What Is the Wrath of God? An Examination of Colossians 3

Today's post is adapted from Colossians, Philemon in the NIV Application Commentary series and David E. Garland's lectures on Colossians on MasterLectures. Watch the trailer here.

Over the centuries, there has been much discussion and conjecture about God’s wrath. Should we consider God a wrathful being? What does this wrath look like? What is the object of God’s wrath? 

Paul approaches this critical topic in the third chapter of Colossians: 

Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. Because of these, the wrath of God is coming. You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. But now you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all. — Colossians 3:5–11

In the NIV Application Commentary: Colossians, Philemon, Dr. David E. Garland says, “God’s wrath manifests itself in a variety of ways in our lives, but should not be mistaken for the vindictive bursts of temper imputed to the pagan deities.”

So how are we to understand God’s wrath? Dr. Garland unpacks the topic more granularly in his commentary on Paul’s comments. The following post is taken from NIV Application Commentary: Colossians, Philemon.

God’s wrath in popular culture

A survey of faith maturity in Christians discovered that most believe that God is forgiving (97%) and loving (96%), but far fewer believe that God is judging (37%) or punishes those who do wrong (19%). [1] These Christians probably doubt that a God of such inclusive love could judge with such inflexible wrath. They may also recoil at an anthropomorphic view of God who, in a burst of temper, would lash out at sinners like an annoyed and frustrated parent swatting an unruly child. Jonathan Edward’s famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” would fall on skeptical ears today.

The best-selling book Conversations With God, by Neale Donald Walsch, represents the current opinion on God’s wrath. [2] It portrays a chummy God who patronizes sin, since there is no objective right and wrong. According to Walsh, God smiles on all that we do and only asks that we do our best. Paul’s mention of the “wrath of God” presents an opportunity to help people recognize the reality of God’s wrath and to disabuse them of common misunderstandings of it.

What does God’s wrath look like? 

In Colossians 3:6, Paul pictures God’s wrath as coming because of the sins listed; in Romans 1:18, he asserts that this wrath is already being revealed. Romans 1:18–32 is the only place in the New Testament where God’s wrath is discussed at length. That passage makes clear that we must be careful not to project the emotion of human anger on to God. God is not like the Olympian gods, who petulantly and capriciously punished humans for the slightest offenses. Paul does not portray God’s white hot anger erupting in a tantrum against sinners and forcing them to pay for their sins. This image, however, is ingrained in popular consciousness by comic strips that picture God’s delivering lightning bolts that zap sinners in their tracks. This common image has nothing to do with the New Testament picture of God’s wrath.

In Romans, Paul portrays God’s wrath as his turning sinners over to themselves. Three times he repeats the verb “he gave them over” (paredoken). [3] 

1. “God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another” (Rom. 1:24). 
2. “God gave them over to shameful lusts” (1:26). 
3. “Since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done” (1:28). 

Since Paul repeats the verb three times, it suggests that he sees this “giving over” as a deliberate act of God. People have willfully deserted God, who, in turn, leaves them to themselves; God allows them to self-destruct.

If we choose chaos for our lives, the wrath of God allows it to work itself out. [4] Consequently, there is no escaping his wrath for any sinful behavior. God does not interfere with our free choice and its consequences but turns us over to ourselves and our sin when we choose to go it alone. If someone wants to drink poison, they can drink poison. God does not break in and say, “I can’t let you do it.” Dodd adds a corollary to Hebrews 10:31—“It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” He notes that it is also a dreadful thing to fall out of the hands of the living God, “to be left to oneself in a world where the choice of evil things brings its own retribution.” [5]

This concept reveals that most people’s doctrine of sin is too shallow. They think that the problem with sin resides only with God: “Don’t push God too far, or God will get you.” The result is that people tend to treat sin as something to be dreaded only if it is detected. They fear getting caught and hope that maybe God is not looking, or that perhaps God can be propitiated in some way to spare them from any retribution. But sin is like cancer that grows out of control and destroys other healthy parts of ourselves. The cancer is the deadly thing, not its detection. Only after the cancer has been diagnosed can treatment begin. The problems come when it goes undiscovered and untreated. Like cancer, sin carries with it its own destructive force. It is something that ruins lives. It distorts and destroys our human relationships as well as our relationship with God.

Are we punished by our sins or for them? 

The surprising thing about Paul’s understanding of God’s wrath in Romans is that the immorality and the foolishness is the punishment, not simply the cause for punishment. [6] Moral perversion and mental pollution are the result of God’s wrath, not the reason for it. [7] This means that we are punished by the very sins we sin. If we shut our eyes to the light, we go blind; if we decide to shut our ears to the truth, we go deaf. If we exchange the true God for a false one, we become like the gods we serve.

A perversion of our relationship with God leads to a perversion of all human relationships, and we become less than human. If we do not see fit to have the true God influence our knowledge, we wind up with unfit minds. Such minds become so corrupted that they no longer can think straight and are totally untrustworthy as a guide in moral decisions. This situation leads to a religion based on falsehood, a body that is defiled, and a society where hate and war are at home. The inevitable price of having our way with God is spiritual poverty, spiritual blindness, spiritual deafness, and passions running riot.

At the same time, Paul also indicates that God’s wrath is redemptive in intention. When we compare sin to cancer, we realize that we hate the cancer and not the person with the cancer. God hates sin, not the sinner. Paul’s reminder to the Colossians that they “used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived” (3:7) reveals that such behavior does not automatically bring wrathful damnation (see Eph. 2:3). God wishes to redeem us from our sinful destructive ways and allows us to go our own way in the hopes that our eventual wretchedness will cause us to wake up.

Once again, Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son helps us see this truth. When the son informed his father that he wanted to depart with his inheritance, the father did not put him under a twenty-four hour guard to keep him home and prevent him from ruining his life in a far country. The boy did not want the father or the father’s ways, and there was nothing he could do to force him to obey as a loving son. He let him have his freedom, even if it led to a pigsty. But in that sty he finally snapped out of it: “He came to his senses” (Luke 15:17).

Human beings are trickier to fix than machines. When an engine does not work, it can be repaired, even if it means putting in a whole new set of parts. We cannot deal with human envy, lust, and greed that way. More than once, people have had to plummet to the depths of degradation before they awoke to their condition and turned back to a loving, forgiving Father.

This understanding of God’s wrath lies behind Colossians 3, but this text directs us to another dimension of God’s wrath. It points to something beyond the reality that we live in a moral universe and that our sins have inevitable consequences. Paul makes clear that sinners will be held accountable to God in a final judgment. This idea is outlined in 1 Peter 4:3–5:

For you have spent enough time in the past doing what pagans choose to do—living in debauchery, lust, drunkenness, orgies, carousing and detestable idolatry. They think it strange that you do not plunge with them into the same flood of dissipation, and they heap abuse on you. But they will have to give account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead.

Again, we must be careful to communicate that God does not delight in taking revenge on sinners. Cranfield points out that God’s wrath is an expression of his goodness. Humans who are not angry at injustice, cruelty, and corruption cannot be thoroughly good persons.[8]  If God is holy, God cannot tolerate willful transgression, indifference to the moral law, or the abuse of others. God honors our freedom to make all the wrong choices, but we will pay the price for snubbing God’s love and mercy. Expunging God’s holy wrath from our faith drains God’s loving grace of any meaning. People need to hear more than the soothing message that God cares about you and “will bless you real good.” God will also judge.

1.  Eugene C. Roehlkepartain, The Teaching Church: Moving Christian Education to Center Stage (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993), 44.
2. Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God: An Uncommon Dialogue. Book 1 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996).
3.  See C. H. Dodd, The Epistle of Paul to Romans, Moffat New Testament Commentary (New York: Harper & Row, 1932), 21–23; G. H. C. Macgregor, “The Concept of the Wrath of God in the New Testament,” NTS 7 (1960–61): 101–9.
4. Caird, Paul’s Letters from Prison, 85, voices the opinion of many commentators on
   God’s wrath:
   The principle of retribution [is] built into the structure of God’s ordered universe. It may operate through the functions of the state (Rom 13:4), through political disaster (1 Thess 2:16), or through the moral deterioration that ensues upon a rejection of God (Rom 1:18–32; Eph 4:17–19). But the essence of it is that God allows men to reap the harvest of their own disobedience.
5.  Dodd, Romans, 29.
6. Ernst Käsemann, Commentary on Romans (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), 38.
7. Ibid., 47.