Is God angry? What is God angry about? Some say that God is angry at sinners. Then others quickly say, “He hates sin not the sinner.” What does that mean? He doesn’t expect us to stop sinning, right?

Jesus said, “Go and sin no more” to several people.

Does he really believe people can stop sinning. And who started all this sinning anyway? Let’s look at the first two people. What did they do to start this sinning?

They had one rule. One rule! Don’t eat from a particular tree. That seems easy enough, I mean, why would they? But why even have a rule anyway?

It was like an exit sign in the Garden of Eden. There was a conscious choice to be made. The eating of the fruit came with a warning. “Dying you will die.” The other tree that came with a name was the Tree of Life. Self-explanatory, I guess. What attraction did the first tree have? It would give you a knowing of good and evil. We know they ate from it eventually. So, they got the knowing. We still have it. So, Adam said, “Hey! This is great. I feel wise. How about you, Eve?” No. He said, “I feel naked! And it is not a good feeling.” “Yeah, let’s make some coverings,” said Eve.

So God spoils their clothes-making by booming out, “Ha! You did it! Here are some punishments to go on top of your miserable state.” Not at all. He simply asked, “Where are you?” He didn’t accuse them. He gave them a chance to explain but they used it to cast blame elsewhere. But didn’t he curse them? Read it closely. He did not curse them. He did curse the serpent. He did curse the earth in that it would not be so friendly to them now. But would he curse those he had blessed? No, he did not.

He made them clothes to help their uncomfortable condition. Good clothes, better than leaf ones. And the ‘punishments’? They were more like reminders that something was wrong now. So, what was their sin? Eating fruit? No. Choosing their own way to live without God’s good guidance. So ‘to sin’ is to make your own decisions without reference to God, and even to go against his clear direction.

Let’s look at someone Jesus told to “sin no more”. Her sin was clear. It had become a lifestyle with her. But where was she now? She was close to Jesus. Close to Jesus and away from the condemnation being heaped on her. She was near Jesus and forgiveness. She was in that circle of righteousness Jesus always had about him. Outside of it was wrongdoing and hypocrisy. That is when he says to her, “Go and sin no more.” Yes, take your new righteousness with you into the world and don’t trade it for a sinful life again.

Now, if God is so angry with us, why do we see it so rarely in Jesus? He takes time to reason with with those who purposely misunderstand him. Yes, he has no time for those who want to manipulate him and make him conform to their ideas of him. But, he simply leaves them, rejecting their plans for him.

We do see his frustration with his friends. When the ones closest to him who would not accept his words and embrace them in faith, he is abrupt at times. He got angry with Peter for the idea that the Messiah should not suffer? He knows the Messiah must suffer. But he shows great patience as he explains to Martha about her brother, Lazarus, and says, “I AM the resurrection and the life!” Right here. Right now. But when her sister, Mary, comes complaining about his late arrival, he says, “Show me where you have laid him.”

He weeps. Is this an angry person? No. He feels the sadness death brings to people. He understands people who don’t realize that death is not the end. Lazarus must return from bliss to show them he is still the same person. But listen. Now he speaks: “Lazarus, come forth!”

God sees you as you were meant to be. That you and I don’t see that, concerns him greatly. Though his love compels him to act, he does say we need to believe him. His love is freely given and can only be freely received. He says, “Come, follow me.”

The Jewish people had a pretty clear idea of sin. But some were using it to separate people into groups or kinds of people: Good and bad. Sinners and righteous. Our kind and their kind. Jesus didn’t accept the idea that people could not change for the better. His message of good news is that God will forget your past and bring you into his family. He extended this message to all people before he left for heaven.

So, where is all this God anger? We didn’t see it when our first parents went against his good advice. People insist on their own way to happiness. How did he show his love? He put himself into the hands of sinful men. They discredited him. They rejected him. They condemned him. But that was not enough. They demanded his humiliation and brutal death by their hated overlords. A reluctant Roman governor yielded to their threats and he was then given Rome’s worst punishment. This had been carefully crafted to give a slow, painful and humiliating death.

This was his demonstration for all time of what sin did to people. It made them jealous, hateful, vindictive, merciless, and conniving. It turned people against a fellow human without any sense of pity for one so unjustly accused of wrong. He became just one more of so many hundreds of Jews killed by the Romans. They were to be subjugated by force. Who cared if some died undeservedly?

But this righteous man returns. He offers to change people from doing evil from a bad heart to doing good from a new heart. He offers a powerful change for any and all who will believe.

But will you and I embrace that change. We will begin to hate sin, too. We will become aware of the death and destruction that are the results. Will we, like Jesus, delight in the good will of God? Will we trade our heart of uncaring stone for a human one?

We can stand with God. We can love God and love goodness. This is the only cure offered by the Doctor of human souls: Jesus. All others are charlatans and quacks who cannot cure the soul. They offer remedies that never reach the deep part where the change is needed. This change toward God will turn us again toward people with love and hope for them.

Yes, the anger of God will be seen one day. It will be toward those who opposed God and his redemption of men. First, against the adversary of God who is not a human. Those who side with him against God will share his punishment. All lies will be exposed. All motives will be shown. All secrets will be told. And Jesus will be seen as he is in all his glory. He will take his rightful place and continue his work of making us into the image of God.

We have heard of a tree called The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This tree was in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve ate the fruit from this tree. We still use the expression ‘the forbidden fruit’. The warning about this tree was this: “but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” It has also been translated ‘dying, you will die’.

As we know, another voice suggested they eat that very fruit. That voice told them that they would not die. Rather, they would gain an ability to judge things for themselves. The words contained this phrase, ‘you will be like God’.

Their reaction to eating this fruit was very strange. It says, “they realized they were naked.” Rather than gaining some power that made them like gods, they found themselves to be naked and they didn’t like it. They took leaves and made themselves coverings.

It seems that the Lord God would visit them. They hear him coming and they run away and hide. Adam hears the voice of the Lord saying, “Where are you?” Adam replies, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” Adam does not know how to lie. We can believe him. He says he was afraid. Afraid because he was naked. That is why he hid.

We have little idea of how they felt before eating this fruit. But it seems that ‘being afraid’ was new. My question is this: why did ‘being naked’ bother them? And what were they afraid of?

Adam had gained a self consciousness that was uncomfortable. He became extremely aware of himself in his body. It was like he woke up and discovered he was naked in a world that suddenly seemed somehow dangerous. He was separate from everything else. He knew he was a person before. He was Adam. He had a wife. But now, he felt alone. He says “I” four times in his short response to “Where are you?”

He feels separate from his Maker and Benefactor so he hides. He feels separate from his wife and calls her ‘the woman’. He realizes that there is at least one creature, the serpent, that deceives people. There is some danger on this earth. Maybe there is more. This is the thing that bothers him. His nakedness means he is alienated from everything else. It is just him, in his body, and that body does not seem enough. It needs a covering of some sort.

A lot is made of the ‘punishments’ that are given out by the Lord. But sometimes left out is that he gives them better coverings. He clothes them. He becomes their tailor as someone said. They are also sent out of the Garden area. But why? Because of the other tree, the Tree of Life.

This Tree of Life becomes a problem. God takes away their access to this tree. What exactly is this tree? All we know is that it will give people the power to live forever.

It seems that the choice they had was either this tree or that tree. They chose one and now lose their chance to eat from the other. The next time we read about it is in John’s vision of the future, “On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”

We have this tree in the past. We have it in the future. But what about now? Is our choice lost? Can we gain this eternal life or is it now denied forever. The same bible that tells us of the Tree of Life, contains other statements about eternal life and how to get it. Jesus makes several statements about this.”

“Very truly I tell you, the one who believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

“Whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

“For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.”

“I am the bread of life that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever.”

Jesus compares himself to something you eat: bread. And something you drink: water. He says the result of this eating and drinking is eternal life, living forever. So we do have a choice now to have eternal life. But we have to eat ‘the Bread of Life’ not fruit from the Tree of Life.

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Noah or Cain

One reason we may have a hard time understanding the story of the flood is that we start with the wrong guy. We start with Noah, right? But we need to start with Cain.

Cain had become a murderer. But God lets the guy live. He doesn’t judge him as unworthy to live. He lets this hard-hearted guy who solved his jealousy problem with murder, go out and pursue his life. Why? Well, remember, his parents, Adam and Eve had chosen to live by their conscience. They wanted to use their new knowledge of good and evil to make moral choices. Choices. Free will.

The Marked Man

Cain had chosen to kill his brother and God told Cain he would no longer be a farmer because the ground itself rejects him.

Cain had not considered what came after killing his brother. He quickly began to fear that he, himself, could be killed in the future by someone as revenge. God puts a mark on him to warn people not to kill him or it will be worse for them. The life of a farmer denied him, he builds a city.

A city. Cain builds a city. What was the result?
Some worked and provided food but others were free like Tubal-Cain to make tools out of bronze and iron. His half-brother Jubal makes music on stringed and wind instruments. This is why we like cities, the arts, right? Yet others like Jabal chose a nomadic life raising livestock.

Why half-brothers?

Their father, Lamech, decided to have two wives. Why two? He just wanted to have two wives. And he had some trouble with a younger man who wounded him. So he killed him. Then he made up a song about it. Or maybe it was a poem. It in Lamech says the punishment was high because he, Lamech, said so. He remembers that anyone who killed Cain would be avenged seven times. Lamech raises this to seventy times. He decided what was right for him and no one was to say otherwise. He was serious about it. Deadly serious.

Violence Ruled the Day

Seth has kids. He is another son of Adam. They farm. The city people make choices, like Lamech, that eventually cause the society to break down completely. The simple description: everyone thought about doing evil, all the time. Everyone made their own rules. What they did exactly is not described in detail but the result was this: the earth was filled with violence. God’s call: “All flesh had corrupted their way on the earth”.

Farm Boys go to City to find Wives

There was hero worship. Maybe clans developed around them. One group, ‘the sons of God’, wanted wives from another group. Maybe it was a group of Seth people who wanted wives from a group of Cain people. The groups mixed and before long there was no group that thought about God. The farming group left farming to join in the new city-based society. Maybe.

Anyway, the result was this. A violent society. The ancestor, Cain, started this kind of city society. He left his mark of using violence to deal with his feelings of jealousy. Now violence became the solution to every conflict of every sort. A society without laws allowing everyone to do anything. It made God sorry he had made people. He had been moved when Abel was killed. He said the blood of Abel called to him from the ground. Now the earth is filled with violence that calls out to God. God sees complete corruption.

His solution: a flood.

Noah

Now, we come to Noah. Noah is about the only guy who has not joined in the corrupt society. God tells him to build an ark.

Noah does this with the help of his three sons but it takes a long time, maybe 100 years. God waits. Noah and sons build. Do you see that God intervenes but men must do something themselves to save themselves. Noah, by doing what God tells him, saves his family and human society. “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh; yet his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.”

Anyway, it is not an immediate flood. It is known to Noah that it will come and it will be big. Do people know about it? I think it would make the news. Man predicts flood and is building large boat. But God does not tell Noah to go and tell the people. He just tells him to build a big boat and exactly how big it should be. And what materials to use. I don’t think there were a lot of boats around.

A New Start

It says in later books and letters that Noah demonstrated his faith and so condemned the world. And that God waited patiently while Noah built the ark.

But it was for the sake of people that God removed a completely corrupt society. All the people would have died anyway and probably violently. There was no way to reform this situation except with a new beginning. There was also an element of purging the earth itself and a new start for wild animals, birds and cattle, etc.

Will it happen again?

How many people died? It does not say. It says eight survived. How widespread was the flood? Big enough to end all life. Did it reach to Australia and drown kangaroos? You tell me. When did it happen? Really unknown. Some say 5,000 years ago; others say 50,000. Could be more. Adding up dates or time lengths in the Bible is a waste of time since that is not their purpose. They are there to show continuity not length of time itself.

But again, the purpose of the flood was to give mankind another chance, not to get rid of people. Peter, a disciple of Jesus, predicts a future event where the Earth will again go through a dreadful transition to prepare for a very different way of life on earth. He says the flood was an example of this kind of major change. Many, but not all, will die before the ‘new earth’ predicted will come to be. And Peter does not make these statements without information from God.

Preparation for this is clear. Jesus has made things clear to all who listen. Believe him. God is willing that all would be saved. We just have to find out what He means by saved.

“No one comes to the Father except through Me” is not a restriction but rather an open invitation.

“I am the Door”. And that Door is open.

He is not willing that anyone would perish.

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