You aren’t afraid of a little lamb are you? Aren’t all lambs gentle and vulnerable? I watched one run over a lady at the FFA barn one day. She was just going to help catch it. It turns out the lamb did not want to be caught by her.
My brother Dan and I watched a lamb grow up in the little German village of Schrollbach. Daring Dan used to get in the pen with that lamb and race across the pen with the lamb chasing him. The lamb kept growing and eventually grew horns – one day Dan stumbled and as he tried to climb over the fence the lamb helped him over with a bump from behind.
The Lamb in heaven is spelled with a capital L. This Lamb has a stable of horses which he unleashes on the earth. The Lamb becomes a King who rides a white horse and goes out to conquer. He sends out horses which bring war, famine and death. We learn in this chapter that God is not happy with those who martyr his people.
Miroslav Volf, a Christian theologian from Croatia, used to reject the concept of God's wrath. He thought that the idea of an angry God was barbaric, completely unworthy of a God of love. But then his country experienced a brutal war. People committed terrible atrocities against their neighbors and countrymen. In his book, Free of Charge, Volf reveals his new understanding of the necessity of God's wrath: “My last resistance to the idea of God's wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry."
Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandfatherly fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators' basic goodness? Wasn't God fiercely angry with them?Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God's wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn't wrathful at the sight of the world's evil. God isn't wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.
Jesus took God’s wrath on the cross for those who believe in him. But all who reject Christ will experience the wrath of the Lamb. In other words, we accept his payment for our sins, or we get to pay for them ourselves. Which will it be? He wants to forgive us, but if we choose to reject him, we choose to experience his wrath. “Mary had a little Lamb, whose fleece was white as snow . . .” and he is not to be trifled with!
