The Lost Message of Paul

The modern gospel message is clear to all: 'Believe and you will be saved! But, because God is love, we are granted free will, which means that if you turn your back on God, your wish will be granted and beyond death you will spend eternity in hell!' To most people outside the Western Protestant bubble, this is not so much 'God is love', but more like 'God is volatile'.

Words translated as wrath: Or you might feel “chemah” when you've been betrayed. Is this anger, or a deep and burning sense of hurt? If a woman discovers that the husband she loves has been cheating on her, or a man feels betrayed by the woman he is utterly committed to, what do they feel? You may choose to call it anger; I think it is more complex than that. It is about the agony of rejection; the suffering of a broken heart. Perhaps God's heart - the heart of the loving parent, husband or king - is wrung with pain when we choose to turn our backs on God.

My critics will of course respond that surely, if God is love, God must also experience anger at injustice. But this misses the point. As the great theologian Karl Barth once explained, if God exhibits characteristics of anger, judgement and the like, they are never more than 'repetitions and amplifications of the one statement that God loves If we forget this if we ever talk about God's anger outside of the context of God's love - we make a great mistake. If God is love, then every action and reaction dealing with humanity flows out of love. This is why we make a tremendous mistake whenever we juxtapose God's love with God's 'wrath. But to speak of God's love in the same breath as God's anguish, as an expression of love, makes all the sense in the world. The expressions 'wrath' and 'anger' are too loose. Both terms carry overtones of vindictive and malicious behaviour. God is always redemptive.

Any of us who have known the joy of raising children have also known the struggle of coping with and responding to their moods and rebellions - and yet no well-adjusted parent, who truly loves their child, ever seeks retribution for bad behaviour and wrongs done to them. For a loving parent, anger (better termed anguish or frustration) is never violent or destructive. Instead, genuine love drives parents to serve their children devotedly and unselfishly, to overlook and forgive shortcomings, often without any apology, let alone thanks.

Oppressive regimes will be overturned. God's promise of a new-renewed-earth is coming. None of this is simply a pipedream. The wolf will live with the lamb. Our social systems and institutions including the Church will be transformed. But, first, they too must face the refiner's fire. And the more that they, like us as individuals, are conformed to Christ in the here and now, the more that purging is already in the process of taking place.

Our personal budgets and corporate annual accounts are simply the story of our ethics displayed in numbers

If there are habits and behaviours that have no place in the coming age, they are habits and behaviours that have no place in our lives now, and no place in the businesses and community activities over which we have influence or control. Our personal code of ethics, our corporate investment manual, should reflect - indeed will always reflect who we really are and who we are becoming.