The Fury of God: We Cannot Truly Understand God’S Love Until We Fully Understand His Fury

Copyright © 2014 Jeremy J. Lundmark.

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ISBN: 978-1-4908-3634-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-3635-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-3633-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014907913

WestBow Press rev. date: 05/23/2014

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1     Get Out of My Garden

Chapter 2     A Supernatural Disaster

Chapter 3     What Would Jesus Bomb?

Chapter 4     Plagues and Death in Egypt

Chapter 5     The Coup D’état of Korah

Chapter 6     The Death of Uzzah

Chapter 7     The Lamentations of Jeremiah

Chapter 8     The Anger of Jesus

Chapter 9     Jesus and the Revelation

Chapter 10   A Tale of Two Cups

Conclusion     The Pendulum

A Closing Prayer

This Book is Dedicated to…

Alison Lundmark

(Wife)

Probably this whole dedication page should be for my wife of ten years, Alison Lundmark. She has been through the most joyful times, and the most challenging times with me in the last decade. Nothing brings me more joy than to see joy on her face. Thank you, honey, for your constant and unwavering love and support.

Dale & Kathy Lundmark

(Dad & Mom)

Mom & Dad, you’ve prayed for me and supported me my whole life. Dad, your wisdom and guidance from cars to anything under the sun have always been of the utmost importance to me. You’re still the one I call first when I’m just not sure. Mom, you set an example of diligence and devotion to Christ that most will never see but we kids have been lucky enough to witness. I think those who have been the beneficiaries of your prayer life will number as many as the stars in the sky when we finally get to heaven.

Diane Vellner

(Mother-in-Law)

Diane, you’ve supported me in ways that go way beyond what a mother-in-law should ever do. Your confidence, that I could do whatever I set out to do in the Lord, has been a regular source of inspiration. Your generosity has known no bounds as long as I have known you, and I am blessed to be able to call you mom.

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been completed without the diligent efforts and feedback from many friends and co-laborers who I have exchanged ideas with over the last few years. While many have made comments on various sections of the book, a few are worthy of noting specifically.

Editors

Tara Cuthbertson helped me through the introduction and first two chapters of editing. It was her detailed edits that helped me get an idea for how my writing style needed to shift a bit to be less preachy and more authorial.

With the help of Becky Robinson’s Weaving Influence I was able to connect with Carrie Koens who did the initial edits for chapters 3-10. Carrie’s Christian background allowed her to combine quality edits with insightful theological commentary to help me think through the way I was communicating my thoughts. Also, Carrie continued to be a source of help long after the initial edits were completed.

Pastors

I have a lot of friends who are pastors, but two specifically took the time to review parts of this manuscript and gave helpful commentary, encouragement, and direction to the book.

Dr. Gary Dull – Faith Baptist Church, Altoona PA

Pastor Larry Jennings – Warren Center Baptist Church, PA

Three pastors have walked the journey alongside me as this book has been written. They may not have had direct involvement in the book, but their encouragement and faithful friendship has been a source of motivation to keep me going in the hardest times.

Pastor H. Robert Anderssen – Trinity Baptist, Smithville TX

Pastor Chris Vitarelli – Horizon Church, Paw Paw MI

Pastor Len Flack – North Country Fellowship, Carthage NY

WE CANNOT TRULY UNDERSTAND GOD’S LOVE

UNTIL WE FULLY UNDERSTAND HIS FURY

"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge;

fools despise wisdom and instruction." (Pro 1:7)

"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the

knowledge of the Holy One is insight." (Pro. 9:10)

Introduction

I. Why Engage this Topic?

Reason #1: We Cannot Truly Understand God’s Love, Until We Fully Understand His Fury.

The first, and most important, reason to engage the topic of God’s anger is that His anger helps to magnify our understanding of His love. Perhaps one of the best ways to illustrate this point is to simply hand the task over to the greatest communicator of Scriptural truth in the history of the world: Jesus.

And Jesus answering said to him, Simon, I have something to say to you. And he answered, Say it, Teacher. A certain moneylender had two debtors. One owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they could not pay, he cancelled the debt of both. Now which of them will love him more? Simon answered, The one, I suppose, for whom he cancelled the larger debt. And he said to him, You have judged rightly. ~Luke 7:40-43

Jesus taught that there is a direct relationship between the amount of debt forgiven and the amount of appreciation a person has for the one who forgave the debt. The Gospel is often preached today as if mankind merely has a small sin problem. There is little, if any, appreciation for the sacrifice of Jesus Christ because there is little understanding of how much our sin angers God. When we fail to understand the degree of fury God has for our sin we, in turn, also fail to appreciate being saved from the judgment that results from His intense anger.

The more we understand what makes God angry, the more we will appreciate the fact that He sent His Son to die in our place. It is one thing to think of a loving, happy God sending His Son to help us out of our plight. It is quite another thing to consider a God who is angry with us and, yet, still sends His Son to die on our behalf. Simply put, we cannot truly understand God’s love, until we fully understand His fury.

Reason #2: Society’s Overemphasis on the Love of God at the Expense of the Wrath of God.

If you take a moment to turn on your computer and start browsing for Christian books online, you’ll find a myriad of book titles. Likewise, if you go to any major book selling website and type in Love of God, you’ll come up with thousands of search results. In fact, I just did this and I came up with 6,858 search results at ChristianBook.com. Now, if you type in Anger of God, you’ll get a few hundred search results at best. I did this as well and came up with 310 search results. That’s not all. If you start looking at the books that are suggested, they aren’t even books about the anger of God; but, rather, they are books about how to be delivered from anger or how to properly deal with anger as a Christian.

It was this simple fact that first drew me to this subject. It bothers me immensely that there seems to be so little emphasis on the fury of God in the mainstream of Christianity, when the Scriptures place such a large emphasis on God’s anger. Further, there seems to be an overwhelming amount of books, sermons, articles, and blog posts on the love of God which suggests to me that the Christian mainstream isn’t just missing the Scripture’s emphasis on God’s fury; rather, it appears to be suppressing it intentionally. If they can see the Scripture’s emphasis on the love of God, how can they possibly miss the Scripture’s emphasis on God’s anger, wrath, and judgment? As a result of this overemphasis on the love of God, at the expense of the wrath of God, there seems to be some agreement between the secular, the liberal, and the Christian mainstream views of God. Namely, that God is a loving God, and He never gets angry.

The Secular Deity

The general consensus among those who hold little or no religious affiliation, but still believe in a deity, is that God wouldn’t do anything negative to anyone. The average non-religious person, when asked whether or not God would punish their sin would likely respond Why would God do anything to me? or I thought God was a loving God? They assume that God, generally, loves all people. If God does get angry, He never expresses that anger on His people. The idea that God would take life, or do anything resembling punishment, is appalling to many today. One of the most common jeers I’ve heard from the atheist, and the argument that arises most often from the non-religious, when a tragedy strikes is this: Why would a good God allow something so horrific? That question rests on the assumption that horrific things and a good, or loving, God cannot be synonymous.

The Liberal Deity

The deity of the liberal is always loving and accepting all the time. Consider, for example, the Universal Unitarian church. This is a church founded on the acceptance of all views of God. The underpinning philosophy is that God is loving toward all, and mankind should emulate that love toward one another. God loves mankind universally and unconditionally. God never punishes because God is all loving. The practical outworking of this kind of thinking usually plays itself out in the forms of relativism and tolerance. Truth becomes relative to each person’s experience to God, and the highest morality is tolerance. In fact, intolerance becomes the only immorality because it’s the only thing which goes against the philosophy of an all loving deity.

The Deity of the Christian Mainstream

What concerns me the most is what passes for a description of God in the Christian mainstream. It is common for Christians to refer to the unconditional love of God. In fact, it is extremely common for Christians to tell unbelievers that God loves them. After all, it is prominent Christians who have written thousands of books on the love of God.

There’s nothing wrong with writing on the love of God; however, there is a problem with emphasizing the love of God at the expense of the anger of God. A lot of false teaching begins with an overemphasis of one of God’s characteristics to the neglect of others. When we focus too much on one aspect of God’s nature, we have a tendency to allow our view of God to become skewed. I’m convinced that 21st Century Christendom has so overemphasized the love of God that it has a God out of balance. The danger, of course, is recognizing this imbalance and then pushing the pendulum too far in the other direction. Even with that danger in mind, a thousand books could be written on God’s fury and we would still have seven times as many books on God’s love as we do on God’s anger.

Reason #3: The Overwhelming Biblical Evidence.

There is an overwhelming amount of Biblical evidence for the wrath of God, anger of God, and, yes, the hatred of God. There are some readers, having been inundated with teaching about God’s love, who might want to throw this book out the window simply because I suggested that God hates anything. In my experience, simply suggesting that God hates will light a passionate fire under those who are well versed in Biblical knowledge about God’s love. In my opinion, those who continue reading and dare to consider the mere possibility that God could hate something, or even someone, are a rare breed. Psalm 11:5 says,

The LORD tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence.

Wait! The Lord HATES!? Yes, the Bible teaches that God not only gets angry with sin, but that He hates those who practice sin. The mainstream evangelical church machine has been cranking out materials that teach that God loves the sinner and hates the sin for decades. It’s hard to stand up against that kind of influence and that’s all the more reason why we need to engage in this discussion.

When I was studying for my Bachelor’s degree, I can remember being delighted to find that our professor had The hatred of God in our theology notes. I was excited, after about two or three full class sessions on the love of God, to get to this professor’s approach to the hatred of God. My heart sank the moment he said We’re going to skip the next section because our time is short and we don’t want to be dwelling on the hatred of God. In his defense his time was actually short. Why was there no time to talk about the hatred of God? We had placed so much emphasis on the love of God that we had failed to allow time to discuss the equally important wrath of God.

I would argue that the love of God and the hatred of God are treated equally in the Scriptures. I might even dare to argue that there is more about the wrath of God than the love of God in the Bible. There is more about God punishing sin than there is about God redeeming the wicked. The reason I would make this suggestion is because there are so many examples of God pouring out His wrath in the Bible.

In this book, we will look at some of the most disastrous instances where God’s fury was unleashed on mankind. The overwhelming amount of material regarding the fury of the God, who we say we love, cherish, follow, and encourage others to follow, demands our utmost and immediate attention. We cannot go on ignoring so significant a truth about Almighty God. If we do, we run the risk of, at worst, worshipping the wrong God, and at best, failing to understand and worship the God who sent His Son to redeem us.

Reason #4: The Nation that Forgets the Fury of God Will Not Last.

I initially put off preaching this series for quite a while. After preaching the series I waited over four years to sit down and write the manuscript. During that span of time I have watch the United States of America continue to decline in strength, in confidence, and in respect around the world. At present, our country’s debt load is nearly to a point where we can no longer bear the burden. The last election cycle was all about reducing the deficit, lowering fuel cost, and creating jobs.

Everyone knows this country is in a bit of a mess. One thing nobody can seem to figure out is why this is happening and what the solution to the problem might be. It seems clear to me that the country that forgets the fury of God will not last. I would argue that the decline of America’s prominence is in direct proportion to its disregard of the wrath of God. Read Jeremiah’s words written thousands of years ago to the people of Judah:

For twenty-three years, from the thirteenth year of Josiah the son of Amon, king of Judah, to this day, the word of the LORD has come to me, and I have spoken persistently to you, but you have not listened. You have neither listened nor inclined your ears to hear, although the LORD persistently sent to you all his servants the prophets, saying, ‘Turn now, every one of you, from his evil way and evil deeds, and dwell upon the land that the LORD has given to you and your fathers from of old and forever. Do not go after other gods to serve and worship them, or provoke me to anger with the work of your hands. Then I will do you no harm.’ Yet you have not listened to me, declares the LORD, that you might provoke me to anger with the work of your hands to your own harm. ~Jeremiah 25:3-7

Jeremiah preached God’s judgment on the people for twenty-three years. For twenty-three years he told the people not to provoke God to anger. What was their response? Jeremiah 25:7 says yet you have not listened to me. The Israelites stopped believing that God, the ultimate judge, would execute His judgment from heaven to earth. What was God’s response to their decision to ignore His anger? He was going to destroy them, place them under captivity, and send them away to Babylon.

I can already hear theologians yelling at the pages of this book that was the nation of Israel! That’s right: Israel was God’s chosen nation. If God spared the nation of Israel for twenty-three years what makes any nation think He’s going to delay their judgment for that long? Christians and non-Christians alike should learn from this passage that it doesn’t matter what nation they are a part of. If any nation forgets the wrath of God, He will remind that nation of His wrath unless they repent.

The United States of America is a great country; however, America is a country that has been progressively turning its back on God. We are living in a post-Christian era of American history. Sure, there are plenty of people who claim to be Christian, but this book will reveal that the God of the Bible is not their God. Denial of the God of the Bible becomes most evident when someone says things like My God would never do something like that. This is precisely the reason why there are nearly 7,000 books on God’s love, and yet only a handful on His wrath. Know this, the nation that forgets the wrath of God will be subject to His wrath before too long.

Reason #5: Knowing God is the foremost responsibility of the Christ follower.

The Apostle Paul said that everything he ever did, which could be considered good, was garbage compared to knowing Jesus Christ. It is our foremost responsibility to know God. If knowing God is important, and it is, then knowing what