Is God Mad?

Is God mad that governments are dropping bombs?

Mad that people are starving?

Mad that immigrants are being kidnapped and scapegoated?

Mad that we treat each other with such cruelty and indifference?

Mad that we continue to choose profit over people, war over peace, violence over kindness?

I wonder if God is angry—not in the way of petty vengeance, but with a love-fueled fire that takes sides with those who are suffering.

I’m mad when I have the space to be. And when I have even a little more space, I often discover that my anger is a form of grief. Amid the authoritarian chaos and failing democracy in which I live, I continue a joyful and privileged life and have not yet been directly affected by the hateful policies pursued by the administration. Knowing the horror unfolding at the hands of my government, I often vacillate between hope and helplessness. I know that my small actions are not enough. I know that only shared, collective action across thousands of communities have a chance at toppling would-be dictators. And somehow, knowing my limitations, I take comfort these days in the thought that God is wailing with anger and lament.

Photo by Simran Sood on Unsplash

For a long time, I thought a mad God couldn’t be trusted. The mad God of my earlier psyche merged into a mad king who flies off the handle and burns or beheads the nonconforming. Such a God is dangerous, toxic, and unsafe. But maybe I projected my fear-filled understanding of unhealthy anger onto God—and maybe God’s anger shows us what healthy anger looks like? After all, I spent years of depression and therapy discovering that I was angry and full of grief, but that my religious contexts of Christian niceness did not provide the tools to acknowledge and move through my anger in a healthy way. I’m not talking about those terror passages in the Bible where a Psalmist prays blessing for the one who dashes his enemy’s babies against rocks (Psalm 137:9). The Bible is filled with humanity’s vengeance, which seems different in quality from God’s anger—and whenever that vengeance spills over into our images of God, whether in the Bible, or in our psyches, it must be rejected in favor of the larger biblical message of universal, nonviolent love.

But the Hebrew prophets are still adamant that God is angry. Their word for it is “wrath,” and they conceive God’s wrath as an expression of God’s passion for justice. God asks through the prophet Jeremiah: “Shall I not punish them for these things? Says the Lord, Shall I not avenge myself on a nation such as this?” (Jeremiah 5:29). When I think of the atrocities that my own nation and the state of Israel are committing, I can’t help but take some comfort in a God whose anger burns against injustice.

What are we to make of divine wrath—is it to be rejected completely, or is there something there in the sacred texts from which we can learn? Is a mad God somehow also a passionate and loving God—one whose heart is broken at the injustices we commit? Maybe God’s anger is a loving and protective boundary against evil?

The great Jewish scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote a classic book on the Hebrew prophets titled simply The Prophets. Spending substantive time with this book over the year has challenged many of my assumptions. In particular, Heschel devotes a chapter to “The Meaning and Mystery of Wrath,” which I highly recommend. His subtitles alone ask the provocative questions that progressive Christians have often not had the courage or interest to ask: “Anger Last a Moment,” “The Secret of Anger is Care,” “Anger as Suspended Love.”

For Heschel, God’s anger is a temporary measure to intervene to stop evil. It is God’s love that lasts forever, while God’s anger eventually cools. “I have loved you with an everlasting love” (Jer. 31:3). “Again and again we are told that God’s love or kindness goes on forever;” Heschel writes, “we are never told that His anger goes on forever.” Here’s the Psalmist: “For His anger is but for a moment, but His favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night but joy comes with the morning” (Psalm 30:5).

The biblical God is not a distant and removed deity, but instead is involved, caring for and loving the world. In these times of institutions failing and injustice rising, it’s easy for so many of us to check out, stream more TV, and become absorbed in the daily needs of our lives. But what if it is part of our spiritual practice to resist numbness? Heschel points to the evil of indifference:

There is an evil which most of us condone and are even guilty of: indifference to evil. We remain neutral, impartial, and not easily moved by the wrongs done unto other people.

It is difficult for us to fathom the depth of God’s concern and love, especially for the marginalized. Grief and anger entwine in God’s heart, and the biblical prophet’s heart, as a response to evil and injustice. Heschel again,

The exploitation of the poor is to us a misdemeanor; to God, it is a disaster. Our reaction is disapproval; God’s reaction is something no language can convey. Is it a sign of cruelty that God’s anger is aroused when the rights of the poor are violated, when widows and orphans are oppressed.

Is it a sign of cruelty that God’s anger is aroused when people are bombed, starved and killed, their lands occupied and stolen? Or is it a sign that God cares?

The God of the Bible is mad.

Mad at injustice.

Mad at collectives—at nations, systems, empires—when they/we fail to honor their obligations to the poor, the oppressed, and the earth.

But it’s important to remember that God’s anger falls on Pharaoh, not the enslaved Israelites.

On the Empire, not the Empire’s victims.

God is not mad at me personally, but the Bible seems to suggest that God is mad at what we do to each other collectively.

I’ll get to this in future weeks in the Revelation commentary—but what if God sends plagues of “wrath” not because God delights in destruction, but because God yearns for liberation?

For those interested, here is another post from three years ago where I wrestle with God’s anger from a different perspective: