God’s Wrath: When Holiness Meets Entrenched Evil

The divine nature is one radiant holiness expressed through the modalities of the Father’s goodness, the Son’s truth, and the Spirit’s love. These are not three ingredients but three personal expressions of the one plenitude. Divine action cannot arise from conflicting motives. Wrath must be understood as emerging from the same diffusive love that creates, the same faithful truth that redeems, and the same goodness that upholds all things.

Holiness is best understood as the simple fullness of goodness, truth, and love—a radiant unity we may call holy-love. Because this unity is undivided, every divine action arises from the same superabundant source. Wrath, therefore, is not a competing attribute or a temporary departure from love, but holy-love’s morally fitting response to destructive evil.

Love protects what is vulnerable, reveals truth, and exposes what corrodes communion. God must love both victim and perpetrator for as long as healing remains possible, yet when a beloved will becomes harmful to itself and to others, love does what love must do. Scripture does not portray God as oscillating between tenderness and fury, as though justice and mercy were rival impulses. The divine motive never shifts. The same radiant plenitude that delights the receptive soul becomes painful to the resistant one, not because God changes, but because the distorted mirror can no longer bear the light that was meant to heal it. Love is intended to be reflected; when it is resisted and absorbed inwardly, it becomes heat—experienced as pain and manifest as sin.

Heat radiates to hurt others. Society is full of heat being radiated. All pain and sin are due to human choices. The very earth and time itself was damaged at the Fall of Adam. Natural disasters occur with increasing frequency because human greed and excesses further pollute creation’s initial goodness.

Wrath intensifies precisely where evil threatens to destroy. It is the lioness defending her cubs, the surgeon cutting to save, the light revealing what hides in shadows. The severity does not reflect a withdrawal of love but its heightened form when confronted with willful harm. However, God balances love for the afflicted (breadth-love) with His love for the “afflictor” (depth-love). This explains Scripture’s pattern: God is repeatedly described as slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The slowness reflects depth-love’s patience; the confrontation reflects breadth-love’s protective goodness.

Love for Both Victim and Perpetrator

A central conviction of LUMEN is that God always loves both victim and perpetrator. When God confronts evil, He is not choosing sides in a zero-sum contest. He refuses to abandon the wounded and He refuses to abandon the one who wounds. The Christian who is strong in the Lord suffers the most, because that suffering allows God to continue in merciful invitation to the perpetrator. This can only be empowered by the Spirit as God and other Christians bear our burdens with us, and it is enacted by Jesus’ teaching to turn the cheek and love the enemy.

This is not to say victims should always continue to accept pain. Abused wives should leave their husbands out of love for themselves (protection) as well as love for the husband (reduce the evil he can enact).

In situations where the victim is called to stay and take the pain, God joins the pain, absorbs the pain, transforms the affront into reflected holy-love. God protects, rescues, and emboldens the creature to stand up to further injustice. When the victim can no longer choose holy-love, or when the perpetrator has fully committed to only evil, God moves to against the perpetrator.

For the victim, we know God also works all things for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purposes (XX). This means our love for God allows Him to transform all evil directed at us into something that ultimately blesses us. Many Christians fail to realize this blessing as they do not love Him, trust Him, and they refuse to forgive. Forgiveness and loving the enemy often become the mechanisms of God’s transforming what was meant for evil into His good blessing.

Wrath As Love for the Perpetrator

God safeguards the reality of creaturely freedom because love desires genuine repentance and restored/initial communion. Yet freedom is never unbounded autonomy. It is always freedom within the arena of creation, and within shared interior space constituted by the Spirit’s indwelling presence. Every act—holy or wicked—occurs within this space. While the Spirit personally indwells the believer (the Body of Christ is His Temple), God is omnipresent and so He is also within the unbeliever who often denies and rejects the Spirit’s voice of conscience.

For the perpetrator, wrath is first restraint, exposure, and limitation. God often throws obstacles in the way of people who want to do evil, affording them the chance to rethink the act. He even uses creation (the dance floor in the dance analogy) to arrest the descent into deeper self-corruption by getting the person caught or exposed. Every sinful destructive act further distorts the mirror of the soul, and it is often a slippery slope as sin begets more and more damaging sin. To love the victim, God often has them caught/arrested/restrained. 

God interrupts the steep descent, preventing deeper collapse and offering the clarity that can open the way back. This first act of wrath is a doubled mercy as it defends the vulnerable and limits the self-destruction of the offender. It is not vengeance so much as holy-love resisting the further corrosion of a soul and protecting people from harming themselves and others.

Hardening of the Heart: Acceleration Rather Than Manipulation

At times, a will becomes so bent toward evil that permitting its prolonged expression would multiply devastation. In such cases, God does not manipulate the will or inject evil into the soul; rather, He accelerates the trajectory already chosen in order to limit the harm that evil can actualize. What is shortened is not the capacity for repentance, but the duration in which evil is allowed to mature before reaching settled conviction. Even in hardening, the divine motive remains unchanged: the flourishing and protection of all creatures involved.

Divine hardening is therefore neither coercion nor the override of a receptive will. It is the morally fitting judgment upon a willed evil, whereby God withdraws softening influences and allows the bent will to reach resolution more quickly. This acceleration brings the perpetrator to a decisive posture—one that prompts divine intervention to protect victims—without violating freedom or dignity. While repentance remains possible for as long as the will is not finally closed, increasing sin bends the mirror further, narrowing the will’s openness until evil becomes firmly chosen.

Hardening, then, is a just response to prior evil, not its cause. By hastening the arrival of judgment, God limits the spread of harm and relieves those under threat. What is removed is not the possibility of repentance, but the prolonged delay that would allow further destruction. The will is never forced; the trajectory is simply allowed to reach its end more swiftly.

This acceleration serves multiple goods. It protects potential victims by bringing evil to a head before it spreads further and more painfully. It limits the perpetrator’s deeper self-corruption by shortening the sequence of wicked acts. It reveals truth by making the heart’s posture unmistakably clear, issuing a clarion call to repentance. Finally, where a person becomes fully committed to evil, it relieves the agony of divided conscience as the moral conflict collapses into decision. In this way, hardening is a severe mercy—holy-love acting with moral clarity where prolonged indulgence would inflict greater harm on both victim and perpetrator alike.

Wrath on Earth and Wrath Beyond Death

Within temporal life, wrath is encountered primarily as the restraint of evil, the exposure of injustice, and the protection of the vulnerable. It remains dynamic, relational, and oriented toward repentance. Earthly wrath is thus largely medicinal, corrective, and revelatory. It seeks to limit harm, call the perpetrator to truth, and restore moral order. In extreme cases, this restraint may even take the form of the perpetrator’s death, which—severe as it is—can constitute a final mercy by preventing further devastation to others and deeper corruption of the self that merits punishment in the afterlife.

Beyond death, however, the mode of existence shifts from becoming to being. The soul receives its spiritual body and is fixed in its orientation. Yet the object encountered does not change: the unceasing radiance of God’s holy-love. Death cannot interrupt divine love; God remains present even beyond judgment. What changes is the soul’s capacity to receive that presence. A will bent away from love now encounters holy-love not as healing light but as searing heat—an experience that endures precisely because the soul’s posture has become settled.

The pain of Hell, therefore, is not externally inflicted as a punishment imposed from without. It is the unrepentant soul’s enduring misinterpretation of the same holy-love that always sought its restoration. After the Day of Judgment, the mirror of the soul is set in its final orientation. To the degree that love has been resisted, absorbed inwardly, and contorted into self-regard, the soul experiences that love as pain. We are, in the end, the summation of our freely chosen loves. Choices that are selfish, violent, or closed to repentance shape the soul itself, forming a capacity for suffering that is perfectly attuned to what the person has become.

Wrath, in this eschatological sense, is not merely punitive, though it is fully retributive. Justice is rendered not through divine hostility, but through the unwavering consistency of divine holiness. God does not send hate; the creature’s distorted posture renders God’s radiance unbearable. The source of pain lies not in God’s disposition but in the soul’s orientation toward that disposition.

At this point, LUMEN does not take a definitive position on whether the suffering of such souls is everlasting or whether it endures until justice is fulfilled and the soul is finally extinguished. Scripture appears capable of sustaining either reading. The notion that the soul is naturally immortal owes more to Greek philosophical inheritance, mediated through figures such as Augustine, than to explicit biblical teaching.

What Scripture does make clear is that eternal life consists in communion with God, and that exclusion from God’s presence constitutes true death and destruction. Whether eternal conscious punishment or eventual annihilation is the more loving outcome remains opaque to human judgment. What is incontrovertible, however, is that Hell’s reality is ever-enduring, that it was prepared for Satan and the demons, that some humans will freely reject God and thus justly enter it, and that whatever form judgment finally takes, it will be perfectly just and wholly consistent with the love and mercy God never ceases to embody.

Wrath as the Truthful Shape of Holy-Love

Wrath is not a contradiction of love, nor a lapse in divine patience, nor a suspension of mercy. It is one of holy-love’s necessary and truthful forms when love encounters reality as it actually is. Love does not float above moral history; it meets persons and communities within the concrete conditions their choices have created. When love encounters openness, it heals. When it encounters distortion, it exposes. When it encounters violence, it resists. When it encounters settled destruction, it judges. In every case, the motive remains the same: holy-love seeking the good of all it touches.

Love, in its multifarious expressions, invites and waits, but it also protects and intervenes. Depth-love bears with extraordinary patience, refusing to abandon even the one who wounds. Breadth-love safeguards those endangered by another’s will, refusing to allow harm to spread unchecked. Wrath arises precisely where these two movements converge—where patience for the perpetrator must give way to protection for the vulnerable, and where truth must interrupt a trajectory that would otherwise consume both victim and offender alike.

Wrath, then, is not divine temper but moral clarity. It is goodness refusing to collude with destruction. It is truth unveiling what has been hidden in darkness. It is love drawing a boundary where continued permission would itself become cruelty. Wrath does not negate freedom; it honors freedom’s weight by allowing choices to reach their proper moral disclosure. What love will not do is pretend that evil is harmless, temporary, or unreal.

In this sense, wrath is a severe mercy. It exposes lies before they metastasize. It restrains violence before it multiplies. It shortens the reach of corruption and hastens the moment of truth. Even when judgment is final, love has not ceased; it remains what it has always been. The pain experienced by the resistant soul testifies not to a change in God, but to the settled posture of the creature toward the unchanging radiance of holy-love.

Wrath is therefore not the dark underside of grace but its truthful contour in a fractured world. It reveals the moral seriousness of God’s love, the luminous integrity of His holiness, and the unwavering consistency of His character. The same radiant holiness that creates and sustains all things also confronts what destroys them—not because God delights in judgment, but because love, if it is truly love, must refuse to abandon the good.

In this way, wrath belongs within holiness, not against it. It is holy-love standing fully revealed in a world where love must sometimes wound in order to heal, resist in order to protect, and judge in order to remain faithful to the good it eternally seeks.