God is not angry

What is God like? One of the criticisms that non-Christians aim at the Bible is that God is vengeful, capricious and angry. They ask why they would want to believe in such a God, let alone worship or obey him? And parts of the Old Testament, taken by themselves, certainly make it appear that God is like that. There's a lot of anger and destruction; it's easy to see where a caricature of God as forever smiting people has come from.

God is a person, not an impersonal force. He has feelings, and He responds to what we do, just as a friend might be upset or angry with us - while not stopping being our friend. In the first books of the Bible, God does get angry. But there is an important promise in Isaiah 54, when God says that He's not going to be angry any more.

This passage is part of Isaiah's prophecy about the return of the Jewish people from exile in Babylon. They've been away from their homeland for two generations, but they're going to go back. As part of Isaiah's vision of the future, there's a description of God's servant, which is understood to refer to Jesus, and then in Chapter 54 there's a message for Jerusalem (and, by implication, all the Jews) about future prosperity. God says that things are going to be good again. He says that Jerusalem is like someone who married young, was forsaken by her husband, but has now been taken back and is the centre of a huge family. He says, in fact He promises, that although He was angry before, He's not going to be angry again. This is a significant promise. God says that it's like when He promised Noah there would never be another Flood. He was angry before, but He's never going to be angry again, never going to rebuke His people. No matter what may change, whether the mountains and the hills tumble, He won't stop loving us.

This is such an important promise. It's important because when people characterise God as angry, we can agree that may have been true once, but the fact is that He's not angry any more. And it's important because when things go wrong in our lives, we can't say "God is angry with me." We may have done things wrong, we may be suffering the consequences of our wrong actions, but God isn't angry - and that's a promise.