Now that Inquirers classes have begun again in earnest at my parish, one of the most frequent questions I am posed is “what is the wrath of God”? As I consider Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon to be a modern-day Father of the Church, I will let him answer here with some quotes from his excellent book Christ in the Psalms. (I am convinced that Fr. Patrick has a photographic memory, and that he never sleeps.) These are from his comments on Psalms 5 and 6. I have included his concluding thoughts on Psalm 6, which deal with sin, death and Satan – all enemies of our souls and bodies. And ending on a note of faith and hope.
p. 10 (Ps 5):
““They have rebelled against You” the psalm says. Sin is abhorrent to God. He not only loves justice; he also hates iniquity. “Fools shall not stand in Your presence,” our psalm goes on, “You hate all workers of iniquity.” When the psalmist prays for the destruction of the wicked, this is not his personal sentiment, so to speak. It is not a prayer of personal vindictiveness but of foundational justice. It is a plea that God vindicate his own moral order. When Jesus refused to “pray for the world” (John 17:9), He was recognizing the existence of those who, willfully unrepentant and deliberately hard of heart, have placed themselves beyond hope. Inveterate sinning against the light – unrepented evil – does exist in human hearts, and God hates it. He hates it vehemently. Jesus on the Cross had not one word to say to the blasphemous, unrepentant thief.
Some modern Christians are tempted to see in such sentiments only a lamentable vestige of Old Testament negativity and judgmentalism, now appropriately surpassed by a New Testament emphasis on God’s mercy and compassion. The idea is abroad these days that, whereas the Old Testament God was a no-nonsense Divinity, the God of the New Testament is quite a bit more tolerant.
Such an idea would have surprised the Apostles. Romans 3:10-18, for instance, which is a mélange of various psalm verses describing the evil of sin, cites a rather violent line from our present psalm with reference to evildoers: “Their throat is an open sepulcher.” Indeed, the descriptions of sin in Romans 1 and 3 make a good commentary on many verses of Psalm 5.
Similarly, when the Book of Wisdom says that “equally hateful to God are the ungodly man and his ungodliness” (14:9), its thesis is hard to distinguish from certain verses in the New Testament, such as “I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness” (Matt. 7:23; cf. 25:41) and “You hate the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate” (Rev. 2:6; cf 21:8; 22:15). The loving mercy of God must never be thought of or described in ways suggesting that Christianity is less morally serious than Judaism. The moral sentiments of the psalms are, in this respect, Christian sentiments, and they are highly appropriate in Christian prayer.”
p. 11: (Ps 6)
“This psalm begins with a forceful recognition of the divine wrath. It is the second time that God’s wrath is mentioned in the Book of Psalms; Psalm 2 had already spoken of God’s anger toward the rebellious. In the present psalm, however, it is the psalmist himself who fears this wrath of God and prays to be delivered from it: “O Lord, do not rebuke me in Your anger, nor chasten me in Your fierce displeasure.” Such a prayer suggests that only the grace of God can deliver us from the wrath of God.
The divine wrath is not some sort of irritation; God does not become peeved or annoyed. The wrath of God is infinitely more serious that a temper tantrum. It is a deliberate resolve in response to a specific state of the human soul. In Romans, where the expression appears twelve times, the anger of God describes His activity toward the hard of heart, the unrepentant, those sinners who turn their backs and deliberately refuse His grace, and it is surely in this sense that our psalm asks to be delivered from God’s wrath. It is important to make such a prayer, because hardness of heart remains a possibility for all of us to the very day we die.
Perhaps the seriousness of such a prayer will appear more clearly if we reflect on exactly what Holy Scripture says about the divine wrath. The latter pertains, after all, to the divine revelation itself: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven” (Rom 1:18, emphasis mine). God’s wrath is not something we need to guess about. It is revealed. And how revealed? “Against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” This deliberate hardness of heart, this radical recalcitrance to grace, is the sin that calls down the wrath of God. “So that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful” (Rom. 1:20,21).
Three times in this passage, the Apostle Paul pounds the point home: paredoken autous ho Theos – “God gave them up…” (Rom. 1:24, 26, 28). In this, then, consists the wrath of God: that He turns man loose, that He lets man go, hands him over, that He abandons man to his own choice of evil. The full context of this passage deserves deep reflection, because the moral evils to which God delivers the hard of heart appear to be the very vices characteristic of our own times (cf. Rom. 1:24-32)… Every deliberate and willful sin is a step in the direction of hardness of heart…It is, rather, a voluntary affront to God’s image in us….
…The psalmist then speaks of death, for by sin death entered into the world. Death is sin rendered visible. What we see death do to the body, sin does to the soul. Death is the externalizing of sin. Death is no friend. Apart from Christ, the Bible sees death as the realm where God is not praised. As the bitter fruit of sin, death is the enemy; indeed it is the “last enemy” says 1 Corinthians 15:26. When the psalmist, then, prayers for deliverance from death, he is talking about a great deal more than a physical phenomenon. Death is the “last enemy”, the physical symbol of our sinful alienation from God: “For in death there is no memory of You; in the grave, who will give You thanks?”
Sin and death, then, form the context of this psalm, and these are the forces of Satan. Sin, death, and Satan – such are the enemies of which the psalmist speaks: “My eye wastes away because of grief; it grows old because of all my enemies. Depart from me, all you workers of iniquity….Let all my enemies be ashamed and greatly troubled.”
Even as he makes this plea for mercy, nonetheless, the man of faith already knows that God hears him: “For the Lord has heard my supplication; the Lord will receive my prayer.””
Thank you, Fr. Patrick, for wisdom!