Short Take: How are the love and wrath of God compatible?

Brandon Kimber with us today on the Christian ReelView, the creator of the American Gospel films. Brandon, I want to play just one final soundbite from the film, having to do with the progressive Christian's rejection of the wrath of God, the atonement, they redefine that term. Everything you've been talking about is a redefinition of orthodox biblical Christianity. It's a battle for terms and what they mean. But here's audio talking about God's wrath and justice.

This has John MacArthur in it, again Bart Campolo, who has now become a secular humanist, and Paul Washer, the biblical Christian as well. Every sin ever committed by every person who has ever lived will be punished. That is required by divine holiness and divine righteousness and divine justice. The idea of justice, like punish the wicked. No, I don't want to punish anybody. I want to redeem everybody.

It will either be punished everlastingly in the life of the sinner, the impenitent, unbelieving sinner, or that punishment will be borne by Christ. John MacArthur might be right about him. That's not a guy worthy of my worship. I'm just not interested.

But first of all, you need to understand something. God's wrath is not like ours. Our wrath is primarily self-centered. It's coercive.

It's unrighteous. But God's wrath is pure, and it is the result of His love for that which is right. If you love that which is right, you will hate evil. If you love life, you will hate death. If you love African Americans, you will hate slavery. If you love children, you will hate abortion.

If you love Jews, you will hate the Holocaust. Why is it that we reserve the right as fallible human beings to burn with indignation when we see an injustice? And yet we say if God does the same thing, that somehow morally beneath Him, His love is fierce. And in the same degree, His wrath is fierce against evil.

Okay, that was a really powerful comment there by Paul Washer. Brandon, explain how this issue of God's love and wrath are so commonly misunderstood, and also by taking it a step further by the progressive quote-unquote Christians, how they reject a God who is full of wrath, who will punish every sin, and who will sentence people to hell for rejecting His Son. Just as we talked about the love versus justice thing, wrath, as Paul Washer said, is God's hatred of evil. And the reason why he has a hatred of evil is because he loves righteousness.

He is righteous. There's a scripture that says love must be sincere, hate what is evil, or abhor what is evil. And that's true for us as humans when we see injustice, and that's true for God. It seems logical that those attributes aren't opposites. They're pretty tied together, and they make logical sense, even apart from what scripture says. But of course, what scripture says matters most. And we see God, we see His wrath and His grace in both the Old Testament and New Testament. It's not that He has changed over time. It wasn't a God of wrath in the Old Testament, and now He's a God of grace and love in the New Testament. No, He shows all those attributes on both sides of that divide.