People everywhere, every day, feel God’s wrath—and not as merely an afterlife threat but as a present reality.
This is an excerpt from the introduction of Stretched: A Study for Lent and the Entire Christian Life by Christopher Richmann (1517 Publishing, 2026).
As any fan of Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments knows, Moses is not just the “man of God” but preeminently the man of the law. And to know God’s law is to know its effects, especially God’s wrath. When we have Moses teaching that “we are consumed by your anger; by your wrath we are overwhelmed” (v. 7) this is, as Martin Luther memorably put it, “Moses at his most Mosaic.” [3] Of course, no one today talks about God’s wrath, at least not in polite company. Nothing could be less fashionable than suggesting that God burns with white hot anger against any human he created. It seems the only people willing to speak of God’s wrath are unhinged televangelists pontificating, for instance, why earthquakes or floods hit certain parts of the globe.
Our allergy to the notion of God’s wrath is an inheritance of liberal theology, a development in elite European nineteenth-century Christianity that was certain that God’s definitive attribute is love and God reveals his love and providence through the steady progress of human cultural development and achievements. In the shadow of liberal theology, many Christians were left with what H. Richard Niebuhr famously summarized: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” [4]
Niebuhr aptly criticized the pitfalls of liberal theology, particularly its handling of God’s wrath. It was only by surgically removing any lingering commitment to Scripture that such a wrathless theology could flourish. Regardless of where you start reading, you will not get far in Scripture without encountering stories of God’s wrath. After the sin of Adam and Eve, God’s wrath is directed toward all creation in the Flood, to the specific populations of Sodom and Gomorrah, to the Egyptian enslavers of God’s chosen Israel, and to Israel itself both during their wilderness travels and while inhabiting the Promised Land.
Regardless of where you start reading, you will not get far in Scripture without encountering stories of God’s wrath.
Although many of these stories are familiar and create the popular image of the “God of the Old Testament” as the angry version of God in the Bible, the writers of the New Testament quite self-consciously carry forward the message of God’s wrath. One of the best preachers of God’s wrath is John the Baptist. For him, God’s wrath is first and foremost an impending phenomenon that you can only hope to escape through repentance and faith in God’s coming one, Jesus Christ. In both Matthew and Luke, John the Baptist castigates his Jordan River audience as a “brood of vipers,” and he charges them, “who warned you to flee the wrath to come?” (Matt 3:7; Luke 3:7).
In John 3, just a few verses after Jesus’ famous claim of God’s love for the world, the Baptizer makes it clear that “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever disobeys the Son will not see life, but must endure God's wrath” (v. 36).
Other New Testament voices make clear that God’s wrath is more than a looming event. For the apostle Paul, God’s wrath is an inescapable reality of human life. Paul tells the believers in Ephesus that “All of us once…were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else” (Eph. 2:3).
For this reason, writes Paul in Romans, “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth” (1:18). We can
make the New Testament case for God’s wrath even without Jesus’ own words regarding “weeping and gnashing of teeth” of the wicked and the carnage of the book of Revelation.
But trying to prove God’s wrath by scriptural proof-texting is surely to miss the point. The truth is, people everywhere, every day, feel God’s wrath—and not as merely an afterlife threat but as a present reality. The problem is they either don’t have the name for it, or they are committed to denying that it is what it is. Psalm 90 calls a thing what it is. God’s wrath is felt in our daily toil: “all our days pass away under your wrath” (v. 9). If we have ears to hear, the dangers and pains of life are trying to tell us something—we are sinful, and God is angry. When suffering friends or family members confess to us a fear that God is angry with them (often expressed in the psalmist’s lament sensing God’s absence, “Why do you hide your face from me?”), [5] we too often swoop in with unbiblical platitudes to excuse God of wrath, like “God
doesn’t give you more than you can handle,” or “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” But even before God pronounced official curses, Adam and Eve experienced the sad results of their sin—they feared the sound of God’s footsteps (Gen. 3:8‑9). Once sin enters the picture, God’s law is no longer simply a directive for proper worship but becomes an agent of terror that causes fright at the sound of rustling leaves.
Our minds run wild, imagining the vicious animal or thug causing the noise. But beneath that fear lies the deeper sense of God’s wrath. Occasionally, a sinner will confess this very thing. Recently, I was counseling a parishioner who wanted to have his two children baptized.
He had not had his girls baptized as infants (which we often do as Lutherans), so I asked him why he was considering this now. He proceeded to tell me that a series of deaths in his family had made him feel like he had a target on his back. Several near-misses with falling ceiling fans convinced him that some dangerous force was out to get him. Getting his girls baptized was the beginning of an attempt to address the fear. Within the jumble of emotions this man experienced, he clearly felt God’s wrath. As unpleasant as it is, he is not wrong. In fact, no one who senses God’s wrath is ever wrong, as such; although believing that this is God’s ultimate attitude toward you leads to despair and hell. As I tell my congregation frequently, to determine if some experience is God’s wrath, we start with the “duck test.” If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is probably a duck. Things go bump in the night. We lose sleep over the stock market. People die around us left and right. We end up gaslighting all of humanity by trying to tell people they are not experiencing God’s wrath when they know in their bones—if not their brains—that they are. Yet, in the end, the pastoral question is not whether some experience is evidence of God’s wrath but what can be done in the face of God’s wrath. Thankfully, in Christ, something is done, which does not merely avoid or deny God’s wrath but ends it forever.
Order Stretched: A Study for Lent and the Entire Christian Life
[3] LW 13:77.
[4] H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Harper, 1959), 193.
[5] See, for example, Psalms 13, 44, and 88.
