He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good

Paul, I fully accept the force of the moral problem you raise and I don’t have any straightforward answers to it. But here’s a few hasty thoughts.

I don’t think we should reinterpret the biblical notion of the wrath of God simply on the grounds that it appears morally repugnant. My view is that the narrative has to be understood first for what it is, and the idea of punishment for sin is so central to the Gospels - and to the biblical story as a whole - that we risk seriously distorting things if we try to neutralize it.

It has always been part of evangelical theology that ‘the wages of sin is death’. We have probably interpreted that on the whole in a rather abstract and anodyne fashion, but the Bible takes the fact of death very seriously. The destruction of Jerusalem and the slaughter of a million Jews was simply an outworking of that principle.

I tend to take a rather pragmatic approach to this issue. The given reality was that Israel was acting in a way that made war against Rome an increasingly likely outcome. Jesus’ prophetic response to that was to interpret Israel’s behaviour as an example of a longstanding habit of rebellion against YHWH and the foreseen outcome as an expression of YHWH’s frustration with his people. But morally speaking, the historical reality comes first and demands to be interpreted within a theological framework.

The moral problem is there anyway. God is at fault either because he deliberately brought about the death of a million Jews in the war or because he didn’t intervene to prevent the death of a million Jews - or the Holocaust, or whatever other catastrophe we may have in mind.

I think this is compatible with the call to love one’s enemies in this way. If Israel had acted as Jesus required the disciples to act, the war against Rome would not have happened. It is because Israel as a nation did not ‘love its enemies’ but recklessly rebelled against Rome that it incurred the concrete, historical ‘wrath’ of God.

Your question is very relevant, Paul, and as Andrew has suggested, raises the wider issue of theodicy: for which, if there was a simple answer, we would no doubt all by now be able to produce it.

However, A.D.70 was more than a failure of God to intervene in a catastrophe: it was a judgment (Luke 21:22). So the first question is: does God have a right to judge, or to inflict punishment? The answer depends on a number of factors: our understanding of the guilt of the guilty party; our apprehension of sin in the light of God’s holiness; our philosophical or moral sense that justice requires the application of sanctions - and so on. The answer will also depend on our sense of God’s right to judge; and perhaps more importantly, our willingness to trust him that when he judges, it is in accordance with principles of perfect fairness, and a preference to show mercy where it is possible and wise to do so.

A further factor will be the extent to which those incurring judgment had received sufficient warning of what was to come. A rather simple illustration might be that if I am driving in my car at night, and I see a warning that the road ahead has subsided and gives way directly onto a sheer cliff, I would be foolhardy to proceed any further. Had Israel been given sufficient warning of what lay ahead? I think so - both explicitly (in the direct warnings Jesus gave of imminent disaster), and implicitly - in the call Jesus brought to Israel to repent and believe in him - language which, as Andrew would no doubt wish to point out, has in the 1st century a direct, practical and political application - meaning give up your own agenda for political and religious change, and follow mine. (Josephus used precisely this language when commissioned by Rome to subdue rebellious brigands in Israel shortly after the time of Jesus). Everyone in Israel must have heard about Jesus. Most people must have had the opportunity of finding out about him and his message. Not to have responded, and thus be spared disaster, would have made the individual or group responsible for what befell them.

A further point concerns the nature of judgment. We tend to think of judgment as something coming supernaturally into the natural realm, cutting across natural or human processes. But that isn’t how the bible presents it. Usually, judgment rides on the back of natural processes of cause and effect - especially human, moral cause and effect. It could be argued that the disasters consequent upon climate change are a judgment of God on us for failing to care for each other and look after his planet. (I say ‘could be argued’). But the processes leading to climate disaster would largely have been the consequence of human activity (if you believe in this explanation of global warming). Failing to be loyal to YHWH in the OT rendered Israel vulnerable to her enemies and oppressors. It was, in a sense, a supernatural enforcement of a natural cause. And usually we get plenty of evidence in the prophets of warnings that this would be the case if Israel abandoned YHWH. Israel’s moral culpability lay in the things she did (or failed to do) during these periods of turning aside from loyalty. Social injustice was not least among these things.

It wasn’t as if YHWH reacted selfishly to Israel’s unfaithfulness - reacting out of spite, as it were. On Israel depended God’s plans for the whole world. Even in the OT there is plenty of evidence that God planned blessing for the entire world through Israel, and that Israel had developed a twisted sense of favouritism, and an expectation of domination of inferior peoples. Israel’s guilt in rejecting YHWH was therefore the greater, since her responsibility was greater. Beyond this was a pursuit of political courses of action which invited trouble from larger and more powerful nations than herself - in the deluded belief that God’s favour would provide all the protection she needed.

It is therefore possible to argue that Israel set herself up for judgment by actions which were almost directly calculated to bring disaster on her - without any added supernatural layer of enforcement. This is particularly the case in AD 70 - when Israel’s national agenda was not only contrary to God’s agenda - but involved political activity of an extremely provocative and foolhardy nature. But AD 70 goes much further than that: as Jesus’s ‘woes’ of Matthew 23 indicated - Matthew 23:35-36 being the overall climax and summary. But we must read on: Jesus’s reaction to this coming catastrophe was not one of wrathful satisfaction - but heartbreak and yearning - Matthew 23:37. And because, contra Andrew, Jesus had demonstrated in himself consistently and repeatedly through symbol and praxis his divine origins and credentials, we must believe that he was reflecting in this response the very heart of God. Which places judgment in a very different perspective from talking of it as a detached, abstract philosophical issue.

This final issue is, for me, the clincher. God’s ‘wrath’ seems to be attended by a great deal of heartbreak. At the risk of trivialising it, it’s like the schoolteacher who says, when about to administer punishment to the recalcitrant pupil, ‘This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you’. How much it hurt God can be gauged by the price paid for that punishment to be averted for those who turned to him. Guess what that was.