Opus 2024-385: The Wrath of Kind

One of the rabbit trails I follow in my thinking is that if God is love then I Corinthians 13 and its definition of love should give us some insights into God and His actions.  It starts off well then you get down to the verse, that says that love is patient.

(1Co 13:4 NAS77) Love is patient, love is kind, and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant,

Patient is literally defined as long suffering, which is how the KJV puts it.  It’s not just the idea that you have a one in three chance of hitting something you throw a baseball at, so you keep throwing until you hit it.  It is not waiting for the water to boil.  Those are superficial examples.  No, long-suffering means that you put up with things far beyond what they deserve and what anybody could expect.  God is long-suffering.  He sets the example for us.  Think of how He was going to destroy Israel.  He was that angry with them.  Think about the flood.  God is capable of wrath.  Instead, he usually extends mercy, grace, long-suffering, and the second word in this list, “kindness”.

We take words like “kind” and put some kind of warm, fuzzy bubble-gum-wrapper emotion around it, and somehow it works out as something you extend towards wiggly puppies or new babies.  That’s true perhaps but that is not what Corinthians is talking about.  As I was contemplating this, it occurred to me that the opposite of kindness, when we’re talking about God would be expressed in His wrath.  We know that God has the potential to destroy, to obliterate, to sweep away that which is in His way which you had expressed often in the prophets.  We see what He did to Pharaoh’s army as they were trying to sneak across the Red Sea.  We see what He did to the Korah and the ones that were swallowed up.  God is capable of some pretty nasty actions.

But they’re only nasty in our eyes.  God has His side where He allows his wrath to be exercised, but it’s not wrath in the sense of losing your temper.  It is a controlled expression of the holy fire of His character against evil, disobedience, rebellion, spit-in-your-face behavior.  God does not extend his wrath lightly.  He does not sweep people away as often as they deserve.  His patience, long-suffering, is incredible.  But when He does respond, He does respond.  And to be honest, if God‘s wrath touches you, you have one of two results.  Either you are destroyed, or you were invigorated.

Let me give you an illustration.  When I was working in the Sequoias one summer I listen to a park ranger talk about the bark of the redwood tree.  I don’t remember exactly what he said, or claim to be totally accurate but the point he was making was that the bark of the redwood does not burn.  He said when you see the big scars on the side of a redwood tree, it’s not because the bark burned away, but because the wood behind the bark was turned into carbon by the heat.  The bark peeled away later.  It does not burn.

OK.  Now supposing you were to go into a redwood forest with a torch and you were to come across a pile of leaves that were supposed to been raked and removed.  Someone had not done their job.  And it’s your job to clear out the forest.  You take your torch, apply it to the pile of leaves, and they immediately burst into flame.  They are consumed.  You take that same flame over to the redwood tree and apply to the bark and nothing happens.  When I personify things, I tend to think that the redwood bark kind of stretches his arms and says “Oh, that feels good.”  If you move on all is good.  If for some reason you hold that fire to the redwood bark, the bark itself is not affected.  For that which is behind it though it’s another story.  My point?

I’ll keep in mind that this could be total heresy, it’s my opinion, but I think that God’s wrath is quite capable of striking down the rebellious elements of society and letting His people stand unaffected.  I was watching a video on volcanoes, and although it had a lot of nonsense in it, at one point it showed how in the middle of a lava flow there would be a little islands of green life.  That’s because when the lava flowed down the mountain there was an elevated spot where it just flowed around it, and it consumed everything in its path but let that little island survive and do quite well.  I think that’s the way it will be with God’s wrath.

Just a few thoughts on how first Corinthians 13 and love reflects the character and actions of God.  I’m sure there will be more some other time.

homo unius libri