when you are drunk? Yes, no, maybe, silence... whatever you do looks bad because the question is loaded. An example of asking the wrong question would be to presume a relation where non exists, such as singing to a plant each day and then assuming this is what caused it to blossom so nicely. Another problem with answering these particular questions is that the way they are posed presumes a cause based on an outcome without any evidence of the actual cause. If I see a car upside-down in the middle of the free-way during a snow-storm, do I know whether the driver fell asleep, or he hit an icy spot and lost control, or there was some other cause? I might venture a guess, but I really only know the outcome, not the cause. Does God hurt people? The question, Does God ever hurt people? must begin with an understanding of what hurt means. It is a simple word, yet it has so many subtle and different meanings. The young man who rejected the gift of a six-year-old probably had some awareness that his rejection of the little girl's gift would hurt her feelings. Indeed it did, she has never in the eight years since wanted to spontaneously offer a stranger anything, it was such an intense experience for her. Was that young man intentionally hurting the little girl, or was he just being honest and any hurt is in the eye of the beholder? When a doctor injects a child with a needle, do we define that as hurting the person? The child would say yes, the doctor and parents would probably say no. One of our daughters at age four had to have surgery and I tried to comfort her as they anesthetised her on the operating table. She screamed for me to get her out of there with tears flowing down her cheeks. She was so terrified and had no idea what was going on. It was one of the hardest moments of my life to tell her it would all be okay when everything in me wanted to lift her in my arms and take her from that frightening scene.

3 If a car exceeding the speed limit hits another car and causes an accident that results in injuries, did the person speeding hurt the other person? We would probably say yes. But what if the person speeding had a wife who suddenly went into labour as they were driving and the person ahead of them, disliking the speeding vehicle, decided to slam on the brakes to teach him a lesson? Now whom would we say caused hurt? Imagine two children are playing and one of them gets angry at the other. The one who gets angry tries to hit the other but misses and instead falls and hurts himself. Who caused the hurt? The child who is crying would blame it on the other one, but the other child as well as adults would see it differently. If one person wins the lottery, a million others are disappointed; nobody is happy for the person who won. If you ever know someone who has incredibly good fortune it can feel just like hurt. Imagine if your uncle won a million dollars and didn't give any to you even though you visit him every holiday; how would you feel? Countries go to war believing that they are helping people, yet they are certainly causing a great deal of harm to many others in the process! They can cause harm to people a continent away and for generations to come if they use nuclear weapons. Should they just allow Adolf Hitler to have his way instead? These few and simple examples demonstrate that figuring out how to define what hurt is, whether it exists in any given situation, and exactly what caused it is not easy. A person who asks Does God hurt people? is obviously thinking, If God is all powerful and all loving, then he can stop any and all hurt from happening. Therefore, He either does not exist or is not loving. Consider the simple example of my daughter on the operating table: Would I have been a loving father if I had taken her from that operating room and not let them perform the operation? I think if I had tried such a thing the doctors would have physically restrained me and removed me from the room because they were convinced what was being done was absolutely essential to her well-being. So my love for her was manifested in letting her suffer for a short while in order to relieve her of long-term suffering. Christians call God, our Father, as Jesus taught.v Jesus used the role of a parent

4 to help us understand how God feels about and His behaviour with regard to us. As parents, our children almost never understand why we do things that cause them displeasure, yet we do such things out of love. What if God's understanding is at least as high above us as we parents are above our children? What if He actually understands things so much more completely than we do that we are by comparison like a child who won't stop complaining no matter what is done for it? Could this possibly be true? Why doesn't God stop at least some kinds of hurt? I love my children and do everything reasonable to protect them from harm. In spite of that, my children often hurt themselves. Some people might blame some of the hurt on me, thinking I should have been more attentive or was negligent. People who have never been parents are especially prone to this, but parents know it is impossible to protect their children from all harm. Many are just too bent on taking risks and thereby hurting themselves. As a human parent I am not omnipresent. With God it is conceivable that he could stop things from happening, like preventing a child from falling and skinning her knee. Would that be a loving thing to do? Should God be doing that? Our son is getting to the age where he is taking more control of his life and someday soon will be relatively independent of parental care. Is it wrong of us as his parents to let this happen? Having left home at 17 myself, I know many of the problems he is likely to run into and would dearly love to help him avoid them, but does that mean I should prevent him from growing up in order to help him avoid these problems? Should God intervene to prevent all the bad things that happen in our youth? I remember hearing of a news story where a teenage mother had a child who cried a great deal. One day while trying to comfort the baby she got so frustrated with her inability to make the baby stop crying that she threw it off the balcony of her apartment. She was tried for murder, yet any parent can imagine how bitterly sorrowful she must have felt and also knows how frustrating it can be to have a child who won't stop complaining no matter what you do. Should God have stopped that from happening? There is an old Japanese story about a father and son that well illustrates the answer

5 to these questions: One day their horse broke down the fence and ran away. When his neighbours heard they declared what a bad thing it was, but the father said How do you know?. A few days later the horse returned bringing another horse with it. The neighbours declared what good fortune this was, but the father said, How do you know? Some time later the son falls while riding the horse and breaks his leg, and again the neighbours think it is bad but the father says, How do you know?. A few days later all the young men of the village are ordered to join the Emperor's army, but the son is excused since he has a broken leg. Just do as I say, don't ask why. How many times do children ask for an explanation for something they don't like, but as parents we realise there is no possible way to explain. And even if we do try to explain, they will just figure out ways to argue against what we know must happen. There are times as a parent when I cannot explain my decision to a child and must insist that they obey me without understanding. God is our creator and His ways are infinitely far above ours. There are many times when we must simply trust and obey without understanding. The Bible tells us that one day, indeed, God will wipe away every tear,vi but right now He has His reasons for allowing people to work things out for themselves, just as earthly parents do with their children. Who knows best? There was an old radio (and later television) show called Father Knows Best that portrayed situations where children (even teenagers) just don't understand and need to simply trust and obey their parents. The prophet Jeremiah shared with us some insight into our heavenly Father in the 18th chapter of his book:
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So I went down to the potter's house, and there he was working at his wheel. And the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter's hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do.
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Then the word of the LORD came to me: O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? declares the LORD. Behold, like the clay in

6 the potter's hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it. And if at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, and if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will relent of the good that I had intended to do to it. The AV uses repent rather than relent. The Hebrew word there, naw-kham', means to sigh, by implication to pity or ease-off or repent. The author C.S. Lewis had an amusing way of looking at the subject of obedience and who is to blame for hurt. He wrote, There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' Total Annihilation Even people who do not read the Bible know of the story of Noah and the global flood in the book of Genesis (starting at chapter 6 verse 6). That is one event that could be seen to have hurt more people than any other recorded historical event. Yet if God simply wanted to hurt everyone then why did he save Noah and his family? When we read the story we find that God instructed Noah to spend 120 yearsvii trying to tell people to turn from evil and return to Godviii and that he warned them about the coming flood and gave them the opportunity to join him on the ark. Everyone but his family refused the safety of the ark that was offered to them. Noah himself had no evidence that the prediction of the flood was true except that God told him so, and his family only had the testimony of Noah on the matter. So the people who died deliberately chose to die. Do we blame God for their death? If a child darts in front of a car and is killed do we blame the driver? In 1984 an Avianca Airlines jet crashed in Spain. Investigators studying the accident made an eerie discovery: The "black box" cockpit recorder revealed that several minutes before impact a shrill, computer-synthesized voice from the plane's automatic warning system told the crew repeatedly in English, "Pull up! Pull up!" The

7 pilot snapped, "Shut up, Gringo!" and switched the system off. Minutes later the plane ploughed into the side of a mountain. The pilot was warned, but ignored the warning. The people were warned in Noah's day, but they ignored the warning. But why...? We can keep coming up with more examples and asking more questions, but we cannot possibly understand all of the reasons God has for doing the things He does. If we did, either we would be God or He would not. We are privileged, however, to actually have any declarations directly from God. We have a book that has been astonishingly well-preserved throughout history. A book that is incredibly consistent even though its lessons span several thousand years of writing. A book that contains all the things people need to know to have the best possible life. How many people criticize God and the Bible and yet have never read even a single page of it? I'd take a wild guess and say probably 99% of everyone on the planet. Even people who go to church don't read the Bible. The answer to the question about hurt My conclusion to the first question, Does God hurt people?, is no. It seems that God holds back the hurt as much as possible given the framework that He has created in humanity on Earth. Why he made it just the way it is nobody can say, so it is nave to think if we were in charge we would have done it better; any child can say that even though it is not true. The Bible reveals that even when times are hard, God is a loving parent whose only intentions are for our good. Consider in the book of Jeremiah, which records a part of Israel's history when they were overtaken by an enemy and taken into captivity, that even while God reveals to them the extent of the suffering He knows they are about to undergo, He also declares His love for them in steering their collective lives in a direction that will ultimately benefit them: For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of

8 peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end. Then shall ye call upon me, and ye shall go and pray unto me, and I will hearken unto you. And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.
(Jeremiah 29:11)

Does God ever get angry? Now that I have argued why I believe God does not hurt us, let's consider the other point about whether He even gets angry. The first thing to look at in evaluating this question is similar to what we did with the first one: How do we define angry? Is anger a emotion that comes upon us as if we are victims of it? Is it something we can control? Is it ever positive or it is always negative? Is it relative? Let me start by considering my parentage again. As a father to my own children do I ever get angry? You bet; daily. When I become aware of improper behaviour I stop them or take them aside and give them a stern talk, or I may even spank them if they show no sign of repentance (that is, no sign of changing). Is that negative or positive? What is this thing called anger that I feel at those times? My wife had a job for a while caring for some young children in our home after a neighbouring elementary school let out. When those children would misbehave (daily) did she get angry and deal with them as with her own children? Not at all. She would lay down the rules and if they did not obey she would bring the matter to their parents. Occasionally some frustration would develop, but not at all the same kind of anger as there is with our own children. So is anger a sign of hatred or love? I argue that it can be a sign of love. Certainly not all anger is an expression of love, but this example demonstrates, as with hurt, that a seemingly simple question is not always so simple to answer. The Directive to Be Angry In Ephesians chapter 4 the apostle Paul teaches the Believers in Christ how to behave towards each other: ye are to put off concerning the former behaviour the old man, that is corrupt

9 according to the desires of the deceit, and to be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and to put on the new man, which, according to God, was created in righteousness and kindness of the truth. Wherefore, putting away the lying, speak truth each with his neighbour, because we are members one of another; be angry and do not sin; let not the sun go down upon your wrath, neither give place to the devil; (stress on be angry is added for emphasis) Why does Paul say to be angry? I think it is for the same reason that I correct my children: because we should love our fellow Christians to such an extent that it upsets us when we see inappropriate behaviour (i.e., sin) such as lying. So why would God get angry with men? One of the many places the answer is found is the familiar passage in John chapter 3: And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life. "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved." When someone cares enough about us to correct us, it is a sign of great love. And when a person is considerate, he corrects his fellow privately, not in public. Likewise, God is so gracious that most often He corrects us quietly, nudges us in the right direction and then waits patiently for us to do the right thing. In Hebrews chapter 12 Paul explains it so clearly and succinctly: For whom the Lord loves, He disciplines, and whips every son whom He receives. If you endure discipline, God is dealing with you as with sons; for who is the son whom a father does not discipline? (LITV) If God is angry with us, then why did he send his son to die? God gave humanity a son, his only-begotten son. He and Jesus decided together that this was the right and proper thing to do from before the world was formed. They knew that men would despise him (just as people despise any goody-two-shoes type of

10 person). They knew he would be mocked and cruelly treated. God knows everything past, present, and future. So why did he do this? I sure wouldn't send my son to help save people in a house that hated my family, especially if I knew they would kill him once he entered the scene. I would never make such a sacrifice. Why would God do such a thing? The Bible teaches that Jesus stepped down from Heaven, cloaked his glory and allowed Himself to be made into human flesh (how this is possible for God nobody can even begin to guess, but it's what He did). Although He could have, he did not use his divine powers to enforce His will upon us. The few times he revealed his powers as God were when he healed people by the thousands, fed people, or prevented people from stopping Him from delivering the message He had come to share. All Jesus did was tell people about God's word (which the rulers already knew but didn't want to obey), declare God's love for them, answer their questions about the right way to behave and how to know God (which ended up highlighting what people were doing that was hypocritical our outright bad, which nobody likes to hear). When He asked the rulers who hated him to tell even one thing that he had ever done wrong his entire life, they had nothing to say. Presented with a perfect man, someone who never did anything wrong never lost his temper, always obeyed his parents, always obeyed the word of God the rulers did what any alpha-male type does when confronted with someone better: they hated him. They mocked him. They had him beat until his flesh was ripped from his body. And even then, when Pilot asked if that was enough, the crowd would not be satisfied until they saw him nailed to a wooden cross where they could mock him further while he died with his mother and friends watching. That's an amazing story. Some people try to say that Jesus was a man. No mere man could do that. Nobody else in history even comes close. Since Jesus died, God has been waited patiently for whosoever will turn from facing away from God to, instead, set their faces towards Him, to answer His call, to accept the faith that Jesus will finish if we will permit, to obey his commandment to love God and our neighbour.

11 Hebrews chapter 11 ends a discussion of faith with an statement about God's patience: And these all, having obtained witness through faith, did not receive the promise, God having foreseen some better thing for us, that they should not be made perfect without us. The perfection spoken of here is the completion of being united with God in Heaven, something we can only marginally imagine and never fully understand until that time comes, but something we know from God himself is something to be greatly desired, the best thing that could possibly happen to us. And the really great thing is that we do not have to do anything except to stop trying to be good on our own without God, which is impossible. So... does God get angry? As I have demonstrated throughout this writing, God's ways are so far above humanity that I cannot possibly hope to understand or explain them fully. But what little glimpse of God that I do see on this topic leads me to believe that, yes, He does get angry, but when He does it is because He loves and wants to correct us. I also conclude that what we often attribute to the wrath of God is wrongly judged because we don't have all the facts. The Bible tells us that God will judge humanity someday and his anger will then be felt such as it has not been felt since the flood,ix but fortunately for anyone who does not yet know God that time has not yet come. Like the one door on Noah's ark, there is one door to Heaven, one way to avoid that anger: John 3:18 He that believes on him (Jesus) is not judged John 10:9 I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture. John 14:6 Jesus said to him, I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.

Deuteronomy 1:37, Also the Lord was angry with me.... Similar verses can be found in Deut 4:21, 9:8, & 9:20, I Kings 8:46, Isaiah 12:1 & 13:13, Romans 1:18, Ephesians 5:6, and Revelation 6:16 among many others. ii I John 4:9, He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. iii James 1:13, ... for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man. iv Leviticus 26:18, ... I will punish you seven times more for your sins. Also Genesis 6:7, Job 2:3, Isaiah 24:21 & 26:21, and Jeremiah 9:25 among many others. v Matthew 6:9 and Luke 11:2, Our Father which art in heaven.... vi Isaish 25:8, ... the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all faces, Revelation 7:17, ... God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and the most moving and beautiful declaration of God's love in Revelation 21:4, And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, enither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. vii Genesis 6:3 viiiIn Hebrews 11:7 it says Noah condemned the world, the word for condemned meaning to judge or sentence. In the book of II Peter 2:5 the apostle Peter wrote that Noah was a preacher (or herald) of righteousness. ix Matthew 24:5-8 & 24:21-24, Mark 13:6-8, Luke 21:10-11, Revelation 16:18.