ANGELS WITH SICKLES AND GOD’S FURY
Like so many other things in scripture, this is to be taken seriously, but not literally. Clearly the text, as other texts in scripture which speak of God’s jealousy, anger, and vengeance, has something important to teach, but, like those other texts which have God jealous and angry, it can be dangerously misunderstood.
What it doesn’t teach is that God gets angry, that God is sometimes furious with us, and that God wreaks havoc on the planet because of sin. What it does teach is that our actions have consequences, that sin wreaks havoc on the planet and on our own souls, driving us to anger, self-hatred, and lack of self-forgiveness, and that this feels as if God is angry and punishing us.
God doesn’t get angry, pure and simple. God is not a creature, a being like us. God’s ways are not our ways. This has been affirmed from Isaiah through 2000 years of Christian tradition. We cannot project our way of being, thinking, and loving onto God.
Scripture and Christian tradition do, of course, speak of God as getting angry, but that, as Christian theology clearly teaches, is anthropomorphism, that is, it is a projection of human thought and feeling into God. In saying things such as God is angry with us or God is punishing us for our sins, we are not, in essence, saying how God feels about us but rather how we, at that moment, feel about God and how we feel about ourselves and our own actions.
God doesn’t hate us when we do something wrong, but we hate ourselves; God doesn’t wreak a vengeance on us when we sin, but we beat ourselves up whenever we do; and God never withholds forgiveness from us, no matter what we’ve done, but we find it very difficult to forgive ourselves for our own transgressions.
There is indeed an angelic razor and a winepress of God’s fury, but those are names for the experience of discontent and self-hatred inside of us whenever we are unfaithful, they have nothing to do with God’s nature.
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