When God Gets Angry

Canyons, deserts, coastlines, plains, downs, hills, mountains, cliffs, crags, bluffs . . .  As I journeyed through widely varied terrain recently, I was struck by the awe-inspiring beauty of even the most forbidding and untamed landscapes.  In the days of Noah, God displayed His wrath against sin in a truly violent fashion with a world-wide flood.  Yet even in this terrifying revelation of anger, God was masterfully creative.  Whatever the world may have been before the flood, it was transformed by this raging catastrophe into a vast gallery of breathtaking scenes carved and sculpted to monumental perfection.

Why a flood?  Why didn't God just send a plague to destroy all the wicked people and leave the earth the way He originally created it?  And why do we actually like the "revised version" so much if it's a destruction of what we were made for?  God displayed His holiness in the flood -- He hates sin so much that He had to purge the earth itself of it, and a flood was certainly the most practical way to do it.  God also showed His awesome power through the flood, creating reminders everywhere of how majestic He is.  Never again would anyone be able to miss the fact that God's power is infinitely superior to man's.  The power to shape the earth so dramatically in endless variety is a power to be feared!  Perhaps God knew that man needed the limits that the redesigned earth would impose -- mountain passes definitely slow people down, even today.  The obstacles that the flood created serve to control the spread of wickedness so that the unchecked corruption of Noah's day may not reoccur on that scale.

God designed us for grandeur of the kind that the flood brought about.  Though they came about as a result of sin, we respond to such things as mountains and canyons because they are intrinsically beautiful and good.  They teach us of God's character, they humble us, they lift our hearts.  Through His response to sin, God gave us a great gift.  In destroying, He created, in hate of sin, He showed love for man, and as the ark shows us, in wrath, He showed mercy.  He still does the same today in the lives of His children -- He will destroy our sin, often violently, and recreate our hearts to display more of Him.  Sin is always ugly, but God in His wisdom turns it into a great tool for His glory.  After the flood, He will bring mountains out of the waves!

God's anger toward sin is a vital part of who He is.  He could not be God without it, not in Noah's day, not today.  And two thousand years ago, God again took out His wrath for a wicked world, not in another flood, but in the death of His Son, Jesus.  The earth still bears her scars, Jesus still bears His.  And they are both unspeakably beautiful.