Title: Don't Mess With God / Topic: God's Wrath

Today’s Reading: Deuteronomy 28; Deuteronomy 29; Galatians 6

Scripture: Deuteronomy 28:20, 63; 29:19-21, 24, 28
28:20 The LORD will send on you curses, confusion and rebuke in everything you put your hand to, until you are destroyed and come to sudden ruin because of the evil you have done in forsaking him...
63 Just as it pleased the LORD to make you prosper and increase in number, so it will please him to ruin and destroy you. You will be uprooted from the land you are entering to possess.
29:19 When such a person hears the words of this oath, he invokes a blessing on himself and therefore thinks, "I will be safe, even though I persist in going my own way." This will bring disaster on the watered land as well as the dry. 20 The LORD will never be willing to forgive him; his wrath and zeal will burn against that man. All the curses written in this book will fall upon him, and the LORD will blot out his name from under heaven. 21 The LORD will single him out from all the tribes of Israel for disaster, according to all the curses of the covenant written in this Book of the Law...
24 All the nations will ask: "Why has the LORD done this to this land? Why this fierce, burning anger?"...
28 In furious anger and in great wrath the LORD uprooted them from their land and thrust them into another land, as it is now."

Observation: This depiction of God's anger directed toward those who turn away from him is horrific and frightening for those of us who take the word of God seriously. Note the italicized phrases above. God's anger is grim and the consequences for those who are objects of this anger are dire.

Application: I, like most Christians today, primarily focus on the "love side" of God. I don't really like these chapters because they detail a kind of harshness and severity that I do not normally associate with God. And yet it is a part of who God is: it is in the Bible. This causes me to pause and think that my view of God, as almost exclusively loving and kind and forgiving, isn't quite complete. There is this "dark side" of God: the punisher, the vengeful, the relentless pursuer.
To be honest, I wish God wasn't that way. But God is God and he is perfect and right in all his ways. The fact that these aspects of his nature cause me discomfort reveals flaws in me, not in God.
One thing is clear: don't mess with God. When I consider passages as above, I think that often, I must not approach my life with God with enough seriousness. As the Bible says, "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling."

Prayer: Lord, thank you for your mercy. I pray that my life would never cause you to relate to me through your wrath, but that I will dwell in the loving shadow of your wings always. Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner.
This I pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.