¹⁰ “Therefore I was angry with this generation, And said, ‘They always go astray in their heart, And they did not know My ways’”

Anger of God is the thing we fear the most. Many reject the notion of God because of a caricaturization, casting Him in the image of a medieval stain glass window super-mortal, arbitrarily casting thunder bolts onto sniveling mortals—a neurotic, emotionally disturbed, psychotic, pathological deity. Nothing could be further from the truth. To be sure, some have wrongly portrayed God in a faulty way, but we must not move the pendulum to far to correct such stereotypes. God indeed gets angry, but not in a capricious way but rather in a completely righteous and controlled way.

Yet the idea of God being angry doesn’t sit well in our “post-modern” enlightened age. The problem, however, is not with God, but rather with us. We mere humans want to retain sovereignty in our lives and not be subject to any authority higher than ourselves. It’s been that way since the garden.

God had “every right” (although putting it that way admittedly is somewhat inaccurate and superficial since there is no greater authority to grant Him “every right”) –He had every right to be angry with the people of Israel. He could not have communicated to them His expectations any clearer than He did in the giving of the Law in all its detail. And He accompanied it with many miraculous “only God could do it” kind of miracles. The people knew clearly there was a God and what He wanted from them. And they still complained, rebelled and disobeyed.

I can imagine today some people musing, “If God would prove Himself, that He exists, then I would believe in Him. I’d stop being an atheist.” Jesus addressed this underlying issue in the story of the rich man and Lazarus. The rich man, from the depths of Hades, asks that Lazarus be sent back from the dead to warn his brothers. At Abraham’s refusal, he says,“ ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent!’ “But he said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.’ ” (Lk 16:30–31).

God’s anger is not with anyone’s doubt about His existence, but rather with our rebellion against what has already been revealed about Him. We have a tendency to “always go astray in [our] hearts” from what we know. “All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; but the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him” (Is 53:6).