When my mom was diagnosed with cancer, I remember sitting in waiting rooms, praying through tears, and watching her courage as she befriended nurses and kept baking cookies for others. But through it all, something settled in me: I hate cancer. I hate it because it threatened someone I loved. I hated what it did, the way it steals and destroys. I’m convinced that hatred wasn’t wrong; it was love refusing to sit silent while something destructive ran wild.
And if that’s true for me, how much more true is it for God?
A lot of people struggle with the idea of God’s wrath. They picture a capricious, cruel deity lashing out in fits of rage. However, the Bible paints a different picture. God’s wrath isn’t random or vindictive; it’s an outflow of His righteous, measured opposition to everything that destroys His good creation. Leon Morris once wrote, “God’s wrath is his strong and settled opposition to everything that is evil arising out of his very nature.” Wrath is not the opposite of love; it’s love in action against evil.
Think about it: if God didn’t hate adultery, would He really love marriage? If He didn’t hate abuse, would He really care for the vulnerable? If He didn’t hate racism, greed, lies, and violence, could we really call Him good? Love demands wrath. A God who shrugs at evil would be a God who doesn’t actually love.
Revelation 16 pulls back the curtain to show us this truth. The bowls of wrath aren’t cruel overreactions; they are God’s decisive “No” to sin, idolatry, and rebellion. They are the final act of a God who is unwilling to let cancerous evil keep destroying what He loves. His wrath is the surgeon’s scalpel, cutting away the disease so that healing can finally come.
Wrath, then, is not the Bible’s dirty little secret. It is the proof of His holy love. The opposite of love is not anger; it’s apathy… and praise God, He is not apathetic. God hates evil, and believe it or not, that is good news. God’s wrath means His love is strong enough to fight for us, to defend us, and to heal His broken world. What proves that more than the cross? At Calvary, we see both the seriousness of sin and the depth of God’s love. In Jesus, God Himself absorbed the full weight of evil and triumphed over it. The cross shows us that God’s justice doesn’t stand apart from His mercy; it meets there. Judgment and love converge, so that those who trust in Christ are not condemned but freed to live in His grace.
May you experience that grace afresh today.
Pastor Ryan Paulson