God is not what Christ forbids – Brad Jersak

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“Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.”

Ephesians 4:31-32

The Two Ways

In his letter to the Ephesians, the apostle Paul lays out two ways of being in contrast to each other. He and others (such as Peter, James, and John) do this frequently in their epistles, following the example of Jesus Christ in many of his “Two Ways” parables. It was also a common approach in books like the Psalms, Proverbs, and Prophets. And before that, in the stories and covenants of the Torah, all the way back to Cain and Abel… or the two trees in the Garden of Eden.

In this passage, we see the Two Ways set head-to-head in high contrast. Bitterness, wrath, anger, wrangling, and slander are presented as five vices to be “put away.” Instead, we are to live in three Christlike virtues. We’re called to be kind, tenderhearted, and forgiving because that is how “God-in-Christ” has treated us. In fact, the kindness, tenderness, and forgiveness we’ve been shown is the grace with which the Holy Spirit empowers us to do likewise with each other.

The Nature of God in Christ

My takeaway for today is that the kind, tender, forgiving heart of Jesus Christ reveals to us the nature of God. By now, that should be obvious to all Christ-followers… Theology 101. We are to conceive of God through God’s final Word about himself: the person of Jesus. As the apostle John once wrote, “No one has seen God at any time, but God the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father–he has made him known.”

But the converse is also true. Paul’s list of vices (bitterness, wrath, anger, wrangling, and slander) are forbidden because they are unChristlike… and since Jesus is the image of the true God, we ought to “put off” these five vices from our conceptions of God, even where the Scriptures seem to treat them as divine attributes. If they are unChristlike, they simply must not be used to describe God.

Sounds simple, but let’s play it out. In Paul’s model, you will see bitterness, wrath, anger, wrangling, or slander are not to be identified with the nature of God revealed in and through Christ. The second ad third words bear repeating: there is no wrath or anger to be found in “God in Christ.” The God of wrath and anger is not the God revealed to us in Jesus.

Yes, this raises a lot of questions about how to interpret the “wrath of God” and even the “wrath of the Lamb” in the Bible. And we’ve gone there in depth in previous CWR posts and books. But we only do so based on our first premise, the one we see in this verse: that Jesus is the Word of God who reveals the nature of God as self-giving, radically forgiving, co-suffering love. We can wrestle with “wrath” and “anger” in the Scriptures only after we have settled on that unwavering premise. The rest, as they say, is details.

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