Patience, a quality of holiness, may be sloth in the soul when associated with the lack of righteous indignation (360).If God is a God of love, then divine anger is necessary in the face of people’s cruel treatment of each other and the earth. Without anger, our love and, more importantly, God’s love would seem soft or incomplete. God’s love is fierce – especially his love for the outcast, the poor, and the meek. God loves us in our vulnerability and has compassion for each of us in our most vulnerable moments. Heschel writes that, “Justice, mishpat, is the measure of His anger.” (370). God’s anger is aroused when the cry of the oppressed comes to his ears. If we wash this down in favor of a benign deity, we ignore not only an essential aspect of God, but we ignore the outcries and the very lives of people living under oppression. At times, human cruelty seems to know no bounds:
The human mind seems to have no sense for the true dimension of man’s cruelty to man. God’s anger is fierce because man’s cruelty is infernal (101).God’s anger is in response to human action. And the secret of anger is God’s care. There is nothing greater than the certainty of His care. God’s anger brings about destruction and distress, but not despair. When God’s anger turns away, we experience immense gratitude and are comforted. This gratitude is the climax of faith, and an indication that God’s anger is aligned with God’s love.
You will say in that day: I will give thanks to Thee, O Lord, For though Thou wast angry with me; Thy anger turned away, And Thou didst comfort me. (Isaiah 12.1)Heschel points out that again and again we are told that God’s love or kindness (hesed) goes on forever (Jeremiah 33:3; Psalms 100:5, 106:1, 107:1, 118:1-4, 136:1-26; and Ezra 3:11). We are never told that His anger goes on forever. God does not retain his anger because He delights in love. God will again have compassion over us, “He will tread our iniquities under foot.” (Micah 7:18-20)
Strength, power, and wealth are values that are deeply embedded in the psyche of American culture. The Roman Empire would say that the gods are on the side of the strong. We see wealth and power glorified in TV and movies daily. These reflect values in our society. Yet, this is not the way of the Lord. Heschel writes:
The prophets proclaimed that the heart of God is on the side of the weaker. God’s special concern is not for the mighty and the successful, but for the lowly and the downtrodden, for the stranger and the poor, for the widow and the orphan…(219).In American society, the traditional view of justice has been symbolized by the balance of scales. The justice scales indicate fairness and equality, balance and stillness. Yet, the image of justice in the Hebrew Bible is one of waters rolling down, a mighty stream! “But let justice roll down like waters, And righteousness like a mighty stream.” (Amos 5.24) This image expresses substance, power, movement, vitality. Heschel writes, “to defy [justice] is to block God’s almighty surge” (275). Nothing can stand in the way of God’s justice, or God’s anger in the face of injustice. But, to the person who calls to God in their suffering, God says:
When they call to Me, I will answer; I will be with them in affliction (Psalm 91:15).As a child, I was taught that God cares and loves us. This is a good message for our children. Yet, while the Bible supports this view, confusion can arise when we think this means life will be easy. The reality is not that God makes our lives free of sorrow or trouble, affliction or trials. We are never promised that we will not experience hardship. But, God reaches out to us in our affliction. In fact, we can grow and deepen our awareness of God while we endure hardship. To know God is to be known by God. When one develops daath elohim, an awareness of God (as opposed to knowledge about God), this inevitably includes an awareness of God’s anger at injustice and God’s deep concern for each of us.
